I've been writing about Dorion Sagan's little book Sex. I've been asked more than once what it has to do with this site and the politics going on here. Today, more than ever before, we need to open our eyes to the connected nature of our world. Cartesian reductionism has formed our thoughts and our world view. That in turn forms our politics. In the first three parts of this series we have a background, a discussion of the first part of the book, and beginning discussion on part two. This link is the last one and it links the others. :
More on Dorion Sagan's book "Sex"
What I want to do in this installment is to try to give a brief summary of the world view Sagan is writing from and to show why it is vital for us to see today's politics from this perspective. Accept it or reject it, but do not be blind to it. Read on and I'll tell you why.
The reason I am bold enough to try to describe Sagan's world view is because we share much in common. I also have read some of his other works and reviewed them here. The book he coauthored with Eric Schneider, Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics and Life tells a little about the long term collaboration I was involved in with Eric and the late James Kay. We wrestled with this stuff for a number of years, mainly in the context of ecosystems and their analysis. The special place the study of ecosystems holds in the realm of science is at the core of how our wold view diverges from that of traditional Cartesian reductionist based mechanistic science.
My present title at the University involves my interest in "Complex Systems". To get the ball rolling I'll simply tell you that I hold the view that all real world systems are complex. What the Cartesian reductionists have done is to avoid that hard reality and instead construct a surrogate world that they find easier to fit into the restricted epistemology that people like Russel and the formalists crave. This has two very important consequences. First, it has been very successful to the point that my claim that reality is something different from their model will be scoffed at by most. Second, its success are limited but in a way that makes technology possible and there is the rub.
Sagan describes a system. It is the earth and its atmosphere and the biosphere, etc. He talks about evolution in the biosphere. I need us to realize that we have some deeply circular paths of causality in that picture. Humans, we who study and write about all this, are a part of the biosphere. The technology that grows from our Cartesian world view is growing by leaps and bounds and is the basis for a good bit of the economy. It has made this media possible and has made other forms of interaction and communication p0possible.
Not to forget that we now have automated a good bit of the killing we do in these things we call wars. So the human component of the biosphere has become dominant in ways we are not even totally sure about. Politics is our feeble way of dealing with all this. Can anyone claim we know what we are doing? such a claim is basically the denial that prevents us from any real understanding of our condition.
Sagan delves into these matters but doesn't go all the way. He wrestles with evolution and thermodynamics and such matters. he probably is driven by his father's long term crusade against the Christian Fundamentalist creation myth.
Our political problems would be small if the Fundamentalists were our biggest problem. We live in an economic system built heavily on consumption and growth. Our science feeds a technology that feeds that system There you have it. I maintain that we have to stop it. We have to replace the drive to grow and consume with a drive to survive and sustain ourselves as a contribution to the big system rather than the possible source of its destruction as we know it.
The idea that real change in this world is possible is tied to all this in a very basic way. Change, real change, can only occur if we stop seeing the world as it was given to us in all the neat disjoint boxes that Cartesian rationality demands. We, in other words, must reject the surrogate world and begin to wrestle with the real, complex world we are part of. Will we? I wonder.