O for Order

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

In "M for Maturity" I continued my discussion of Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. The Holy Father's recent book (written while he was still Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) makes a case for re-anchoring Western culture in two essentially Christian values: the inviolability of human life and the furtherance of human dignity.

Pope Benedict believes that those values were shunted aside in the wake of the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment in Europe, supplanted by a commitment to the idea of the radical self-determination of the individual man or woman, in the name of liberty. According to Benedict, placing unfettered self-expression at the absolute center of our moral order relativizes everything else, including life and dignity, to the detriment of all.

In "F for Freedom" I contrasted the idea of absolute freedom with the longstanding Catholic call to chastity — sexual chastity. I showed how the recent movie "V for Vendetta" seems to typify the stresses in our culture. It presents us with a stark choice between freedom and the traditional sexual morality the pope would urge upon us in the name of chastity. I tried to suggest that "V for Vendetta's" attitudes are so much in the ascendant in our society today that any call for re-Christianization that has a return to old-style chastity as its hidden agenda — as I believe the pope's message does — is doomed to fail.

In "C for Chastity" I extended such remarks to show that chastity, as recommended to us by the Church, is more than just a matter of sexuality. It is a refusal to allow ourselves to be controlled by our own "unbridled restlessness" in any venue of life. I asked, "Is there any way we can be good Christians without a return to chastity as the Church traditionally defines it?" I pointed out the difficulty of having us go back to acting chastely in concert as a society, being publicly and overtly chaste together, so as to avoid the pitfall of chastity itself becoming just another option on the list of choices for radical individual self-expression.

In "M for Maturity" I intimated that our society is presently coming out of a stage of cultural "adolescence" in which top-down controls on our individual moral behavior are being supplanted by bottom-up self-control. The culture is maturing. Abortions are down. Drug abuse is down. Teen pregnancy is down. Gradually, we are learning to control ourselves in the absence of top-down, external taboos.

Now, in this post, I would like to suggest that this maturation is an example of "order for free."

Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe

By "order for free" I mean roughly what biologist Stuart Kauffman meant by it in his book At Home in the Universe. The book is about evolution. Not just biological evolution, mind you — though that's a big part of it. There are also cultural, technological, and economic forms of evolution, says Kauffman, and they have a number of characteristics in common.

One of these characteristics is for some changes which emerge naturally in any sort of complex, dynamically self-altering system to be weeded out and others to prosper. Darwin called this process "natural selection."

But Kauffman proposes another common characteristic of such evolving systems: "self-organization." Self-organization is the tendency for complex dynamic systems to produce "order for free."

Kauffman shows how there may well be "laws of self-organization and complexity" by dint of which, in the realm of biological evolution, the living forms which selection chooses among are generated in the first place. These candidate forms of life which natural selection chooses from are examples of order for free.

These same proposed laws of self-organization and complexity, Kauffman, shows, might well govern evolutionary processes at all higher levels of biological organization: species, ecosystems, right up to what biologists call the "evolution of co-evolution" — the way in which species play off against one another as they evolve itself evolves. Self-organization could accordingly be appropriately called the "handmaiden" of natural selection.


Many different types of self-organizing systems seem to share yet another characteristic, that of gravitating to a conceptual — nay, mathematical — locale called the "edge of chaos." This, Kauffman shows, is a "place" where novelty can arise and not be immediately expunged, as it would be in the regime of true mathematical chaos.

On the other hand, there is also the mathematical regime that corresponds to static order ... or, actually, two orderly regimes. In one, nothing ever changes, period. In the second, there are sterile, cyclical changes, but never anything new under the sun.

The edge of chaos is where dynamic "order for free" arises. Systems whose constituent members are connected, but not too connected, produce both novelty and stability. There is a natural balance between bottom-up emergence and top-down control. In the latter, the system spontaneously develops what might be termed a form of self-control, and its activity accordingly tends to resist the destructive forces of the chaotic regime.

Should there be an external, exogenous disturbance to the system's ongoing activity, pushing the system over into the chaotic regime, the self-organizing system tends automatically to gravitate back out of chaos and regain its original poise at the edge of chaos. From there, it goes on producing new "order for free."


Life on earth seems to be such a self-organizing system, says Kauffman. So, too, are human culture, human technology, and human economic activity. My thought is that human moral consciousness is likewise capable of being self-organizing in such a way as to produce order for free.

If so, it evolves. And if it evolves, it organizes its history into eras. Just as the history of biological evolution has eras dominated by different kinds of fossils, the history of moral evolution has its own eras and extinctions.

For example, it can be profoundly hoped that we will soon arrive at an era in which war is a thing of the past.

Notice, as a likely example of the possible emergence of moral order for free, that war is largely absent today from the continent of Europe, whose soil was once so blood-soaked. Notice, also, that Europe is the very seat of the post-Enlightenment values which Pope Benedict tends to look so askance at in his book.

It isn't terribly clear how Europeans have managed to stop slaughtering one another. As recently as two years prior to my birth in 1947, the bloodshed of World War II came to an end. Since then there has been the overarching menace of the Cold War, then the wars and uprisings in the Balkans and parts of the former Soviet Union. But even with Cold War tensions no longer in play, most of Europe has remained peaceful. Who would have thought it, given the continent's bloody history?

Maybe it's a case of order for free ... moral order, since whether or not to wage war is at bottom a moral choice.


If order for free can replace bellicosity with peace, can it replace licentiousness with chastity? By "chastity" here I mean not a bunch of rules of behavior we find impressed upon us from the outside — from the top down, as it were — by the church and/or the secular culture, but a bottom-up orientation toward the avoidance of sexual (or any other kind of) excess.

If, as I say, abortions are down, drug abuse is down, teen pregnancy is down, and so on, are we on the verge of a new moral era? Is "order for free" at work in the way it is going to turn out to be oriented?

(To be continued in my next post ... )