Off the Grid
A (very broad and brief!) History of Dwelling and Consciousness
By arrgyle
Mar 26, 2004, 11:00pm

In tracing the evolution of humanity's worldviews and consciousness, the importance of dwelling is typically neglected. Seen as a purely physical construct necessary for survival, one's dwelling receives little attention in the realms of epistemology and philosophy; at a minimum it is seen as merely the expression of them. Conversely, writings on architectural history, technology, or physical anthropology might focus specifically on the evolution of dwellings, but fail to place it in any broad cultural or philosophical context.

Steve Beck, however, in his thesis Dwelling in Balance, sees dwelling and worldview as part of an intimately intertwined system. In addition to the typical postulate that our need for survival in our physical surroundings determines how we shelter ourselves, Beck also argues that our “worldview conditions our approach to the dwelling process” (23) just as powerfully. The way we dwell, in turn, can then also shape our worldview and consciousness in a “self-perpetuating causal cycle” (17) that either reinforces the current worldview or even changes it despite cultural or physical realities.

For Beck, this inherent systemic cycle between dwelling and worldview has unfortunately devolved into a self-reinforcing destructive feedback loop in today's world:

Our escalating problems of housing, life-support, settlement and environment are symptoms of the failure of our dwelling process for people and habitat worldwide. The ultimate cause of failure is a belief that existence is a struggle for survival won only through domination and exploitation, which leads us to struggle against the way existence actually works. Ironically, the resulting failure seems to confirm the need to struggle, leading to the self-perpetuating causal cycle of our current dwelling process. (17)

Thus, in our attempt to create dwellings that protect us from domination and exploitation from the natural world and from other people, the resulting dwelling system ironically acts in a dominating, exploitative way. The worldview influences a specific dwelling system, and then that system reinforces the initial worldview, despite desire to change that worldview and despite new physical realities that contradict that dwelling process. For example, Beck points to our society's desire for “mansion-castle” homes run off of fossil-fueled services despite the demonstrated harm to the environment and ourselves and despite the current cultural push for a more environmentally-aware worldview.

Beck pinpoints the start of this destructive cycle historically and philosophically with the start of the Industrial Revolution. Prior to this age, “the house was not merely a house, but together with its site, served as the basic means of life-support” (38). However, with the development of industrial processes powered by the cheap energy abundance of fossil fuels, the house became an individual industrial product separated from the life-support systems. Power, water, food, and waste treatment became distinct services that were delivered to the dwelling product, whether it was a cottage, apartment, condominium, factory, or mansion. This divorce of house from life-support systems reflected and reinforced a concurrent divorce of humanity from nature and of humanity's desire to dominate and control nature through technological achievements. And now, even though we see the eventual depletion of fossil fuels and the destruction of the natural world through our attempts to control it, our dwelling system still reinforces the need to keep ourselves separate and safe from the rapidly deteriorating natural world.

Identifying the Industrial Revolution as a major factor in our current dwelling crisis is highly compelling, but Beck hints that other long-evolving undercurrents have also influenced our current dwelling trajectory. For example, the Industrial Revolution itself did not just emerge out of nowhere with the discovery of oil and coal; it was also fueled by specific worldviews at the time, and specifically the Cartesian paradigm, the “attempt to reduce transcendent existential insight and phenomenological meaning to the level of empirical data” (14). Beck thus hints at a much longer evolutionary dance between dwelling and worldview, between shelter and philosophy than just events beginning in the 19th Century. The interest here, then, is to delve into that longer evolutionary, holonic dance and place the changing concepts of dwelling into the broader scope of human philosophical and cultural development.

Such a serious, in-depth attempt would require considerably more research and space than available here. Instead, we will look at the pattern of dwelling throughout human cultural history here in broad brushstrokes. By using Ken Wilber's Quadrant Schematic of human physical, mental, cultural, and philosophical evolutionary trajectories—as explained in Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality —we can map out a similar trajectory for the evolution of the concept of dwelling holonarchically over time and how it corresponds to, and possibly influences, the other trajectories. We can also overlay this map with concepts from Ann Baring and Jules Cashford's The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image , along with Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry's The Universe Story to provide a unique interconnection between dwelling and worldview. Concepts and historical patterns will necessarily overlap more than the discussion here can accommodate, but the overall trajectory will allow for a deeper insight into causes of our current dwelling process and possibly suggest solutions for improvement.

On Wilber's quadratic schematic, the most appropriate place to begin exploring humanity's concept of dwelling starts in the archaic era, that holonic epoch where Homo sapiens as distinctly different from hominids and other primates arises, that period in time when the “emergence of human socio-cultural evolution” (164) takes place. In some ways this era may be even too early to begin discussion of dwelling, but it works as a proper foundation for a logical progression to the other eras. It is in this epoch where the barest inklings of noospheric (ie. the psyche) influence appear, but for the most part there is little difference between humans and the natural world around them as there are for other animals. Humans and their environment are tightly integrated and in many ways undifferentiated.

Living in small family groups, the female power of reproduction has primary focus, and so “the beginning of the Great Mother Goddess” worldview emerges, according to Baring and Cashford, and she “alone gives birth to the world out of herself, so that all creatures, including the gods, are her children, part of her divine substance” (660). Because of such an undifferentiated worldview between nature and humans, dwelling for most in this period is primarily nature itself: living nomadically in the bush, in the open savannah, in the discovered cave. There is little need to “construct” dwelling from the environment around them—aside from occasional minor adaptations—because their natural environment—the world around them— is their dwelling; and this dwelling concept arises from and informs the “Mother Goddess” worldview.

This era slowly shifted to what Wilber calls the magical/animistic era. Through the “familializaion of the male,” where men specifically take on the “role of the father” (164) in family structure and begin a path toward integration of the biospheric differences between male and female, changes slowly occur in worldview as well. Wilber sees the noosphere (ie. the realm of the mind and psyche) more explicitly emerge, but “as such it is still relatively undifferentiated from the biosphere, from the body and sensorimotor intelligence” (165). Thus, humans' self-identity is still a natural or body-based identity, so as more noospheric elements arise, such as specific mental images or symbols, they are “often confused or even identified with the physical events they represent” (165).

In this holonic era also, family groups—through the growing role of males in family relationships—evolve into larger family groups and small tribes. As a result, the “Mother Goddess” worldview still survives—Baring and Cashford report that it predominantly survives through Bronze Age Crete—but it slowly evolves into a Goddess-God relationship. “The Mother Goddess unites with the god—once her son, now her consort—to give birth to the world” (660). This signals the beginning of a split between nature and spirit, between humans and the natural world around them. “Everything is still alive and sacred,” say Baring and Cashford, “but the duality…prepares the way for the distinction between energy and form…between nature and spirit” (660).

Such changes are reflected in the way humans begin to “construct” their dwellings out of the nature around them. Building simple huts, yurts, bark tipis, and earthen dwellings, humanity takes its first steps in separating themselves from nature yet still undifferntiatedly a part of it. In this period as well, the dwellings are imbued with magical qualities that help inform its design and construction. These magical qualities arise from the emergence of noospheric concepts still grounded and integrated with the natural world; as a result, these dwellings are highly sustainable by today's standards, but not necessarily from conscious design. As Wilber points out, “'close to nature'…” does not “…automatically translate into ‘ecologically sound'” (166). Such tribal societies just did not have the capacity to devastate the environment with their dwellings, and those that “had ecologically depleted an area” with their dwelling process “were forced to move on” (167). When it comes to dwellings in this time period, “tribal awareness was in all cases close to nature, in the sense of dissociated; ecologically sound is another matter” (167).

Such an environmentally deterministic argument, however, invites the possibility that construction of the dwellings themselves contributed to the emerging holonic worldview at this time. Following the reasoning of Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel , for example, one can postulate that purely physical and environmental factors—such as population density and access to appropriate resources—encouraged people to construct dwellings out of the nature around them. This, in turn, shaped the emerging worldview that began separating humans from the natural world. They may have not developed a full ecological worldview from this process, but they may have developed a more magical worldview that naturally was in tune with nature while concurrently beginning to separate from it.

This trend of separation continues with increased differentiation as humanity enters Wilber's mythological epoch. To rise above their isolated tribal lineages, humans had to “go transtribal, and mythology, not magic, provided the key for this new transcendence” (170). A codified mythology allowed larger groups of people to organize and live together, but the result was a wider separation from a “natural or body-based…blood-bound and ancestral” (170) worldview. This resulted in the formation of early nation-states and empires with a correspondingly vaster fission between a more differentiated noosphere and biosphere, between “mind” and “nature.”

Since this trend emerged primarily from growing male influence, Baring and Cashford also see this critical time period as the final death throes of the Goddess worldview. “..the Mother Goddess is killed by the god…who then makes the world from her dead body” (661). The word dead is crucial, for it signals the end of the world as a “living being and sacred entity” (661) and asserts it as “the inert and inanimate substance that we call ‘matter', which can be shaped and ordered only by ‘spirit' (661). Thus, as humanity's noospheric realm increases through the establishment and maintenance of codified mythologies, the corresponding biospheric and physiospheric realms devolve into inert substances in service to the noosphere. In addition, the sprouting seeds of rationality at the time—as glimpsed through the likes of Aristotle, Plato, Heraclitus, and others—only served to reinforce this worldview.

The resulting transformation in the dwelling process is equally dramatic. Individual and family dwellings, in general, exhibit a further separation from nature: processed structural elements such as brick, shaped stone, and hewn lumber are used in construction, less attention is paid to nature's sustainable cycles, and more overtly human technologies are used to “run” these dwellings—such as aqueducts, water pumping, and waste disposal. All of these changes assert the power of human ingenuity and labor over natural resources and cycles.

The most dramatic change, however, occurs through the construction of dwellings meant to establish the codified mythologies themselves: stone and marble structures like the Parthenon and Delphi, monumental Egyptian and Aztec pyramids, and ultimately grand castles and cathedrals. Built less for human habitation and more for “mythic embodiment,” these structures acted as organizational focal points for holding larger nation-states and early empires together, while implicitly expressing the emerging domination of the noosphere in human cultural and psychic evolution. It is also at this point that we see Beck's struggle for survival through domination and exploitation emerge, for only through the domination and exploitation of slaves could enough human labor be marshaled to create such immense structures. This establishment of slavery stands out, unfortunately, as a defining moment when the dwelling process explicitly influenced humanity's worldview.

With the ideas of “mind over matter” and “survival through domination and exploitation” taking hold, humanity inched haltingly into the egoic-rational era, of which Wilber argues we are in currently but possibly nearing the end, and which Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme call the Cenozoic Era. This period marks the shift away from unquestioned mythological imperial membership in empires to a “modern state…separated from its embeddedness in particular mythologies— the all-important separation of church and state ” (178). This epoch also espoused a “universal or global reasonableness” that urged humanity to “look within” (179) rather than without or above to discover this rationality. With this shift toward an individuality-based rationality, the noosphere completely differentiates from and dominates over the biosphere. Accordingly, Baring and Cashford argue that, in this era, the Goddess is now nowhere to be found:

Finally, the god creates the world alone without reference to the Mother Goddess, either through self-copulation or through the power of the Word. (661)

And actually, as this era of rationality evolved into the even more rational, empirical and scientific Cartesian and Darwinian worldview, the idea of a god creating the world is replaced by pure chance.

This new worldview, then, coupled with the rise of science, engineering, and the Industrial Revolution, allowed humanity the opportunity to separate from and to fully dominate nature for the first time in global history. Our dwellings reflect this shift accordingly, as mentioned by Beck earlier: fossil-fueled mansions, tract housing, and mobile homes, all with no connection to the earth or its sustainable cycles, and all built out of the perceived struggle for survival through a self-reinforcing cycle of domination and exploitation.

Also, since the Age of Rationality destroyed the need for mythology and focused on the individual, the “mythic embodiment” that was normally reserved for monumental structures is now transferred to the individual home. As Beck notes, “our corresponding model of house is (now) the mansion-castle...and it signals the success of its owner-aristocrat through a conspicuous display of excess” (23). Such superfluous display was originally reserved for mythical gods, goddesses, or rulers. This transference of “mythic embodiment” also takes place in the construction of towering skyscrapers that symbolize the economic rationality of money.

Not all dwellings during this period reflected domination, exploitation, waste, and environmental destruction, however. Architects and inventors such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller followed the more positive aspects of egoic-rational thought. They found ways of building the most with the least amount of processed resources, or of integrating modern dwelling styles with more natural surroundings. As unique as they were for pursuing the useful aspects of egoic-rational thought, they were still, for the most part, hemmed in by it as well.

The psychological despair and environmental destruction that this current epoch has thus wrought leaves apparently little room for hopeful evolutionary change. Why, then, are thinkers such as Wilber, Swimme, Cashford, and Baring envisioning the next quantum leap in human consciousness and planetary renewal? Ironically, they see the leap occurring from a visionary, integrated-yet-distinct transformation of all the previous eras of human evolutionary consciousness.

For Wilber, this quantum leap will occur through the “quest for a truly universal or global or planetary outlook” that is “noncoercive in nature” (185), which he calls centauric vision-logic. This worldview will finally integrate “the body and mind, or biosphere and noosphere” (186), which we have successfully (and some may argue detrimentally) differentiated throughout human history. However, our centauric vision-logic will join the two integrally-yet-aperspectivally, meaning that we will simultaneously integrate both the noosphere and the biosphere while keeping each distinct all at the same time . Such contradictory-sounding concentration, Wilber argues:

…holds the only hope for the integration of the biosphere and noosphere, the supranational organization of planetary consciousness, the genuine recognition of ecological balance, the urnrestrained and unforced forms of global discourse, the nondominating and noncoercive forms of federated states, the unrestrained flow of worldwide communicative exchange, the production of genuine world citizens, and the enculturation of female agency. (187)

Similarly, Baring and Cashford see this next evolutionary stage occurring by truly bringing the Mother Goddess back into our worldview. However, they see her return not as merely a return back to “Goddess giving birth to the world,” but rather as “the sacred marriage of goddess and god” (681) birthing the world and distinctly embodying it together. Symbolically, this echoes Wilber's vision-logic, for it evokes humanity as

a co-creator in nature, in so far as it can foster, ignore or destroy its identity with nature, for nature's continued existence depends ultimately on the kind of consciousness we bring to bear on it” (681).

For Swimme and Berry, this co-creation with nature will usher in what they call the Ecozoic Era, an era that will truly embrace and overcome

…the tension between the Entrepreneur and the Ecologist, between those who would continue their pludnering, and those who would truly preserve the natural world, between the mechanistic and the organic, between the world as a collection of objects and the world as a communion of subjects, between the anthropocentric (human-centered) and the biocentric (nature-centered) norms of reality and value. (250)

The type of dwelling process needed to usher in this new era of human consciousness, then, must similarly embrace apparent contradictions between noosphere and biosphere, between mind and matter, between humanity and nature. Consequently, we cannot merely go back to primitive, undifferentiated modes of dwelling; however, we can use rational science and technology to uncover the sustainable natural cycles that vernacular dwellings inherently used and apply them to newer dwellings that do the most with the least amount of resources. We cannot merely go back to using just local, natural materials in the construction of our homes; however, we can use local natural materials where possible in conjunction with judicious use of newer and sustainable processed materials where needed. We cannot merely go back to lighting our homes with candles and heating our food in fire pits; however, we can use the older ideas of distributed and “point of use” energy with the newer technologies of photovoltaics, passive solar cooking, and radiant floor heating. We cannot merely go back to purely tribal modes of communal living; however, we can dwell in intentional, egalitarian, clustered cooperatives. We cannot merely go back to monumental structures of mythological expression; however, we can integrate deep, archetypal patterns that resonate with us spiritually into the overall design of our “right sized,” solar, self-reliant, sustainable dwellings.

Works Cited

Baring, Ann and Cashford, Jules. The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. London: Penguin Books, 1991, pp. 659-681.

Beck, Steve. Dwelling in Balance: A Proposal for Universally Ownable Housing and Environmentally Sustainable Settlement. Seattle: University of Washington, 1991.

Berry, Thomas and Swimme, Brian. The Universe Story. San Francisco: Harper, 1992, pp. 241-268.

Wilber, Ken. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala, pp.153-204.

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