For more than three hundred years Western thought has been dominated
by the images of industrialism and scientific method. It’s time to change metaphors. We need to move beyond linear, mechanistic metaphors to more organic metaphors of human growth and development.
A living organism, like a plant, is complex and dynamic. Each of its internal processes affects and depends on the others in sustaining the vitality of the whole organism…Most living things can only flourish in certain types of environments, and the relationships between them are often highly specialized. Healthy, successful plants take the nutrients they need from the environment. At the same time, though, their presence helps to sustain the environment on which they depend. (1)
Think of anything in the human arena and it will display all the characteristics of non-linear systems. Family, government, business, relationships, science, religion, societal systems, the arts, the human mind etc – even a cursory examination will reveal that these are all things that are hard to predict, hugely variable and must be examined as a whole if we hope to understand how they work. As mathematician Steven Strogatz says about such systems:
This synergistic character of non-linear systems is precisely what makes them so difficult to analyse. They can’t be taken apart. The whole system has to be examined all at once, as a coherent entity.(2)
A linear system can be taken apart, examined and put back together and while it may give up it’s secrets readily, it will always simply be just the sum of it’s parts. Not so with complex, dynamic systems which have the potential – given the correct conditions – to far exceed the sum of their parts and produce outcomes that could never even be dreamed of when looking at any of the individual components.
How cool is that?
(1) Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything (with Lou Aronica). Viking, 2009, p. 257.
(2) Steven Strogatz, Sync : the emerging science of spontaneous order. Hyperion (2003), p. 182
No one who has ever existed, or exists now or will exist is you or I or another. Each of us is unique in the entire history of the world. The coordinate space I occupy in the universe is occupied by no other being, human or otherwise; this spot of mine in space and time (yes the separate categories our minds manage in spite of the contradictions of physics) is mine and no others. The resulting point of view is unique not just temporally and spatially but historically. If miracle is another word for a nearly impossible to calculate probability algorithm, then my being is a miracle as is yours, hers, his, each and every other person who lives now, has ever lived, will ever live.
From this we can conclude the macrocosmic relationship each of has to every human institution: race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, marriage, religion, political party, profession, job . . . I am we the people as you are we the people as each of us must be we the people for freedom to mean anything, for it to have any valence for the people as a people, for each of us as a person, and not a state serving public. Each of us must remain macrocosmic to humanity, and in this we could carry deference for the individual human life.
Thanks for the comment. The duality of individuality and simultaneous oneness is wonderfully fascinating, isn’t it?
No one who has ever existed, or exists now or will exist is you or I or another. Each of us is unique in the entire history of the world. The coordinate space I occupy in the universe is occupied by no other being, human or otherwise; this spot of mine in space and time (yes the separate categories our minds manage in spite of the contradictions of physics) is mine and no others. The resulting point of view is unique not just temporally and spatially but historically. If miracle is another word for a nearly impossible to calculate probability algorithm, then my being is a miracle as is yours, hers, his, each and every other person who lives now, has ever lived, will ever live.
From this we can conclude the macrocosmic relationship each of has to every human institution: race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, marriage, religion, political party, profession, job . . . I am we the people as you are we the people as each of us must be we the people for freedom to mean anything, for it to have any valence for the people as a people, for each of us as a person, and not a state serving public. Each of us must remain macrocosmic to humanity, and in this we could carry deference for the individual human life.
Thanks for the comment. The duality of individuality and simultaneous oneness is wonderfully fascinating, isn’t it?