Motus Mentis

Is it possible to balance order and entropy in complex societies while maintaining vitality and avoiding sclerosis and stasis?

If we look at societies as living systems, they must maintain a dynamic, not static, equilibrium: to sustain life, energy must flow through them without disturbing the complex balance of internal parts and subsystems. They must present to the world a barrier that marks a boundary between “self” and “other”, but the barrier must be just porous enough; if the organism seals itself off entirely, or exposes itself too indiscriminately, it will die.

Likewise, the parts of a living system must be differentiated into various organs and tissues; these must operate independently enough to perform their separate functions without mutual interference, but they must also coordinate their activities flexibly and responsively enough to serve the interests of the whole.

A healthy organism must also be able effectively to present itself to the world as a unity that is able to interpret its environment and act in harmony with its own interests. Those interests include avoiding physical peril, locating and consuming usable energy sources, and, for social organisms, knowing who its friends are. If it fails at any of these things, it will die.

What is common to all of this? Differentiation, discrimination, and hierarchy. Differentiation is essential throughout: a lung is not a liver is not a heart. Discrimination is essential as well: friends are not enemies; predators are not prey; food is not poison.

Systems and subsystems must also be ordered in hierarchical levels. Subsystems may be nested many levels deep, and every level there will be local rules of order — but the survival of the organism itself is a holistic concern of the highest importance, as subsystems generally will not survive the death of the organism as a whole.

A healthy organism, then, is a dynamic system comprising a hierarchy of differentiated and subordinate organs, tissues, and subsystems. At every level its survival requires discriminations, and local rules, of a thousand different kinds. Even the simplest living thing is a system of astonishing complexity.

Because a living organism does not exist statically, but in a dynamically balanced equilibrium of energy throughput, it has a weapon against entropy that dead things don’t. A corpse decays in a matter of weeks; some living things can maintain themselves in good order for centuries. When its hierarchical inner organization is working harmoniously, a healthy organism can repair and replace damaged or worn-out parts. When its discriminatory faculties are in good order, a living system can keep itself fed and sheltered, and can detect threats, and avoid or neutralize them.

Such maintenance is itself hierarchical in its operation. For example: most of the time, a warm-blooded animal regulates its body temperature by local and automatic adjustments of its internal subsystems. When it is cold, it might shiver, or make its fur stand up, or divert blood from its surface to its core. When it is hot, it might pant, or sweat. If this is not enough, though, the problem must be addressed at a more holistic level, further up the hierarchy of systems: the animal must find shelter or shade. So another attribute of successful living systems is subsidiarianism: the management of necessary responses at the appropriate hierarchical level. What it can do “locally”, without imposing demands on higher-level systems, it will.

In general, all of this happens quite instinctually. There is no need for a dog to consult an operation manual to decide whether it is in fact hot enough to start panting, any more than we need to understand the chemistry of digestion in order to absorb nutrients. Indeed, the complexity of living systems is such that such explicit knowledge would be quite impossible. The organs and subsystems simply do what they do, and interact as they need to interact. With much effort we have learned a thing or two about all of this, and can tinker with it a bit — but we still know very little, and our tinkering, more often than not, has unintended and harmful consequences.

We did not design our living bodies; they are simply presented to each of us, as we enter the world, as an antecedent fact. Whether you believe they are the end-product of billions of years of evolutionary trial and error, or of divine creation by a superintelligence beyond our comprehension, doesn’t really matter: either way, living systems are, as far as we know, the most complex things in the Universe — and they survive, and defy entropy, by maintaining themselves in a harmonious, dynamic equilibrium that involves differentiation, discrimination, and a responsive balancing of holism and subsidiarianism in a multilevel hierarchy that is, for the most part, beyond our understanding.

We can say this also, I believe, about human societies: that they are living organisms, and that we did not design them, but rather come into them, as we do our bodies, as an antecedent fact. Like living things, they survive, and defy entropy, by maintaining themselves in a harmonious, dynamic equilibrium that involves differentiation, discrimination, and a responsive balancing of holism and subsidiarianism in a multilevel hierarchy that is, for the most part, beyond our understanding.

If all of this is true, and living systems such as our bodies and our societies really do embody knowledge that is vastly beyond the capacity of any individual to understand, then an awareness of our relative ignorance should compel us to go carefully as we tinker. Instead, though, the fashion in politics, academia, and high culture today is for a blithe and arrogant unwisdom that regards some of the essential features of healthy living systems — in particular, differentiation, discrimination, and hierarchy — as unwholesome and offensive defects.

In other words: a subsystem, in this case the organism’s brain, has gone rogue, and is usurping the lawful operation of other essential systems. Its malfunction includes a particularly mortiferous delusion, namely that it has the knowledge and understanding to override all of the natural, subsidiary functions of the organism without killing it.

As noted above, a healthy organism can sometimes repair malfunctioning parts, or mount an immune response to dangerous pathogens. Perhaps this is already happening. Time will tell.