Sageocracy rests on a hypothesis that may seem bold: that human beings are capable of functioning collectively from values deeper than competition, fear and the short term. This hypothesis is not only a conviction. Several decades of research in psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology and the social sciences, which cross-check one another, make it plausible.
This article presents its broad outlines: not to claim that science endorses a particular political project, but to show that the horizon Sageocracy aims for is not a fantasy. It is a direction that the data make plausible.
Human consciousness develops, and this development is measurable
Psychologist Robert Kegan, of Harvard University, spent forty years documenting the development of adult consciousness. His research shows that human consciousness does not stop in adolescence: it continues to evolve throughout adult life, through qualitatively distinct stages.
The most advanced stages, what Kegan calls « self-transforming » consciousness, are characterized by an increased capacity to step back from one’s own frames of thought and to hold together multiple, even contradictory, perspectives without being destabilized. They remain rare among adults, as Kegan himself stresses; but they are not a gift reserved for a few: they develop when conditions allow.
Susanne Cook-Greuter, working in the same tradition, has extended this field of research and shown that the most advanced levels of development correspond to a growing capacity to integrate complexity, to tolerate ambiguity and to take multiple perspectives into account. These stages measure no human worth, and no one can invoke them to decide in place of others.
Empathy and cooperation can be trained
For a long time, science treated empathy as a fixed personality trait: you had more or less of it, depending on your genetics and your upbringing. The research of the last twenty years has radically changed this picture.
Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, has observed, particularly in experienced practitioners, that regular contemplative practices, such as mindfulness or compassion meditation, can lastingly modify the way the brain functions. The areas associated with empathy, emotional regulation and self-awareness become more active. Stress reactions diminish.
Tania Singer, of the Max Planck Institute, has rounded out this picture by distinguishing affective empathy, feeling what the other feels, from compassion, wanting to act to reduce another’s suffering. This second capacity is not only trainable, but resistant to the emotional exhaustion produced by unregulated empathy. This research shows that human beings are not condemned to selfishness: they possess capacities for empathy and compassion that can be cultivated.
Evolution favors large-scale cooperation
The idea that human nature is fundamentally competitive and individualistic, popularized by certain readings of Darwin, has been profoundly revised by the evolutionary biologists of recent decades.
Frans de Waal, studying primates, has shown how ancient empathy and cooperation are: they are not a veneer laid over a selfish nature, but a part of what we are.
Lynn Margulis showed, on the cellular biology side, that the eukaryotic cell, of which animals and plants are made, was born from the lasting association of formerly separate micro-organisms. Other biologists, such as John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, have shown that several major transitions of the living were born from such associations. Evolution is therefore not only competition: the complexity of the living often goes through cooperation.
The human moral circle is expanding
Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, has defended a counterintuitive thesis, which is debated among historians and statisticians: despite the horrors of the twentieth century, interpersonal and collective violence has decreased significantly over the long term, relative to the size of populations. The explanations he proposes include the gradual extension of the moral circle: the human capacity to recognize the humanity of people more and more distant from one’s group of origin.
Peter Singer theorized this extension of the moral circle as a continuous dynamic: humanity has gradually extended its moral recognition from the tribe to the nation, from the nation to the species, and is beginning to extend it beyond the human species. This process is not inevitable: it can regress, and sometimes it does. But it is real, documented, and rooted in cognitive and affective capacities that human beings possess and can develop.
What Sageocracy does with this data
Sageocracy does not cite this research to give itself a scientific legitimacy it would not otherwise have. It cites it because it echoes something it has sensed since its founding: that human beings are capable of much more than what their current institutions ask them to be.
Current institutions were designed on the basis of a certain idea of the human being: selfish, distrustful, short-termist, tribal. They have produced remarkable results within that framework. But they were not designed to support, encourage and value the more developed capacities that scientific research documents today.
This is precisely what Sageocracy seeks to do: to design institutional mechanisms that presuppose a human being capable of syntony, of living contribution, of expanded responsibility, and that create the conditions in which this capacity can develop, be exercised, and gradually become the norm rather than the exception.
« The institutions we build say what we believe human beings are capable of being. It is time to revise that belief in light of what science observes. »
This article explores what research brings to sageocratic reflection. For an introduction to the civic project, the articles in the Understanding the project section are the recommended starting point.