(6)
The predicament of young people today is especially critical. Forestalling the threatening apocalypse will devolve on their perceptions of value; their sensibilities of the beautiful and worthwhile must be aroused and renewed. And just these values are those being suppressed by scientism and technomorphic thinking.

Educative measures begin with an exercising of Gestalt (form) perception, our only means for achieving a sensibility to harmonies. In order for this perception to function properly, it must, as must any computing mechanism, be provided with an immense amount of data. The closest possible contact with the living natural world at the earliest possible age is the most promising way to achieve this proper function. (p. 6, 7)

See also Citation # 8 at The Devil in the Fire by John W. Aldridge; ( http://www.librarything.com/work/4269... )

(7)
In a certain sense, in the phylogenetic sense, it is permissible to say that creative evolution has ceased on our earth. Human cultural development goes on at an ever-increasing rate and has now reached such a velocity that it is hardly and exaggeration to maintain that the tempo of genetic, phylogenetic evolution, by comparison, can be regarded as negligible, can, in fact, be equated with nil. In any case, the alterations brought about upon the entire planet through human cultural development are carried out at a rate that completely rules out phylogenetic development keeping pace with it, or even being "towed along" behind. Because of this disjunction, humans are, in the highest degree, an endangered species.

"Die ewig rege, die heilsam schaffende Gewalt" ( The perpetually stirring, the curative creative force), as Goethe called it, can be effective today exclusively through man's sense of values. The decision whether the evolution of organic life here and now is to go "downward" or "upward" has become the responsibility of mankind. Without a sense of values, questions concerning the the consequences of our actions can lead neither to commandments nor to prohibitions.

No one knows if the further phylogenetic development of humans will continue to lead upward at all. I, however, steadfastly believe in this possibility. If cultural development, despite running along at a rate immensely faster than phylogenesis, continues to remain subject to laws similar to those followed by phylogenesis, then it is very probable that it is also capable of turning the directions of phylogenesis toward its own inclinations, that is, in the same direction. yet this direction now appears, in the light of our present technocratic world order, to be leading indubitably downward. If this is so, then human existence is imperiled.(p. 12, 13)

(8)
When, as a comparative anatomist or as a comparative animal behavioralist, one becomes familiar with some particular segment of organic life, this familiarity can often involve one in a remarkable conflict. One is torn between admiring astonishment for the quite ingenious design features of some evolutionary constructs and disappointment concerning those solutions to problems , seeming obvious to our minds, which the processes of evolution have not found. So much that is clearly useless excess baggage is lugged along from generation to generation! Many scientists, among them Nicolai Hartmann, are inclined to overestimate degrees of usefulness and purposefulness. Hartmann does this when, for example, he expresses the belief that purposefulness is a priori insightful and has, thereby, the characteristic features of a category of the organic. He says: "It is quite obvious, that is, the essence of the matter is that an organism with purposeless organs, appendages, forrms and functions cannot be viable." This statement definitely exaggerates teh state of affaires; it must be brought into juxtaposition with Oskar Heinroth's repeatedly expressed recognition; "In organic life there is not only the useful but, as well, everything that is not so useless that it leads to the elimination of the species in question.” (p. 20, 21)

(9) A second, perhaps still more essential consequence of conceptual thinking and of verbal language is the ties by which these bind individuals to one another. The rapid dissemination of knowledge and the assimilation of opinions, beliefs and convictions by all members of a social group produce a unity of consensus and confraternity such as has never existed before. Bonds of this sort entwine larger and smaller clusters of human beings. Commonly shared knowledge, skills and aspirations produce cultural unity. Mind is for me just these basic accomplishments of human society brought about through conceptual thinking, verbal language, and shared tradition. The life of the mind is a consequence of a social effect. I have often maintained that a human, taken alone, is no human at all; only as a member of a reasoning group can a person be completely human. The life of the mind is fundamentally supraindividual life; the individual’s concrete realization of reasoning communality is what we call culture. (p. 57)

(10)
Our species has, I believe, a built-in mechanism whose life-preserving function consists of making alterations of cultural structures possible without, at the same time and during the process, endangering the entire stock of information contained within the tradition of a culture. Similar to the mutation rate that must be correctly gauged in order not to jeopardize the continued evolutionary development of the species, so must the extent of possible changes within every culture be contained and limited. At the approach of puberty, young people begin to loosen their allegiances to group rituals and the norms of social behaviour that are being passed on to them by means of family traditions. At the same time they become receptive to new ideas which they can make their own and for which they are prepared to do battle. This molting or shedding of traditional ideas and ideals is a critical phase of human development and brings dangers with it. During this developmental period young people are especially susceptible to indoctrination.
Nonetheless, this dangerous part of human ontogeny is indispensible since it provides one of the possibilities for effecting alterations in the grand inheritance of the cultural tradition. This crisis involving evaluations of ideals is like an opening door through which new thoughts and ideas and new perceptions and knowledge can gain entry and can become integrated into the structures of a culture. Without this critical process the cultural tradition would remain too rigid. The culture-preserving and, consequently, life-sustaining function of this mechanism has, however, as a necessary precondition, something similar to a state of equilibrium between the immutability of old traditions and the capacity for adaptability through which throwing overboard certain parts of the traditional inheritance cannot be avoided. A preponderance of that which is conservative causes exactly the same result in the biological development of species as in the development of cultures—the formation of “living fossils”; and overabundance of variability, on the other hand, causes in both (species and cultures) the formation of abnormalities. As examples of such maldevelopments in social behaviour can be cited the emergence of such phenomena as terrorism and the current popularity of quite inept religious sects.
…With the vastly accelerated increase in the tempo of developments in our civilization, the generations have become more and more unlike one another. An additional fact that cannot be denied is that the amount of tradition which must be thrown overboard by each succeed generation is increasing steadily. …
While the generations within each of the industrialized/civilized nations become more and more dissimilar to one another and more alienated, the members of the same generation throughout the world become more and more alike. (p. 61, 62, 63)

See also Citation #3 at The Lonely Crowd by Riesman, Glazer & Denney, (http://www.librarything.com/work/6473...)

(11)
It is an error to believe that after the form and content of an old culture are thrown overboard a new and better, ready-made one will quite naturally be brought into being to take its place instantaneously. We must seriously confront the sobering fact that there is no purpose-oriented predeterminism of what happens in our world to protect our culture. We must be clearly aware that we humans, ourselves, bear the burden of responsibility for preserving our culture both from erroneous developments and from rigidity. (p. 64)

(12)
The human soul is very much older than the human mind. We do not know when the soul, all subjective experience, came into being. Every human who is acquainted with higher animals knows that their experiences, their “emotions,” are fraternally related to our own. A dog has a soul that, in general, is similar to mine; in its capacity for unconditional love that soul probably even surpasses mine. No animal, however, has a mind in the sense defined here; neither dogs nor the anthropoid apes that are most closely related to humans have such a mind.
The human mind, brought into existence through conceptual thinking, syntactic speech and the heritability of traditional knowledge made possible by speech, develops many times faster than the human soul. As a consequence, humans very often alter their own surrounding world to their disadvantage and to the world’s disadvantage. Right now humans are on the verge of destroying the communality of all life on the earth on which and from which they live and, in doing this, committing themselves to suicide.
The rapidity with which the human mind changes and with which the human, through his technology, makes his own world into something completely different from what, just a short while ago, it was, is so great that, for all practical purposes, the pace of evolutionary development, when compared to it, is standing dead still. Since the emergence of human culture the human soul has remained essentially the same; it is not astonishing that then that culture very often makes unfulfillable demands on the soul. (p. 124)

(13)
The cultural and civilizational straightjacket binding humans today is being drawn tighter and tighter. Neither our natural and creaturely behaviour nor the good manners that, traditionally, have become our second nature fit any longer in a world that is artificially contrived and determined almost exclusively by technocracy. My belief is that some youthful rebels confuse these differing constraints, that when protesting against the technocratic/capitalistic success-society they mistakenly violate codes of decorum. It appears to be not understood by some young people that rebellion against the technocratic success-society would have much greater chance of success if they could refrain from offenses against propriety, honor and aesthetic-ethical convention. Nevertheless, all the rebellions staged by today’s (circa 1960s-1970s) youth, even when they are not always thought through thoroughly, signify the presentiment of a truth: the human mind, in taking us down the path of technocracy, has become the adversary of life itself and collaterally the adversary of the human soul. (p. 125, 126)

(14)
In the course of mankind’s history the desire for order did not become a danger until quite late. (p. 133)

(15)
It must be the goal of democracy to arrive at a compromise between maintaining the order that a gigantic number of people make absolutely necessary and preserving those freedoms for individual action which belong to the rights of man. Achieving this high goal through legislation is much more difficult than most honest democrats are willing to admit. Even if the effectiveness of democracy were not undermined by the power of large industries at work behind the scenes, there would still remain the virtually insurmountable difficulties of converting, in a just way, what the voters most desire into actions taken by those for whom they have voted. (p. 136)

See also, on democratic practice in modern technological societies, Le destin technologique, by Jean-Jacques Salomon, chapter 10, "Pretence and the sharing of (political) power", especially pages 240-251 and 255-258 and 261-273. (http://www.librarything.com/work/9290... ) and Chapter 11, "The New Rules of the Game", pp. 274-295

(16)
Retrograde Evolution or « Sacculinisation »
…from each already achieved stage of development evolution can go in any direction whatever, blindly responding to every new selesction pressure that turns up. We need to be aware that within the terminology just used, in “direction” of evolution, an initially inadvertent value judgement is implicit. This will be discussed in the second part of the book. For the present context it is quite enough if every one of us understands what is meant when speaking about a higher or a lower living being. When we use the terms “higher” and “lower” in reference to living creatures and to cultures alike, our evaluation refers directly to the amount of information, of knowledge, conscious or unconscious, inherent in these living systems, irrespective of whether it has been acquired by natural selection, by learning, or by exploratory investigation, and irrespective of whether it is preserved in the genome, in the individual’s memory or in the tradition of a culture. … It is nearly impossible to find an immediately understandable expression for this process (i.e. an evolutionary process leading to a value diminution). The words “involution,” “decadence,” or even “degeneration” all have implications not applicable to the process referred to here. This process is so specific that I was tempted to call it “Sacculinisation” after an impressive example. …I coined it by taking the name of a creature in which the process of retrograde evolution is especially vivid. The crayfish Sacculina carcini is probably a descendant of the large phylum of copepod shrimps (Copepoda), perhaps also of the goose barnacles (Cirripedia). As a larva freshly emerged from an egg, this crayfish is a typical nauplius, that is, a little six-footed crustacean that paddles swiftly through the water and is equipped with a central nervous system whose programming allows it forthwith to search out its prospective host, the common green crab (Carcinides maenas), and straightaway to fasten itself firmly onto, then to bore into the host’s underside at the boundary between the cephalothorax, the united head and thorax, and the tail. As soon as this has been accomplished, simple unstructured tubes grow out of the front end of the little crayfish and into the body of the host, which they penetrate throughout, just as the mycelium, the mass of interwoven threadlike filaments of a mushroom, penetrates the substratum. The eyes, the extremities and the nerve system of the crayfish-parasite disappear completely; it grows on the the outer side of the host into a gigantic genital gland that, on larger crabs, can reach the size of a cherry. (p. 42)

The evolutionary processes occurring among parasites and among symbionts always have, as a prerequisite, a partnership involvement with another living organism that takes over all those functions that have retrogressed and been lost by the sponging parasite or symbiont partner. The common green crab forages for food, moves away from danger into a safe place and performs innumerable other functions while the parasite allows itself to rely on the host to take over all of these responsibilities. …

Whether or not a species can fall victim to retrograde evolution without another living form—host or symbiont—carrying out vicariously the necessary survival functions is a very important question. Only a single certain example is known for manifestations of domestication in an independent, free and certainly not parasitic animal—the cave bear. … The question of retrograde evolution and the indications cited are of such vital importance for us humans because our species has already begun to show, as far as our bodies are concerned, unmistakable manifestations of domestication, and because a retrogression of specific human characteristics and capacities conjures up the terrifying spectre of the less than human, even of the inhuman. If one judges the adapted forms of the parasites according to the amounts of retrogressed information, one finds a loss of information that coincides with and completely confirms the low estimation we have of them and how we feel about them. The mature Sacculina carcini has no information about any of the particularities and singularities of its habitat; the only thing it knows anything about is its host. (p. 44, 45)

(17)

However great the gulf—Nicolai Hartmann would say the ‘hiatus”—between a purely genetic evolution and the emergence and development of a culture may appear to be, both still remain subject to fundamental rules applicable to the game of becoming. The assumption that the development of a culture is governed by insight and reasoned knowledge and pursues with prudent certitude that chosen path toward the “higher” is an erroneous assumption. None of the basic cognitive functions not yet specifically human—perception of depth and direction, a central-nervous representation of space, Gestalt perception and the capacity for abstraction, insight and learning, voluntary movement, curiosity and explorative behaviour, imitation—is, through its integration (i.e. in humans) for conceptual thinking, made dispensable; none loses even the least part of its significance. Among humans all of these functions are more strongly developed than any of them is among an (i.e. another) animal species, even when they represent for those animals a fulfillment of the most vital, life-furthering functions. (p. 57, 58)