Why Humanity Evolves and Civilisations Pivot

But collapse and crisis are poor catalysts of change

Jerusalem rises as Albion falls asleep. William Blake understood that the modern mentality was uncoupled from the inside of the world

Every so often the human imagination changes. Deep switches tend not to happen following major events, because people are inclined to react to wars and pandemics, environmental concerns and technological angst with what they already know and trust. But modifications can occur when the experience of being human itself is revised.

Novel philosophies and the cultivation of different perceptions prompt existence to be reimagined across its many variables, from the ecological to the existential; the social to the spiritual. Then, civilisations pivot.

Worldview breakthrough is no mean undertaking and is, therefore, fascinating when it occurs. And the 17th century, which bore modernity, provides a case in point.

The period was rich in crises and innovations, as all periods are: the Mayflower arrived in Massachusetts; Charles I was beheaded; the Bank of England established. But the experience of being alive was transformed not because of what happened, but because in this period, people’s inner experience was reconceived dramatically.

You could say it was then that people started having inner experiences in the way you and I today take for granted.

We call that interiority and its emergence can be tracked back to a particular moment by the way words were reappropriated. Take “emotion”. It has not always meant a private feeling like love, horror or pity. Before the 17th century it referred to external events, implying a public disturbance or change of position; the wind might emote when it blew or a crowd gather with emotion. “Commotion” still carries the original sense.

Then, about 400 years ago, it became increasingly important for people to describe the intimacies of their personal lives. Interiority flourished and emotion became an affect or feeling.

People became fascinated with “character”, which, until it denoted personality traits, meant the impression left on malleable materials like wax or sand. Robert Burton published his bestseller, The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621. “Envy”, which had meant active malice, shifted to secret discontent. “Greedy”, which had been closer in meaning to ambitious, became insatiable or stingy. “Happy” moved from lucky to cheerful.

Outside in to inside out

In his first book of genius, History in English Words, the philologist and philosopher Owen Barfield charts dozens of such migrations, showing how introspection became a fixed feature of human life. Before, people had experienced life from the outside in. This assumption is why the medieval mind presumed astrology to be self-evidently true, because an individual’s dispositions were experienced as being influenced by the external vitality of constellations and planets. Similarly, ghosts and ghouls mattered as they would affect your spirits.

But then a shift occurred and that prepared the way for mass technologies, which in turn amplified the endogenous effects. For example, after the Restoration in 1660, Charles II introduced the waistcoat to society, with its defining accessory: the pocket watch. People must have wanted their lives to be ruled by a portable machine that they carried on their person. The idea of being on time, or early or late, gripped our ancestors, eliciting new and distinctly modern causes of anxiety.

More generally, machines seized the environment because of the way in which people had come to live, move and imagine their being to an extent that had not happened before. The state of mind led to the acceptance of the previously strange mechanical philosophy of Francis Bacon and early modern science began to eclipse the ancient and medieval understandings of natural philosophy: the cosmos was not alive, radiating its influences; it was inert, turning like clockwork.

The upshot was that the vitality of the external world was redescribed to convey the feelings of increasingly isolated inner lives and, with the uncoupling of the two domains, nature drained of meaning. “The gods have become diseases,” was Carl Jung’s way of characterising the impact of this reduction.

Doubting the subjective

A pair of words that reversed meaning, thereby illustrating the profundity of the change, were “subjective” and “objective”. Ever since Aristotle, “subjective” had meant that which sustains and exudes itself. The subjective elements of reality were, therefore, real and reliable; God was subjectivity itself. Conversely, “objective” meant that which is merely an object and so imperilled by change and decay.

But as the changed human imagination provided a home to technologies such as pocket watches, external things like the arms of a clock came to feel more reliable. The objectively measurable was deemed more consequential than the subjectively known and, almost overnight, the meaning of the two words somersaulted. “Subjective” came to mean personal and so probably doubtful, and “objective” came to mean impartial and so true.

If there were one reversal in history that I could bring about, it would be that one. The flip of subjectivity and objectivity has possibly done more damage to human life than any other shift in the modern world because it has cut us off from our experience.

Nowadays, people prefer to talk of dopamine rushes before feelings, of being wired not being understood; they turn to brain scans before Shakespeare when asking about love. They will ignore activities that have the most basic value, like a walk in the park or saying thank you, until a scientific study confirms what a moment’s reflection affirms.

Not trusting our subjective experience and thereby becoming conversant with it, discerning it, being curious about it, has precipitated untold suffering, ennui, purposelessness.

The revision is also a basic philosophical mistake. So-called objective truths are the ones that keep changing. The history of science is the story of their continual modification, making science interesting.

But to find something that is unchanging and reliable, you have to turn to subjective experience. I’m not thinking of the transient ups and downs of inner life, the idiosyncrasies and secrets, the continual flux. But rather the constant awareness and steady presence that is the unchanging background and underpinning of consciousness. You have it. I have it. All humans have it, even when asleep, or an alarm clock would not wake us up.

Oddly enough, a number of contemporary physicists are affirming a return of subjectivity. Every so often, one will declare that reality is mental, the universe is a thought, or existence is an observation. As the potter and nondual philosopher Rupert Spira puts it: “Any honest model of reality must start with awareness. To start anywhere else is to build a model on the shifting sands of belief.” Existential uncertainty is what the turn to objectivity has wrought.

The world changed with the birth of the modern experience of interiority. Humanity would evolve again, civilisation pivot, if this secret came out: the truth of things is found within, for really there is no without.