1970 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 109

FROM TERRITORIAL IMAGE TO CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT (Is social pollution inevitable in the evolution of compassionate man?)

Aristide A. H. E S S E R

Preface This article examines the mechanism by which man's cultural evolution clashes with his animal origins. The process occurs in the mind, where newly created cultural images continually strive to change established images which proved of value in our organic evolution. The conservative tendency of spontaneous behavior, resting on established images, which proved valid in the past, distorts the deliberate behavior initiating from new, progressive cultural images. The result of this process can be termed social pollution. An attempt is made to describe a solution to the increasing clash between particular individual motivations (e.g., property rights, private enterprise) and societal goals (e.g., equal rights to resources, improvement of the quality of life). For the sake of argument, it is assumed that there are no technical or political solutions to the major problems besetting the world as an ecosystem (see the pertinent recent discussions in Science (6)). My plea for our personal reorientation toward altruism is intended as the accentuation of a necessary tendency, not a rejection of individual autonomy. Some historical highlights of the slow change in two of the most powerful of pre-cultural images (territoriality and dominance hierarchy) are discussed. The contemporary feeling of impasse in the cultural evolution of the West is traced to its most recent social pollution: the cult of individualism which reinforces, rather than changes, some of the obsolete aspects of territorial and dominance behavior. (Obsolete pure dominance-submission behavior is exemplified by the

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