Our language shapes our thoughts. Yesterday I wrote about Chris Hedges thoughts about our being in a "revolutionary" moment and generated a good discussion about revolution.
Tonight at dinner we had a bit of synchronicity. I was thinking about writing this diary and out of the blue my wife asked "could the Industrial revolution" turned out differently?" Of course she knows my thinking about how the Industrial Revolution has shaped us and led us to our present set of problems.
My answer was much of what I was planning to write in this diary. Read on below if you are interested. this is part of an ongoing theme I have been developing for some time.
Our language shapes our thoughts. Two ideas have had so much to do with shaping modern thinking. One is the Industrial Revolution and the other is evolution as introduced by Darwin.
In my ongoing probe into the way our minds relate to our situation I have had a lot to say about this. The ideas go beyond the scope of any single diary so it is a real task to write the diaries so they both connect for those who are following me and yet say something meaningful to the one time reader.
One thread I have been developing is the way biological evolution can be exploited for ideas about societal evolution. clearly the level of analogy and the metaphors have to be dealt with carefully but they certainly are there. That brings us back to how I answered my wife's question.
I have often posited that were we to be able to run evolution over again like a laboratory experiment we would find that it was different from the start yet ended up much the same way. If you have any familiarity with non linear dynamics and chaos theory you know why it has to be different. The old sensitivity to initial conditions thing.
Why would it come out roughly the same then? I go back to a book that influenced many of us when I was a grad student in the period 1960-1963. Actually, two books were involved, one citing the other. A popular text in biophysics was Biophysical Chemistry: Thermodynamics, Electrostatics, and the Biological ... By John T. Edsall, Jeffries Wyman If you go to the link check out the first two chapters and you will be intouch with what shaped my present thinking. The first dealt with the chemical elements and how they determined the constraints on biological evolution. The second was even more fascinating because it dealt with water and its central role in bringing about life as we know it. It was these chapters that built on a classic by Henderson The Fitness of the Environment
In 1913, Henderson wrote The Fitness of the Environment, one of the first books to explore concepts of fine tuning in the Universe. Henderson discusses the importance of water and the environment with respect to living things, pointing out that life depends entirely on the very specific environmental conditions on Earth, especially with regard to the prevalence and properties of water. In the book The Fitness of the Environment (1913) he wrote we find "an inquiry into the biological significance of the properties of matter" (Henderson). He saw the properties of matter and the course of cosmic evolution intimately related to the structure of the living being and to its activities. He concluded: "the whole evolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one, and the biologist may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric".
As a sociologist (1932–1942) he applied the functionalism of physiological regulation to the phenomena of social behavior basing on his concept of social systems. He described social systems with the help of the sociology of Vilfredo Pareto. In contrast to Pareto, Henderson applied the concept of social systems to all disciplines that study the meanings communicated in interactions between two or more persons acting in roles or role-sets. Henderson influenced many Harvard sociologists, especially Talcott Parsons, George C. Homans, Robert K. Merton, and Elton Mayo who all became pioneers in sociology or psychology. Henderson was instrumental in promoting Talcott Parsons career at Harvard despite Pitirim Sorokin's opposition. He also discussed intensively with Parsons the methodological chapters of Talcott Parsons "The Structure" of Social Action" (1937) at the time when Parsons was working on the raw manuscript.
Henderson's investigations had their inception and consummation in the philosopher's chair. In spite of his diversity of interests, his work exhibits in retrospect a fundamental unity; his career was largely devoted to the study of the organization of the organism, the universe, and society.
It may surprise you that these ideas go back that far. One of the shortcomings of modern education is the sacrifice of the history of ideas for what is "new". This circles back on the following discussion of how this all relates to the Industrial Revolution.
I have been making the case that Henderson explored so long ago. It is a complex argument and maybe that's why it has not been an ongoing part of what we call "science" today. I'm going to be brief so the snipers will have a field day. Meanwhile if you are seriously following the train of thought I promise more will follow.
My thesis is simply that evolution has to happen withing the constraints the world gives it. In biological evolution these were explored early on by the authors cited above and others.
What is even more fun is the way human social evolution parallels biological evolution in so many important ways. The major constraint, of course, is the human mind itself. We do not understand that much about our minds much as we like to think we do. What is clear is that we learned to make tools and then we developed science and technology. What is also clear is that our understanding of our minds and the social constructs they create has not paralleled the science and technology. In particular our ability to govern ourselves has not even come close. We also have evolved an economic system closely coupled to the science and technology and which is also divorced from any rational basis. The consequences are with us now and I need not belabor them.
So the "Industrial Revolution" is a phase in the greater development of life on the planet especially as it became dominated by the Human species. It is a part of the most general notion of "evolution" possible.
As I have posited about biological evolution, the more general evolution is working within constraints. Were the "experiment" capable of being run again it would be different yet end up very much the same because of the constraints.
I'll end with a quote from the flyer for our book because it sums this up very well:
This perspective reveals the limits that complexity places on knowledge and technology, bringing to light our hubristically dysfunctional relationship with the natural world and increasingly tenuous connection to reality. The inescapable conclusion is that, barring a cultural metamorphosis that breaks free of deeply entrenched mental frames that made us what we are, continued development of the Global Economy will lead inexorably to the collapse of civilization.
Fri Jun 05, 2015 at 8:39 PM PT: It seems like this is appropriate to add at this point: A paraphrase from Goethe's Faust: When concepts fail, words arise.