From Laying the Ladder Down: The Emergence of Cultural Holism

by Betty Jean Craige, University of Georgia

[published by University of Massachusetts Press, 1992]

From our standpoint at the end of the twentieth century, as we come to understand a world of continuous change, we can view the history of Western thought as a successive discarding of absolutes. From Copernicus we learned that the earth is not the center of the universe. From Darwin we learned that human beings were not specially created by God, that all species, including our own, have evolved and are continuing to evolve by natural selection. From Einstein we learned that space and time are not absolute. Now we glimpse a universe of flux, in which our planet itself is evolving toward a future to which we humans may not belong.

Yet, as we have seen, the model of reality our ancient Greek predecessors developed has been remarkably difficult to escape. The concept of a scale of ascent predisposed us to think of differences in terms of rank on a scale of worth, whose social and economic consequences we continue to experience. The spirit/matter dualism that, before Darwin, distinguished humans from brutes reasserts itself in the distinction between sentients and nonsentients made by the animal rights advocates, who condemn their opponents for anthropocentrism; atomism characterizes the rights activists' species egalitarianism. The belief in a static order of things, discredited for the biological kingdom by Darwin, reappears in the concept of the earth's homeostatic ecosystem.

These apparent inconsistencies within the emerging holism belong to the process of change, a process in which innumerable conflicts in presuppositions, values, and interests lead eventually to ways of thinking and interacting that are more widely beneficial than the old. A new order does not emerge all at once.

A world without absolutes, a world of continuous change, is a world whose evolution--cultural and physical--humans may influence. It is a world, therefore, for which humans have responsibility; and since we humans alone, at this stage, are conscious of how we influence it, we have sole responsibility. However, the loss of faith in an eternal order ought not to leave us in despair, for the hierarchical social systems we developed with that faith did not make for social harmony. In the absence of belief that our world was designed to turn out the way we find it, we may hope to make it better. If all is flux, and we know it, then perhaps we may create social justice.

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