The exploratory approach adopted below is necessarily speculative because the underlying hypothesis cannot be proven or disproven scientifically. Evidence in its favor may be weighed against counterexamples but the balance will remain subjective and the approach thus speculative. Speculation is not science but can lead to knowledge insofar as knowledge is justified true belief, which is how epistemologists define knowledge. That justification may include qualitative as well as quantitative evidence.
While no direct measures of societal maturation or metamorphosis may exist, various dimensions of that maturation and metamorphosis might be identifiable and measurable directly or indirectly. Sometimes data can be found regarding a trend that merely parallels an aspect of societal maturation or metamorphosis. In other cases there may be data concerning conditions that would facilitate, enable, incentivize or catalyze societal such development.
The evidence presented here is admittedly selective, biased, and grounded in advocacy. Given the hypothesis’s all-encompassing scope, an objective analysis would be impossible. I leave it to others to suggest evidence opposing the hypothesis.
The hypothesis may be speculative and of questionable veracity but would satisfy the need for a progressive vision with which to unify, inspire and direct lives constructively, something widely agreed as missing as a paradigm for the Democrats and the Left. As Robert Merton writes (Merton 1968, Social Theory and Social Structure, p.8) “If it is worth its salt, [social science] must provide solutions for [war and the exploitation and poverty and discrimination and psychological insecurity .. plagyuing men in modert society]. … If everyone were to back the sure thing, who would support the colt yet to come into his own?” The metamorphosis hypothesis is unprovable but we would nonetheless benefit from adopting it as a self-fulfilling prophecy. A positive attitude is good for one’s health.
The hypothesis comports with informal observation and is based on the widely and long-accepted approach to analyzing reality along material, energy, and informational dimensions. Purely speculative is the added assumption that organic development proceeds sequentially in emphasis from material through informational to energy dimensions. While social scientific methodology uses rigorous statistical methods but poses hypotheses that are unapologetically unrealistic in their simplification and abstraction of reality with a select number of parameters, by contrast, the metamorphosis hypothesis is plausibly realistic, but the testing methodology is speculative.
I term the approach “phenomenological” in the sense that supporting evidence references societal phenomena, often as commonly recognized or merely reported in the news or other secondary sources. Huserl and Heideger used the term differently. As employed here, the approach relies on evidentiary sources that observe and record societal phenomena qualitatively. Occasionally a book or article itself becomes a phenomenon, changing cultural perceptions and values. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (1962), Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered” (1972), and Dennis Meadows et. al. “Limits to Growth” (1972), were news-making best sellers when they appeared, awakening societal consciousness to environmental degradation, an alternative to consumerism, and the unsustainability of contemporary economic growth trends. Reports or analyses of societal phenomena become evidence of society’s reflective self-awareness as expressed through those media. */* John Picard Stein, “Resource Guidebook for a Phenomenological Approach to Societal Metamorphosis”, unpublished manuscript presented at xxxx conference, 1986.