The Big Picture

At this point we might want to consider the idea of order in general, especially how order can be achieved in nature at all. We might like to think that objective ordering is something special to humankind. That it requires some inspired vision from another world, from an eye in the sky, as it were. For how can unruly subjective natures come anywhere close to achieving objective order for themselves without something like divine guidance inspiring them?

The answer is - it is the nature of things to arrive at objective orderly arrangements through the interaction of subjective entities. This is true for both living and non-living systems. And it’s the case on all levels from the microcosm to the macrocosm in regard to everything that is. It is the case with subatomic particles, atoms, molecular structures, the language of life itself and the way in which living things organize.

This also has to do with the attraction/repulsion dynamic. The subjective nature of attractive gluons and repellent quarks create objective nucleons. Molecules are ordered by the way in which atoms can bind together by virtue of their subjective attributes. They become attractive to one another with regard to their electron sharing compatibility. In this subjective way molecules are ordered and become what we see as the objective order of objects. So, we have things behaving as they must according to their subjective natures, interacting accordingly and forming in the process objective entities.

Life forms exhibit objective ordering from the microcosm of individual cells to all the macro organisms cells create. Just as the chemistry of individual atoms decides the ordering of molecules so it is with the building blocks of life. The ordering of the genetic code is decided by the individual chemistry of the substances involved. As a result, the four nucleotides that make up the genetic code correspond with one another via exclusive pairings. Cytosine and guanine link only with each other, as do thymine and adenine. Indeed, all the elements comprising a living cell combine together step by miniscule step with no other purpose than to indulge their individual chemistries. What we see as the objective ordering of a cell is a serendipitous outgrowth of subjective chemical entities interacting in their own particular ways all bound together in a symbiotic compatibility incidentally resulting in the orchestration of life.

It just might be that the first cells of life were chaotic cancer-like cells that briefly produced copies of themselves before quickly dissipating until the orderly formation of what we now know as normal cells was incidentally struck upon.

For an example of this kind of objective ordering operating on a macro level we can look at how songbirds arrive at their particular melody. Without knowing any better one might conjecture that angels from heaven taught the birds their melodies. That flying down from above, upon God’s instruction, they perched upon trees with their harps and the various melodies they played were miraculously transported into different kinds of birds who joyously began to sing. And from this one would assume that nestling songbirds learn their particular melody by imitating the performances of their elders after repeatedly listening to them.

However, this is not the case. It is not merely by imitation that a young songbird learns its melody. For, in a scientific experiment conducted to discover just how a bird goes about learning a particular song, a songbird was hatched and raised in isolation so that it never heard the song of its kind, nor of any other kind, for that matter. Upon reaching the age when it was normal for the bird to begin singing it did so out of its own self. The song, however, did not quite sound like it was suppose to. A sound graph was made of the isolated bird’s song and it was compared to one made from a bird who had been exposed to the song all its life. The isolated bird’s version of the song fit into the graphic patterns of the communal song but fell short in its fullness and range.

So, each bird is genetically programmed to produce varying skeletal arrangements of the same song and the group version, or the objective ordering, is arrived at through a compendium of individual subjective versions working upon one another to create an agreeable arrangement. A group of individ¬u¬als each with their own subjective cacophony interact to form objective harmony.

Human language was once thought to be a pure invention of the mind, a gift from the Gods, but we now know it to be a result of our brain’s programming in the same way as the songs of birds are part of their programming. And, it just so happens, there was an inadvertent experiment performed on human beings that was similar to the one performed on the songbird that showed that the impetus to create language is innate.

I remember a story reported on network television news sometime in the 1970s - twin sisters were found in an old abandon mining town in California where from infancy they resided with deaf and dumb guardians. At the time they were discovered the two girls were teenagers and had setup house in a shack of their own. Never having heard language of any kind they had managed between themselves to create a basic language that enabled them to communicate enough for their own curtailed purposes. It was a language the like of which no one had ever heard before but it was a specific simplistic rendering of complex language in general. So, out of the interaction of their subjective compulsion to talk the two girls arrived at a language with which they could communicate with one another. The twins’ language and that of the isolated songbird’s was a rough sketch of the full version of the vocal expression of their kind.

The twins managed to arrive at an objective form of a simple language out of their subjective capacity to connect certain sounds with certain things and a subjective need, or attraction to connect with one another. One can only imagine how thrilling it must have been for them when they first discovered a common language for themselves. For a time they would probably have been randomly vocalizing in a way that made sense only to their individual selves. Then one of them might have pointed to a chair, say, and made a sound and after repeating the gesture and the sound a few times the other twin picked up on it and began pointing at the chair with the same sound. What an ecstatic moment that must have been. I am reminded of the film The Miracle Worker when Patty Duke, as the young Helen Keller, finally connects a sound with a thing and the rush of excited pleasure she emotes as she runs around with her teacher, Anne Bancroft, making the language connection with other things.

Anyway, the point is that objective order is arrived at from subjective actors - objective language out of a subjective capacity that we all have in common. Our innate motivations to speak and to communicate with others can be thought of as desires on our part or as attractions. Socializing is attractive to us.

It’s the same with arriving at an objective social order. We all have subjective attractions to an orderly state of one kind or another, strict, loose and varying degrees in between. And it is through the interaction of those subjective attractions that we find an objective order that everyone can participate in. We cannot expect our own particular attractions to be exactly manifested in the agreed upon order, especially when it comes to those with attractions to the extremes on one end or the other. Having one’s subjective attraction to social order exactly reflected in a society is called dictatorship.

We think that our orderly civilizations are what it’s all about. They are what this world was created for. And for the most part we tend to be ignorant of the accompanying disorder created by our imposing order. The means by which we survive are always uppermost in our minds. Any downside is not noticed unless it becomes a threat to our ordered states. Environmental disorder, for example, has only recently become a real concern as we realize its negative impact on our orderly civilizations.

It has recently become a concern even though we’ve known about the environmental cost of our ordered civilizations from the get-go. At the dawn of civilization the City of Ur was utterly dependent on the yield from its agricultural system. Over time abundant yields became less than abundant and eventually, due to soil erosion and depletion of its nutrients the farmlands of Ur could no longer produce anything and the civilization unraveled.

Also, our common understanding of order is, perhaps, illusive. It seems we think of it as something unique in and of itself, something that exists on its own terms, so to speak. And chaos is something altogether separate. But order can be seen and defined as chaos in slow motion. Thus, the second law of thermodynamics where orderly systems tend toward disorder. We don’t really dust the furniture to make it dust free but to start it getting dusty again. Chaos can be seen and defined as constantly changing order. Take a snapshot of any chaotic system and there you will see its momentary order.

It is our attraction to order and our repulsion to disorder that accounts for their exclusivity in our minds. As a result of this polarization we come to think of them as complete opposites and totally separate. And this illusive exclusivity can result in an unwarranted faith in one kind of order or another. One can get the impression that the specific kind of order that one is attracted to makes unconditional sense. So, one comes to believe that a particular order can be imposed on a society and will work exactly as envisioned and remain forever in place. Even though such belief is completely unwarranted given the historical record.

We can take a lesson from the United States, China and the Soviet Union in the 20th Century. Capitalism ruled in the US early in that century and many people were made to suffer under its reign. Workers - men, women and children - were forced to labor in the harsh conditions of unhealthful and dangerous work places for wages that were extremely inadequate. Commenting on the plight of the haves and the have-nots at that time, Andrew Carnegie once reportedly quipped, “I’m in heaven, they’re in hell and that’s the will of God.” Eventually, however, it became evident to a growing number of citizens that changes to the prevailing ideology had to be installed. And, so, in order to address the abuses caused by the exclusive rule of capitalism significant doses of socialism were introduced into the exclusively capitalistic system. Also, in the 20th Century communism reigned supreme in the Soviet Union and the leadership remained absolutely committed to a hard-line Marxist/Leninist approach until this empire, ruled with an iron fist, suddenly dissolved overnight. The rulers of the Soviet Union had absolute power to make the socialist dream of a “worker’s paradise” a reality and they couldn’t do it. The other great communist empire, China, was a very different story. In the 1970’s the Chinese leadership held a conference in their capital (Peking at that time) and these avowed communists, some of whom had fought along with Mao, came to the conclusion that Marxism alone could not provide for all of a society’s needs. And, so, China began the gradual introduction of free enterprise practices into their system, by which it was able to prosper.

The nature of things comes into play here. The ideas of socialism and capitalism are not unrelated to the natural world. It is, perhaps, the way in which they reflect the natural world that is responsible for their being the world’s dominant ideologies. We like to think our isms are all divinely sent, or that they are pure inventions of the human mind. But they are, as we shall see, all immanently connected to the workings of nature.

The human brain evolved in the wild over hundreds of thousands of years. Nature was intently observed and studied as if the human brain’s existence depended upon it, and, of course, it did. Every aspect of nature became indelibly conceptualized in the human brain. And although we have no conscious connection to our more primitive past the comparatively brief time we humans have spent within the bubble of civilization has not erased those indelible impressions from our brains. But we have formed a rainbow of abstractions from them through the prism of our civilized minds.

These abstractions take hold of us and can appear to be something greater than they are. Not only religions but also ideologies like capitalism and socialism are abstractions that appear to some to be absolute truisms.

Depending on one’s predilection one can abstract from the nature of things a Communist or a Capitalist point of view.

For instance, all life on Earth is food for other life. From a communist perspective this can be seen as a cooperative self-sustaining mechanism of life itself. Vegetation generously provides itself as food for the taking. And prey provides food for the predator. That prey tries to avoid being eaten is no exception to their inclination to provide themselves as food. The prey must try to go on living in order to reproduce more of their kind to be preyed upon. Any life form that is not killed and eaten as prey will eventually provide food for the scavengers like vultures, worms, and maggots. Life’s just one big cooperative.

Looked at from the other perspective, predator and prey can take on a capitalistic character of survival of the fittest and individual initiative where it’s all about the predators being on top and exploiting those below them on the food chain.

There are other ways of seeing capitalism and communism in the wilds of nature: In a capitalistic version of the natural world a fruit-bearing tree develops and produces its product. When the fruit is ripe it advertises itself to potential consumers with attractive color and aroma. The consumers partake of the product’s nutrition and deposit its seed back on the earth as an investment in the future. And if conditions are favorable the seed will eventually produce new products and the process continues.

The communist view of this would be: No one owns the means of production, the product is free and the whole process is provided for by the State, the State of Nature.

One supposed feather in the cap of capitalism is the idea of a pin factory that Adam Smith made so much of in The Wealth of Nations. Well, that idea was around long before humankind appeared on the planet.

The definition of a pin factory is - an organism dedicated to the production of multiple units of a single product.

Well, a berry bush, for example, is an organism dedicated to the production of multiple units of a single product. All of the berry bush’s different parts, from its roots to the tips of its branches have a job to do in producing its fruit. And, of course, there is the honey-producing factory known as the beehive to consider.

On the other hand, socialists have claimed that things are naturally evolving toward a socialist ideal. But that doesn’t seem to be bourn out historically where we see that individuality evolves from collective states. In the United States, for instance, the communist society of Amana freely evolved from within itself into a community of private individuals. The tendency toward individuality is not only evident in the macro world of societies, where we see how social evolution has progressed from primitive communal tribes into societies of private individuals, but also in the micro world of life itself where the cells known as eukaryotes evolved out of prokaryotes. The latter is the prototype bacteria whose cells do not contain a nucleus and exist together in a colony of total equality where each and every individual bacterium is exactly the same as every other. The socialist ideal! Prokaryotes were around long before eukaryotes made their appearance on the scene. The cells of eukaryotes do have a nucleus, which enable them to create unique, separate individual life forms. So, the socialist theory concerning the evolutionary processes of social organisms flies in the face of the natural progression of things.

However, this is not to say that communism does not have its place in the world, in the nature of things. The unique life forms created by eukaryotes are not totally independent entities. Life as a whole, or as an ecosystem, is a single organism within which all individual life forms are interdependent. However diverse life becomes it will always be one entity existing as a communist ecosystem wherein all participants cooperate to promote the sum of what they are part of, life itself.

Separate individual creatures, then, arise out of a communal state but are never entirely disassociated from it, are never entirely free from participating in cooperative activities. (A species that exploits environments without participating in their enrichment in some equally significant way had better be a species with a low breeding rate.)

It is the nature of life to be communally and individually oriented. Is it any wonder, then, that socialism and capitalism have become the major ideologies in the world? And that their natural holistic dynamism is attested to in human societies?

The most advanced countries in the world today all have a mix of capitalism and socialism to one degree or another. There’s a reason for that. Nature does not give us a choice between the collective and the individual. To create a viable society the two must work in conjunction with one another, as they always have in the natural world.

We are not free to impose a particular denatured order on our social bodies. Our freedom lies in creating those that reflect the natural order by bringing the individual and the collective into salubrious alignment with one another.