How did we humans become human? Everything is somehow a development of what preceded it. However, there are also times and situations where it is possible to perceive that not just another step in a seemingly endless series of steps has been taken—that a breakthrough has happened! We see this on the physical level, for example, when gradual step by step changes occur in potentially radioactive material—until at a “critical mass” is reached and a “chain reaction” is triggered. Then, the change is no longer arithmetic (2 plus 2 is 4; 4 plus 2 is 6; 6 plus 2 is 8….), but suddenly becomes exponential (2 squared is 4; 4 squared is 16; 16 squared is 256; 256 squared….!!)

We can see this happening in major developments in the history of humankind. Here is what we know so far: The cosmos began 13.8 billion years ago with the so-called Big Bang! What precisely happened afterward up to today we are increasingly learning. However, precisely What It was; Why It banged; Where It was before It banged…. (the three unanswerable W’s) we have no idea (the fourth W we have answered; we know When It banged). Nor can we humans with our intellects—which by nature operate by analysis (literally “take things apart”) to see how they are synthesized (literally “fit together”)—possibly “get behind” the It before It banged, if It existed somewhere (?) sometime (?) before It banged…..

Once the Cosmos (Greek, “order”) began to come into existence 13.8 billion years ago, we increasingly have been able to plot its development, including the separation of the Earth from the Sun 4.54 billion years ago years ago, the appearance of life on the Earth (4.28 billion years ago), the appearance of homo sapiens sapiens (that’s us humans) perhaps 300,000 years ago in central Africa, and our subsequent slow spread around the globe of the Earth. Everything human seemed to advance painstakingly slowly, until around 12,000 years ago our forebears “invented” farming. The spread and improvement of agriculture in turn then led to the first ancient civilizations, that is, “city-zation” (Latin, civis, city), the oldest being Ur of Sumeria in 3,800 BCE in present-day Iraq.

The next “exponential” leap forward happened in the four ancient civilizations: Greece, Mesopotamia, Indus River Valley, Yellow River Valley at more less the same time: 800-200 BCE. The German scholar Karl Jaspers named this the Axial Age, meaning that there was a profound shift of life-understanding after the “Dividing Axis” when a major change in how humans understood themselves and the world around them occurred.

The Axial Age ushered in a radically new form of consciousness. Whereas Primal consciousness was tribal, Axial consciousness was individual. “Know thyself” became the watch-word of Greece; the Upanishads identified the atman, the transcendent center of the self; the Buddha charted the way of individual Enlightenment; Confucius taught that the goal of every (male) person is to become a Ren, a fully authentic individual human person; the Jewish prophets awakened individual moral responsibility. This sense of individual identity, as distinct from the tribe and nature, is the most characteristic mark of Axial consciousness. From this flow other characteristics: Consciousness which is self-reflective, analytic, and which can be applied to nature in the form of scientific theories, to society in the form of social critique, to knowledge in the form of philosophy, to religion in the form of mapping an individual spiritual journey. This Axial consciousness continues to be dominant today.

Multiple empires, and even civilizations, rose, plateaued, and eventually often declined. However, another major Axial Age-like shift happened in Western European civilization in the 17th-18th century—the “Age of Enlightenment.” This is when and where “Freedom” seen as the proper mode of existence for all humans was proclaimed and quickly began to be realized around the world wherever Western Civilization went—which practically was everywhere. There were initially these two fundamental human values that were proclaimed and spread around the world by the suddenly vastly superior intellectual, commercial, military, political overwhelming power of Western Civilization: As mentioned, Freedom, and its “generator,” Reason. It was discerned that what distinguished us humans from the rest of the animals was first of all our Reason. Our Reason made us “on one side” like God, endless, infinite.

Our rational thought made us god-like in that our thought was infinite. For example, the Cosmos is endlessly expanding at the speed of light (186,000 miles/second!), and mentally we are there (!) at the edge of our relentlessly expanding Cosmos. (Unlike God, however, there was a time when each of us did not exist, and there will be a time when we will not exist). Consequently, even as even the Bible notes, we are like God: We are the Imago Dei, the Image of God.

Centuries before, even millennia before the Biblical period (12,00 BCE-100 CE), we humans in general believed that we needed to follow the teachings of the gods, and eventually the one and only God—but because most of us could not read, we were informed by priests to follow “sacred scriptures”—as they explained them, of course. Then, in 1453 CE the first printed copy of the Bible was produced with movable type by Johannes Gutenberg—creating mass printing—utterly transforming and accelerating the availability of education for all. Here was a major building block of the 18th-century “Enlightenment.” As a consequence, we humans increasingly learned to accept an idea not simply because some Authority said so, or because it supposedly was stated in a Sacred Scripture (interpreted for us by priests and the like).

Rather, we humans increasingly began to ask: “Does it make sense?” If yes, we accepted it, and if not, we increasingly said, No. Our ultimate standard for accepting something as true and to be followed increasingly became Reason. This, of course, was/is also true when we “rationally” decide to accept the explanation/direction of someone who immersed her/himself in the subject—we did/do so because s/he “made sense to us” in his/her explanation and direction—otherwise, No. The result was/is not chaos, but Reasoned Order—my/your/our Reasoned Order—which increasingly is based on rational, life-experienced evidence, and then freely acted on.

It is important to note the intimate connection between Reason and Freedom. As noted, Freedom is proper to us humans—all humans! However, our Freedom depends on our Reason. As our Reason increasingly expands and deepens, we become increasingly free—endlessly, depending on the quality/quantity of our expanding/ deepening Reason/Knowledge. If we are ignorant in an area and do not seek rational direction, of course, our Freedom is proportionately limited. Reason and Freedom are two sides of the coin of our Humanity!

Yes, there is in 2019 the Trumpian solipsistic authoritarian “America First-ism,” which is aped or anticipated by a number of upstart authoritarians around the world: In Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Egypt, Syria, India, China, Philippines, North Korea, Cuba, Brazil…. However, any sensitive cultural historian could have foretold this systaltic (“contractive,” the opposite of diastaltic, “expansive”—as in heartbeats) phase in America, if not via Trump, then some other agent, and across the world; these phases are always at work not only in each individual human body, but likewise in humanity at large. At the same time, the perceptive cultural historian also sees the longer-term, over-arching Arc of History bending towards a higher, more rational, freer, progressive, and dialogical way of life.

Most humans everywhere and “everywhen” tended to assume that the way they experienced things was the way things were “from the beginning.” Those of the Abrahamic religions tended to have the story of creation as laid out in the beginning of the Bible as their lodestar, explaining where we and everything else came from—which was in a creative flash by God some 5,722 years ago, or thereabouts, exactly the way we and the world are today. However, starting already in the eighteenth century, and increasingly in the nineteenth century, Westerners increasingly began to realize that things have really changed over time—dramatically!

For example, it became increasingly more difficult to match the finding of fossilized ancient sea or land creatures dug up deep down the side of a mountain that for one reason or another was laid bare. How to match the comparatively minuscule 5,722 years allegedly available since the beginning of the world, according to the Bible, with the hundreds of thousands of years, or more, needed to fossilize them and lay innumerable layers of sediment on top of them. It increasingly seemed that the world and humanity was vastly older than the assumed few thousand years!

Consequently, the discipline of History really began in the 19th century to become a true discipline by developing and applying rational principles to historical evidence. Humans increasingly began to realize that we are products of our similar or separate histories. Learning about our past was increasingly seen as learning about ourselves, so that we might increasingly smooths out the wrinkles in the mirrors of history which had distorted our vision of ourselves. Of course, this is a never-ending task—but simply becoming aware of that fact is both enlightening (Reason) and liberating (Freedom)!

This awareness of the force of the past in our lives was also massively reinforced and expanded as this perception of the dynamism of reality was increasingly found in our foundational physical research—which reach a fever pitch in 1859, with the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, arguing with ineluctable evidence that the world was millions of years old, and that humanity is profoundly related to all other forms of life, having evolved from earlier forms of life—and is still evolving: In the Noosphere (the sphere of the “mind” spread around the Globe) as the paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin discussed so insightfully in the mid-20th century. In short, reality, including humanity, was not static. It was dynamic!

This evolution of religions and cultures points towards a process essential to healing the deep problems that inhere in all aspects of our human cultures and even threaten our very survival, namely: The awakening of human beings to developing and embracing the Virtue of Dialogue. This shift from monologue to Dialogue constitutes such a radical reversal in human consciousness, is so utterly new in the history of humankind from the beginning, that it must be seen as an even greater shift in human history than either 1) another Major Paradigm Shift, or 2) a Paradigm Shift of the magnitude of that caesura, that break of the 800-200 B.C.E. Axial Age, and hence today is a Second Axial Age. Yet more, 3) Humanity is clearly entering a radically new Age! This new Age of Global Dialogue that humanity is now entering continues to be centrally characterized by Reason, Freedom, and Sense of History/Dynamism—but now also increasingly by a newly emerging powerful way of engaging the world, and the humans in it, that is, Dialogue.

The human intellectual “Default Position” of the past tended to be to gain Truth by research, reflection, but most often from one authority or another, religious or secular. Once we possessed the Truth, our goal was to freeze it, protect it, defend it! This might seem strange and “off” to many today because of the exploding information revolution However, if we turn back to the beginning of the 16th century, we find that all Truth, religious and scientific, seemed to be settled in the West. However, that was precisely the beginning of profound challenges to the status quo in religion (by Luther, Calvin, Zwingli….) and science (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo….).

This is where and when great paradigm shifts in religion and science erupted, leading to the 18th-century Enlightenment, Age of Reason and Freedom mentioned above, followed by the increasing awareness of the historicity, dynamism of the whole world, and foremost so, of humans. That reinforcing sequence of radical changes in human self-understanding, and consequent action, gave birth to that fourth radical shift in the human grasp of the world, self, and Truth, namely, Dialogue, or rather, in a deeper, more focused sense: Deep-Dialogue.

Dialogue here doesn’t mean just talking together. Fundamentally, Dialogue means: “I want to talk with you so I can learn what you think and act and why.” I don’t come primarily to teach, but to learn—and in a full dialogue, you also come to learn what I think and act and why. Of course, then, I cannot learn from you unless you teach me what you think act and why—and vice versa. Simple, but Transformative!

We need to thus engage in Dialogue, not just occasionally and only in formal settings. Rather, we need to constantly school ourselves—not easy!—to develop this mode of living habitually; we thus need to develop it into a virtue, the Virtue of Deep-Dialogue!

How did this totally opposite default position of “learning unchanging Truth once and for all, and then defending it to the death” (usually yours rather than mine!) come about? The answer can be to a large extent expressed in a simple mantra: “Nobody knows Everything about Anything: Therefore, Dialogue!” Think about it, what physicist would get up in the morning and say, “I know everything about physics; I don’t need to go to the laboratory anymore.” Or what biologist would get up in the morning and say, I know everything about biology; I don’t need to do any more research.” Or what sociologist, psychologist, historian….? And, if in each of these partial disciplines of the world, of humanity, no expert, or combination of experts, could know everything about her/his discipline, how much more is it impossible for any one expert, or combination of experts, to know everything about that Combination of All Knowledge: Religion (that is, an “Explanation of the Ultimate Meaning of Life, and How to Live Accordingly”)?

It is in the gradual but increasingly massive wake of that growing insight that Knowledge, Truth, is ineluctably changing, expanding, deepening—endlessly!—and that therefore no one person, or combination of persons, can have a singular lock on Truth. Thus, we all must “freely’ engage in dialogue, in Deep-Dialogue, to constantly keep moving toward the “horizon” of Reality. But, of course, the final horizon of Truth, like the earthly horizon, always exceeds our grasp. Truth/Reality is un-ending, in-finite Reality—which many people call God.

* Professor Leonard Swidler, Ph.D. can be reached via dialogue@temple.edu