‘There is something within us … that demands we  pursue the whole story of the whole cosmos if we are to be whole persons, in order to know who we are, where we are from, where we are going, and how we should live.’
– Call for Papers, Metanexus 2009: Cosmos, Nature, Culture: A Transdisciplinary Conference

The ‘whole story’ naturally divides itself into three stories: the unfolding of the universe (‘cosmos’), the evolution of life (‘nature’), and human history (‘culture’).  This paper focuses on the third of these.  It offers a holistic account of human history that draws on systems-theoretic ideas, more specifically on a process model first applied by the author to levels of structure in biology and linguistics.  While the model provides only a skeletal framework for a story of history, even in rudimentary form it has the possiblity of illuminating our past, our future, and our present.

Technically, the model depicts diachronic change as partially deterministic and partially stochastic, driven primarily by internal forces but subject also to external influences.  After its inception and initial development, a process often reaches a critical juncture where it encounters some limitation.  If this is overcome, development may continue until a second critical juncture is reached, where obstacles to further advance are more severe.  At the first juncture, continued development requires some complexity-managing innovation; at the second, it needs systemic integration in which the old organizing principle of the process is replaced by a new one.  Overcoming the first blockage sometimes occurs via a secondary process that augments and blends with the primary process, and is subject in turn to its own developmental difficulties.

The story of human history told via this model combines ideas from Toynbee, Marx, Jaspers, Mumford, and others.  It integrates materialist and idealist orientations by joining the historical dialectic of Marx to the Axial focus of Toynbee and Jaspers.  As described in this model, the ‘primary’ macro-historical process began in the biological emergence of the human species, continued with the development of agriculture, and reached its first critical juncture after the rise of the great urban civilizations.  Crises of disorder and complexity faced by these civilizations were eased by the religions and philosophies that emerged in the Axial period.  These Axial traditions became the cultural cores of the major world civilizations, their development constituting a ‘secondary’ process that blended with the first.  This process also stalled, but in the West, the impasse was overcome by a ‘tertiary’ process: the emergence of humanism, the empowerment of reason, and – quintessentially – the development of science and technology.  This third process blended with the first two in societal and religious change that ushered in ‘modernity.’  Today, this current of development also falters, and inter-civilizational conflict afflicts the secondary stream.  Most seriously, the primary process has now reached its second, especially hazardous, juncture – the current global and macro-historical crisis of environmental, ecological, and economic sustainability.  ‘System formation’ via a new organizing principle is needed at a planetary scale.