The Age of Separation, the Age of Reunion, and the convergence of crises that is birthing the transition

Description of the Book

The Ascent of Humanity is about the history and future of civilization from a unique perspective: the evolution of the human sense of self. This book describes how all the expressions of our civilization—its miraculous technology as well as the pillage of earth, culture, goodness, and beauty—arise from our identity, our way of being, "the discrete and separate self". The gathering crises of our age demonstrate that this way of being is on the verge of collapse. And this collapse is setting the stage for a revolution in human beingness whose stirrings we already begin to feel.

The Ascent of Humanity is about Separation: its origins, its evolution, its ideology, its effects, its consummation and resolution, and its cosmic purpose. What is the purpose of the grandeur and the ruin we have wrought? If civilization is to collapse, Why? and What for? Will we then go back to the Stone Age, or will we be born into something entirely new? This book draws from mythological sources, as well as natural processes of birth and transformation, to offer a narrative framework for the majesty and madness of human civilization.

More than anything, The Ascent of Humanity is about how to create the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible. I have long found most prescriptions for "what you can do" to reverse humanity's trajectory of ruin quite empty. Recycle your bottles and turn off the faucet when you brush your teeth. Write your Congressman. What are these tiny individual actions against the juggernaut of destruction that consumes oceans, trees, soil, and culture? This book offers an entirely different approach that begins with the reconception of our very selves. It invalidates the logic of despair that so many activists have felt, that arises inescapably from the conception of ourselves as discrete and separate subjects in a world of other. This is the ideology of separation. The ideology that has created the human realm we know is the same ideology that has us despair we can ever change it. Wait, did I say "we"? I mean actually "you" and "I". "We" is often disempowering too, because it leads us to wish, "Oh if only everyone would get it, then we would have a better government, better laws, and stop being so greedy." But they don't—how could I make them?—and the despair comes back. Helplessness. Frustration. This may be the only book you have ever read that fully gets the enormity of the crises facing us, yet responds neither with despair nor with fantasy suggestions about what "we" should do about it.

Why the Tower of Babel?

The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel provides one of the central metaphors of the book. In the story, the builders sought to build a tower that reached to heaven—a metaphor for the attempt to reach the infinite through finite means. Similarly, human beings through their technology—social and material—have sought to create a perfect world, a Utopia. Social technologies, such as systems of law, and physical technologies of energy, materials, and biota, have created an edifice that reaches high indeed. We call it civilization, but are we really any closer to Heaven? Are we better off today than the hunter-gatherer, the Roman peasant, the 1950 American? No matter how many problems we solve, the sky seems just as far away as ever.

Meanwhile, the higher we build the more problems appear in the base of our structure, as if our civilization were beginning to collapse under its own weight. Look at Pieter Bruegel's painting. The lower sections begin to crack and crumble even as they build the tower higher. Similarly, even as technology achieves new wonders, fundamental problems as old as civilization proliferate. We have microchips and nanotechnology, yet a large and growing portion of humanity cannot meet basic human needs for food, health, and security from violence.

One look at the Tower in the painting is enough to see that the builders' project is obviously doomed. It is absurd, in fact. The higher the building goes, the greater an insulation from reality is necessary to continue the effort. Yet continue it they must, because their whole way of life is built around its construction. Jared Diamond gives a similar answer to the question of why the Easter Islanders continued to destroy their ecosystem to erect huge monoliths, even when their doom should have been obvious. Their politics, their economy, their social organization, all depended on the construction. We as well are addicted to the ascent of technology. Faced with the problems caused by previous technology, we know no other way to solve them but through new technologies that generate their own unintended consequences. Helplessly, we build the Tower higher.

One of two possible fates is in store for such an enterprise. One is a stupendous collapse, when the weakened foundation can no longer bear the structure's weight. Many thinkers foresee precisely such a finale for civilization as its ecological basis degenerates. Another possibility is that, like in the story, the builders abandon their attempt. The Babelians woke up one day to find themselves speaking different languages—a metaphor for a breakdown in communication, consensus, and comity. The grand project of civilization is fragmenting; scientific hyperspecialization renders various fields mutually unintelligible; and we are doubting the possibility and desirability of building yet higher.

Instead, people everywhere feel the pull to go back to nature, back to the land; to live more simply, more freely, more slowly. This trend points to the great irony of the all-consuming effort to build a tower to the sky—the sky is all around us already! A perfect world is available right now, and has always been available. We are no closer than our hunter-gatherer forebears, and no farther either. All that is needed is a shift of perception. We might still build towers, but the motivation will be entirely different. To what purpose would we turn the human gifts of hand and mind—technology and culture—when we are no longer driven skyward?

Why we are offering a free, full-text version on line

While the author and the publisher both would love to make money from this book, we feel that the overriding priority is to disseminate these ideas as widely and as quickly as possible. As the planetary crisis mounts, as activists despair of their capacity to halt the life-devouring machine, this book is sorely needed as a map for the transformative process ahead of us, both individually and collectively.

Moreover, I, the author, have deep reservations about the validity of intellectual property. The ownership of ideas, I believe, is just the latest step in a centuries-old enclosure and privatization of the commons. What was once public and free to all, has progressively entered the realm of property. Can anyone really claim to have created a new idea? Ideas build on other ideas, and even the most original idea is the end result of a long social process. I do not believe I have a moral right to make the ideas in this book into my property. Both the online and the print version will carry a limited copyright. Anyone is free to use or copy this material for any non-commercial purpose. Just acknowledge the source, please.

On the other hand, The Ascent of Humanity is the result of ten years of labor. As each of us express our gifts to the universe, so the universe will gift us in return. We believe that this book will be profitable in spite of our giving it away for free. For the online version, we have implemented an optional payment tab for people who want to support the author in his work. And of course many people will want the beautiful bound version.

The Writing of The Ascent of Humanity

This book is a labor of love that has occupied ten years: six years of research and desultory attempts at writing, and then four years intensively devoted to writing, rewriting, and re-rewriting. The online version represents the fifth draft, completed in August, 2006. The print version has a small amount of new material and a number of corrections, revised footnotes, and so forth.

The Ascent of Humanity took its final form as I taught a class by the same name at Penn State University. Much of the material is what I would have liked to have taught had only the majority of my students been as intellectually present and engaged as a few exceptional students were. I could not have written this book without these students. At key moments, they displayed a wonder and a passion for these ideas that renewed my vigor and reminded me that I am not, in fact, crazy.

The intellectual influences that converge upon this writing began to enter my life at age 22, when I read Prigogine & Stenger's Order out of Chaos. Thus began a wide-ranging autodidactic education, encompassing non-linear dynamics, physics, cosmology, genetics, ecology, Taoism, Buddhism, Christian and Islamic mysticism, history, philosophy, nutrition, education, and many other fields. All the usual interests of a New Age intellectual dilettante! But I think if you read the book, you will discover a cogency and scope that resists facile dismissal. Writers to whom I am particularly indebted include Lewis Mumford, Joseph Chilton Pearce, David Bohm, John Zerzan, Lewis Hyde, Lynn Margulis, Joseph Tainter, Joseph Epes Brown, Silvio Gesell, Wendell Berry, Marshall Sahlins, and Stanislov Grof.

On a more personal note, the progression of this book from the Age of Separation t the Age of Reunion parallels the development of my own life. Like humanity in general, I too passed through an "Age of Reason"; I too implemented a "technological program" of management and control; I too saw my social and spiritual capital converted into money. I personally experienced the extremes of the discrete and separate self, and witnessed the same inevitable collapse of that regime that is overtaking us collectively. Today, although I often experience flashbacks to my Age of Separation, I am more and more solidly planted in a personal Age of Reunion. All that humanity has lost—community, connection to nature, play, intimacy, trust in providence—is returning to my life. I share elements of this story in the book as well, personal illustrations that the transformation of human civilization has an inescapable personal dimension.

Some Early Responses to The Ascent of Humanity

This is an extraordinary book. Eisenstein has put his finger on the core problem facing humanity—namely: separation. All the crises that humanity now face are grounded in the belief that we are separate—separate from each other, separate from the biosphere that sustains us—separate from the universe that has brought us forth. This is a tour-de-force filled with astounding insight, wit, wisdom and heart.
Christopher Uhl
Professor of Biology
Author of Developing Ecological Consciousness: Paths to a Sustainable Future

...quite marvelous, a hugely important work... This book is truly needed in this time of deepening crisis.
John Zerzan
Author of Future Primitive and Elements of Refusal

A radical awakening as to how we arrived at our current crisis and how we can more effectively redefine the path of our evolutionary journey.
Bruce Lipton
Cell Biologist, Author of The Biology of Belief

Brilliant and original, with great depth of insight and understanding, Eisenstein’s Ascent of Humanity easily ranks with the works of such giants of our age as David Bohm, Julian Jaynes, Jean Gebser, Whitehead. It is a profoundly serious, indeed somber portrait of our times, even as it opens a door of honest hope amidst the dark destiny we have woven about us. Accept the challenge of this major accomplishment and discover the light shining within it.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
Author of many books, including The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Magical Child, Evolution's End, and The Biology of Transcendence

This is one of those rare books that moves the goal posts. Eisenstein pulls together a wide array of insights to show that what we thought was the solution is also the problem. It is eye opening fodder for conversations with everyone I meet. As a technologist and a human being, I believe this could well be one of the most important books of the decade.
Garret Moddel
Professor of Electrical Engineering at UC Boulder
Chairman & CTO, Phiar Corporation

Panenthea Productions

The Ascent of Humanity is being published by Panenthea Productions, a company "dedicated to the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible." The official publication date is March 2007, and the cover price is $25.