Voices of the First Day by Robert Lawlor

“Western historians and scholars have locked themselves into methods of thinking that are framed and limited by hidden value judgments. We adhere to the theory of evolution because our traditional thinking habits share the same structure as this theory. We believe that the gradual accumulation of data, experience, and analytical skills will eventually cause all our current problems and ‘unknowns’ to fade away: weak or bad ideas will die off and good ideas will survive, in much the same fashion that natural selection works in nature. We believe that we learn lessons from history, and we believe that these lessons gradually modify our concepts until new value shifts emerge. We conceive of human development, and even the development of biological species, as ‘evolving’ in the same way as do our ideas and knowledge structures. What we call Darwinian evolution, with its dependence on the idea of progressive sequences, is in reality a single, outmoded, linear, and analytical thinking method projected on the entirety of universal creation. We ignore the fact that behind our so-called objective history, progressive thought, righteous democratic values, and religious morality lurks a distortion that perpetrates suffering, genocide, and the wholesale destruction of life.”

-Robert Lawlor, 1991