“Evolution” has been the dominant thought of humankind since, at least, the early 20th century. Everything evolves, everything changes and develops, even the universe itself. Our cosmos (of some 13.8 billion years) has evolved so substantially that today’s cosmos is very different from the early cosmos.

As part of the evolution of the cosmos, life has evolved. The geologists tell us that the evolution of life on Earth has substantially changed even the geophysical features of our planet, for example, by creating an atmospheric envelope rich in oxygen. Scientist-philosopher Teilhard de Chardin (1959) and many others have traced this integral development of the geosphere in relation to the emerging biosphere and the development of the noosphere (mind-sphere) that came about through human evolution (see Martin 2008 and 2018).

The emergence of the noosphere was inseparable from the development of human beings as language-speaking creatures. We know today that all human beings are genetically structured to acquire language as young children (Pinker 1995). With language, hidden and mute structures of the world that simply and silently embrace all other animals emerges into the dimension of knowledge, awareness, and critical distance. The subject emerges conscious of itself and its relation to the object. The object, along with its environment and relationships, is described in language.

With language, all languages, three dimensions of existence emerge that philosophers of language, like Jürgen Habermas (1996), call the subjective, the intersubjective, and the objective dimensions. The concepts of the true, the good, and the beautiful also emerge into human consciousness everywhere. Human beings have long grappled with these concepts in relation to these three dimensions of the noosphere from which a “Utopian horizon” emerges, beckoning the subjective, intersubjective, and objective ever-forward toward fulfillment (Martin 2021). In other words, self-aware temporalized creatures live within a dynamic present ever appropriating their past and projecting themselves toward a higher and more complete future, that is toward a “Utopian horizon.”

Hence, just as the biosphere embraces and evolves the geosphere along with itself, so the noosphere that appeared with language embraces and evolves the geosphere and the biosphere along with itself. Human consciousness evolved from an early primitive level to a mythological level, and then to a critically self-aware level in the ancient world during the first millennium BCE. Human beings domesticated animals and learned to plant crops, taking charge of the biosphere in the service of their own evolution.

With the decisive discovery of the scientific method and the hidden mathematical structures of the natural world in the 17th century, human beings developed the ability to refine the noosphere further by developing the technosphere. The geosphere and biosphere of the Earth are now modified in a dynamic way to create a world of machines that cover the Earth. As many thinkers (like Jeremy Rifkin, 2013) have pointed out, the technosphere has immense potential to transform nature and humanity to higher levels of evolutionary emergence that we can hardly imagine.

The digital revolution (the so-called “third industrial revolution,” Rifkin 2011) presents humanity with an immense potential to transform our world into a sustainable, flourishing paradise of peace, justice, and sustainability. Human beings no longer need to dominate and exploit nature. They can now manage nature and cooperate with one another and nature to create the products and services that underlie a quality, flourishing life for each person. Much of what is needed for life can be supplied by robots, by digital printing, etc. Our “Utopian horizon” beckons us to further evolution.

Out of the technosphere emerges the humanosphere, the cosmosphere, and the theosphere, now interrelated in a new level of awareness and practice portending a fulfillment and self-actualization of the human project. (In future publications, I will be defining these dimensions more fully.) Human beings begin to become aware of the inner reality at the heart of the cosmic process (often called divine), ontological freedom at the heart of space and time that allows evolutionary change to happen and guides its development toward ever-higher levels of “complexity-consciousness.”

Out of the evolution of the noosphere and its progeny, the technosphere, there emerges the cosmotheosphere in which our ability to contemplate the ultimate mystery behind temporal existence brings us to grow beyond reason and technique into the fullness of our human being (Panikkar 2014). It is here that human unity in diversity becomes truly possible because the unity of the human project (discerned in such traditional teachings as “love your neighbor as yourself”) is discovered in a depth awareness of that unity that embraces all and therefore need not be founded on any external similarities (see Martin 2018, Chap. 5).

Outmoded and regressive orientations drop away as human beings move into the fullness of their destiny and the actualization of the divine dignity as children of cosmic-divine evolution. In our own day, it is absolute (“sovereign”) borders exacerbating largely illusory and superficial differences between peoples that begin to be seen as regressive illusions. It is also the external accumulation of wealth and egoistic greed for ever more possessions that begins to disappear.

We embrace one human civilization—aware of its birth from the womb of the cosmos and resonating with the mystery of the divine grounding within the emptiness (sūnyatā) of all things. Absolute boundaries dividing us into militarized sovereign nation-states are seen as illusions of a bygone era, and the greed for possessions is seen as the compulsions of an immature, ego-driven self. As Indian sage, Rabindranath Tagore writes: “It is the mission of civilization to bring unity among people and establish peace and harmony” (2011, 214). We are ready to ascend to a world civilization based on the principle of unity in diversity.

It is here that the Constitution for the Federation of Earth emerges as a blueprint for world civilization. The Earth Constitution does not abolish national borders or nation-state identities, but it integrates these under unity in diversity in dynamic ways that allow for further evolutionary growth toward a disarmed world and an economic regime for the world based on the well-being of all rather than the private accumulation of wealth for a few.

In Columbia, South America, a new President has just been elected who founded a movement called “Columbia Humana,” a new spirit in his country in which common humanity takes precedence over wealth, power, violence, and corruption. We were there on August 7, 2022, for the inauguration and heard President Petro speak of a “quantum leap for humanity.” But it cannot be just one nation, culture, language, or race. Human beings are ready for a quantum leap to the next level of evolutionary development—our universal humanity discerned through the openness of the noospheric self to the mystery of its own depths and origin, evolving into cosmic awareness.

The Earth Federation under the Earth Constitution is not founded as a mere collection of militarized sovereign nation-states as is the United Nations system. It is founded on the unity in diversity of our common humanity, on the equal dignity of all. It concretizes both our ascent to awareness of our common humanity and makes possible further evolution away from violence, war, egoism, and greed. It represents the “quantum leap for humanity” toward a new, free civilization of love, justice, peace, prosperity, and sustainability.

It is both a product of this leap as well as a facilitator of the leap toward ever higher levels of these freedoms. The United Nations cannot solve our problems because it is premised on an anachronistic system of economics and politics. Our problems are solved, as Albert Einstein (1981) pointed out, through moving to a higher level of consciousness and self-actualization. The Earth Constitution explicitly retains many valuable UN agencies but abandons its anachronistic Charter and replaces the Charter with the Earth Constitution.

Columbia Humana cannot fully succeed unless it becomes Earth Humana, along with evolved and awakened global citizens from countries around the world who place the principle of unity in diversity before anachronistic divisions of our world into sovereign nation-states intertwined with vast accumulations of private wealth. The Constitution for the Federation of Earth provides the concrete tools for actualizing Earth Humana—the quantum leap of human beings into the fullness of their humanity and their destiny emerging from the evolutionary foundations of the divinely-grounded cosmos.

The Constitution is premised first and foremost on human dignity within the framework of unity in diversity. It outlines the concrete steps we can take to facilitate the next evolutionary step toward human fulfillment as children of the cosmic evolutionary process. It raises us to the level of Earth Humanity—one integral civilization premised on the realization of truth, goodness, and beauty for all, whatever language one speaks. Today, our glorious human destiny is in great danger of failure. Now is the time to take action to ratify and enable our common humanity under the Earth Constitution.

Notes

Constitution for the Federation of Earth. Published by the Institute for Economic Democracy Press, Appomattox, Virginia, 2010 and 2014.
Einstein, Albert (1981). Einstein on Peace. Eds. David E. Rowe and Robert Schulman. New York: Avenel Books.
Habermas, Jürgen (1979). Communication and the Evolution of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.
Lassky, Valdimir. Martin, Glen T. (2008). Ascent to Freedom: Practical and Philosophical Foundations of Democratic World Law. Appomattox, VA: Institute for Economic Democracy Press.
Martin, Glen T. (2018). Global Democracy and Human Self-Transcendence: The Power of the Future for Planetary Transformation. London: Cambridge Scholars.
Martin, Glen T. (2021). Utopian Horizon Value Theory: A Transformative Power at the Heart of Human Futurity. Article in the American International Journal of Humanities and Social Science. Vol. 7, No. 1, February 2021.
Martin, Glen T. (2021). The Earth Constitution Solution: Design for a Living Planet. Independence, VA: Peace Pentagon Press.
Panikkar, Raimon (2014). Mysticism and Spirituality: Part One: Mysticism, Fullness of Life. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Pinker, Steven (1995). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: Harper-Perennial.
Rifkin, Jeremy (2011). The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Rifkin, Jeremy (2013). The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Tagore, Rabindranath (2011). The Essential Tagore. Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, eds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1959). The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Brothers.