Early Voices of Conscious Evolution
Insight and Inspiration from the Beginning of the Modern Era
Early Voices of Conscious Evolution is a unique collection of writings drawn from more than 120 thinkers, scholars, and social actors of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The passages were carefully selected to evidence the beginnings of a dramatic shift out of a long period of relatively unconscious evolution of culture and society, characterizing most of human history, and into a new era. This new era featured a growing realization that we could consciously steer culture and society toward forms more supportive of human development and a sustainable relationship with the natural environment.
Helping to place current social dynamics into a longer-term context and empowering frame, Early Voices of Conscious Evolution will be of interest to any and all readers interested in the deeper history of social change and the possibilities for peaceful transformation today and tomorrow.
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About the Author
Matthew Shapiro is an independent scholar, writer, and deep activist. His focus is on building capacities for participatory democracy and vision-based social systems design at the local level. A true polymath, Matthew has pioneered in fields as diverse as K-12 education and renewable energy development.
Paralleling his professional careers, for three decades Matthew has led a series of local initiatives intended to help catalyze the co-evolution of society and culture toward forms more supportive of human development and a sustainable relationship with the environment.
Matthew’s written portfolio includes articles in The Eastern Anthropologist and World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution; chapters in edited books about dialogue; guidebooks and support materials for the participatory design of education systems; and independent research studies and surveys related to neighborhood and civic participation.
Matthew’s longstanding focus on bridging theory with action has led to encounters and collaborations with leading thinkers, including virologist Jonas Salk, participatory design pioneer Bela H. Banathy, and “flow” psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Excerpts
The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence, and of like duration with that through which traces of that crime and that improvidence extend, would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species. (1874)
Unrest is not a crime. Unrest is a symptom of growth. Just how much the unrest of women has had to do with evolving the new ideals that are characterizing the age will never be known. Nor is it important that it should be known. The significant thing for men and women to recognize is that a new valuation has been placed on life and must be maintained by them working together. Feminism is not anti-man. Feminism is pro-man. The conservation of life is human, racial business, not of one sex, but of both. (1915)
Conscious evolution means giving less and less place to herd instinct and more to the group imperative. We are emerging from our gregarious condition and are now to enter on the rational way of living by scanning our relations to one another, instead of bluntly feeling them, and so adjusting them that unimpeded progress on this higher plane is secured…We know now that there are no immutable goals—there is only a way, a process, by which we shall, like gods, create our own ends at any moment—crystallize just enough to be of use and then flow on again. (1918)
The story of evolution is a great aid to correct thinking. It may begin with stars which are a long way off, but it leads to man and man’s evolution. It gives you a solid scientific ground for hope and trust in man. No evolutionist can be a pessimist. The human story is only just opening…We are the factors of evolution to-day. (1920)
The Tediousness of Human Evolution is owing…To the tendency of ideas to outlast their origin, i.e. the tendency of human institutions to outlast the psychological conditions from which they arose…Psycho-Democracy considers social institutions as structural forms in collective consciousness which are subject to the same evolutional transformation as is collective consciousness itself, and that our social institutions of today will cause future generations to roar with laughter. (1921)
There can be no progress without see-ers of visions and dreamers of dreams. Conscious social evolution consists in imagining a better world, and then striving to realize it in the sphere of action…A progressive people, a spiritually virile people, must be trained to live in art [sic] in a world of constructive dreaming. (1924)
Early Voices of Conscious Evolution 