What do we mean by Cenolithic?
The word is clearly is related to the terms we use to describe the primitive technologies of humanity’s past: Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, and even Chalcolithic. These “Stone Age” monikers, however, describe more than just the types of tools we were pounding out at different stages in our past. They reference an environment, both physical and social, to which the human creature adapted over millions of years.
The Stone Age, in fact, covers nearly all of human history. Until a few centuries ago, it encompassed everything outside of Eurasia and Africa, and significant regions within those continents.
The metallurgical, agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions that shaped the modern world are very recent changes. As a species, we have only begun to adapt to these revolutions.
We are very much a Stone Age animal in an Information Age civilization.
If you have doubt, try to create a pie chart to compare the 2.5 million years of the Stone Age to the 2.5 centuries of the Modern Age. The Modern Age will be swallowed and you’ll end up with a circle of a single color.
Cenolithic is a recognition that human psychology is rooted in a past that has not prepared us to manage — instinctively — a global, high-tech society involving billions of people and many, many planning levels. “Ceno-” comes from the Greek kainos (καινός meaning “new”) to indicate that our “-lithic” brains are finding themselves in an entirely new environment.
Stone Age instincts, geared to helping a small group of primates in constant contact to navigate a wilderness environment, are simply inadequate to managing modern organizations with global reach, multiple planning levels, in which people can only occasionally apply social pressure on each other.
As a philosophy, Cenolithic is based on a very simple, self-evident principle: a creature that creates and constantly renews most of its environment cannot be expected to have adapted to it, genetically. The instincts that served us well in the Stone Age environment may now be inappropriate or even dangerous to the sustainability of our society.
If this seems overly pessimistic, remember that it is possible, if not probable, that there are individuals capable of transcending the limitations of typical human instinct, with thought processes that may have been superfluous or even ill-adjusted to the Stone Age environment, but are now ideally suited to ad hoc analysis of a changing, anthropogenic environment. Identifying these processes, and the rare individuals who possess them, is key to our long-term survival as a species.