RESEARCH

The Cultural Complexity Index (CCI) is an initiative dedicated to the acquisition and analysis of a comprehensive dataset on human cultural evolution, specifically data bearing on religious and philosophical development.

 

The data will consist of measurements attained through an automated scoring system called the Computerized Lectical Assessment System (CLAS). Trained on over 50,000 texts over 25 years, CLAS can quickly and efficiently offer a statistically significant assessment of a text's conceptual complexity using a 1300-point scale. This scale relates directly to developmental levels from the constructivist tradition of cognitive development, and so allows for any sort of literary production from across human history to be assessed in terms of a robustly validated universal learning sequence called "hierarchical complexity."

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Texts of a mythic, philosophical, and speculative nature ranging across a broad spectrum of different socio-historical contexts are currently being assessed (e.g., the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, Plato's dialogues, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, Newton's Principia, Foucault's The Order of Things, etc.). Each will be coded accordingly, allowing for the detection of any large-scale, diachronic developmental trends as cultural systems moved from highly localized, pre-agricultural societies to a globalized network of post-industrial, postmodern societies.

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Beyond general trends, such data can also reveal specific content related to different CCI levels. Analysis of the data will thus allow for the tracing of learning sequences related to matters of meaning and ultimate concern across the historical record. Such efforts will further illuminate and extend related studies in the field of faith development (Fowler) and religious judgment (Oser), charting parallels between ontogenetic and phylogenetic scales in a cross-cultural manner.

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As this data will be of interest to a wide variety of disciplines, the reach of this project will be felt in fields as diverse as religious studies, anthropology, comparative literature, developmental psychology, classics, and Biblical studies. In particular, research topics like the origins of agricultural civilizations, the Axial Age transformation, and the beginnings of modernity will stand much to gain.

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More importantly, this work will shed unprecedented light on the question of religious development through cultural evolution. Have religious conceptions and value systems actually complexified through time? Various notable historians, sociologists, philosophers, and metatheorists—such as Jürgen Habermas, Robert Bellah, Michael Barnes—have all made insightful theoretical contributions to the concept of religious evolution, but this project would be the first to ever empirically test such psycho-cultural developmental claims. And it would do so based on the most up-to-date and scientifically validated developmental construct (hierarchical complexity), using state-of-the-art scoring software (CLAS) which, for the first time, renders a project of this scale possible.

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