By a ‘saved’ world we mean a united world in which environmental destruction, poverty, exploitation, internecine conflict, terrorism and war have been eliminated and the overwhelming majority, if not all, of the world’s population are participating in a harmonious and prosperous global civilisation manifesting brotherhood.

The proposition at the heart of it is the belief that we have reached the stage, as a result of the knowledge we have accumulated, when we can see the goals we are moving towards – and that these goals provide an imperative for unity, a Unifying Principle, that is powerful enough to overcome the divisions that separate us along national, racial, ethnic, religious and cultural lines, and eradicate them permanently.

If we can be convinced that these insights could indeed save the world, then we would be obliged to take them seriously and subject them to close scrutiny – do they fit with the known facts of the world? Are they rational and reasonable? You will be the judge.

Aldous Huxley framed the underlying concept in Brave New World Revisited, which appeared as the Foreword in a reprint of his famous novel:

“In a society dedicated to the pursuit of sanity, religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of Man’s Final End. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of High Utilitarianism in which The Greatest Happiness principle is secondary to The Final End principle –the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: “How will this thought or action contribute to or interfere with the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of Man’s Final End?”

So let us paint a picture of a world in which the population is united in the pursuit of such an end. This fictional world has the same provenance as ours in every respect. The people are humans. But their beliefs about themselves and their place in the scheme of things are different from ours.

Central to their belief system are two goals they are moving towards. They believe them because they appear to unify and explain the tangle of observations which comprises their experience. They are the place where all paths to the truth join up.

One is based on a belief that humanity has, in an ecological context, a role to play in the living system in which we have evolved, and that the end goal of human consciousness is to ensure Life reaches the next safe haven. The other, which is contingent on the pursuit of the former, is the opportunity to create a paradise on Earth which will last until solar activity makes the planet uninhabitable – around a billion years. It is understood that the highly evolved life forms, including ourselves, which are totally dependent on the Earth’s environment for their sustained survival, will never reach that haven – though, crucially, it is also believed that if the project is successful, creatures very similar to ourselves will eventually re-emerge and face similar challenges to our own. The choice is seen like this: either Man grasps his fate, pursues it manfully and has a good chance of resurrection or he denies his fate and faces the certainty of oblivion.

Here, Happiness is regarded, not as an end in itself, but arising from the pursuit of valued goals and their attainment. Man views himself as an integral part, and inseparable from, the living system in which he is embedded. The question of why we are here is considered closed, and the paths to understanding what it really means to be human are open and accessible.

It is recognised that Man has an almost infinite capacity for conditioning himself to any kind of conduct, and that we tend to behave like the kind of people we consider ourselves to be. Here, mankind is learning which of our desires are essential to our humanity, either because we cannot live without them or because we would cease to be human if we did, and which can be dispensed with in a suitable environment.

The conflicts of the past are viewed in the context of the evolution of mankind’s belief systems. Our beliefs determine our values and they in turn determine our attitudes, aims and activities. When a significant change occurs in our beliefs about ourselves and our place in the scheme of things, our values, aims and attitudes change too. The fragmented and discordant nature of the world of the past is explained by the state of ignorance which inevitably exists along the path to enlightenment.

There is a biological principle which holds that every species contributes to the system and thereby survives and obtains what it needs from the system in order to thrive. This principle is called upon to illustrate much historical suffering: Man could not live authentically until he had understood what it was that he was contributing to the system.

Take, for example, the social evil of Exploitation. When you run it by the Final End Principle, whether it is exploitation of our environment or of other individuals, you are able to swiftly conclude that both are unthinkable. The environment is the source of all the materials, not just for day-to-day survival but for the completion of the project that gives people the sense of their identity. Its preservation is crucial to the mission. The parameters around judgements of self-worth and the allocation of resources have changed. The money/power dynamic has shifted. Many of the things people thought they needed in order to be happy are no longer necessary or even desirable. In a value system that places living things at the top, whether they are plants, animals or people, the over-exploitation of any for personal gain is as unimaginable as it is unnecessary.

There is the unity of all religions and the unity of science and religion. The objects and processes in religion are interpreted symbolically and regarded as metaphors for the goals mankind is moving towards. Man’s accountability to God, Judgement Day, the Resurrection, the immortality of the soul, a haven among the stars and a hell below – these mythical processes and objects in religion can, with minor modifications, be adapted easily into forms which clearly represent the facts of human life and destiny according to the prevailing belief system. In eastern religions the soul is enslaved to a cycle of re-birth, and cannot be set free until its work in this life has been completed. In the Hindu system there are cycles within cycles of death and re-birth, cosmic destruction and re-creation, with a duration of up to 300,000 billion years. In the Jewish view the Kingdom of God will be established on earth when God’s truth has filled the land. Ancient Islamic texts on The Day of Reckoning preach: “when the sun is folded up and the stars do fall, and when the mountains are moved … and when the seas shall surge up … and when Paradise shall be brought nigh, then the soul shall know what it had produced”  (Koran 81: 1-15).

Cultural and religious identity are not divisive as each set of customs and rituals, every belief system, expresses different aspects of Man’s connections with the whole, and the whole consists of all those aspects. Unity is the state where multiplicity and conformity co-exist. Here, people have the opportunity to conform without surrendering more of their individuality than they want to.

In this brave new world, morality is based on guiding principles for the achievement of mutually agreed and valued goals. Reasoning in morals is conducted in the same way that accountants reason in accounting. *1.

Here, the natural law and the moral law are consistent with each other. The ends to which reason is subjected are in plain view. Individuals may obey the moral law or disobey, but obedience involves no loss of the free use of reason. They are free –not because they make the moral law but because the moral law makes them free. This freedom is seen as the opportunity to live authentically – to be ‘true to their nature’.

Clear about their right to freedom and the duty of collective responsibility, they have gained control of the moral decisions of how to lead their own lives. The good is the good of all because the ends and the means thereto are complementary principles. The means to the end is unity and there can be no unity without social justice (equality of opportunity). Here, Social Justice is no mere aspiration or end in itself, it is critical to the mission.

Party politics is redundant. Nobel laureate Herman Hesse supplies the model for the governance of this kind of society in his novel The Glass Bead Game. A Council of the Wise concerns itself with strategies for social development and the achievement of all long term goals. Here, it is the arbiter in disputes of the law and the moral law, and disputes between the two. The implementation of its pronouncements are devolved to national and local administrations.

There is universal education because everything depends upon the awakening of individual consciousness. Emphasis is placed on subjects that can inspire wonder and awe for the natural world. All children learn Evolutionary Theory, Ecology and Cosmology as well as History and Philosophy. The limits to our knowledge are understood: we are grounded in nature but we cannot have complete knowledge of it. The mind supplies the concepts for organising experience and it makes the conjectures that take us beyond present evidence. Life has priority over reason. Life is the end-point of all justification. Beyond this all belief is groundless.

The transformation in Man and Society has changed the social and political existence of every person on the face of the planet. It is a change affecting the humanity of human beings. What it is that holds all men together has superseded preoccupations with the things that divide us. United in pursuit of a common destiny that transcends the competing narratives of the past, the one-ness of mankind is an unshakeable reality. The resources previously spent on social failure and on conflict and preparing for conflict have been used to address the injustices of the past and create a prosperous and harmonious global civilisation.

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Before we continued to the evidence in support of our central hypothesis i.e. that we have reached the stage where we can see the goals we are moving towards, we would want to be satisfied that, even if they were true, they could or would in fact produce the picture we have painted of a Saved World.

We may be inclined to believe that tyranny would remain, albeit in altered form. For example, the Final End Principle includes the phrase “…by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals”. Now let’s say the greatest possible number of individuals were to be calculated at 500 million, then does it not follow that The Final End Principle must mandate that the remainder of the population be eliminated?

The counter-argument is: if we believe that this does follow, then we have fallen into the trap of looking at one paradigm though the lens of another. Currently, our numbers place a heavy burden on the planet’s resources. But it is also the case that the potential contribution of the great majority of the world’s population remains untapped (one of the root cause of our social ills?).

Now, we have to try and project ourselves into the new Paradigm. Here, there is the global concurrence of values and the economic problem has been resolved. The billions of previously ‘redundant’ individuals are contributing to the system and therefore they are no longer a burden upon it. The ‘project’ has a billion years to run and therefore expediency does not require the implementation of desperate measures – measures which would in any case derail it. In these conditions “the greatest possible number of other individuals” means a population whose level is deemed sustainable and can be controlled and managed by collective consent.

History has made us highly suspicious of Totalitarianism. Attempts to impose collectivism on a large scale have always led to tyranny because collectivism cannot be sustained where the aims and ends of the individual are out of tune with those of the collective. The Utopian nightmare which is totalitarian dictatorship arises from, and personifies, the mass grouping of de-individualised, weak and helpless beings rather than a convention of individuals.

In the new paradigm, the individual’s connections to the whole and those of the collective are in unison. Society needs no protection from the individual because it embodies him. In these conditions society embodies the autonomous individual who has acquired sufficient certainty of judgement to act on his own insight and decision and not from a desire to copy convention – even though he may happen to agree with collective opinion.

If our view of human nature prevents us from seriously considering the prospect of a Saved World, then we must be able to demonstrate convincingly that our conditions and circumstances have no meaningful bearing on our dispositions or behaviour. We must be unshakeably of the view that educated, enlightened people with access to ample resources, occupying a niche that supplies them the sense of meaning and fulfilment must be compelled, because of their ‘innate’ flaws, to find ways to justify behaving like savages regardless of the consequences for themselves and everything they hold important to their lives.

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The evidence in support of the view that we have reached the stage where we can see the goals we are moving towards is multi-faceted. The pillars are inferences from fundamental biological principles and the discoveries we have made about the cosmos. They are supported by anecdotal evidence from history, philosophy and the sacred texts of the world’s religions.

Life appeared on Earth about 3.9 billion years ago. For the first 2 billion years the only living things on Earth were bacteria. The bacteria transformed a planet that was oxygen-less and openly exposed to cosmic radiation into an environment which is inhabitable by oxygen breathing organisms with cellular structure and sexual reproduction –the basis for the diversity of life. With the introduction of sex and death, around a billion years ago, evolution proceeded several thousand times faster. From then on, ‘higher’ organisms would age and die and individuals would pair their chromosomes in sexual reproduction. The pooling of genetic information increased the number of possibilities for evolutionary adaptation. Our common ancestry with all living things is evidenced by the fact that we all share the same DNA structure underlying the genes and chromosomes which differentiate one species from another.

We have stated that our hypothesis rests on fundamental biological principles. One such principle is that the capacity for renewal is a defining characteristic of living things. If it lives it has the capacity to renew itself. Single-celled organisms can be killed but they don’t die of old age. They renew themselves by dividing in two, making fresh DNA copies. Simple multi-celled organisms evolved through a process in which single celled organisms join up (they integrate) and then those cells differentiate – they specialise in different ways. For example, the cells on the outside might specialise in locomotion, while those on the inside might specialise in digestion or metabolizsation.

Cells are living systems and so are the tissues and organs of the body. Every organism throughout the evolutionary tree, from the smallest bacterium to a human being is a living system. Most organisms are complex eco-systems themselves – products of the integration of living systems. We may infer from all this, when it is useful to do so, that we can treat all living forms as part of the same living system. The system sustains itself through the diversification of species and the complex web of interactions and interrelationships that exist between them.

Most relationships between living organisms are characterised by co-existence and interdependence. Competition takes place within a broader context of co-operation, keeping the larger system in balance. Even predator / prey relationships usually benefit both species. Co-operation and integration are essential aspects of the ways in which living systems organise themselves at all levels. In each level we find integrated self-organising wholes that consist of smaller parts and, at the same time, act as parts of larger wholes. Macro and micro evolve together. The whole biosphere is a dynamic, integrated web of living and non-living forms. Transactions and interdependencies exist among all its levels with none being subordinate to or dominating another but acting in independent harmony to support the functioning of the whole. Ultimately, there are no levels, they are all part of one evolutionary cake. *2

The same principles of living systems apply to social structures such as anthills and beehives and to human families, communities, societies and cultures. In turn, all these systems are embedded in ecosystems. At a larger level still there is the biosphere, the ecosystem of the entire planet, upon which our survival is utterly dependent. Detailed studies of the way in which the biosphere seems to regulate the planetary environment have led to the suggestion that these phenomena can be understood only if the planet as a whole is regarded as a living organism. The scientists responsible for this theory named it The Gaia Principle.

All living forms on Earth are related to one another, and no species exists or evolves in isolation. Even though many species die out, evolution as a whole continually expands. The significance of this is that there is, ultimately, only one living system in our solar system –a living entity which exists and evolves as an indivisible whole. If we wished to challenge the inference that it must have the capacity to renew itself, we would have to be able to explain why it differed in this regard from all other living systems.

The emergence of multicellular life forms with sexual reproduction, flowering plants, insects, vertebrates, reptiles, birds and mammals – these are some of the great leaps in evolutionary history. The system is made up of millions of species, but a much smaller number of what we shall call ‘layers’ of Evolution (the layers of an onion are a useful, if limited, analogy). Each layer represents a major stage in the evolution of life on Earth. At the core we find the precursors of the bacteria which gave rise to the Earth’s atmosphere.

The atmosphere facilitated the rise of another layer – the green plants that convert the sun’s energy into cellulose. These plants facilitated the rise of another layer, the Primary Consumers.

Primary Consumers have to spend most of their waking hours grazing in order to obtain a sufficient supply of energy (most birds, rabbits, deer, cattle, etc. etc.). Primary Consumers convert plant proteins into a more compact form of energy (meat) giving rise to Secondary Consumers.

Secondary Consumers do not need to graze constantly. Predation led to new developments culminating in the arrival on the scene of an ape smart enough to invent television.

To say this was a highly simplified picture of Life and evolution would be an understatement, but we do not require a fuller picture in order to infer, from fundamental biological principles that:

1. There is one living system.
2. The system is comprised of many layers of evolution.
3. The system functions as a whole through the interplay between these layers and the organisms that populate them.
4. The system has the capacity to renew itself.

At one end of the evolutionary scale we find the bacteria. Of all the living systems on Earth the bacteria are the most perfectly adapted to the cosmic environment. They are virtually immortal. If adaptation alone was the goal of evolution, it would be hard to explain why life evolved beyond them. At the other end we find Man, whose environment must be regulated within the strictest limits.

Based on the impact it has made on the global environment, if nothing else, it is evident that Man’s particular brand of Consciousness is as significant an evolutionary step as any of the other great leaps in evolution. Our actions impact every aspect of the living system in which we are embedded. Man’s scientific and engineering capabilities have transformed the face of the world. They have given us the power of life and death over the organisms we share the planet with – their fate is in our hands. They have empowered us to tinker with the building blocks of nature to the extent that we have the capacity to intercede proactively, by design, in the course of evolution itself.

We have learned to understand what each layer of evolution is contributing to the functioning of the system – with one exception. If we had a credible answer for what our unique brand of Mind is contributing to the system as a whole, then we would have gone a long way towards answering one of the most confounding questions of all: the question of why we are here.

One of the products of our interactions with our environment is knowledge. An implication of the ‘one living system’ hypothesis is that it may be inferred that what we know the system knows – precisely because we are a branch of the system – a system made up of branches. This is the same as saying that a large company’s intellectual property is the sum of the intellectual properties of its various departments, since its departments make up the company. Different departments are responsible for different things, and a department’s need to know information is linked to its place in the scheme of things, its capacity to digest the information and act upon it.

Our sun is a relatively stable luminous star that is roughly halfway through its life. Its output is increasing all the time and will remain within a range that’s suitable for life on earth for about another billion years. Earth is at least three quarters of the way through its existence as a safe haven for living organisms. For a living system that renews itself, this is crucial information. Moreover, the department with access to the information has the capabilities to digest it and act upon it to the advantage of the system as a whole. This suggests that the process of evolution has culminated in the development of a renewal mechanism for the whole system.

The system knows that renewal entails leaving our solar system and reaching a safe haven elsewhere. We also know that a relatively minor variation in any environmental factor, from the mineral composition of a planet to its gravity or the properties of its moons, would rule out the viability of any life form which was highly-evolved elsewhere. A planet with an atmosphere would of necessity harbour a living system already.

A diverse living system attuned to the new environment could arise by evolutionary processes alone, and we could expect to find conscious creatures eventually re-emerging to face challenges similar to our own. The earth as an exporter of life is a proposition that’s entirely possible scientifically, but the evidence suggests that it would be overwhelmingly improbable if it were left to chance. The dynamics of the cosmos are such that the transmission of life beyond our solar system would have to be directed. And the consciousness which has taken 4 billion years to evolve on this planet is ideally suited to the challenge.

The vision of the future in which we escape our doomed planet aboard intergalactic space cruisers overlooks the fact that our survival is utterly dependent on the eco-system we have evolved in. We are totally dependent upon all the levels of organisation that comprise the biosphere. We could not depart without taking the entire living system with us. We may well, as human beings, come to roll through vast reaches of space aboard pressurised Noah’s Arks of enormous proportions capable of withstanding cosmic radiation and temperatures of minus 270 degrees Celsius. But what then? The only life originating from our planet that could adapt to a new location would be bacteria-like organisms that are able to tolerate the kind of conditions that prevailed on Earth when life kicked-in four billion years ago. A group of researchers reported in the October 2000 edition of Nature that they have recovered bacteria alive after 250 million years in suspended animation.  Another study has shown that some terrestrial bacteria can survive cosmic radiation much stronger than any the Earth has ever experienced.

We may infer from all of this that the renewal process of the living system as a whole must follow the same pattern as the renewal process of individual species. This pattern is characterised by dis-integration. Multicellular organisms dis-integrate into gametes which are packages of DNA containing half the chromosomes required for a complete cell of the organism. When they are fused together the process of cell division, integration and differentiation begins. One of the most graphic illustrations of the theory of evolution is that during their development, embryos parallel the evolutionary history of their species – from single to multicellular organisms and on up through their particular branches on the tree of life. The embryo of a bird or mammal develops through a stage that resemble a fish and then a frog.

From the knowledge we have accumulated about Life and the cosmos, we have every reason to believe, and few grounds for doubt, that the renewal process for the living system which exists on Earth is a matter of:

1. Identifying the bacterial life forms which kick-started the evolution of life on Earth.
2. Identifying potential safe havens – suitable planets in the process of formation.
3. Engineering a means of dispersal.

It can be no surprise that Man has already embarked on this kind of research. However, in our society it is believed that we are masters of the universe and such scientific endeavours as are undertaken are done with a view to our own survival. We scour the earth for life’s secrets and we search the heavens for habitable locations.  We may be following our destiny, but we are not following it in the full conscious realisation of the fact that pursuing these goals on behalf of the whole living system is the role of consciousness and hence the reason why we are here.

…to be continued

*1. Mathematician and philosopher Leibnitz, one of the most influential thinkers of his time, made this prediction in the 18^th century.

*2. ‘The systems view of life’ in The Turning Point by Fritjof Kapra. Also: ‘Looking Glass Evolution’ in Looking Glass Universe by Briggs and Peat