There are many ways to study and interpret human history. In The Patterning Instinct, our author presents an important one: through a cultural lens. Lent argues that the shape of many of our societies today can be understood through a further understanding of the patterns of thought of previous generations. In short, “culture shapes values, and values shape history.”
In 1405, Admiral Zheng and a glorious armada of three hundred magnificent ships left the shores of China. He had over 27,000 crewmen with him on a mission to establish relations with nearby societies. They sailed all throughout the islands of Indonesia and the basin of the Indian Ocean creating trade routes and making friends. Zheng would go on to lead seven of these expeditions over the course of thirty years. Then, in 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain with a crew of ninety men in three small boats. He would go on to ‘discover’ the new world and begin the process of Europe’s global colonization. Why is it that it was Columbus’ voyage that changed the world so dramatically, while Zheng’s armada left such little imprint? The Chinese were a far more advanced society in the 1500s than Europe, and yet, the Chinese never came to dominate the world the way that the colonizing Europeans would. In attempting to answer why, Lent combs through history, from our earliest hunter-gatherer ancestors to the ancient Greeks, Indians, Chinese, and onwards to Europe and our modern society.
The answer is that the Europeans approached the world with fundamentally different values than the Chinese. “The collective European mind-set was more predisposed to use knowledge as a means to gain power over the environment, including both the natural world and other human societies. In contrast, the collective Chinese mind-set was predisposed to use knowledge as a means of maintaining stability.” The Europeans saw nature as something to dominate, while the Chinese saw nature as something to harmonize with. For example, the Chinese had gunpowder centuries before the Europeans, but it only changed the nature of warfare (and global power) once the Europeans got their hands on it. This was because of their frame of mind: dominate nature. These two cultures viewed life in cognitively different ways, each set in motion thousands of years ago.
The European’s took direction from the ancient Greeks, who believed in a separation of the body and soul. Alternatively, the ancient Chinese concept of qi (pronounced Chee) was both material and spiritual in nature. “Unlike Plato’s substance dualism, which posited two separate kinds of reality—spiritual and physical—and became the foundation for Western thoughts, qi presented a cosmological framework in which there was only one kind of stuff—qi stuff—which was both spiritual and physical at the same time.” This eventually led the Western world to view the natural world as something different from themselves, eventually something to dominate.
Western philosophers went on to believe in a separation of reason and feeling, and championed the abilities of human reason and logic to understand the natural world. Eastern religions (Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism) were again more holistic in their understanding of life. The muslim world had made advancements in science and math long before the Europeans, setting themselves up for a scientific revolution that never occurred. When ancient muslims were confronted with experimental results that defied their traditional thinking, they chose faith over logic, and turned to the Quran.
These foundational frames of European thought (in addition to their religious absolutism) “underlaid and shaped the European attitude toward their voyages of discovery.” Conversely, the “Chinese saw themselves embedded in a harmonic web of life, which led to the view of a cosmos where the purpose of life was not to seek everlasting salvation but to harmonize one’s existence within the hierarchical network of family, society, heaven, and earth.”
Today, we (in the West) take our worldview for granted, assuming it as objectively true. But it is not, and has never been that way. Our societies are culturally specific and subjective, and have come about as our collective thought patterns have evolved slowly over thousands of years. Today’s consumerist culture praises constant growth and still sees nature as something to dominate. This frame for how we view and interact with the natural world has led us into some major problems like global warming, the depletion of fresh water, and the disruption of ecosystems, along with severe wealth and income inequality, the erosion of democracies, and increasing secularization which has led to a pervasive nihilism. Why has all this happened? Because of the root metaphors underlying the growth and advancement of society. But of course, without these metaphors, we never would have advanced in the first place and invented all of the amazing tools and technologies we have.
Lent does his best to understand the evolving world through the lens of systems thinking. One of the important aspects of viewing life as a system is understanding that “in self-organized systems, the complex interaction of many connected elements causes emergent behavior that could never be predicted by a study of each part alone.” So, while we try to solve problems by breaking them down into elements that we can more easily understand, this, ultimately, does a disservice to the overarching problem, one that must be understood in its entirety to have a hope at solving it. Lent advocates for a cognitive change, from one of dominating the natural world, to one in harmony with it. Otherwise we may eventually run out of natural resources and find ourselves on the brink of a societal calamity.