What significance, if any, does human civilization have in the context of the universe as a whole? Is there such a thing as social progress? If so, towards what end does it proceed, and how does it take place? What role have the great salvation religions, the industrial, democratic, and scientific revolutions, and the socialist project played in humanity's struggle to fulfill its vocation in the cosmos? And how, above all, are we to make sense out of the current crisis? What are the next steps in the human civilizational project?
Towards Synergism: The Cosmic Significance of the Human Civilizational Project is, first and foremost, an attempt to answer these questions. Drawing on such recent scientific developments as unified field theories, complex systems theory, postdarwinian evolutionary biology, dialectical sociology, and anthropic cosmology, the author argues that the universe constitutes a relational, self-organizing, teleological totality in the context of which the social form of matter generally, and human civilization in particular, plays a critical, even constitutive, role as a center for the creation of dynamic, organized complexity. From this perspective, progress is first and foremost the development of human social capacities --technological, political, artistic, scientific, and philosophical. The author analyzes the structural obstacles to social progress -- patriarchy and the warlord state, the marketplace and bureaucratic centralization-- and argues that the principal obstacle in the present period remains the market system. The author demonstrates the corrosive impact of the market system on the integrity of the ecosystem and the social fabric, shows how the marketplace holds back the development of human social capacities, and argues that the socialist movements failed, not because the market system is superior, but because dialectical materialism failed to provide an adequate ontological ground for its theory of social development and its theory of value, and because historical materialism never advanced an adequate strategy for overcoming the individualism and consumerism engendered by the marketplace and for promoting the full development human beings as active participants in the self- organizing activity of the cosmos. The work concludes with an in-depth analysis of the current situation and an extended reflection on the next steps in the human civilizational project. The author argues that humanity's full potential will be realized only when we come to understand ourselves as neither the passive subjects of an unchanging divine order or as an island of meaning in an ultimately meaningless universe, but rather as active participants in a vast and beautiful cosmohistoric evolutionary process which includes, but also transcends human civilization and the social form of matter. We are, in effect, real participants in the life of God.
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