The Web of Life

In The Tao of Organicity I broached the topic of "organicity," by which I meant the idea that the cosmos is intrinsically organic in the way it has proceeded over the course of billions of years to develop physically, eventually to produce life and then conscious life. I said:

Things are said to have an organic unity if they fit together harmoniously as necessary parts of a whole. Organic also means "characterized by continuous or natural development." These are the senses of the word I am interested in when I say I have almost a religious faith in the organicity of the universe.

The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra

In that post I indicated my interest in reading Fritjof Capra's book The Web of Life, which I am now deeply immersed in. The book turns out to be an extremely readable introduction to a paradigm of thought called, variously, "systems theory," "cybernetics," "deep ecology," "self-organization," "complexity," and like terms.

I recognize Capra's topic as containing most if not all of what I have already written concerning new ways of looking at the world in light of the theory of evolution in my Beyond Darwin blog. Specifically, the ideas of biologist Stuart Kauffman in books such as At Home in the Universe are, ahem, right at home in Capra's paradigm.

Unlike any other book I have read about what I choose to dub "the organicity paradigm," Capra's gives a wide-ranging overview of the history of this kind of thinking, which goes back well over a century in scientific and philosophical circles. I hadn't realized that. I thought it sort of emerged wholly formed in the 1960s, say, at about the point when the increasing ubiquity of computers was enabling scientists to study nonlinear dynamical systems in some depth for the first time; this was the origin, for example, of chaos theory.


But, no. Among the antecedents of that enterprise was that of the original cyberneticists, starting in about 1946 with the Macy Conferences in New York City, dominated by the likes of Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, from the hard sciences and engineering, and Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, from the social sciences.

Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener was, according to Wikipedia, "the founder of cybernetics, a field that formalizes the notion of feedback and has implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society." It is interesting that the seemingly machine-oriented concept of feedback generalizes to how living organisms do what they do.

Wiener apparently was intensely aware of this link when he wrote the following two things:

[Feedback is the] control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance. (Capra, p. 57).

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. (p. 52)

Those quotes resonate with me. In my own spiritual life, I seem to be seeking to get away from my erstwhile Christian worldview in which God is seen as the Great Expecter who sits in judgment of my, and everyone else's, "performance." According to that worldview, God (who is by definition external to us, or at least "separate in being" from us) sets up standards of conduct for us to adhere to and finds us to be in sin if we don't adhere to them.

I presently am finding that that worldview stokes my sense of "existential guilt," the subject of My Existential Guilt and My Existential Guilt (Part Two) in this blog. My reaction seems to have been to undergo an ongoing dark night of the soul, which now leads me to embrace a wholly different stance toward reality.

The new stance is the one I am calling "organicity." I was moving towards it when I wrote the three posts in my Does Nature Need Correcting? series — to wit, in the "organicity paradigm" there is no need for an external Great Correcter to judge nature, human or otherwise.

What then can control whatever tendencies we may have to be unethical or immoral? After all, the idea of a Great Expecter/Corrector — a judgmental God — has long served the human race as a jim-dandy external control mechanism.

In the organicity paradigm, the control has to come from within: from our actual performance, not our expected performance. There has to be self-regulation, rather than regulation by dint of some written-down list of must-do commandments and must-avoid "deadly" sins. With self-regulation comes the self-organization that produces Wiener's "patterns that perpetuate themselves" amidst the "river of ever-flowing water" of this world.

Thus might we come to see ourselves as "whirlpools" rather than as "stuff that abides." Whirlpools, after all, maintain themselves for some period of time, according to their inner dynamics ... then dissolve back into the river.

I hope it is evident that it is not easy to reconcile my "organicity paradigm" with that of a world created and judged by a God above and beyond it. No matter that God is also said to be immanent within the world; he is of another substance entirely. In my present frame of mind I simply cannot see how to reconcile his existence with an "organicity paradigm." One of them has to go, and right now, for me, it is admittedly God who is being discarded.