http://abetterhumanstory.org/

https://3quarksdaily.com/

"Who are we human beings by nature? Why has our storybeen such a troubled one? What do we need to do to achieve the kind ofworld we want?

"As acivilization, we have not had adequate answers to those questions. Part ofthe reason for that is that we’ve not had a perspective on ourselves andour story that shows us some important truths.

"Formillennia, humankind developed its answers without any idea of how we cameto be, or of how we were related to the living world around us. It’s onlyover a handful of generations that people have had the knowledge of theproper time-scale, that we’ve have known

· that time didn’t begin mere thousands of years ago,
· that we emerged out of the whole 3.5 billion year history of Life-on-Earth,
· that the great majority of the history of our species preceded the rise of civilization.
"Suchknowledge has come to us too recently, apparently, for our civilization totrace all the implications of the Evolutionary Perspective that areimportant for understanding “The Human Story.”

"Ferretingout some of those missing – and important -- implications is one way todescribe my life’s work.

Then the piece unfolds in two parts, each of which utilizes amajor truth from the Evolutionary Perspective to illuminate something important-- and largely missing from our civilization's current understanding -- aboutthe Human Story.

"The first of those evolutionary principles is this:
Evolution, byconsistently choosing Life over Death, creates Order. Order-- from the cell tothe organism to the ecosystem. (The way I like to put it: “The lion andthe zebra and the grass work together to operate a perpetual motionmachine, even as they devour each other.”)
I then proceed to use that principle to show that the rise ofCivilization was a Fateful Step, that it inevitably unleashed a majordestructive force that would inevitably driven the evolution of civilization indestructive ways. And from there to show that "The Ugliness We See inHuman History is Not Human Nature Writ Large."

In other words, this first principle leads to my idea, THEPARABLE OF THE TRIBES, that among other things proves that we are bettercreatures than we have thought ourselves to be.

The second evolutionary principle is this:

Forthe most part, the components of a creature’s nature are there because theyhave proved life-serving. And one dimension of what evolution crafts into thecreature is its Experiential Realm. That’s because “the quality of Experience”is an important contributor to the means by which many creatures survive.


From this principle, it can be pretty well proven that somedimensions that our secular worldview tends to give short shrift -- the moral and the spiritual dimensions -- are both very real, very valid, and veryimportant, and are emergent realities in the history of Life-on-Earth that havebeen crafted into our species Experiential Realm because they have been life-serving for our species.

From there, it is a quick and easy step to pretty wellproving that it is inevitable that a creature that takes the step onto the pathof Civilization will enact a story in which a major dynamic will be the contention between two coherent forces over which will govern howthe human world develops-- one that continually "makes the human worldworse" and one "makes the human world better." And that the waythese two forces battle each other -- at the heart of the human drama -- is somuch like how "theBattle BetweenGood and Evil" has traditionally been understood, that it isreasonable to regard that dynamic at the core of the story of thecivilization-creating creature by that ancient name.

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