Communion: An Evolutionary Perspective

Or, Humanist Evolution to Live By

What whispers are these O lands, running ahead of you, passing
under the seas?

Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to
the globe?

— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1892

1: Genesis

Complex life is an expected function of thermodynamic gradients on chaotic media, such as existed in Earth’s sundrenched and volcanic oceans and, later in time, in the bodies of cells and cultures. Chaos is defined as a swarm of low probability events; the thermodynamic gradient is another name for the cosmic drift from low probability (Big Bang) to high probability (entropy).

2: Evolution

Biological individuals arise as a ceaseless process of the compounding of groups of smaller individuals—called multilevel endosymbiosis—to colonize all viable metabolic pathways; thus maximizing biodiversity and dissipating as much energy as possible for as long as possible in a persistently chaotic environment.

3: Culture

Human culture is a form of multilevel endosymbiosis in the sense that the media of biodiversity expands to include information and communication as structuring processes of new symbolic entities and forms of inheritance, and the bonds and enmities between individuals and groups transition from internal biological chemistry to the feelings of love or hate among people and their social groups.

4: Morality & Religion

Morality and religion is the transcription code for turning individuals into the culture’s groups, and guarding them against dissolution from outsiders. It encodes the same fundamental principles of identity, boundary, hierarchy, and competition between individuals, their group, and their environment as generated the first bacteria that evolved into cellular organisms.

5: Spirituality

Spirituality is a name for the evolutionary continuing of multilevel group-speciation beyond the traditional level of the individual (exploiting the peculiar, miraculous plasticity of the human self) to include, through recursive expansion, empathic communion with all people and all living beings. With every expansion of group identity comes a corresponding lessening of fear of death and ability to live in the moment.

6: Technology

Technology operates at the level of the individual and the group but has no inherent morality; it helps individuals become gods, and groups become empires. But with the right tools in the right hands, the spiritual evolution of humanity can be greatly augmented by the upcoming technological developments in directly-connected minds, connected environments, and virtual, augmented, and merged reality; analogous to how diversity and tolerance in modern social groups have been helped by information technologies, as well as hurt by them.

7: Communion

Communion is a philosophy of life that augments domains 1 through 6 with social technology to create a virtuous feedback-loop of ever-escalating circles of empathy arising as groups and individuals strive to save each other from common adversities. Like a capitalism of the soul, it creates a system whose local maxima is social-group self-interest and an invisible hand whose global maxima is the enlightened society and beyond. Boundaries of self expand, feelings of happiness and love grow. It is the Golden Rule (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) upgraded to a principle of human evolution. In other words, humanist social self-transcendence.