The new book that I am currently working on is entitled Human Dignity and World Order: Holistic Foundations for Human Liberation. One fundamental theme of the book is “conscious evolution.” Many thinkers have been talking about conscious evolution for at least the past half century, yet little serious work has been done. There have been a number of very good conferences online: on world unity, on synergy, on developing planetary consciousness, or on evolutionary harmony, but these mainly preach to the choir. The real engines of power in the world do not appear interested.

My thesis in my new book is that we will only create a decent future on this planet if we establish a world civilization on human dignity. The book investigates at some length what this dignity is about, not only in the literature on dignity, but also phenomenologically through description of the workings of human consciousness. The concept of dignity exploded into human consciousness following the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 which begins with the powerful words: “Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” The concept continued to be embodied in numerous UN documents and declarations, continuing to the present.

Today, the entire world is familiar with this concept, and many, like myself, think that the opening statement of the Declaration is true: recognition of dignity is indeed the foundation for freedom, justice and peace in the world. If this statement is true, and if people worldwide are familiar with this statement, then why is the world such a mess? Why do wars, terrorism, corruption, pollution, and environmental destruction continue unabated? The answer given in my new book is that our world order, the world system as we now know it, is not founded on human dignity.

Many scholars have pointed out that our world system is an integration of global capitalism and militarized sovereign nation-states. Both dimensions of this integrated system developed synergistically out of medieval feudalism during the 16th to 18th centuries. The system of sovereign states is often referred to as “the Westphalian System” since it was first outlined at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 after the Thirty-years’ War in Europe. Capitalism was founded on the exploitation of nature and human beings for the enrichment of the wealthy owners of capital. Sovereign nation-states were founded on the principle of an absolute territorial atomism, each unit defended by a military apparatus, and each unit in competition with other such units for markets, wealth, natural resources, and international power.

Despite the fact that many constitutions cite human dignity as part of their framework, for a militarized sovereign nation to be actually founded on dignity is quite impossible. What about the dignity of unwanted immigrants and refugees? What about the dignity of official enemies? What about the people being tortured or murdered by governments in other countries? The bottom line (as with all values) is this: dignity is universal. It is a quality of infinite worth within all persons. To try to implement dignity within a territorial fragment is to contradict or nullify the dignity of all those outside the territory.

One of the most famous affirmations of human dignity came from Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant said the fundamental principle of morality was to treat every person as an end in themselves, never merely as a means. To be an end in oneself is to have dignity, he declared, to recognize oneself and others as being inviolable, infinitely valuable. The UN Declaration of Human Rights correctly recognizes that all our inalienable human rights derive from this dignity.

What would economics look like if it were based on human dignity? No more exploiting people to make a profit off their labor? No more killing people in wars that right now create immense profits for the capitalists; no more humiliating people by casting them as outgroups and ingroups, divisions exploited by the capitalists for increasing their profits. Naomi Klein, in the The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism reveals the many ways that capitalists profit from natural disasters such as the hurricane that devasted New Orleans or the tsunami that besieged Sri Lanka in 2005. Neither sovereign nation-states nor capitalism are premised on human dignity. Works like Jonathan Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century show that the rhetoric of human dignity in many national constitutions and in many UN Declarations is quite meaningless in practice. The 20th century, continuing to this day, was a nightmare of mass slaughter in many wars, genocides, terrorism, widespread torture and many other atrocities.

How do we actualize dignity as the foundation for humane economic and political affairs? The answer is to ratify the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. The Constitution not only abolishes national sovereignty and systematically disarms the nations but establishes an economic system predicated on human welfare rather than the private accumulation of capital. But it does something more: it initiates Conscious Evolution for humanity.

The Earth Constitution does not use the phrase “conscious evolution.” However, it embodies a set of practical utopian ideals in its very first article that require just this—goals such as “to end war and disarm the nations,” “to protect universal human rights,” and “to protect the environment and the ecological fabric of life.” To immediately realize any of these goals under the present dysfunctional world system appears quite impossible. Nor could they possibly be fully realized under the first operative stage of Earth Federation as defined in Article 17. They only become possible within a transformed world system based on premises that work for, rather than against, their actualization.

Conscious evolution has become an important contemporary idea. Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich in their 1988 (republished in 2018) book called New World: New Mind argue that “the time has come to take our own evolution into our hands and create a new evolutionary process, a process of conscious evolution” (2018, 12). Barbara Marx Hubbard in her book titled Conscious Evolution writes:

We see that planet Earth is herself a whole system. We are being integrated into one interactive, interfeeling body by the same force of evolution that drew atom to atom and cell to cell. Every tendency in us toward greater wholeness, unity, and interconnectedness is reinforced by nature’s tendency toward holism. Integration is inherent in the process of evolution. Unity does not mean homogeneity, however. Unity increases diversity. We are becoming ever more connected as a planet while we seek further individuality for our cultures, ethnic groups, and our selves. (1998, 48-49)

This insightful description could serve as a gloss for the entire Earth Constitution, which is based explicitly on the principle of unity in diversity achieved through an integration of humanity under the Constitution. In the light of what has been revealed by contemporary cosmology and earth science, the holism of the cosmos, nature, and humanity should be clear. Hubbard rightly claims that this gives us a guide, a criterion, by which to consciously affect the evolution of our species: “greater wholeness, unity, and interconnectedness.” In other words, how do we move people more rapidly through the growth processes depicted by psychologists like Abraham Maslow or spiritual thinkers like Ken Wilber? Both speak of higher “Worldcentric” and “Cosmocentric” levels of growth in which we discover ever greater wholeness, integration, and a tremendous release of beautiful unity in diversity. Wilber declares that we need “a social policy geared to help human beings evolve through the stage-levels of existence” (1982, 291).

The answer to this question is that “conscious evolution” cannot be merely subjective and/or merely cultural. Private civic organizations claiming to promote conscious evolution will be negated and counterbalanced by corporate propaganda, national government propaganda, and other civic organization propaganda that opposed conscious evolution. In the USA, right now, these people call themselves the “anti-woke” movement. Conscious evolution must come from government and ultimately this can only be from a democratic world government structurally designed to do just that.

The Earth Constitution, in numerous places such as Article 8, draws on global private and public educational institutions in its quest for monitoring our progress in sustainable living on Earth, the election of wise people to the House of Counselors, and the use of human knowledge and technologies for the good of people while preventing harmful uses. The educational infrastructure of civilization is thereby mobilized in the process of actualizing the goals set in Article 1, such as ending war and disarming the nations, protecting universal rights, and creating planetary sustainability.

Indeed, the Provisional World Parliament has passed the Education Act (WLA 26) that, without using the phrase “conscious evolution” describes a process of learning that is transformative and actively promotes planetary consciousness and worldcentric wisdom. However, the real tour de force on behalf of conscious evolution is in the Constitution itself: Article 11 on the World Ombudsmus. This article alone sets the Earth Constitution on a plane far beyond any potential competitors of those that have been written to date.

The World Ombudsmus will be one of the 7 primary organs of the Earth Federation government (Article 3). As such it will be organized by the same principle of unity in diversity that is also required of the other 6 organs. It is run by a council of five “World Ombudsen” (one elected from each continental division of the world), and extended by a commission of 20 World Advocates, one for each of the magna-regions of Earth and integrated within offices in each of the 1000 World Electoral Districts covering the planet.

Out of the list of 11 functions for the World Ombudsmus listed in Article 11, we can distill them all into three central ones: (1) To protect the people of Earth against violations of their rights as stipulated in Article 12 of the Constitution, (2) To serve as a watchdog on all the other aspects of the world government to ensure that the Constitution is being followed and that people’s rights are not violated, and (3) “to press for the implementation of the Directive Principles for the World Government as defined in Article 13 of this World Constitution.” Here we have conscious evolution embedded within the Earth Constitution. The job of the World Ombudsmus is to guide the growth of humanity, as rapidly as is reasonably possible, to the point where peace, justice, and sustainability are realities.

Article 13 specifies the “certain other rights'' within the Constitution that are not immediately enforceable, rights such as clean water and air, nourishing food, and adequate housing for everyone, including protected public health for the entire planet, protection of the natural environment, and conservation of the limited natural resources of the Earth. It specifies primarily what has been called “the second and third generation of human rights' ' that are impossible to satisfy under the current world system. The World Ombudsmus is mandated to press for their realization. Even within the first operative stage of the Earth Federation government the practical utopian goals of Article 13 could not be realized, although substantial progress could certainly be made.

The World Ombudsmus is a permanent structural feature of the Constitution, meaning that the practical utopian goals behind the Constitution (in Articles 1, 4, 12, 13, 19, and elsewhere) are understood to be open-ended with practically unlimited possibilities for further improvement. In other words, these goals appear not only in the Constitution but on our human utopian horizon. In the words of Professor Errol E. Harris, they are the “conscience of humanity” now come to meaningful fruition because they coincide with the sovereignty of humanity having both the power to enforce them and the ethical grounding that makes this government legitimate.

This is what a conscious world system based on human dignity would look like. Dignity, as many thinkers have pointed out, is not a static quality of humanity, it is integral to the process of growth that characterizes all human life. Conscious evolution means a growing awareness of the cosmos, the world, and ourselves. Such growth is nearly impossible under the present world system. Under a dignity-based world system, such growth would be an integral aspect of economics as well as politics. Before it is too late, we need a world system that makes possible real conscious evolution.