image by Orin Optiglot

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
—Charles Darwin

And why should cultural evolution be any different? Indeed, looking at the major stages of human civilization we see that each emergence both solves problems of the previous stage and provides the “strife” needed for the next stage to emerge.

• Tribal consciousness, in which we were completely embedded in our tribal structures, led to the intense individuality of warrior culture.
• The brutality that developed out of warrior culture led to traditional cultures founded on the Great Faiths and reliant upon law and order.
• But traditional ways of seeing, in which religion dictated all the terms of reality, led to the rise of modernism, in which science and rationality took over as the primary lenses through which we view the world.
• In turn, the strifes of modernism—imperialism, oppression, and all the problems caused by the pursuit of unchecked material wealth—provided the raw material for postmodernism, and now many of us make meaning of the world from its egalitarian, inclusive, non-hierarchical values.
• Now we are beginning to see the pathologies of postmodernism as well—moral relativism, extreme narcissism, and ultra-differentiation so intense that we violently disagree with people who share 95% of our values.

The question now is, out of these problems, out of this strife, where will we go next? Where will this flowering process of ever-more-complex pathologies and ever-higher resolutions lead us? These folks have some pretty good ideas about it, but ultimately, it’s up to us—each of us and all of us—to decide.