This is the twelfth Chapter from the online book: Living Ethics: The Way of Wholeness. See: 1) How Should We Live? 2) Ethics and Civilization 3) Worldview and Ethics 4) Self View and Ethics 5) World as System 6) The Material Cosmos 7) Biological Systems 8) Human Systems 9) Psyche as System 10) The Collective Unconscious 11) The Collective Conscious
Donivan Bessinger, MD
Darkness there was:
At first concealed in darkness this
All was undiscriminated chaos. —Rig Veda (1)First there was Chaos,
the vast immeasurable abyss
Outrageous as a sea,
dark, wasteful, wild. —John Milton (2)
Hesiod said that Darkness was first, and from Darkness came Chaos. From a union between Darkness and Chaos came Night and Erebus, the impenetrable deep where Death dwells. It was the union of the latter two that conceived Doom and Death, Old Age and Murder, Dreams and Discord, Vexation and Misery, Nemesis and Sleep, but also Joy and Friendship and Compassion.
Chaos carried potent genes indeed. To the union of Darkness and Chaos was also attributed the birth of Air and Day who gave life to Earth Mother, Sky, and Sea. Air and Earth engendered Terror, Craft, Anger and Strife, Oaths, Vengeance, Intemperance, Altercation, Treaty, Oblivion, Fear, and Pride, and of course, Battle, all apt cousins for Doom and Death and all their kin. None of us would be surprised were Chaos thankfully to be named patron of modern news editors. (3)
In many creation myths, Chaos is the raw and formless primal state of things, in which all is disorder and confusion, indeterminate and indeterminable, unpredictable, without direction and without dimension, profound and fathomless, a turbulent flow of nothingness, the gaping boundless void, the yawning light-less life-less chasm in which all is nothing. To the ancients, Chaos—the name in Greek connotes yawning and gaping—is a god himself, the god of uncreatedness who engendered all creation, the god who according to Ovid made “… the forms of determinate being and the order and harmony of the universe.” (4)
To Milton, Chaos is the state from which the world was created, as well as the state to which it reverted when Paradise was Lost. Chaos represents the antipodes of Paradise: The “place of utter darkness” in which Satan bivouaced with his fallen angels was “fitliest called Chaos.” Chaos is also the Power of that place, the Guide and Judge over the cosmic strife “when everlasting Fate shall yield to fickle chance.” (5)Chaos, who plays so prominent a role in Paradise Lost finds no mention in Paradise Regained.
Perhaps it should not be surprising that the Western cultural consciousness pervasively treats chaos in an altogether negative way. Even science, in its search for principle and order, has long drawn a line between itself and the realm of that which appears randomly disordered. It is only in the past two decades that science has begun to cross that line, and to study the phenomena of disorder.
The experience is totally changing our concept, for in chaos we find that Milton’s Chaos is a “myth,” that is (in our current conventional use of the word), a fiction. This newest of sciences shows that systems which deteriorate to apparent chaos are not necessarily disorderly.
In his 1988 book, Chaos: Making a New Science, science journalist James Gleick (6) is a Guide who helps bridge the abyss between these new findings and our conventional understandings. Much of the important work began in meteorology. In the early 1960’s, Edward Lorenz devised computer models that generated wind and temperature patterns that successfully mimicked the behavior of real-time weather. However, when he tried to get the model to reproduce a pattern, he found that the new graph was like the first only for a short while. The system was “sensitive to initial conditions:” The tiniest variation in the initial values made the old graph and the new diverge rapidly, becoming totally unlike. There was a new “chaotic” pattern, but with the same internal order, represented in the mathematical formulas in the computer program.
When such curves were graphed on a computer screen in a different way, they showed unexpected loops which spiraled up and around, back and forth, as though they were “attracted” in a strange way by fixed points. The chaos of the system traced an orderly design. Such behavior was found in many different types of chaotic systems at both micro and macro levels.
A particular surprise was presented by Mitchell Feigenbaum. In studying numerical functions of turbulent systems, he found that the transition from order to chaos was defined by a particular number. Whatever the system being studied, there is a universal number that defines the breakpoint between ordered flow and the newly discovered order of chaotic flow.
IBM scientist Benoit Mandelbrot provided a new understanding of the order in the apparently random outlines of natural systems, and showed that the order extends to all scales. He defined the geometry of fractional dimensions (fractal geometry), and provided formulae which make possible the generation of computer images of earth-scapes with natural-looking mountain contours and coastlines. Such order is also present in the outlines of clouds of all sizes, and even in the branching of blood vessels and airways of mammals. “Strange attractors” too, seem to follow fractal behavior.
In summary, this non-linear world shows regularity in irregularity, order in that which previously seemed random, infinity in finite volumes. There are fractional dimensions. Enfolded within disorder there is organizing principle, and the boundaries of all turbulences are defined by a universal number. Chaos is a world of mathematical strange attractors, but it is also a source of strange attractions as computers generate color graphics of new functions which are as compelling psychologically as any ancient myth. Just as we learned in quantum physics, the world does not work the way we have intuitively thought that it does.
From all of this, there emerges the view that the myth of chaos does not lie in myth as fiction, but in myth as meaning, a meaning arising from a new awareness of the principle of order. Our new myth is based on the twin realities of the material world and the human spiritual oneness with it. This new systems synthesis makes conscious and meaningful that which was previously dismissed, “scientifically,” as impossibly improbable.
From our studies of many systems and of systems wholeness, we can also discern anew the ancient wisdom that there is a universal reality which must lie behind our deliberations about ethics. The new worldview leads toward a redefinition of ethics at individual and global levels. We may not leave our Fate to fatalism. We must always seek to discern principle, and apply it to the chaos of our conscious human world, just as we find it universally applied in the unconscious natural world of the biosphere and cosmos.
How should we live? Ethics is the rational inquiry which seeks to answer Socrates extraordinary question. If that inquiry is to succeed, or to begin at all, it must be preceded by an attitude of concern toward the good. Ethics is of interest only to the ethical person, who cares to define good, and to act in accordance with it.
How should we live? Our answer must be consistent with rational understandings of creation’s phenomena; but the answer also requires a subjective inquiry into our own attitudes toward life. The most rational worldview is that which harmonizes the objective and the subjective domains of experience. It is that understanding which leads us toward a living ethics.
Developing the concept of Living Ethics will be the task of the next volume. Expressed in terms of a life-systems worldview, it has a somewhat more modern ring than does Albert Schweitzer’s presentation of reverence for life of nearly seventy [now eighty] years ago. Yet it is the same formulation, fully as rich and instilled with the same imperative.
Reverence for life goes beyond the mere non-violence embodied in the Jainist and Gandhian ahimsa principle. It is also much more than an intuitive, sentimental or mystical contemplation of life, though it well may have those elements. The systems worldview calls for an intensive, rigorous imperativism to accept life on its own terms, and to live it fully, individually and globally, in full recognition of life’s needs and the balance of all life.
Though a prevalent view of ethics in academia has been “ethics without biology,” (7) we will not survive unless we live in appreciation and respect for the wholeness of life, and of life’s innate homeostatic principle. It is our human task to unfold order and meaning from the chaos of current consciousness. We will never do so by a system of reason alone, which denies the validity of the homeostatic aspirations of the human unconscious, any more than we can do so by providing intuitive spiritual or psychic answers that deny the demands of reason.
This human task can be met only by reconciling these demands. The new worldview understands that local material phenomena are undergirded by a non-local quantum reality of a very different quality. It also understands that the human person’s local material body is also undergirded by the non-local spiritual reality of Seele as both psyche and soul.
Some of us will see this ethical mandate in a purely secular humanistic light. Some of us will see in its non-locality a divine omnipresence and immanence. From either perspective, the universe encompasses us with its evidence for a principle of interactive wholeness and challenges consciousness to respond to its dynamic order.
Will we, in this spatiotemporal realm, ever “sing Recovered Paradise to all mankind?” (8) Whether we can adapt consciousness to this new noospheric environment remains much in question. The future, not only of human life but of global life as well, stands at risk while awaiting our answer.
Copyright 2000 by Donivan Bessinger. All rights reserved.
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More by Donivan Bessinger, MD
References:
(1) “DARKNESS THERE WAS”—Rig-Veda. Portable World Bible, ” See The Portable World Bible, R. O. Ballou, editor. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. p 32.
(2) “FIRST THERE WAS CHAOS”—John Milton, attributed without specific reference by Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York: New American Library, 1940/1969) p 63. I have not found this quote in my volume of Milton’s English poems; perhaps it is a translation from one of his Latin ones.
(3) PROGENY OF CHAOS—Robert Graves. Greek Myths, Vol. 1. New York: Penguin, Revised 1960. Section 4a. Vol 1, p 33
(4) “THE FORMS OF DETERMINATE BEING”—Encyclopedia Britannica 1965; 5: 277
(5) “WHEN EVERLASTING FATE SHALL YIELD”—Milton. Paradise Lost
(6) IN HIS 1988 BOOK—James Gleick. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.
(7) “ETHICS WITHOUT BIOLOGY”—Thomas Nagel. “Ethics without biology” in Mortal Questions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
(8) “SING RECOVERED PARADISE”—Milton. Paradise Regained.