Abstract
This analytical essay is drawn from a larger study which attempts to redefine the human condition in terms of the evolutionary relationships with those diverse technologies, institutions and organizational forms which have subtended our survival. The major premise is that, rather than being alien to or constraining upon human development, these supporting systems have made us human. We retain our human qualities only by externalizing various physical and intellectual capacities into autonomously evolving organismic systems which enable us to sidestep many of the natural processes of adapting the organism itself to the environment. Human artifice is the natural order for human beings. Given this hybrid position in the evolutionary scale, humans have remained uneasy and ambivalent about this symbiotic dependence on their survival extensions and amplifiers and have endowed this relationship with various mythologic and totemic qualities. The latter both obscure and reinforce the systemic nature of the overall process. The analysis is carried forward to suggest (a) that one of our major tasks is to reconceptualize these aspects of human systemic development, and (b) that the models of human society, of our institutions and social capabilities with which we operate, tend to restrict much of our thought and action within obsolete historical conditions. The urgency of mastering our new global complexities and of extending more positive control over our affairs underscores the need for the overall human system to become more consciously self-steering.
Published Version
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