The Importance of Seeing Things Whole

The Importance of Seeing Things Whole

by Andrew Bard Schmookler

[This is the sixth and final entry in the series I’ve offered here.]

 Please Permit Me to Talk as if Compelled by Truth Serum

It’s an awkward position to be in. Much of what I’ve spent more than a half century creating would likely die with me if I died now. Which would be no big deal except that I have long strongly believed it could prove valuable to a human future I care deeply about.

That has driven me, in my mid-70s, to throw caution to the wind. Which means doing everything in my power to get this creation of mine out into the world far enough that it would survive my own death.

The awkwardness involves my having come to the judgment that this “everything” includes my making claims that some may dismiss as grandiose. But my conviction of the validity of those claims compels me to take that risk.

What I feel impelled to get out into other people’s minds – so it would not die with me – is what I call an “integrative vision” for understanding the human story: a way of seeing things whole that has important implications for how we see ourselves as a species, how we understand what we see in the pages of human history, and how we perceive the challenges humankind must meet if our civilization is to survive for the long haul.

For a while, I tried to resign myself to the reality that, despite my efforts, most of that “integrative vision” would disappear with me. That would have worked, had I been able to look at it just in terms of my life, and my desires. I’ve had my share of wishes come true.

But that’s never been what it’s mostly about. Since the first big piece of that integrative vision came to me in 1970, I have always been driven by the conviction that there was something here that might help humankind survive for the long haul, rather than end our species’ story in self-destruction.

Eventually I came around to thinking, “With such things at stake, what risk would not be worth taking?”

I resolved that I would throw caution to the winds and speak the truth as I see it, as if I were compelled by truth serum, as if unencumbered by fear.

And I decided that I would try to mitigate the risk by asking the reader: “Please don’t come to any conclusions about the validity of the excessive-sounding claims without checking it out.”

(And reading the previous five entries in this series would be a good way to begin that checking out.)

The Issue of the Plausibility of the Claims

My goal in this piece is therefore straightforward: to maximize the chances that this “integrative vision” I’ve put together will be housed in other people’s consciousness (and therefore maximize the chance that it will survive the extinguishing of my own consciousness).

That means that my target audience consists of those people who would really want to have the kind of understanding I’m claiming to offer, who would therefore incorporate enough of it into their thinking to create the possibility that this “integrative vision” would be available to a plausible human future (where it might have a beneficial impact).

Trying to put myself in the shoes of such people, I imagine they’d start by being doubtful about the plausibility of my claims. Hearing a thinker (who’s not world famous) declare that he’s put together an illuminating way of seeing the human story, I would ask three questions:

• Is it plausible that this person would be a credible judge of Big Picture ways of understanding the human world?
• Does this person show signs of narcissistic over-estimation of himself?
• If those claims are valid, how are we to explain the world’s not having dealt with this “integrative vision” as if it were a Big Deal?

That last question has been one I’ve pondered now for several decades, ever since the aftermath of the bit of a splash made by the publication of the foundational idea in 1984 with the book The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution.

The book was beautifully produced, and treated as a major publication, by the University of California Press. The Parable of the Tribes was greeted by New York Times with a full-page review, and was soon featured in Esquire Magazine. An international academic society — that focused on political psychology and the quest for peace during the dangerous days of the renewed Cold War – awarded it a prize.

What happened in the years following has been a mystery I’ve pondered now for decades.

When that idea came to me in 1970, it blew me away. Expecting that it would have a similar impact on others, I devoted a decade to developing and presenting the idea as compellingly as was in me to do.  I imagined that it would immediately prompt an excited and far-reaching reconsideration of how our civilization understands the human story.

But that’s not what happened.

The idea got out there, with the “splash” the book made, putting forward bold assertions that– if valid — would have profound implications. According to how I was brought up to imagine how things worked in the realm of thought, the Thinking World would feel compelled to either 1) refute that potentially impactful set of revolutionary ideas, or 2) accept what had been persuasively presented, and follow the implications of that truth, or 3) continue to struggle with it, to evaluate whether or not fundamental changes in one’s way of understanding the world were called for.

But what ensued was none of those. Within less than a decade, the Thinking World simply allowed the idea to disappear. Never refuted in the least. But not adopted either. Nor grappled with.

That was an outcome I’d never imagined: that the Thinking World to which I’d sent a message that was bone-shaking for me when I received it, would simply walk away from the challenge The Parable of the Tribes posed.

But whatever the explanation of the world’s ignoring the argument I made, what that means for the intended readers of this piece is this: the fact that the world has not treated what I presented as a Big Deal represents no evidence against the validity of my claims. No one ever laid a glove on the argument the book presented.

So, then the question comes back to whether my judgement about such things is to be trusted. Relevant to answering that question, when I’ve asked it of myself, is that for the purpose of developing such a capacity it would be difficult to design a better background than the path I took during my formative years:

• My father was a brilliant man, and a learned social thinker. In discussions as far back as I can remember, my father shared his ways of understanding the human world.
• Then I spent four years as an undergraduate at Harvard, mostly studying the great thinkers (about the human world) from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Hobbes to Adam Smith to Tocqueville to Marx to Weber and Durkheim, and especially Freud, graduating summa cum laude based on a book I’d written as a senior — (under the tutelage of one of America’s foremost psychologists, Erik Erikson, and foremost sociologists, Robert Bellah) — utilizing psychological and sociological concepts to illuminate the meaning of tragic drama in ancient Athens and Elizabethan England .
• My graduate studies were at the University of Chicago to study with the Committee on Social Thought, at Yale in American Studies, before eventually getting my doctorate at Berkeley in a program specially created to accommodate my “original theory of the evolution of civilization.”

Such a background gives no guarantee. But it certainly seems to make it plausible that it would give someone the ability to recognize what is and isn’t a well developed a Big Picture Idea about the Human World, how well it holds water, and how important is the light that it sheds.

Of course, judging one’s own work could be a different matter. I’ve examined closely the question, “Am I deluding myself?” and over the years have checked also with others, feeling a need to examine that closely because of the mystery of how the world has treated it.

My best answer is that, though I recognize my narcissistic needs, I don’t see evidence that ego-driven distortions require any more than a minor downward adjustment in my assessments of my own work. (Truth serum requires that I say what I see, and there are some others who see the same thing.)

I wouldn’t be writing this essay, nor still taking risks at 76 to achieve my Mission Unaccomplished, if I were not confident that this “integrative vision” establishes some things that are true, important, and not widely understood. It’s something that ought not be squandered, as it now is in danger of being.

***

So, having examined those three questions many times for myself over some thirty years, those are the answers that I’ve come to. My hope, of course, is that those answers would satisfy the kind of people to whom this essay (and this series) is addressed, persuading them that it’s necessary to at least check out the claims I’ve made.

(It can be checked out not only through the series here, including a quick recapitulation at the end of this essay, but also — if those essays establish sufficient credibility and seem promising — it can be checked out more thoroughly in a much larger body of work. Much of that larger body of work can be accessed through my website, ABetterHumanStory.org.). There are housed books, essays, op/ed pieces, podcasts , in which the ideas in this series are substantiated and elaborated, and expanded with several additional dimensions in that integrated picture of the human story and challenges humankind now faces.)

Is There a Market for Big Ideas?

Sometimes I think, maybe I’ve been worrying about the wrong thing.

My concern, as I’ve said, is that people will dismiss what I claim about the “integrative vision.” But it seems entirely possible that the bigger impediment to my achieving my purpose — getting people to seriously take on the Big Picture I present – is not that they’ll dismiss the claims as the delusions of a crank, but that people won’t care whether the claims are valid or not.

Our intellectual culture seems to have changed in a fundamental way over the course of my lifetime. What seems to have changed is how much our world of thought seeks to understand the world in an integrated and coherent way, and how much it is content to see it in more fragmentary form, as a set of disconnected pieces.

Here’s a major piece of evidence.

In the America I grew up in, there were two Big Idea perspectives on the human world, each of which had a non-trivial following.

• Each of these perspectives focused on some important dimensions of the human world, and each made a systematic, rational/empirical (intellectually impressive) case for how to understand the forces at work in that realm.
• Each offered a picture that tapped into important passions and needs that people experience in their quest for a better life and better world.
• And, in the 1950s and 1960s, each of those Big Picture perspectives was studied by a number of people with good minds who perceived the world through the lens provided by that Big Idea thinker.

One was the Freudian perspective. The other was the Marxian.

Each of those perspectives contained important insights that are still worth attending to, for example:

• The Freudian insight that there are important things going on in our psychological life of which we are unaware;
• The Marxian awareness of how, in human societies, exploitive relationships tend to emerge between the classes of the powerful and the weak, and how the interests of a society’s dominant class(es) tend to distort a society’s understanding away from truth and its power-arrangements away from justice.

But in any event, since the times in which I was learning about these things, both of those thinkers have fallen in influence and prestige.

At least part of that is because important parts of what both Freud and Marx said didn’t hold up well, discrediting the overall theories. But that’s not the whole thing: it seems also because the demand for “Seeing Things Whole” has dropped out of the market.

What has been striking to me is not so much that Marx and Freud have fallen out of favor, but that no comparable Big Ideas have risen to take their place.

There have been plenty of good ideas, but they tend to be about more specific and concrete things. What seems to be missing are the kinds of ideas that present a Big Picture that’s Whole enough that people find it worth forming communities of thought around.  No ideas, like Freud’s and Marx’s “systems of thought” that got widespread enough that one can see that they impacted culture and society.

One might hypothesize that the reason nothing has taken their place is that nothing comparable has been available. But I’ve had the opportunity to observe that the thinking world of our times shows no yearning for any such way of “Seeing Things Whole.” Regardless of the validity of my claims, it seems clear to me: If there were an appetite there for the sort of thing I claim to provide, my own experience would have been different.

And it is not just the experience with the books I’ve published – Big Ideas never refuted, but also not adopted. In addition, over the past almost twenty years, I’ve put out hundreds of essays on national websites which combine my analysis of the particular issues of the present moment (America’s political crisis) with drawing connections between the momentary and the Big Picture. From the discussion that have unfolded on the comment threads, I’ve observed that while readers often value my observations on the immediate and concrete, they almost totally ignore what I provide in terms of “Seeing Things Whole.”

All of these things combine to lead me to wonder: when I address “those people who really would care about getting what I claim to deliver,” how many such people actually exist in these times?

The Importance of Seeing Things Whole

The effort to see things whole has been my focus for more than half a century.

• My studies from college onward were firmly in the “interdisciplinary” mode.
• In my oral comprehensive exams for my doctoral degree, my committee was invited to examine me on the more than ten disciplines that I was working to integrate in my doctoral dissertation (a 1600-page version of The Parable of the Tribes, which eventually was condensed into the version published by the University of California Press, still in print from SUNY Press).
• “Seeing Things Whole” was the name I gave my first website, back in the 90s.
• And then “Seeing Things Whole” was the name of a series of dozens of essays I published on my website NoneSoBlind.org -= NONE SO BLIND =- (archive.org), starting in 2008, exploring patterns and connections, visible in the world, that show something important about how “everything is connected with everything else,” and how the world works.

(Among those entries were:

SEEING THINGS WHOLE: The Zeitgeist as Evidence of Subtle Patterns and Connections

SEEING THINGS WHOLE: Metaphor and Reality

SEEING THINGS WHOLE: Contagious Interactions Among People

SEEING THINGS WHOLE: Order vs. Chaos in the Flow of Events)

Why make a big deal about seeing things whole?

It is often said, “Everything is connected to everything else.” Perceiving that connectedness is vital to human understanding, and to meaningful human life, in several ways.

** It is important spiritually — as one of the important routes to our spiritual fulfillment is the recognition and creation of wholeness. (See “Our Pathways into Deep Meaning.”)

(And that experiential reality may connect with the overwhelming sense of Oneness – through the centuries, and across cultures – reported by mystics returning from their visions.)

That importance is suggested also in the meanings of the word “Shalom,” with its root meaning “Whole” that also becomes Peace, operating as a bridge between the world we live in and the Wholeness to which we aspire.

** It is important intellectually. By seeing how things form patterns, and how causes are connected with effects, that we can gain understanding of the incredibly rich web of meaningful connections in our lives and world. (“Meaning” itself depends on how the particular fits into the larger context.)

** It also is important politically, for it is only when we see the larger forces at work in our world that we can understand the nature of the problems we face, and how those problems might most effectively be addressed. (And humankind certainly does have a problem: it looks like it’s a toss-up whether human civilization will destroy itself in the next couple of centuries.)

(The political value of “Seeing Things Whole” has been made very clear, more particularly, in the American crisis of the past generation, where – or so I’ve tried to show — the failure of our contemporary secular culture to see things whole has greatly contributed to the ability of the forces of Democracy to hold their ground against the forces of Fascism. Which is part of the larger picture of the global advance of fascistic forces. [See “The Battle Between Democracy and Fascism.”])

Over the more than half a century that my work has focused on trying to see the problems of our civilization “whole,” the single connection I’ve found most fruitful to make has been to see the human story more fully in the context of the whole history of Life on Earth. Specifically….

Seeing the Rise of Civilization in an Evolutionary Perspective

Life evolved on this planet for well over three billion years. That evolutionary process, which created us, also created an extraordinarily complex order of which our ancestors – along with all the other creatures that had evolved – were an integrated part.

But then, mere thousands of years ago, our species took a step unprecedented in the history of life on earth: Humankind stepped onto the path of civilization. (“Civilization” can be usefully defined as those societies created by a species that extricates itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically by inventing its own way of life.)

Seeing things in the whole context of evolutionary dynamics means recognizing that embarking on the path of Civilization inevitably – if also inadvertently — entails a step out of Order and into Disorder. And, as can be shown, that this form of Disorder inevitably generates a social evolutionary force that drives the creature’s civilization to develop – regardless of the species’ nature and desires — in destructive ways it did not choose but could not avoid.

The root of my “integrative vision” is that there are hugely significant, yet long unrecognized, consequences that inevitably flow from any species starting to develop civilization. The breakthrough into Civilization – a new kind of life-form in that it is shaped not by natural selection but by the creative intelligence of the creature — is probably the most important point of discontinuity in the history of life. It inevitably makes for a whole new ball game.

(It is certainly the only juncture in Life’s history that has generated the possibility that Life-on-Earth might be destroyed not by some cataclysm from the non-living cosmos (like a huge asteroid) but from within the living system itself.)

I imagine that it is because the process of absorbing the elegant and illuminating Darwinian perspective has been slow and gradual, and remains incomplete in our era, that this has been an opportune historical moment for discovering important, but previously unrecognized, implications of the evolutionary perspective.

Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, but the social thinkers that followed show that, for the most part, they had not integrated into their understanding a Darwinian view of how living systems have been shaped.  (In his Civilization and Its Discontents¸ for example, Freud asserts that humans have difficulty functioning in society, whereas the evolutionary view makes it plain that our ancestors had been social animals for millions of years before becoming homo sapiens.)

Even over the course of the last half-century – during which I’ve been discussing these matters with audiences – I’ve seen the evolutionary perspective gaining ground. Gradually, the idea of “the beginnings of human history” has come to mean less “the first cities” and more “our hominid ancestors.” Fields like “evolutionary psychology” have been established.

In that context, it seems unsurprising that, by 1970, when the idea that changed the course of my life came to me, people had not looked very thoroughly at what it would mean for a creature to “extricate itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically by inventing its own way of life.”

It turns out that quite a few rather consequential developments follow from a species taking that step.

Like these several key points (that have been central to previous entries in this series), all of which become more evident when the human story – the story of civilization-creating creatures — is seen in an evolutionary perspective.

• Any creature, on any planet, anywhere in the cosmos, that steps onto the path of civilization will inevitably be swept up in a social evolutionary process as destructive and tormented as that which has marked human history.

When we see what a species’ departure from the natural evolved order inevitably implies – that it will plunge into an anarchic situation whose resulting “war of all against all” combines with the open-ended possibilities for cultural innovation to generate an unfortunate process of selection, in which the cultural possibilities that can survive and spread must embody “the ways of power,” and in which therefore “the Spirit of the Gangster” is given a disproportionate voice in shaping how that creature’s civilization will develop — we realize that…

• The ugliness we see in human history is not human nature writ large.

When we look at the Force of Brokenness that inevitably results from the struggle for power that inevitably arises with the emergence of civilization, and at how that force reverberates through the civilized world, over time — as each form of brokenness that appears in the human world generates other forms of brokenness — it becomes clear that

• The rise of civilization inevitably unleashes “a coherent force that consistently makes things worse.” It is a Force that can be seen in the connections between causes and effects, and one that impacts the world of civilization much as “Evil” has been traditionally understood to operate. And that “Force of Evil” (or Destructive Force, or Force of Brokenness) will inevitably play a leading role in the drama of the civilization-creating creature.

All of which means that any creature that steps onto the path of civilization will inevitably get caught between two evolutionary processes – the biological evolution that crafted its inborn nature, and the social evolutionary process that got unleashed when it escaped from the niche in which it evolved. The result is that the world of the civilization-creating creature will inevitably be an arena in which two coherent forces are embattled over how the creature’s civilization will develop.  One of those forces will be continually pushing things in life-serving directions, the other in directions that degrade that creature’s world.

• Thus Civilization – whether launched on earth by homo sapiens or elsewhere by some other creature with the level of creative intelligence required for such a breakthrough – inevitably generates a dynamic that can reasonably be called “a Battle Between Good and Evil.”

It is a given that any creature that can invent civilization will have the capacity to transmit culture through the generations. Inevitably, the accumulation of innovations will eventually bring the powers wielded by that creature’s civilization to such a magnitude that they could, if wielded destructively, bring that species’ story to a catastrophic ending.

What this implies is that the breakthrough into civilization – by any species, on any planet — inevitably brings with it a Central Challenge, which eventually will boil down to this:

• Will that species be able to order its civilization well enough – soon enough – to avoid that civilization’s self-destructing?

Through a separate line of thinking, the evolutionary perspective also provides a much-needed illumination of two essential dimensions of the human world: the Moral Dimension and the Spiritual Dimension.

The evolutionary perspective reveals these as two emergent realities—aspects of reality that come into existence (and can only exist) once the evolution of life has generated creatures with the requisite experiential capacities. The evolutionary perspective readily demonstrates that

• “Value,” which provides the basis for the Moral Dimension, is not only real, but it is also life-serving in important ways. For natural selection has inscribed an inborn system of Value — what the creature experiences as “better” or as “worse” — that serves to motivate creatures in directions that, in the ancestral past, enhanced the chances for survival.
• The “Spiritual Dimension” — an experiential capacity that is factually part of our species inherent nature — likewise, is real. The  evident impactfulness of that level of experience testifies to its importance. And the selection for that capacity constitutes powerful evidence that it has played a life-serving role in the human world.

I’m looking for people who would care to know those things, if they could be shown to be valid.

Needed: Amendments to the Secular Worldview So that It Sees More Whole

This “integrative vision” puts together a variety of pieces — the selection for power, the reality of something it’s reasonable to call a “Force of Evil,” the proper regard for the moral and spiritual dimensions of the experiential realm – into a way of seeing the human story (more) Whole.

Each of those ideas can also be seen as fleshing out some important areas in our civilization’s secular worldview that have proved dangerously undeveloped.

Through history and around the world, most cultures used religious systems to provide a set of ways of understanding the various challenges with which the human experience compels people to deal. Having developed over millennia, these religious frameworks of understanding found ways of portraying a very wide range of important realities.

By contrast, the emergence of this secular worldview — as a major force in civilized societies, and for many as a replacement of received religion — is a comparatively recent development. For whatever set of reasons (the rise of science? of technology? of market economies?), a significant segment of societies like ours withdrew from the worldview provided by traditional religion and adopted a different approach to getting to truth.

The turn to the secular worldview meant leaving behind the (often supernatural) answers religions have provided to some important questions without necessarily having anything with which to replace them. The result has been that there have been some important realities that the secular worldview has failed to comprehend.

Among the important truths that religions taught but that the predominant secular understanding does not now contain, are those points just made above — about

• the reality of something reasonable to call a “Force of Evil,”
• the centrality in the human drama between two coherent forces that can reasonably be called ““a Battle Between Good and Evil.”
• and the reality and importance and life-serving nature of the moral and spiritual dimensions.

The secular worldview should be regarded as a work-in-progress. It has its strengths (scientific, etc.) and its weaknesses (inadequate understanding of the nature of the Forces at work in the human world).

The “integrative vision” that has been my life’s work is an attempt to help fill in some of the missing pieces– pieces that we can infer are important because their absence in the secular worldview has proved, in our times, to jeopardize much that we hold sacred.

All We Hold Sacred is on the Line

The “integrative vision” is offered as a way of understanding. But its ultimate purpose is to have an impact at the level of action.

Each of those points above, for example, has proved relevant to the ability – or rather, inability — of the American body politic to protect itself effectively from the rise of a fascistic political force.

• If one does not have a conceptual space for the existence of something like a Destructive Force, or Force of Evil, one will be hindered in recognizing the nature of such a Force if it should arise before one’s eyes.
• If one does not give the moral and spiritual dimensions of human reality the deep respect they warrant, one will not connect fully with the moral and spiritual passions that equip one for fighting powerfully and effectively against such a Force.
• The Central Challenge articulated in the first entry of this series makes it clear how we have been tasked: to enter into the Battle Between Good and Evil and work to help humankind and its civilization to get their act together in time to prevent the human story from culminating in self-destruction.

Not seeing WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST enabled a political force to reap political benefits for conduct that should have incurred political costs. The failure to properly combat that destructive force allowed the power of that force to grow to the point now where a great many insightful observes declare that the very survival of American Democracy is in jeopardy.

Which means that so much that we hold sacred – so much that gets crushed when Fascist regimes rule – is in jeopardy.

But it’s bigger than the American crisis of this time.

“The Battle between Democracy and Fascism” – which has moved in a worrisome direction not only in the American power-system, but also on a global scale – has a direct bearing on the still larger question of “The Fate of Human Civilization,”i.e. on whether human civilization will be able to get its civilizational act together so that humankind can survive and thrive for the long haul, or will destroy itself? Because…

Fascism as One of the Major Forms of the Destructive Force in the Modern World

Fascism pretty well coincides with the proposed definition of “Evil.” Unlike the forms of brokenness that the liberal side customarily generates, the coherence of the Force of Fascism is obvious: Fascism presents not as a bunch of individual entities operating separately, but as a mass mobilized as a fist.

And fascism consistently makes the human world more broken– fanning hatreds, persecuting the vulnerable, dealing in lies, waging unjustified war.

And the Spirit of Fascism shows is connected with those forces that threaten to bring Life’s experiment with “Civilization” to a catastrophic conclusion:

• The Spirit of Fascism expressed itself with the invasion of Poland in 1939, and this year with the invasion of Ukraine by the Fascist dictator of Russia, Vladimir Putin. Fascism’s destructive tendencies are displayed in the huge amount of brokenness that has ensued from Putin’s ugly decision.  Thanks to a Fascist dictator, the human world has been reminded that human civilization could end in a nuclear holocaust.
• And the Spirit of Fascism, ruling Brazil in recent years, lately worked to accelerate the destruction of the Amazon forest (at the very moment that the earth desperately needs the Amazon to help ameliorate the destructiveness humankind has already wrought upon by disrupting the earth’s climate system). That Fascist Brazilian leader reminds us of the kinds of forces at work in the world that might drive human civilization into self-destruction through inflicting profound damage on the biosphere on which we depend for our survival.

The crisis that has arisen in America is tied together with the longer-term crisis regarding the survival of human civilization.

“Wired? to be Inspired

Discernible in the human world are two coherent forces, each of which consistently spreads a pattern — one a pattern of Wholeness, i.e. the kind of order that is life-enhancing. And the other a pattern of Brokenness that consistently makes things worse. The long-term question about the human future — “thrive” or “die” — turns out to be about which of those two forces wins the ongoing battle over which will shape the human world.

Calling the battle between those forces “the Battle Between Good and Evil” is as good a way of describing it as any. And in fact, I believe is the best way because it captures the issue at a level that gets us plugged into those moral and spiritual passions that would make the victory of the Good – and the protection of all we hold sacred — more likely.

Fortunately — or so I have come believe — we humans are “wired” to be inspired to fight and win battles that take the form of “Good vs. Evil.”

I infer that from the huge success played by the biggest of our movie blockbusters: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Avatar — all enactments of a Battle Between Good and Evil. That they were not only “successful at the box office,” but also played a mythic role in the culture, indicates that this form of narrative — with its dynamic of morally and spiritually infused combat — is one that people find exceptionally meaningful.

We in the audience identify with heroes in that battle, and engage vicariously in the fight. We pay good money for the thrill and gratification of victory over Evil — whether it be Luke Skywalker destroying the Death Star, or Frodo managing to achieve the impossible and save the world, or Sully defeating the evil and greedy military-industrial organization that’s destroying Pandora in its Greed.

It seems to run deep, and I don’t think it’s just instilled by culture. The ability to rouse oneself to protect what one values most (from some threat that might destroy it) is probably highly selected for in the evolutionary process. And that basic survival impulse could readily evolve into experiencing such battles in terms of Good vs. Evil.

Wired — to channel our moral, spiritual, and physical passions into the fighting of the fight against Evil to protect what we hold sacred.

But it turns out that gaps in people’s understanding can interfere with the ability of the “wiring” to carry the current to where it needs to go.

That’s no problem with a movie, where the artistry of the films persuades us to see that WHAT WE ARE UP AGAINST is Evil, whether it be the Emperor in Star Wars, or Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, or the Greedy military-industrial force in Avalon. That artistry, combined with people’s willingness to suspend disbelief and accept whatever the magical and mythical terms are of that fictional world, enables people generally to experience what we’re wired to experience.

But when it comes to the real world, disbelief is not suspended. And a lot of people don’t see any “Battle Between Good and Evil” because their beliefs about how the real world works do not include the kind of Good/Evil dynamic the movies conjure up.

It is said in baseball that “You can’t hit what you can’t see.” The past generation in American political history shows that you also can’t see what you’ve got not conceptual space in your mental maps for.

Which I believe is a major reason that a lot of people simply could not see what was rising before their eyes in the American power system. (And that is why I described as dangerous some of the gaps in the predominant secular worldview.)

It is important for those gaps to be closed, as there arise real-world battles that are fundamentally the same as those confronting Luke and Frodo and Sully. And, as there is nothing more important in the human story than that the Life-Serving forces triumph over the Life-Destroying, it is of importance to gain an understanding that can help people tap into those same empowering moral, spiritual, and physical passions we are wired to bring to a battle against a dark and destructive force.