This is the eighth 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
Donivan Bessinger, MD
The education of the human race, represented by the people of God, has advanced, like that of an individual, through certain epochs, or, as it were, ages, so that it might gradually rise from earthly to heavenly things, and from the visible to the invisible. —Augustine (1)
The ancients, isolated in relatively small populations, and presumably mythologizing quaint and exaggerated stories from the occasional wanderer (gossip is not a new phenomenon!), lived with a worldview which included “knowledge” of monstrous humanoids. These included such creatures as dog-headed men and one-eyed giants. There were many even more wondrous than that, such as the “shadow-foot” (2) whose one huge foot provided shade while it lay on its back.
It was against such a background that Augustine provided a perspective on humankind which, while primarily inspired theologically, was also significant in the history of philosophy.
Whoever is born anywhere as a human being, that is, as a rational mortal creature, however strange he may appear to our senses in bodily form or colour or motion or utterance, or in any faculty, part or quality of his nature whatsoever, let no true believer have any doubt that such an individual is descended from the one man who was first created. (3)
In such point of view, Augustine presented the ecumenical idea of mankind (4) in which, for the first time in Western philosophy, all humanity was recognized as being of one kind, or in current biological terms, one species. That idea is the critical point of departure for the study of human systems.
Augustine, who wrote from a broad view of the history and literature available to him, also saw in mankind’s experience the advancing “education of the human race” quoted above, and thus came close to implying a theory of evolution of ideas. Yet this education has been slow in coming. As Boorstin reminds us, Columbus’ log records his failure to find “human monstrosities, as many expected” in his encounters with the original Caribbean people. (5) Boorstin notes that at the time of their encounter with the peoples of America, most Europeans considered “burned” black African skin a climate-caused variation which did not challenge their humanity. They had not encountered the idea that racial variation might occur also in temperate climes.
However, just as the colonizers’ and slavers’ arrogant treatment of Africans certainly denied human equality (a tradition South Africa still lives with, and which is too recent in American experience to be comfortable), so too was the essential humanity of “Indians” and the Spanish right to enslave them soon called into question. In Spain in 1550, a Great Debate pitted Sepulveda (patronized by the commercial interests of the West Indies) in support of Aristotle’s idea of natural slavery, against Las Casas, a cleric who argued in the Augustinian tradition for the Indians’ rights to human justice. (6)
Apparently, the debate proceeded on philosophical rather than biological grounds. The biological argument, which could have settled the issue at the very beginnings of encounters with other peoples, defines a species primarily as a reproductive community. Had that argument been available, the issue would have been settled in the 1520’s when the Spanish explorer CortÇs had appealed to the Pope to legitimize his children born to Indian women. CortÇs had even sent a band of Aztec jugglers to Rome to draw attention to his cause! (7)
Though slow, the education of the human race has advanced to the general acceptance of our kinship in “one kind” and of our common membership in one human community. The arguments presented in Ethics and Civilization illustrate that the ancient isolations are rapidly breaking down to bring us into a common reality of one global society. We have also discussed the origins of human society in the idea of logos and in the common awareness of existence. These ideas, and other lessons derived from consideration of the origins and function of socio-economic systems, lend additional support to a systems-oriented “universal” world-view.
In Ethics and Civilization, we discussed Buber’s ideas of the origin of human awareness and human bonding at the pre-speech logos level of awareness of “other”. Buber characterizes this starting point as neither metaphysics nor theology, but as “philosophical anthropology”, (8) which is the study of “the wholeness of man.”
A legitimate philosophical anthropology must know that here is not merely a human species but also peoples, not merely a human soul but also types and characters, not merely a human life but also stages in life; only from the … recognition of the dynamic that exerts power within every particular reality and between them, and from the constantly new proof of the one in the many, can it come to see the wholeness of man. (9)
Anthropologist Weston La Barre sees our functioning as human and the emergence of culture as essentially an ethical process:
Culture is the non-bodily and non-genetic contriving of bonds of agreement that enable this animal to function as human. Such relationships—of father and son, and of male and male—must be forged ‘morally’. They can operate only through the discipline of aggression, through identification with one another, through the contriving of communication and understandings, and through the discovery or invention of agreements and compromises. (10)
This ethical aspect of cultural bonding is a function of logos. Even the nuclear biological family unit requires a bonding principle that goes beyond the mere sexual union of male and female.
What connects the father and son, male and male, is the mystery of ‘logos’ and logos alone: logos as the literal “word” which conveys linguistic meaning and understanding; logos as laws, agreements, rules, and regularities of behavior; logos as the implicit means and substance of common understanding and communication, and of cultural joining in the same styles of thinking; and logos as shared pattern, within which father can identify with son and permit his infancy, within which son can identify with father and become a man, and within which a male can perceive and forgive the equal manhood of his fellow-man. (11)
Thus, La Barre sees the family as “the font of all morality, law, and indeed of all human culture.” (12)
The systematic study of society began in the nineteenth century with Auguste Comte. He coined the term sociology and advanced the idea of the mutual interdependence of the parts of the social system. His contemporary, Herbert Spencer, (13) younger by twenty-two years, further developed the view of society as an organism. Spencer, caught up in the implications of developing evolutionary theory, attempted to encompass even the origin of the universe and the evolution of the galaxies. His work on society as organism earns him a place as a forerunner of general systems theory. (14)
Spencer argues that society is more than simply a collective name for a number of individuals. “A whole of which the parts are alive, cannot, in its general characters, be like lifeless wholes.” (15)
Though the generic language of general systems theory as presented in World as System has evolved since Spencer, we would do well to let Spencer himself draw the parallels between societies and organisms.
How the combined actions of mutually-dependent parts constitute life of the whole, and how there hence results a parallelism between social life and animal life, we see still more clearly on learning that the life of every visible organism is constituted by the lives of units too minute to be seen by the unaided eye. (16)
[L]et us now return and sum up the reasons for regarding society as an organism. It undergoes continuous growth. As it grows, its parts become unlike: it exhibits increase of structure. The unlike parts simultaneously assume activities of unlike kinds. These activities are not simply different, but their differences are so related as to make one another possible. The reciprocal aid thus given causes mutual dependence of the parts. And the mutually-dependent parts, living by and for one another, form an aggregate constituted on the same general principle as is an individual organism. (17)
The view of society as an aggregate of units forming a system is, of course, a functional rather than a political view. That is to say, its boundaries are conceptual, not geographical. Indeed, humans do have certain territorial needs, including space for shelter and food preparation for the family unit, though the perception of these requirements varies enormously according to cultural expectations and economic limitations. At that level, there is a geographical aspect, and a desire to define one’s own property line.
That was especially evident during my stay in Oak Ridge, mentioned in How Should We Live?. The residential parts of town were being converted from a government reservation to the normal system of private home ownership. The usual first act of the new landowner was to build a fence, usually small, but nonetheless important as a symbolic demarcation of private territory.
Beyond the immediate boundaries of personal living space, however, humans also need a certain territorial “operating range”, depending on the division of labor in the society and the requirements and opportunities for food (i.e. economic) production. It is in the overlapping of those operating territories that socio-economic adaptations are carried out and that aggregates of family units define new societies, which in turn, organize to claim their own territories and defend them.
Yet, even for the nation-state, the systems boundary transcends the geographic border. No state can exist in isolation. Every state has required some degree of contact with other states, beginning with at least unofficial trade arrangements, and progressing usually to diplomatic or consular, and perhaps to treaty arrangements. Moreover, borders cannot be closed entirely, regardless of official policies. Air and water systems respect no boundaries, as acid-rain and nuclear fallout remind us. Even nation-states are involved in the web of inter-relationships and interdependencies which extend their territorial “operating range” throughout the globe.
Groups also aggregate to form subsystems without jurisdictional boundaries, such as voluntary service agencies and commercial corporations. These too may extend their operating range throughout the globe to become major systems themselves, interacting with nations and with other corporations. Agencies, such as the World Health Organization in its successful campaign to eradicate smallpox, may do notable service in the interest of the global social system. Similarly, multinational commercial corporations have a capacity to influence global society, sometimes for good, (18) sometimes for evil. (19)
In discussing the overlapping of operating territories in which adaptations of groups are carried out, we are dealing with both social and economic functions. Such overlap is at risk for becoming the field for destructive competition and aggression which works against the organizing of a functioning unit, that is, of a society.
However, the overlap of individual operating territories may also become a benefit for all members concerned, and an adaptive selecting force favoring the survival of a newly integrating group. It becomes the field for cooperative production in which members differentiate their efforts to meet the mutual needs of the group. Adam Smith argued in 1776 that the division of labor is the primary social organizing force, deriving from human nature itself.
This division of labor, from which so many advantages are derived, … is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature … to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. (20)
However, the different functions of members do not imply a biological basis for “class” differences, which are a consequence of the adaptations themselves, in the workings of the group. Modern psychological theory, as in Self View and Ethics, helps explain differences in talent and interest, and in that sense there is a “biological” dimension to the division of labor. Nevertheless, it is even more important to the success of today’s complicated and inter-dependent society that we understand Smith’s point. We must accept that we are all of “one kind”, regardless of differences in function in society.
The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education. (21)
Adam Smith flourished two hundred years before Herbert Spencer’s metaphor of society as a functioning organism, and the knowledge of physiology available to Smith was very limited indeed. Harvey had described the circulation of blood a hundred years earlier, but Smith lived in the era of “sthenic” and “asthenic” causes of disease, and there was little idea of the complexities of metabolism and pathophysiology. Yet Smith too used a physiological metaphor, observed the operation of homeostasis, and drew an analogy to the functioning of society.
Some speculative physicians seem to have imagined that the health of the human body could be preserved only by a certain precise regimen of diet and exercise. … Experience, however, would seem to show that the human body frequently preserves, to all appearance at least, the most perfect state of health under a vast variety of different regimens … But the healthful state of the human body, it would seem, contains in itself some unknown principle of preservation, capable either of preventing or of correcting … the bad effects even of a very faulty regimen. … In the political body, the natural effort which every man is continually making to better his own condition, is a principle of preservation capable of preventing and correcting … the bad effects of a political economy. (22)
Homeostasis in the individual organism is of course involuntary, autonomic, and unconscious. By contrast, the functioning of society is largely a matter of conscious decisions and willful actions. Is homeostasis then a proper metaphor? Is there a homeostatic function operating in society?
In the individual, the maintenance requirements of homeostasis (hunger, excretion, etc.) do reach the conscious level. In society the conscious decisions of individuals (whether in realms as diverse as economics, art, and religion) arise from natural imperatives originating from the unconscious level.
Though the mechanisms of response to disturbances in the social economy tend to be more variable and their effects less predictable than responses in the metabolic economy, there are nevertheless responses which serve the ends of maintenance and which are potentially resonant throughout society. Even when the first response of a small group to an “injury” is self-serving and non-adaptative for the whole, others beyond the small group will be forced to respond to the reactive waves in a manner analogous to feedback in a system.
In its ordinary workings, a sociological homeostasis tends to maintain a relatively stable balance of social systems large and small. However, adaptive response to disruption seems a function of size. While small groups are limited in their responses, larger scale social systems exhibit a broad range of possibilities for response, whether the problem is from social causes (war, revolution, riot) or environmental ones (flood, drought, volcanic eruption). That capability is largely due to greater diversity, especially in the larger pool of ideas and skills, and the broader division of labor. In general, the capacity of social systems to absorb and adapt to change exceeds that of individuals.
Under stress, social systems of indefinite boundary may well be more adaptive and responsive than systems having strictly defined jurisdictional boundaries. The conceptual boundary will prove more flexible as the system seeks new adaptations. The social system under stress has options to coalesce with other systems or to divide into subsystems. In either case, the subsystem must evolve its new adaptations and develop a new homeostasis, and in so doing, may serve the maintenance of the whole. Within societies, there is a hierarchy of homeostatic mechanisms constantly seeking a new functional mean.
For example, corporations have more flexibility to merge or to establish subsidiaries than do nation-states, and the process is considerably less disruptive. Though a state may serve as a buffer mechanism to absorb and reduce change, its rigidity may just as well serve to inhibit adaptations to change. Regardless of the political theory on which they are based, bureaucracies tend to suppress the type and diversity of homeostatic responses. The rigid stability fostered by large bureaucracies is not typical of the dynamic stability of a homeostatic system. The large bureaucracy tends to be non-adaptive in the face of rapid change.
Competition itself, when regulated in the interest of the whole, also serves the homeostatic function. However, despite the strong tendencies in society for balance, there often exist tightly defined subsystems which serve to draw energy from the whole and act as an injurious element with respect to the functioning of the whole. Here, a psychological metaphor aids understanding of the social system.
In analytical psychology, a complex is an autonomous “cell” of psychic energy, composed of intense feelings and ideas. It is usually unconscious, but when sufficiently intense will reach expression in conscious behavior. Often it will be irrational or distinctly abnormal behavior, as when the complex is expressed as a phobia or a compulsion. The complex may form when consciously unacceptable ideas or experiences are constantly repressed without being faced and without being dealt with homeostatically in the psychic system. Such complexes may draw increasingly enormous amounts of energy for their own maintenance, at the expense of the healthy functioning of the individual.
Complexes can develop as subsystems in society when a society is not responsive to the needs and interests of all its members. The classic case would be a repressed and suppressed minority which, in the face of frustrated social or economic needs, becomes a disruptive force in the economy of the whole. The social energy of such a group is drawn from the greater whole and turned back on the whole in ways that further disrupt homeostatic responses. As in the psychological model, the problem may be prevented by dealing with all stresses equitably without repression, so that all individuals and groups consciously function as a part of the whole social system.
Another example would be a criminal group whose extravagant self-interest (greed) overrides its regard for the interests of the whole society. Such criminal greed-complexes are particularly devastating when incorporated into and protected by the power-structure of a nation, as illustrated dramatically in Haiti’s experience of the Duvaliers.
Problems of such complexity defy single-level solutions. Theoretically, prevention can lie only in heightening ethical concern at all levels of society (even global society), so that individual and subsystem self-interest tends always to be balanced by homeostatic responses within the system, protecting the interests of the whole. Further, a system must develop collective responses at multiple levels to insure that injurious activities are isolated and moderated before developing autonomous energy sufficiently great to be threatening to the whole.
The functioning of society as a multi-level system lends further support to our universal world-view, and points a way to improved problem-solving. We recall Augustine’s language. In viewing the functioning of society as an organic whole, we further advance the “education of the human race” from the earthly realm of ordinary awareness of the immediately visible, toward the epoch in which that which now seems “heavenly” and “invisible” can become real.
Our investigation of systems wholeness now brings us to consideration of that invisible realm which is the source of our aspirations toward the “heavenly” goal: the realm of the human psyche.
Copyright 2000 by Donivan Bessinger. All rights reserved.
Next Chapter: Psyche as System
More by Donivan Bessinger, MD
References:
(1) “THE EDUCATION OF THE HUMAN RACE”—Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (354-430). The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods. New York: Random House/Modern Library, 1950. Bk 10, Sect 14.
(2) “SHADOW-FOOT”—Daniel J. Boorstin. The Discoverers. New York: Random House, 1983. p 626.
(3) “WHOEVER IS BORN ANYWHERE”—Augustine. ibid.
(4) “ECUMENICAL IDEA” OF MANKIND—Robert Nisbet. The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1973. p 186.
(5) AS BOORSTIN REMINDS US—Boorstin. op.cit. p 629.
(6) SEPULVEDA—ibid. pp 632-633.
(7) AZTEC JUGGLERS—ibid. p 630.
(8) “PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY”—Maurice Friedman. Introductory essay to: Martin Buber: The Knowledge of Man: A Philosophy of the Interhuman. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. p 13.
(9) “A LEGITIMATE PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY”—Buber. ibid. p 14.
(10) “CULTURE IS THE NON-BODILY”—Weston LaBarre. The Human Animal. University of Chicago Press/Phoenix, 1954. p 211.
(11) “WHAT CONNECTS THE FATHER AND SON”—ibid. p 212.
(12) “THE FONT OF ALL MORALITY”—ibid. p 213.
(13) SPENCER—”Survival of the fittest” was Spencer’s term, as acknowledged by Darwin in Origin of Species, Chapter 3. Darwin also replies to Spencer’s “law that homologous units of any order became differentiated in proportion as their relations to incident forces became different” (Chapter 4).
(14) HIS WORK ON SOCIETY AS ORGANISM—Stanislav Andreski. “Sociology, Biology and Philosophy in Herbert Spencer.” Introductory essay in Herbert Spencer: Structure, Function and Evolution. New York: Charles Scribner, 1971. p 27.
(15) “A WHOLE OF WHICH THE PARTS”—Herbert Spencer. The Principles of Sociology Vol. I (1876). See Andreski, editor. op. cit. p 108.
(16) “HOW THE COMBINED ACTIONS”—ibid. p 112.
(17) “LET US NOW RETURN AND SUM”—ibid. p 120.
(18) SOMETIMES FOR GOOD—Axel Madsen. Private Power: Multinational Corporations for the Survival of Our Planet. New York: William Morrow, 1980.
(19) SOMETIMES FOR EVIL—Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Mueller. Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974.
(20) “THIS DIVISION OF LABOR”—Adam Smith. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776. Bk 1., Ch 2.
(21) “THE DIFFERENCE OF NATURAL TALENTS”—ibid.
(22) “SOME SPECULATIVE PHYSICIANS”—ibid. Bk 4, Ch 9.