Evolution, Consciousness, and Democracy

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 23 Feb 2026

Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

Pathways to the Earth Constitution

 “It is finally the Utopians, not the “realists,” who make scientific sense.”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Our age is the age of evolution.  The old paradigm of a static universe, wound up like mechanical clock, producing an assemblage of objects with external relations to one another, is dead forever. Physicists have shown that the entire universe consists of an evolving whole, a cosmogenesis perpetually in the making.  Biologists have shown that biological complexity gives rise to consciousness and that human “reflexive consciousness” is the highest form of consciousness that we know. In the light of these cognitive revolutions, we need to examine the concept of democracy once again to illuminate the dimensions of this developing idea and connect it with the movement to ratify the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

In the early 19^th century G.W.F. Hegel introduced the powerful idea that the Cosmos must be characterized as movement, that the movements of history and nature were built into the very structure of reality. Mid-century, Charles Darwin introduced a scientifically confirmed concept of biological evolution for all species. (A few years back, I had the honor of giving a lecture on the Earth Constitution at the Darwin Center in the Galapagos Islands where Darwin did his primary research.) By the first half of the 20^th century, thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin and A. N. Whitehead (along with physicists and cosmologists) were thinking in terms of an evolving universe of which the evolution of life on Earth was simply a local manifestation.

By the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, many thinkers were adding to the concept of evolution the idea of an evolving human consciousness.  Although the stages of development vary slightly with each thinker, in general human beings (both phylogenetically and individually) have moved from a primitive unity (unconsciousness) to an archaic, then magical, then mythic, then mental (or pluralistic), to finally integral stages (using here Gene Gebser’s terminology).  We are still in the process of growing to the integral stage in which we are or will be (1) aware of all the previous stages and the developmental process as a whole and (2) live from a deep and harmonious awareness of the evolving whole of cosmic-human existence.

Hence, emergent evolutionary holism has become the starting point for comprehending every aspect of the world in which we live. It provides the conceptual framework for comprehension for our age. The implications are immense. We now understand that the universe has a future, that evolutionary life on Earth has a future, and that human beings, integral with these first two futures, also have an evolutionary future. Like all other things, we are integral to the future of the universe. In the Ethics of Hope, German philosopher-theologian, Jürgen Moltmann, writes the following:

“I assume that the phenomenon of life in all the wealth of forms and in the build-up of its complexities did not inevitably follow from the ‘Big Bang’, nor did it come about entirely fortuitously, but that it is an emergent phenomenon, that is to say, a wholly new thing in the history of the universe and of nature on earth. The phenomenon cannot be reduced to something different, nor can it be viewed in isolation; it can be interpreted as an anticipation of a new future for the universe”  (51).

The evolutionary process can be seen to result in “emergent phenomena” in which the holism of the Cosmos emerges into qualitatively higher levels: the level of “life,” for example, qualitatively transcends non-living matter, and the level of self-aware life (human consciousness) qualitatively transcends all non-self-aware life. We can anticipate a “new future for the universe” he declares and, by this same token, a “new future” for humanity. As a Christian, Moltmann understands this in terms of the New Testament promise to bring “the kingdom of God” to Earth. In this kingdom, a new level of human unity emerges characterized by universal love, compassion, kindness, and respect.

Moltmann continues: “The concept of evolution lets us understand how whatever exists today has come about, but not how it might have been and can today possibly become. In the conceptual world of evolutionary theory, the past determines the present but not the future…. The new emergence theories break down this frontier in the concept of evolution. They tell us that in the history of nature something new does come into being which cannot be explained from the already given components” (125).

The transformed future promised by the New Testament is here understood as scientifically possible. The standard Christian dogma of an “original sin” that all people inherit accounting for the evil and chaos within existence is superseded by an understanding that the divine spirit is struggling to bring something truly new out of the evolutionary process. For Moltmann, as for Teilhard de Chardin, the evolutionary development of human self-awareness and self -reflection represents a divinely-inspired emergence of an awesome transformative force within the evolutionary process. In his Hymn of the Universe, Teilhard expresses this idea in the following:

“Beings endowed with self-awareness become, precisely in virtue of that bending back upon themselves, immediately capable of rising into a new sphere of existence: in truth another world is born. Abstract thought, logic reasoned choice and invention, mathematics, art, the exact computation of space and time, the dreams and anxieties of love: all these activities of the inner life are simply the bubbling up of the newly-formed life-centre as it explodes upon itself” (102).

Teilhard points out the awesome aspect of simply being human.  Something has “exploded” in the evolutionary process that has all these transformative powers, and this “new sphere of existence” is not only a product of evolution but possesses the freedom, self-direction, and self-awareness that allows it to contribute in fundamental ways to the evolutionary process. As he puts this in The Phenomenon of Man, in our day, the human being “is not seen as a static center of the world—as he for long believed himself to be—but as the axis and living shoot of evolution, which is something much finer” (36).

Our discussion has now moved into the dimension of “consciousness,” and we have seen that paradigm of Cosmic Evolution that informs our era embraces the idea of developmental levels of emergent human consciousness, with the understanding that our consciousness can and likely will continue its evolutionary upsurge. Philosopher Paul Diels, in The God Symbol, argues that we are moving toward “superconsciousness”: “This superconscious process shares one factor with consciousness: foresight; but its foresight does not deal with accidental facts as does the intellect’s. It concerns lawful relationships and deduces lawfully foreseeable consequences: it is clairvoyant. One trait is shared with the instinctive unconscious of animals: unerringness. But the latter is not automatic; it is intuitive and its evolutionary tendency is to become certainty of the spirit” (5).

At the “integral” level of consciousness development or beyond, we can achieve a “certainty of the spirit,” a superconsciousness that transcends the ordinary egoistic consciousness with which all persons begin life.  In Christianity and Evolution Teilhard observes that “evolution has in a few years invaded the whole field of our experience; but, what is more, since we can feel ourselves swept up and sucked up in its convergent flood, this evolution is giving new value, a material for our action, to the whole domain of existence: precisely in as much as the appearance of a peak of unification at the higher term of cosmic ferment is now objectively providing human aspirations (for the first time in the course of history) with an absolute direction and an absolute end” (238-39).

We realize what immense gifts we receive from the very fact of being human: self-reflection, foresight, creativity, capacity for knowledge, for research, for developing the new and contributing to the great convergent flood of evolution. We discern “an absolute direction and an absolute end” because implicit in the very concept of evolution is a goal, a telos, what philosopher Errol E. Harris calls “a nisus” for development, discernment, and activating our own role in the emergent evolutionary process. The Cosmos gifts us with awareness of the goal, awareness (in Christian terms) of the coming kingdom of God on Earth, or in humanist terms, we receive the capacity for actualization of our most fundamental human potentials for coherence, harmony, love, justice, freedom, and dignity.

Here is where the concept of “democracy” necessarily enters in ways that allow us to discern the deeper emergent potentialities of the democratic idea.  Let is recall that the modern democratic idea began to emerge in the 17^th century with thinkers like Johannes Althusius in the Netherlands who pioneered the idea that government arises from the people and is responsible to the people. The idea soon became formulated in 18^th century “social contract” theories, like that of John Locke, who attributed “God-given” natural rights to people who came together in civil society to form government with the purpose of protecting these a priori rights and settling disputes about them in an equitable and just manner. People had the rights to “life, liberty, and property.”

The democratic revolutions in the United States and France in 1787 and 1789 were founded on this theory of democracy as embodied, for example in the US “Bill of Rights” and in the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man.  People had freedom of speech and press and the right to petition government for redress of grievances. They had the rights of habeas corpus and due process of law. However, they had no rights to eat, to a living wage, to a house in which to live, to education, nor to health care.

The notion of human rights, of course, remains fundamental to the democratic idea  but the concept of rights has evolved considerably since these early beginnings.  The Marxist and socialist struggles of the 19^th century developed a set of economic and social rights that complemented the merely political rights of the 18^th century.  As philosopher Alan Gewirth lays out in The Community of Rights, government cannot be democratic if it does not address both dimensions of rights, which he calls “the rights to freedom” and “the rights to well-being.”

If government arises from the people and is responsible to the people as Althusius had argued, then government must address wages, clothing, food, housing, education, and health care for the well-being of its population.  A population that is hungry, homeless, or uneducated cannot participate in government as responsible citizens. If democracy means this reciprocal relation with the people, then government must ensure these “second-generation” rights as well as “first generation” rights. Nevertheless, as we moved into the late 20^th century, a third generation of human rights began to emerge. Among other places, this was developed and articulated within some of the United Nations’ agencies, such as UNESCO.

Third generation rights can be summed up as “the right to peace” and the “right to a healthy, sustainable environment.”  These rights correspond to a growing awareness that our fundamental human problems are “planetary” in scope. They are beyond the level of nation-states.  It may be that any nation-state can provide freedom and well-being for its population, but no nation can provide world peace (and an end to the threat of nuclear holocaust) nor a sustainable planetary environment. If the democratic idea sees government as the protector of rights, then with the third generation of rights we have moved beyond nation-states to the need for world government.  If democracy is the protector of all human rights, then no sovereign nation-state can any longer be a democracy.  The democratic idea has moved to the global level.

In the mid-20^th century, philosopher John Dewey argued in his Political Writings that “democracy” is most basically an “ethical” concept before it is a political system.  Democracy is about people working together harmoniously and productively to solve society’s problems, not only to supply the food, clothing, and shelter that everyone needs but to envision a better future through education, research, and planning. He said that he advocated a “planning society” rather than a “planned society.”

The cooperative interactions that make up a democratic society, for Dewey, must be worldwide. They must be global, since cooperation for a better future is a need of all peoples everywhere and since human “personhood” (on which the concept of democracy is based) gives us a common humanity that supersedes differences in nationality, race, or religion. Dewey called for a “federation of nations” in which the nations transcended sovereignty to actualize the universal democratic idea. As an ethical notion, the obligation for democracy pertains to all peoples everywhere.

Later in the 20^th century, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas saw democracy as linked to our human capacity for “communicative action.”  To date modern humanity has largely thought in terms of “instrumental action” in which we manipulate people or things to serve our purposes and desires.  But “communicative action,” on which democracy is based, opens up for us a new potential within language that moves us literally to a higher level—the level of morality, reciprocity, respect for one another, and the possibility of mutual understanding.

In The Future of Human Nature he writes, “In the forms of communication through which we reach an understanding with one another about something in the world and about ourselves, we encounter a transcending power” (10). We can transcend differences of race, nationality, or religion to participate in what he calls our “anthropological universality—[that is] everywhere the same” (39).  For Habermas, a democracy includes “the basic idea of the mutual recognition of free and equal persons who voluntarily associate with one another in order to legitimately regulate their common life through the means of positive law” (76-77). Speaking of nation-states in The Post-National Constellation, he writes: “developments summarized under the term ‘globalization’ have put this entire constellation into question” (60). The universal imperative to communicative action (i.e. democracy) must now be applied globally as the sovereign nation-state has ceased to be a credible option.

Jürgen Moltmann argues that “trust” is the most fundamental characteristic of democracy: “Trust is the substance of democratic politics…not power, not even the sovereignty of a government. Democratic politics is essentially seeking the self-government of the people, which means that it is peace politics, not power politics…. Everyone must deal circumspectly with this general good and must not put it at risk through lies. People do what they say they are going to do, and must say what they are doing. Anyone who replaces trust by controls sows mistrust and destroys his own basis.  Without trust, nothing works in a democracy. Trust is won through truthfulness and is strengthened by honesty. Mistrust evokes fear, and leads to struggle of each against all”  (166-67).

It should be clear that there is a pattern developing here through examining these thinkers concerning the democratic idea. It is a pattern that makes democracy a universal ethical principle, applying to all people everywhere, a principle that requires cooperation (Dewey), mutual respect and understanding (Habermas), mutual trust (Moltmann) and ultimately—unification (Teilhard). Cosmic evolution gives birth to a cosmic being who grows through levels of awareness to an integral level of democratic harmony, trust, and communicative action. Teilhard, in The Future of Man, sums this up as follows:

“It is upon the maintenance and growth of human consciousness of what I have called the ‘sense of the Species’ that the realization of a truly democratic world society ultimately depends. Only a powerful polarization of human wills, after each fragment of humanity has been led to the discovery of his own particular form of freedom, can ensure the convergence and unified working of this plurality in a single, coherent planetary system. Above all, only this polarization, through the unity thus constituted, can create the atmosphere of noncoercion—unanimity—which is, when all is said, the rare essence of Democracy” (242).  For all these thinkers, consciousness in its certainty and “clairvoyance,” mandates a unified global democracy.

The Constitution for the Federation of Earth beautifully addresses the concerns of them all. It unifies humanity and is structured to provide all three generations of human rights. It premises the authority of government on human dignity and universal human rights (in Articles 12 and 13) while constructing a World Parliament and set of governmental agencies premised on dialogue and communicative action, rather than on force and arbitrary power. It is designed with careful checks and balances to ensure trust and transparency. Even the World Police, under Article 10, have as one of their mandates “conflict resolution.” It provides for a world system based on trust, communicative dialogue, transparency, and, perhaps most importantly, openness to further evolutionary growth and development. It is high time for humanity to act on these compelling insights into authentic democracy. It is high time to ratify the Earth Constitution.

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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 23 Feb 2026.

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