Better view

“People are different.”
– a fellow traveler

That seems true enough on the surface, yet it inspired me to see if they really different at a deeper level, and if so, in what way?

As I watched the first two episodes of the BBC series How Art Made the World this week, I was struck by the startling evidence of similarities in the perspectives of people across time and space.

In art, we are taught that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. And this made me wonder if the differences between people could be largely dependent on the beholder’s perspective too?

Take a look at how the Egyptians depicted humans in their visual arts, unchanged over thousands of years during their civilization. Such consistency is unthinkable in our rapidly changing world of today. The Egyptian way of visualizing people was carefully crafted and uniformly maintained with great discipline. Time passed, the perspective stayed the same.

Then watch the similarities in how our ancestors painted animals on cave walls across historical Europe, and how close these resemble the rock wall paintings in South Africa made just a couple of hundred years ago. They might have painted for similar reasons, as the documentary suggests, showing what they saw in their mind as they traveled in and out of the spiritual realm during altered states of consciousness that were induced by spending time in dark and narrow spaces.

When Picasso explored the famous bull paintings in the Lascaux cave in France in 1940, he declared that “we have learned nothing in twelve thousand years," attesting to the enduring similarities in art and artists over such a long time.

And observe how the chubby, impersonal “Venus” statuettes from prehistoric times, discovered in many places across Europe and beyond, look remarkably similar. Yet there is no indication that the communities who made these images were not in touch with each other, so how could they produce such similar visions of people? The documentary suggests that the perspective was determined by the tribes’ shared view of their existence as hunter-gatherers. Different places, same perspective.

Jump in the time machine and switch for a moment to today’s global challenges and the politics to address them…

When President Bill Clinton spoke in June 2009 to promote global cooperation for the survival of mankind, he urged people to focus on their similarities. “We are genetically 99.5 percent the same,” he said, yet “from time immemorial, people have fought over identity rooted in that (half percent). We should have spent more time thinking about that other 99.5 percent of ourselves.”

And summing up the prospects for success, he concluded that “if we have a chance, it has to begin by people accepting that they can be proud of who they are without despising who someone else is.” Such messages are now broadcast in electronic images, across vast distances.

Focusing on similarities has a compelling logic, yet unlike in the Egyptian and early European times, in today’s world it seems difficult to do. Even if people might be similar in many ways, they seem to be hard-wired to look for their differences in their continuous search for meaning and creative expression, and as they work hard to make money from products and services that have to stand out from others to be marketable.

Meanwhile, wars and conflicts keep filling news stories, showing that plenty of people around the world are still committed to despising each other because of perceived differences.

And yet, look around and observe that globalization trends continue to diminish or wipe out diversity, as illustrated by the phenomenon of Starbucks and other global brands. While people keep focusing on differences, diversity and uniqueness, increasing numbers end up drinking the same coffee, wearing similar clothes, and using the same computer software and other accessories.

What more is there to discover about similarities and differences? Turning back to history, the BBC documentary points out that people did go through very dramatic changes in their societies, which altered their outlook drastically and made them look at themselves and their fellow humans in a totally different way.

For example, when the Egyptians became exposed to the Greeks, a new way of visualizing people emerged synergetically in art, which was soon to inspire people across their lands, and later spread from Greece to other parts of Europe and even across the world.

And the hunter-gatherers who created the Venus statuettes and cave paintings stopped doing so rather abruptly around the same time as they evolved into societies organized around agriculture.

While spending time in these musings, I also continue my exploration to understand integral theory and wonder how it might be applied to stimulate personal growth and foster sustainable development in today’s world.

From reading philosopher Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything, I am discovering how his AQAL model of integral theory suggests that the development of individuals and of societies can be compared to climbing a ladder. The components of his metaphor are the ladder, the climber, and the different views that appear when climbing the ladder.

Wilber argues that as people grow and societies evolve, they can negotiate higher levels in development, much like climbing the rungs of a ladder, and that the process of moving from one level to another is both challenging and a one-way street. Once a higher level is reached and inhabited, the view of self and the world changes into an expanded version, which becomes less and less egocentric and narcissistic.

He refers to three important stages of development (for individuals and their cultures) as being egocentric, ethnocentric, and world-centric, and he quotes research results claiming to show that roughly two-thirds of the world’s population today still live in egocentric and ethnocentric stages.

Wilber also explains that a smooth journey upwards on the ladder is by no means assured, and that as they grow, people and societies tend to leave dismembered parts of their identity behind “in the basement,” from where these “shadows” conspire to reduce the energy for further growth until they are faced and re-integrated.

As a result, greater depth (moving higher on the ladder) comes with lesser span (fewer people reaching, and living from these higher levels).

If it is true that a majority of people are still living in egocentric and ethnocentric stages of development that focus predominantly on their individual needs and those of their groups, it might well be very difficult for the world to respond to the challenge posed by President Clinton to look for what people have in common rather than their differences.

As I continue to read about higher world-centric and integral stages of development, with their changing and ever wider views from the higher rungs of the ladder, it seems that while science and art show that people throughout history have always shared much in common, the differences between people today remain huge in their own eyes and in the prevailing worldviews of the egocentric and ethnocentric “membership” societies they live in.

A piece of good news seems to be that all through history people have found it possible to climb up the ladder of expanding consciousness, where they discovered more similarities and greater depths of existential experience. And Wilber claims that the number of people living today with integral worldviews, while still very small, is growing rapidly.

Throughout human history, art has always been an important channel of expression for the mystics who climbed the ladder and transcended their own society’s worldview, from cave paintings to sculptures, from the writings of Thomas à Kempis to the poetry of Rumi, from the writings attributed to Lao Tze to the koans of zen masters over time, from the questioning and deconstructive prose of Osho to the lyrics and humming in a universe “written on air” by Jim Paredes, and in countless other artistic expressions around the world.

It seems that, when seen from higher rungs on the ladder of consciousness, people’s similarities as well as their different worldviews can come into a clearer perspective. Climbing that ladder may allow people to see that they are not so different after all, but that their worldviews are. And the different worldviews of these “beholders” are what largely inspires their perceptions, actions, and art.

As I continue climbing, I find that the view keeps getting better.


Photograph: Better view at the end of war. Liberation monument commemorating 5 May 1945 in Wageningen, the Netherlands.