Social Justice and Superorganisms
* Article: Social Justice and Superorganisms. On the Moral Phenomenology of Participating in the Evolution of the Cosmos. By Zak Stein, Marc Gafni, Barbara Marx Hubbard. The Center for Integral Wisdom & The Foundation for Conscious Evolution, 2015.
A contribution for the roundtable discussion of David Sloan Wilson’s, Does Altruism Exist. Summer 2015.
Discussion
Zak Stein, Marc Gafni, and Barbara Marx Hubbard on the role of self-consciousness in as a factor in evolution:
"To make a long story short: heterodox evolutionists and evolutionary phenomenologists have long been concerned with the role of self-consciousness in as a factor in evolution. They have have found that the key concept needed to foster ethical group synergy and emergence is that of uniqueness. It is one of the few keystone concepts that can bridge the gap between interiors and exteriors, science and ethics, matter and sprit, autonomy and communion. A sense of the inviolability and value of each individual’s Unique Self is the feeling of a healthy group. When a group comes together in such a way where no one’s unique self is diminished, but all are, in fact, leveraged, there emerges a Unique Self Symphony. This requires all the members to hold the group in mind, to envision their part in the self-organizing and self-orchestrating social reality to which they consent to participate. This a just form of emergent super organisms because it requires that we care about everyone’s story. It has the perspective of social justice—the omni-considerate view from everywhere—at its core and leverages the benefits of justice to promote further harmoniums evolutionary emergence.
A self-conscious Unique Self Symphony is the feeling of being ethically integrated into a larger totality; having a sense of social justice is having a sense (very literally) for the presence or absence of harmonious social integration. The felt integrity of one’s unique self is the core of an evolutionary phenomenology of moral consciousness, especially when a group is in the midst of dynamic autocatalytic closure. To fit into the evolutionary puzzle or story (why is it always a struggle?), the shape required by each individual is unique. Other forms of superorganic closure require violence and will ultimately be undone, unseated not because they are physically unsustainable (although they likely would be), but because they are unbearable for human identity formation and moral development."