💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › murray-bookchin-sociobiology-or-social-ecology.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:33:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Sociobiology or Social Ecology
Author: Murray Bookchin
Date: 1993
Language: en
Topics: social ecology, sociobiology, Murray Bookchin
Source: Which Way for the Ecology Movement? Essays by Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin

Sociobiology or Social Ecology

I

The interface between nature and society has been a haunting

philosophical, ethical, and cultural problem for thousands of years.

Indeed, that it constitutes the stuff from which naïve myths and

thoughtful moral credos have been formed for ages is a fact we are

seldom permitted to forget, if only in a fashion that is patronizing to

presumably less “sophisticated" cultures. After all, were not the

earliest religions “mere” nature religions and the earliest philosophies

“mere” nature philosophies? As far back as we can search into humanity’s

rich reservoir of intuitions and rational formulas, our relationship to

nature – indeed, humanity’s place in nature – has been a central theme

of ideas and sensibility. To seek an objective grounding for reason and

ethics that is more than crudely instrumental and subjectively

relativistic has been the alluring goal of human thought for an

incalculable period of time.

It was only with the opening of the Christian era and, centuries later,

with the birth of its wayward child, the Renaissance, that this haunting

interface was slowly edged out of the realm of human speculation.

Christianity’s intensely anti-naturalistic bias essentially replaced an

earlier, richly formed idea of nature with a colorless Supernature as

ruthlessly as the late Renaissance philosophers and scientists (notably,

Descartes and Galileo) were to replace organic strategies of knowledge

with harshly mechanical ones—an umbilical cord between the cathedral and

the laboratory that Bacon was to sanctify in his utopian House of

Saloman. The results of these ideological changes were more fateful than

their creators realized. Human thought was completely deflected from

rational inquiry into the relationship of society to nature – one free

of the religious and philosophical archaisms of the past – into a

narrowly instrumental, means-end rationalism. A distinctly philosophical

credo was established in the nature of the new science that was no less

metaphysical in its presupposition that the archaic metaphysics of

classical thought: a vision of nature as “mute,” “blind,” and

intelligible only in mathematic terms; a vision of natural history as

strictly fortuitous; and perhaps more decisively, an ethical strategy

that was grounded not in objectivity and a search for the inherent

self-organizing attributes that impart meaning to nature and society but

in “effectiveness” and in a logical calculus of efficiency that could be

justified only in terms of “success” and personal proclivities.

Ironically, the Renaissance vision of society’s interface with nature

had not removed morality as such from the issue’ it has replaced a

committed vision of right and wrong with an essentially uncommitted one.

In its scientistic “value-free” but instrumental approach to society, it

has in fact provided a means-end rationalism that could as easily

justify fascism as it could socialism – and, sadly enough, a uniquely

vulgar interpretation of “anarchism” that tends to erupt from time to

time like a fetid ulcer in the Anglo-American culture region * Granted

that medieval teleology with its rigid mythos of an inexorable “final

cause” had permeated speculative thought with the autocracy of a

preordained religious destiny; Renaissance mechanism, in turn, lifted

the burden of “final cause” only to replace it with an equally rigid

mythos of “efficient cause” with its unyielding determinism and its

autocracy of reductionism. In neither case was freedom serviced and

domination banished. Rather, the same commitment to metaphysical of

unswerving determinism was reinforced over more organic concepts of the

world that gave it meaning without the all-residing presence of a deity

or a machine.

- Consider, for example, an article in defense of contemporary

sociobiology in a recent issue of The North American Anarchist (renamed

Strike) which deals with nature as “blind…meaningless…mute” and the

like, and rehabilitates all the vulgarities of mechanical materialism a

la Mettrie or Moleschott. I quote from memory but with a deep concern

that this kind of intellectual primitivism may find its place as

“materialistic” or “anti-theological” in anarchist ideas. We have as

much to fear from kneejerk form of scientism and behaviorism, not to

speak of sociobiology, as well have from theology and mysticism.

These general remarks are not made idly. They are indispensable for

understanding two conflicting interpretation of the interface between

society and nature: sociobiology and social ecology. The historic crisis

in reason, science, and ethics which has reached such acuity in recent

years – with Renaissance mechanism’s underlying tenants of instrumental

rationalism, of quantification as the “language” of science, and of

physics as its “paradigm” – feeds into a more compelling material

crisis: the unprecedented ecological deterioration that threatens the

very integrity of complex life-forms, including humanity. None of the

critics of instrumentalism, quantification, and reductionism, from the

phenomenologists to the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School,

could have anticipated that nature itself would raise problems that once

seemed confined to the ideological and social realms. The massive

disequilibrium between humanity and nature created by a terrifying,

exploitive society has thus created the need for a new agenda with roots

in an admittedly very old tradition. We are once again faced with the

problem of how society emerged from nature, the continuities and

discontinuities that exist between the two, the development of a

sensibility and of social relations that accord with these distinctions

(including reason and science as well as alternative communities and

technics), and finally, an ethical that is grounded in nature as it is

in human rationality. In short, the old ghosts, seemingly dispelled by

the Cartesian and Galilean traditions, have come back to haunt us—not,

let me emphasize, for want of the obscurantist ideological needs that

many archaic religions and philosophical systems were meant to satisfy,

but for want of a new perspective on humanity and nature that can

resolved the ecological crisis of our times.

It is against this much larger background of ideas and problems that

sociobiology’s sudden emergence and utterly reactionary content should

be evaluated. The idea that society has roots in nature is not new.

Until the nineteenth century, the term “natural philosophy” was used as

a synonym for the term “science.” Hegel’s recovery of Aristotelians

physics and biology from the theological trappings of the medieval

Schoolmen (all his own prejudices and idealistic nonsense aside)

exercised an enormous influence in the academic world as a qualitative

basis for the deductive sciences. Nor can we ignore the influence

“dialectical materialism” has exercised even if only as a source of

sharp intellectual contentions. Issues like “teleology” and

“purposiveness” in nature, however simplistically defined, are central

concerns of modern systems theory and neo-positivist philosophies of

science, not simply of Teilhard de Chardin’s quasi-theological

ruminations on orthogenesis.

Sociobiology has oozed into these major intellectual crevices of our

times like some ideological pus from a suppurating ulcer. It is evidence

not of a cure to the problems that have emerged but of the disease

itself. It would be a serious error to view sociobiology merely as part

of a persisting endeavor to relate attributes of the organic world to

the social or to explore the biological roots of society in terms of

their continuities and discontinuities. This project is thousands of

years old and has had a highly diversified life of its own. It extends

back to the pre-Socratics and has acquired its most conventional form in

a neo-Bergsonian vitalism and in systems theory. Sociobiology, as the

term is currently used, is a very specific creature in its own right.

More precisely, it is not a discipline; it is a movement, no less

offensive in its crudities than social-Darwinism. Considered as a

movement, sociobiology’s manifesto can largely be regarded as E. O.

Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Its specificity as a “New

Synthesis” cannot be ignored. The work of Wilson and his collaborators,

some of whose views approximate pure fascism, must be singled out as a

new attempt to deal with the interface between biology and society,

indeed, to give it the halo of a scientific authority that defies mere

theorizing and speculation. We are no longer dealing, here, with the

Ionian philosophers, Permenides’ and Heraklitos’ “Dike,” Plato’s

Demiurgos, Aristotle’s tour de force in the Physics and the scala

natura, Demokratos, Epikurus, the Stoics, or, for that matter, with

Bruno, Kepler, Leibnitz, Hegel, Kropotkin, Bergson, and the like. We are

talking of a love affair between a new, presumably very “modern” and

“sophisticated” group of largely Anglo-American biologists and

ethologists on the one hand and genes on the other. The opening chapter

of Wilson’s Sociobiology is titled “The Morality of the Gene” – and it

is the book’s reductionist and ugly ethos, viewed as a key to society

and human behavior, that must never be permitted to elude us.

Accolades for Wilson’s “civility” and “appropriate sense of humor” (to

use Ashley Montagu’s flattering characterization) in the face of very

heated attacks upon his views do not justify an equal degree of civility

and humor from his critics. There is nothing very civil about

sociobiology and certainly nothing very funny about its conclusions.

Indeed, the critical response to Sociobiology has been largely

favorable. This cordial, often enthusiastic reception has been extended

not only by members of the scientific community but by a wide range of

the entire political spectrum from writers for Britain’s fascist

National Front to their counterparts in the happily defunct

“Anarcho-Communist Federation of North America.”

Wilson, however, does not need reborn fascists and self-styled

anarchists to speak on his behalf. He is more articulate and coherent

than many of his fervent supporters. The vividness of his emphasis on

aggression, hierarchy, domination, territoriality, and competition as

genetically innate to all life-forms is so defiantly brash that it has

become conventional to critically single out these issues. In Wilson’s

writings, very few of the less savory aspects of animal and human

behavior are free of a genetic pedigree, and with his pedigree they

become biologically inevitable, in fact, adaptative to survival. Such

awkward traits as altruism and such patently cultural attributes such as

sympathy emerge as problems, into the “morality of the gene.” Enough has

been written on Wilson’s substantive issues raised by his colleagues’

works.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to ignore Wilson’s intellectual strategy.

Sociobiology is shrewdly riddled by a sufficient number of second

thoughts and qualifications to obscure the viciousness of its thesis.

More cautious that such rabidly reactionary acolytes as Richard Dawkins,

whose Selfish Gene has been characterized by so prudent a critic as Mary

Midgley as the “work of an uncritical philosophic egoist,” Wilson is

careful to take note of the “limits of aggression,” to poetize over the

“field of righteousness,” and to acknowledge the “plasticity of [human]

social organization,” with due deference to “sharing” and “bonding.” But

wherever Wilson seems to relax his genetic determinism in the realm of

culture, he rarely displaces it completely. Sociobiology unceasingly

stakes out limits to non-genetic autonomy. Biological determinism,

specifically in its crassest genic form, is not merely a massive

emphasis but an all-encompassing gospel. Whatever seems to challenge

this calling is conveniently removed from the purview of the book. It

becomes non-existent or didactically dismissed when it cannot be cajoled

by all means – fair or foul – into a genic “paradigm.”

And Wilson is by no means so prudent as to abandon foul means. We shall

have occasion to see that his genetics, far from being on the cutting

edge of genic theories, is in fact rather archaic and shopworn. Nor is

his ethological data free of rather cynical distortion. James C. King,

in his highly informative and restrained criticism of sociobiology,

notes that wedded to Wilson’s “single-gene analysis and genetic

determinism is … an emphasis on conflict and violence.” Wilson’s nature,

including much of human nature, is ravaged by claw and fang, indeed, by

a pervasive social-Darwinism that is denied rhetorically only to be

smuggled in substantially. This high-pitch of conflict and violence is

far from supported by the scientific “objectivity” that is supposed to

render the sociobiological synthesis so new.

A few examples are worth citing. Wilson’s use of Schneirla’s data on

cats to demonstrate that parent-offspring relations are marked by

conflict in weaning kittens from their mother has been justly

characterized by King as “close to distortion and point up the

predisposition of the sociobiologist to see conflict everywhere.” As it

turns out, Schneirla’s account of this relationship is highly complex:

it involves an intricate alternation of lessening concern between the

feline parent and its offspring which ultimately yields a condition of

interdependence rather than hostility. Even more disconcerting is

Wilson’s misuse of G.B. Schaller’s data on the Serengeti lions. Adducing

Schaller’s work as evidence, Wilson brashly contends that lion “cubs are

sometimes killed and eaten during territorial disputes” – and there the

account of high cub mortality is permitted to rest. Actually Schaller

and other authoritative ethologists attribute this high mortality rate

mainly to parental neglect rather than cannibalism. Acolytes of

sociobiology are all the more revealing of their biases when the data

around a particular issue is disputable. Almost invariably their

interpretations of ambiguous facts fall on the side of aggression,

violence, infanticide, and conflict. The more gory the trait, the more

likely it is to invite the purpose prose of dogma rather than the staid

language of “scientific objectivity”.

All of this raises what is most crucial in sociobiology’s image of

nature – of life as it is formed, of life-forms interacting with each

other and their abiotic environment, and ultimately of human nature as

it is formed biologically and culturally. Wilson’s image of nature, like

Freud’s, is unequivocally Hobbesian, a bellum omnium contra omnes.

Methodologically, Wilson is reductionist. What is no less significant,

he has an epistemology that renders his subject matter inherently unruly

and impervious to explanations that elicit any traits of an immanently

symbiotic and mutualistic nature. Human nature, however one chooses to

describe it, is an effect rather than a cause. It is largely the result

of the ever-domineering gene. That there are immanent, self-organizing,

and – yes, let us use the dreaded word, harmonizing – as well as

conflicted – tendencies in nature and society which could form the bases

of a new biosocial approach to evolution remain notions that are

essentially alien to Wilson’s sociobiology.

It would be very useful, if space permitted to explore Wilson’s

definitions of “society,” “hierarchy,” “dominance,” “aggression,”

“band,” “caste,” “communal,” “competition,” and like words that clearly

reveal his orientation toward biosocial, evolutionary, socially

structured, and ethical phenomena. What is striking about most of these

definitions is that, where they have social implications, Wilson firmly

contains them by unrelenting, often rigid, biological terms. On the

other hand, where their biological implications almost beg for

interpretation, they are equated with biologically biased social terms.

What I am saying is that Wilson’s ruthless reduction of social phenomena

to biology in general and genetics in particular is obscurantist by

definition in the literal sense – by his definition of key terms that

enter into his book. He renders it difficult for anyone but the most

sophisticated reader to use language in such a way that it can reveal

the discontinuities as well as the continuities between biology and

society. Even more irritating, Wilson so crassly biases his language

that the dialectical relations between these continuities and

discontinuities become elusive. The perceptive reader, in effect, is

stranded on a sociobiological island where it is virtually impossible to

consume anything but sand and salt.

This become evident when one turns to Wilson’s definition of “society.”

A “society” in Sociobiology is a “group of individuals belonging to the

same species and organized in a cooperative manner.” The diagnostic

criterion is reciprocal communication of a cooperative nature, extending

beyond mere sexual activities – after which mouthful of words, Wilson

dispatches the reader to Chapter Two of the book.

It is vitally necessary unless one is a mindless acolyte, to know what

Wilson means by “organized” and “cooperative” here – two culturally,

philosophically, and ethically laden terms that have far-reaching

implications in social theory, not to speak of biology, where their

meanings may differ so drastically in the same species (such as baboons)

in different ecosystems. One finds, in fact, that Chapter Two in no way

clarified the meaning of these highly charged terms. If anything, Wilson

wanders all over the place. We no more know what “cooperation,” means

than we know the meaning of “organization.” Wilson’s definitions are as

arbitrary as they are intuitive. We are urged, in fact, to define the

terms “society” and “social” sufficiently “broadly in order to prevent

the exclusion of many interesting (!) phenomena” – in whose opinion and

by what criteria Wilson fails to explain.

Accordingly, Wilson is now free to opine on any phenomenon that captures

his fancy – a totally legitimate right if sociobiology is a purely

speculative theory but certainly intellectually outrageous if it is (as

its acolytes demands) a “science.” We are told, for example, that

“swarms of courting males” are not “true societies” because they are

“often drawn together by mutually attractive stimuli, but if they

interact in no other way it seems excessive to refer to them by a term

stronger that aggregation.” By contrast, Wilson declares, bird flocks,

wolf packs, and locust swarms are “good examples of true elementary

societies.” So are parent-offspring relationships if they “communicate

reciprocally” because they have “often complex and serve multiple

functions.” Indeed “in many groups of organisms, from the social insects

to the primates, the most advanced societies appear to have evolved from

family units.”

We must pause, here, to examine this fascinating muddle of ideas and

categories. If society is to be so broadly defined that it includes bird

flocks and locus swarms but not swarms of courting males, by what solid

criteria other than Wilson’s cavalier use of the word “excessive” are

the former distinguished from the latter? All three flocks and swarms

are united by some kind of “attractive stimuli”; they perform some kind

of “function” and in the “broadest sense” are apparently “cooperating”

to fulfill that “function.” Taken at face value, Wilson has assigned the

notion of internal organization – that is, some vague idea of “group

behavior” – as his criterion for distinguishing a “society” from a mere

“aggregation.” But the swarming of courting males, or for that matter,

the winter congregation of rattlesnakes and ladybird beetles (which

Wilson also consigns to the status of “aggregations”) are forms of

“group behavior” in themselves. The fact is that Wilson’s criteria in

distinguishing “society” from “aggregation” are matters of degree rather

than of king. Courting males, wintering rattlesnakes and ladybird

beetles are not sufficiently “organized” and do not sufficiently

“cooperate” for Wilson’s tastes to qualify in his sovereign opinion as

“true societies”; hence by no standards other than his personal judgment

are they reduced to “aggregations.”

I have emphasized Wilson’s biases primarily to argue several key points.

Minimally, with bias as its criterion, sociobiology holds to promise of

becoming even a reasonably precise science. If fact, it rates very badly

as a “new synthesis.” Indeed, its claim becomes all the more arrogant

because it professes to have achieved an “objectivity” that is

ostensibly lacking in the “metaphysical” orientations it explicitly

opposes. Actually, one encounters arbitrary judgments everywhere

throughout the sociobiological literature and the writings of Wilson’s

ethological allies. But what is more important—and often less

apparent—is that Wilson is seeking something that he never fully finds

in the animal world: society conceived as an institutionalized system of

relationships—that is to say, the conscious fabrication of associative

behavior. Animals may form loosely or tightly aggregated communities,

but differences in degree of aggregation do not determine whether they

are societies. They merely determine how stable these aggregations are

as communities and the range of functions they perform.

The need to distinguish society, a uniquely human attribute, from

community, a generally organic attribute (which, as we shall see, can

apply even to the organization of a single cell), is by no means

academic. Indeed, the tendency to confuse the two—an error that is

easily make because every society is necessarily also a community—mars

the work of such widely disparate thinkers as Marx, Darwin, Kropotkin,

and, of course, Wilson. We can ill afford this confusion without

yielding the most disconcerting results. A community organized at

various levels of aggregation by chemical stimuli, by hormonal and

neural relationships, by reproductive functions (mammalian mating rarely

occurs without extrasexual or “reciprocal communication”), by learning

specific adaptive functions, and finally, by filial, symbolic, economic,

and consciously cooperative activities (whether they be ritually,

mythically, or rationally expressed) — all of these are patently not

coequal in form or content. To place a beehive, whose basic function is

reproductive, and a town, whose basic function is cultural, under a

common rubric, and then to merely distinguish them by their “degree” of

complexity is not simply intellectually fatuous but ideologically

insidious. Even the “socializing tendency” Kropotkin imputes to nature

can be obfuscatory if it fails to recognize that institutions are never

strictly or even primarily “natural,” however much they seem to parallel

fairly complex animal interactions. However prevalent mutual aid may be

among nonhuman organisms, social cooperation presupposes will and

intentionality, which is only dimly present in the animal world. By the

same token, the widely touted “division of labor” which is falsely

imputed to all kinds of animal communities, particularly the “social

insects,” is an economic fact – a specifically human one – not a

variegated constellation of complementary functions and activities.

To ignore these distinctions is to invite considerable ideological

mischief. Like the notions that nature is “cruel” or “kind,” “stingy” or

“generous,” “harsh” or “gentle,” we read back into levels of organic

development behavioral criteria that have yet to be consolidated by

human thought. Potentiality is not actuality, any more than tendency is

the fruition of the possibilities it may yield. Society may be latent in

nature, but it only comes into its truth as “true societies” (to use

Wilson’s jargon) through the cultural, economic, symbolic, and

subjective interaction of organisms – and let me emphasize, not by the

mere presence of one or two of these traits but by the presence of all

of them, woven into a common mosaic that is visibly and permanently

organized. Social institutions may be rooted in consanguinity or civil

relations; they may be agrarian, with rich natural overtones, or urban,

with strongly political ones – but in essence they are human because

they are fabricated by disparate attributes, minimally conscious,

communicative, and cooperatively economic ones. Bees and wasps are

decidedly not “social” because their modes of organization, however

elaborate and intricate, are massively predetermined by genetic codes.

That is to say, they are rigidly fixed along uncreative,

undevelopmental, and largely biochemical lines. That they actually form

the genic “paradigm” for Wilson’s concept of sociality is one of the

most sinister features of sociobiology. Largely reproductive in

function, the “social insects” represent the antithesis of any concept

of evolution as untrammeled and emergent: they open no fresh or creative

pathways in organic development but rather only an unswerving fixity and

self-replication that form any innovative viewpoint that represent a

blind evolutionary alley.

In fact, a genetic strategy that makes the behavior of the “social

insects” comprehensible actually renders human society incomprehensible.

So-called primate “hierarchies” (a completely libelous term) yield

strictly individual dominance-submission relationships (another libelous

term) on the basis of largely physical attributes – notably, strength,

hormonal fortitude, and possibly even intelligence, although the visible

distinctions between a “smart” ape and a “dumb” one are barely

noticeable in a primate community. It is quixotic ethologists like Jane

Goodall-Lawick, rather than apes themselves, who make these uniquely

anthropomorphic distinctions. The myth of an intragroup “hierarchy”

dissolves completely once we recognize that an “alpha” male chimpanzee

is an individual creature, not an institution. His “dominant status”

(whatever these words means) lives or dies with the fortunes of the ape,

not with the fortunes of the group. Hence, “hierarchy” in the most

“caste-like” apedoms or monkeydoms more closely resembles the links in a

chain than layers and consciously empowered community structures.

The difference is a crucial one. A weak, enfeebled, unnerved, and sick

ape is hardly likely to become an “alpha” male, much less retain this

highly ephemeral “status.” By contrast, the most physically and mentally

pathological human rulers have exercised authority with devastating

effect in the course of history and altered its destiny profoundly. The

cry “The King is Dead! Long Live the King!” expresses a power of

hierarchical institutions over persons that is completely reversed in

so-called “animal hierarchies,” where the absence of institutions is

precisely the only intelligible way of talking about “alpha males” or

“queen bees.” Sociobiology, with its definitional reductionism, totally

dissolves these crucial distinctions. “Hierarchy,” to Wilson, is a

“system of two or more levels of units, the higher level controlling the

least to some extent the activities of the lower levels in order to

integrate the group as a whole.” One is tempted to observe that this

“integrative” function must be hot news to an ape or termite. In any

case, the terms “system,” “levels,” “units,” and “controlling”—so widely

disparate throughout the animal world—are precisely the concepts and

categories that Wilson is obliged to explain if the notion of “animal

hierarchy” is to have meaning. These explanations are all the more

necessary because “castes” of “worker bees” (another group of juicy

terms) are in no way comparable to the “alpha males” among primates.

Wilson’s fast-and-loose interchanging of “levels” and “units” allows him

to recklessly pirouette around every part of animal ethology, from

beehives to baboon troops. The genetic origins of beehive

differentiation are blissfully transferred to less instinct-governed

primate groups and then, almost joyously, to strictly contrived human

social and political institutions.

From a definitional viewpoint, Wilson’s terms and categories almost

consistently bed the questions they are required to answer. A “caste” is

“any set of individuals … that performs specialized labor in a colony.”

One is impelled to ask what “labor” means to Wilson in, say, a beehive,

a wolf pack, a baboon troop, and a Detroit automobile factory. Can all

these “levels” of associations be flippantly subsumed under “labor”? And

is “specialization evidence of a “caste,” a “profession,” a

“discipline,” a “proclivity,” a “calling,” each guided by genetic

instinctive, psychological, economic, or creative sources? Or, after

all, as Wilson would have it, are all of them reducible to the mere

expression of “selfish genes” and an anthropomorphic myth of genic

“morality”?

If one goes through most of Wilson’s remaining socially charged

definitions, sociobiology’s landscape becomes increasingly depressing.

Most seriously, Wilson’s genic limits and biased definitions deny both

nature and society’s fecundity at best—or else dissolve them into the

crassest form of social reactionism at worst. Wilson’s genic “limits” to

human behavior are not ideologically equivocal, even as some of his

critics tend to believe. They are socially and politically reactionary.

In On Human Nature, Wilson closes his tract with lyrical futuristic

speculations that are inherently hostile to any emancipatory conception

of human freedom. We learn that sociobiology “enlarges” our knowledge of

human nature, that we can erect our values on a more “objective basis,”

notably, a genetic one in which our “set of trajectories” or

explanations, far from enlarging, “will narrow still more.” Accordingly,

Wilson, after having immersed us in a claw-and-fang social-Darwinism, in

the very act of denying it rhetorically, opines that “we already know,

to take two extreme examples, that the worlds of William Graham Summer,

the absolute Social Darwinist, and Mikhail Bakunin, the anarchist, are

biologically impossible. As the Social sciences mature into predictive

disciplines, the permissible trajectories will not only diminish in

number but our descendants will be able to sight farther along them.”

These remarks, which essentially foreclose any creative social

flexibility beyond the specious limits of a chromosome, are evidence of

a totalitarian gall. They constitute a dogma of total surrender to

social conditions as they are—social conditions, I would add, that are

closer to social Darwinism today than in almost any period in humanity’s

bloody history. It is easy and rather superficial to criticize Wilson

for his attempts to validate hierarchy, aggression, war, social

domination, and conflict on biological grounds. These notions have been

the flotsam-and-jetsam of sociology for decades. What renders Wilson’s

sociobiology particularly sinister is that it prostitutes the Hegelian

notion (as vulgarized by Engels) that “freedom is the recognition of

necessity” into a genic closure of all natural and social creativity.

Wilson’s “morality of the gene” is not only “selfish” but suffocatingly

rigid; it not only impedes action with the autocracy of a genic tyrant,

but closes the door to any action that is not biochemically defined by

its own configuration. When freedom is nothing more than the recognition

of necessity, when our expectations “narrow” as we discover the gene’s

tyranny over the greater totality of life, we are obliged to make the

best of what we know we cannot do. The possible becomes an expression of

the impossible¸ just as Wilson’s notion of reason is interpreted as a

mere “epiphenomenon” of neurology.

If sociobiology has anything to offer, it is a very harsh conclusion:

when knowledge becomes dogma (and few movements are more dogmatic than

sociobiology), freedom is ultimately denied. In Wilson’s case, the

freedom that is denied is not Summer’s “absolute social-Darwinism” – for

Summer’s premises are built into sociobiology by definition, even as

they are passingly rejected textually—but precisely the “extreme” which

Wilson’s singles out from all others: the anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin.

II

Our discussion of the reactionary content of sociobiology should not be

permitted to conceal the problem it seeks to resolve. Biology,

particularly in its relationship to society and ethics, has begun to

acquire enormous, indeed highly controversial, importance. After a

generation in which these two topics have been ruthlessly dissociated

from one another by academics, the issue of objective ethical criteria

and society’s interface with nature—an issue forced upon us by

ecology—has made the need for a new continuum between them an imperative

of programmatic importance. Our “place in nature,” to use Max Scheler’s

phrase, is no longer to be evoked in wistfully romantic verbiage. It has

become a philosophical challenge to overcome the dualism we inherited

from Hobbes, the moral relativism we inherited from Hume, and the notion

of a “blind,” “mute” mechanical nature we inherited from Galileo.

Tragically, the need for meeting these challenges and resolving them is

not forced by sociobiology alone, with its simplistic crudities. Like

all sweeping issues of any historical period, the relationship of

society and ethics to nature has been burdened by serious ideological

tensions which have one-sidedly warped almost every intellectual

contestant. Genic reductionism, in fact, is merely the coarsest weed in

a larger bouquet whose constituents are only slightly less crude than

sociobiology. It is unfortunate to note that a gifted evolutionary

theorist like Stephen Jay Gould, for example, has reacted so sharply to

the recent popularity of creationist theories of life that he denies any

moral content to natural history. The temptation to react against one

extreme, notably reborn Christianity, by evoking an equally questionable

extreme like a mechanistic Darwinism, does no service to theories of

biological evolution.

Mechanistic theories of evolution are as rooted in speculative

prejudgments as creationism. By the same token, the shared failure of

divine creationism and mechanistic evolutionism to resolve the moral and

ecological problems created by our historic cleavage from nature has not

been eliminated by infusing systems theory with a sovereign,

all-encompassing importance—or worse, by surrounding it with a mystical

halo borrowed from archaic, often quietistic Asian religious systems.

The “California School of Mystics” if I may be permitted to so label

writers like Fritjof Capra, Eruch Jantsch, and for the hovering ghost of

Gregory Bateson, is redolent of a systems theory as unspiritual and

reductionist as the very mechanism it purports to oppose. The lavish

quotations from Taoist and Buddhist literature do not alter the fact

that systems theory is as mechanistic as the Newtonian image of the

world as a clock. Feedback loops—whether negative or (in the case of

Manfred Eigen and Ilya Prigogine) positive—are ultimately rooted in the

mass-energy casualties and mathematical formulations that nourished

Cartesian-Newtonian mechanisms. We should not permit our newly acquired

aversion to a means-end (or “linear”) rationalism to cloak the fact that

the “circular” rationalism of the California Mystics has simply replaced

the clock with the radar set and the library with magnetic tapes.

“Spaceship Earth” is still a spaceship, not a fecund, living planet that

nourishes life.

Ultimately, it is not in oscillatory movements of feedback loops or an

ill digested notion of form, “mentation,” and “oneness” that a new

ecological monism will be formulated. The recovery of the notion of

“directiveness,” which systems theory has brought to the foreground of

natural and social evolution, is an advance of considerable importance.

The natural world, in this light, can no longer be seen as “mute,” not

can life and mind be viewed as the accidental epiphenomena of “blind”

cosmic forces. “Nature,” to use a highly abstract term, is fecund, not

passive, and it consists of more than energy and mass (the traditional

“matter” and “motion” mystique that orchestrated the crude materialism

of the last century). By the same token, Teilhard de Chardin’s

“noosphere” is modern Neoplatonism writ large, and Taoist “Oneness” that

renders “God” as the “mind of the universe” (Jantsch) regresses to a

religious archaism—and dualism—that classical Hellenic philosophy called

logos.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who may well enjoy the distinction of being the

most educated of the systems theorists, prudently distinguishes the most

significant forms of directiveness or “dynamic teleology.” There may be

the simple direction of events to their final state or a purposive

directiveness which Bertalanffy associates with Aristotle’s notion of

“final cause” or “equifinality,” by which he means a given final state

that can be reached in many different ways. Finally, Bertalanffy cites a

directiveness “based on structure” which, carried beyond his own limited

examples drawn from feedback mechanisms, suggests a concern with the

nature of the nature of things. More than two millennia ago, Pythagoras

emphasized more pointedly than his formalists (as distinguished from

analytic) heirs—I refer here to systems theorists who have no

substantial knowledge of the classical tradition—that it is as much in

the nature of substance to direct itself toward form and complexity, to

develop and grow—and with growth to achieve increasing subjectivity—as

it is for matter to move. Neither oscillation alone nor accident,

neither mass alone nor motion, but rather development and the

self-organization of substance (all theological qualifications aside)

constitute the innermost properties of being that render a natural

history, and evolution of reality, possible. Hence a cosmic drama, it

could be argued, does exist that is “directed” not be a deity exogenous

to it or by a divine “architect” who fashions it; rather, it would be a

self-directed and self-unfolding drama whose “finality” is as much an

inherent property of substance as is motion. It is not simply by virtue

of feedback loops and homeostatic mechanisms (the last is a well-chosen

word) that substance would unfold self-directively, but rather by virtue

of that delicious Aristotelian-Hegelian word “potentiality,” the

entelechia of phenomena, that would yield to the world particulars in

their wholeness and fullness as a rich unity of diversity. Hence,

“integration” and “oneness” would be reworked to convey the notion of a

fecund pattern of interdependent phenomena, an ecosystem whose

development comes from its uniqueness, not its homeostatic oscillations

alone.

We would thus live in a world that is not lacking in meaning. Perhaps

more significantly, such meaning as it had would be liberating in the

sense that it would impart to human goals a purposiveness that brings a

highly self-reflective nature – mentality itself – into the cosmos,

freed from the confines of a purely privatistic and epistemological

approach to ethics. We might say with Hans Jonas that this “Ontology as

the ground of ethics was the original tenant of philosophy. Their

divorce, which is the divorce of the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’

realms, is the modern destiny. Their reunion can be effected, if at all,

only from the ‘objective’ end, that is to say, through a revision of the

idea of nature. And it is ‘becoming’ rather than ‘abiding’ nature that

would hold out any such promise. From the immanent direction of its

total evolution there could be elicited a destination of man by whose

terms the person, in the act of fulfilling himself, would at the same

time realize a concern of universal substance. Hence would result a

principle of ethics which is ultimately grounded neither in the autonomy

of the self nor in the needs of the community, but in an objective

assignment by the nature of things.”

What is most fascinating, however, is that “Nature” (metaphorically

speaking) is writing its own nature philosophy and ethics – not the

logicians, positivists, sociobiologists, mystics, and heirs of Galilean

scientism. It is becoming increasingly evident that we are not “alone”

in the universe, not even in the emptiness of space, as Bertrand Russell

would have us believe. Owing to what is a fairly recent revolution in

astrophysics (possibly comparable only to the achievements of Copernicus

and Kepler), the cosmos is opening itself up to us in new ways that call

for an exhilarating and speculative turn of mind and a more qualitative

approach to natural phenomena. It is becoming increasingly tenable to

suggest that the entire universe may be the cradle of life—not merely

our own planet or planets like it. The “Big Bang,” whose faint echoes

from more than fifteen billion years ago can now be detected by the

astrophysicist’s instruments, may be evidence less of a single

accidental event than of a form of cosmic “breathing” whose gradual

expansions and contradictions extend over an infinity of time. If this

is so—and we are admittedly on highly speculative groups—we may be

dealing with cosmic processes rather than a single episode in the

formation of the universe. Obviously, if these processes express an

unending form of universal “history,” as it were, we, who are

irrevocably locked into our own cosmic era, may never be able to fathom

their reality or meaning. But it is not completely unreasonable to

wonder if we are dealing here with a vast, continuing development of the

universe, not simply with a recurring type of cosmic “respiration.”

Highly conjectural as these notions may be, the formation of all the

elements from hydrogen and helium, their combination into small

molecules and later into self-forming macromolecules, and finally the

organization of these macromolecules into the constituents of life and

possibly of mind follow a sequence that challenges Russell’s image of

humanity as an accidental spark in an empty, meaningless void. Certain

phases of this sequence constitute a strong challenge to a view in which

the word “accident” becomes a prudent substitute for virtual

inevitabilities. A cosmos interspersed with dust composed of hydrogen,

carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen molecules. Radio astronomers have detected

cyanogen, carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, formic acid,

methanol, acetaldehyde, and methyl formate in interstellar space. In

short, the classical image of space as a void is giving way to the image

of space as a restlessly active chemogenetic ground for an astonishing

sequence of increasingly complex organic compounds.

From there, it is only a short leap to the self-organization of

rudimentary life-forming molecules. Analysis of carbonaceous chondrites

(a group of stony meteorites with small glassy inclusions) yields

longchain aromatic hydrocarbons such as fatty acids, amino acids, and

porphyrins – the compounds from which chlorophyll is built. In a series

of laboratory studies beginning with the famous Miller-Urey “spark-gap”

experiment, simple amino acids were formed by passing electrical

discharges through a flask containing gases that presumably composed the

earth’s early atmosphere. By changing the gases in accordance with later

theories of the primal atmosphere, other researchers have been able to

produce long-chain amino acids, ribose and glucose sugars, and

nucleoside phosphates – the precursors of DNA.

Hypothetically (albeit with an impressive degree of supporting

evidence), it is now possible to trace how anaerobic microorganisms

might have developed simple membranes and how, with increasing

complexity, they have emerged as distinct life forms capable of highly

developed metabolic processes. Few working hypotheses more strikingly

reveal the highly graded interface between the inorganic and the organic

than speculations on the formation of genetic structures. Such

speculations bring us conceptually to the most central feature of life

itself: the ability of a complex mosaic of organic macromolecules to

reproduce itself and yet to do so with changes significant enough to

render evolution possible. As early as 1944, Erwin Schrodiner may have

provided a clue to organic reproduction and evolution. In What is Life?

this eminent physicist observed that “the most essential part of a

living cell—the chromosome fibre—may suitably be called an ‘aperiodic

crystal.’” The “chromosome fibre” does not merely repeat itself and grow

additively, like a “periodic” crystal; instead, it changes significantly

to yield new forms—mutations—that initiate and carry on inherited,

evolutionary developments.

Graham Cairns-Smith has advanced another hypothesis (one among the many

now being proposed and soon forthcoming) that may help clarify the

nature of early reproductive processes. DNA is much too unstable

chemically, Cairns-Smith emphasizes, to have survived the radiation and

heat to which the early earth’s surface was exposed. In an analogy that

could bear improvement, Cairns-Smith compares DNA with a “magnetic tape:

it is very efficient if provided with a suitably protective environment,

suitably machined raw materials and suitably complex recording

equipment.” This machining equipment, he contends, can be found in the

organic world itself:

With a number of other considerations, this leads [Cairns-Smith] to the

idea of a form of crystallization process as the printing machine, with

some kind of crystal defects as the pattern-forming elements. Bring as

specific as possible, a mica-type clay seemed the most promising

possibility.

Minimally, Cairns-Smith’s hypothesis suggests that life, in its own ways

and following its own genetic evolution, is not miraculously separated

from phenomena existing in the inorganic world. I do not mean to imply

that biology can be reduced to physics any more than society can be

reduced to biology. Insofar as Cairns-Smith suggests that certain clay

crystals could possibly be templates of organic reproductive material

and thereby launch the evolution of secondary and still more advanced

forms of organic hereditary materials, he is also suggesting that nature

may be unified by certain common tendencies. Such tendencies would share

a like origin in the reality of the cosmos, however differently they

function at different levels of self-organization.

My point here is that substance and its properties are not separable

from life. Henri Bergson’s conception of the biosphere as an

“entropy-reduction” factor, in a cosmos that is supposedly moving toward

greater entropy or disorder, would seem to provide life with a cosmic

rationale for existence. That life forms may have this function need not

suggest that the universe has been exogenously “designed” by a

supernatural demiurge. But it does suggest that “matter” or substance

has inherent self-organizing properties, no less valid than the mass and

motion attributed to it by Newtonian physics.

Nor is there so great a lack of data, by comparison with the

conventional attributes of “matter,” as to render the new properties

implausible. At the very least, science must be what nature really is;

and in nature, life is (to use Bergsonian terminology) a counteracting

force to the second law of thermodynamics—or an “entropy-reduction”

factor. The self-organization of substance into ever more complex forms

– indeed, the importance of form itself as a correlate of function and

of function as a correlate of self-organization – implies the unceasing

activity to achieve stability. That stability as well as complexity is a

“goal” or substance; that complexity, not only inertness, makes for

stability; and finally, that complexity is a paramount feature of

organic evolution and of an ecological interpretation of biotic

interrelationships—all these concepts taken together are ways of

understanding the natural world as such, not mere mystical vagaries.

They are supported more by evidence than are the theoretical prejudices

that still exist today against a universe charged with meaning.

This much is clear: we can no longer be satisfied with a passive “dead”

matter that fortuitously collects into living substance. The universe

bears witness to an ever-striving, developing – not merely a “moving” –

substance, whose most dynamic and creative attribute is its ceaseless

capacity for self-organization into increasingly complex forms. Natural

fecundity originates primarily from growth, not from spatial “changes”

of location. Nor can we remove form from its central place in this

developmental and growth process, or function as an indispensable

correlate of form. The orderly universe that makes science a possible

project and its use of a highly concise logic – mathematics – meaningful

presupposes the correlation of form with function. From this

perspective, mathematics serves not merely as the “language” of science

but also as the logos of science. This scientific logos is above all a

workable project because it grasps a logos that inheres in nature – the

“object” of scientific investigation.

Once we step beyond the threshold of a purely instrumental attitude

toward the “language” of the sciences, we can admit even more attributes

into our account of the organic substance we call life. Conceived as

substance that is perpetually self-maintaining or metabolic as well as

developmental, life more clearly establishes the existence of another

attribute: symbiosis. Recent data supports the view that Peter

Kropotkin’s mutualistic naturalism not only applies to relationships

within and among species, but also applies morphologically – within and

among complex cellular forms. As William Trager observed more than a

decade ago:

The conflict in nature between different kinds of organism has been

popularly expressed in phrases like “struggle for existence” and

“survival of the fittest.” Yet few people realize that mutual

cooperation between different kinds of organisms—symbiosis—is just as

important, and that the “fittest” may be the one that most helps another

to survive.

Whether intentional or not, Trager’s description of the “fittest” is not

merely a scientific judgment made by an eminent biologist; it is also an

ethical judgment similar to the one Kropotkin derived from his own work

as a naturalist and his ideals as an anarchist. Trager emphasized that

the “nearly perfect” integration of “symbiotic microorganisms into the

economy of the host … has lead to the hypothesis that certain

intracellular organelles might have been originally independent

microorganisms.” Accordingly, the chloroplasts that are responsible for

photosynthetic activity in plants with eukaryotic, or nucleated, cells

are discrete structures that replicate by division, have their own

distinctive DNA very similar to that of circular bacteria, synthesize

their own proteins, and are bounded by two-unit membranes.

Much the same is true of the eukaryotic cell’s “powerhouse,” its

mitochondria. The eukaryotic cells are the morphological units of all

complex forms of animal and plant life. The Protista and fungi also

share these well-nucleated cell structures. Eucaryotes are aerobic and

include clearly formed subunits, or organelles. By contrast, the

prokaryotes lack nuclei; they are anaerobic, less specialized than the

eucaryotics, and they constitute the evolutionary predecessors of the

eucaryotics. In fact, they are the only life forms that could have

survived and flourished in the early earth’s atmosphere, with its mere

traces of free oxygen.

It is now widely accepted that the eukaryotic cells consist of highly

functional symbiotic arrangements of procaryotes that have become

totally interdependent with other constituents. Eucaryotic flagella

derive from anaerobic spirochetes; mitochondria, from prokaryotic

bacteria that were capable of respiration as well as fermentation; and

plant chloroplasts from “blue-green algae,” which have recently been

reclassified as cyanobacteria. The theory, now almost a biological

convention, holds that phagocytic ancestors of what were to become

eucaryotes absorbed (without digesting) certain spirochetes,

protomitochondria, and, in the case of photosynthetic cells, coccoid

cyanobacteria and chloroxybacteria. Existing phyla of multicellular

aerobic life forms thus had their origins in a symbiotic process that

integrated a variety of microorganisms into what we can reasonably be

called a colonial organism, the eukaryotic cell. Mutualism, not

predation, seems to have been the guiding principle for the evolution of

the highly complex aerobic life forms that are common today.

The prospect that life and all its attributes are latent in substance as

such, that biological evolution is rooted deeply in symbiosis or

mutualism, indicates how important it is to reconceptualize our notion

of “matter” as active substance. As Manfred Eigen has put it, molecular

self-organization suggests that evolution “appears to be an inevitable

event, given the presence of certain matter with specified autocatalytic

properties and under the maintenance of the finite (free) energy flow

[that is, solar energy] necessary to compensate for the steady

production of entropy.” Indeed, this self-organizing activity extends

beyond the emergence and evolution of life to the seemingly inorganic

factors that produced and maintain a biotically favorable “environment”

for the development of increasingly complex life forms. The traditional

assumption that life has been forced merely to adapt to an independent,

geologically and meteorologically determined “environment” is no longer

tenable. This dualism between the living and the nonliving world (which

is based on accidental point mutuations in life-forms that determine

what species will evolve or perish) is being replaced by the more

challenging notion that life creates to a great degree its own

environment on a worldwide scale.

Finally, the Modern Synthesis, to use Julian Huxley’s term for the

neo-Darwinian model of organic evolution in force since the early 1940s,

has also been challenged as too narrow and perhaps mechanistic in its

outlook. The image of a slow pace of evolutionary change emerging from

the interplay of small variations, which are selected for their

adaptability to the environment, is no longer as supportable as it seems

by the actual facts of the fossil record. Evolution seems to be more

sporadic, marked by occasional rapid changes, often delayed by long

periods of stasis. Highly specialized genera tend to speciate and become

extinct because of the very narrow, restricted niches they occupy

ecologically, while fairly generalized genera change more slowly and

become extinct less frequently because of the more diversified

environments in which they can exist. This “Effect Hypothesis,” advanced

by Elizabeth Vrba, suggests that evolution tends to be an immanent

striving rather than the product of external selective forces. Mutations

appear more like intentional mosaics than small, scratch-like changes in

the structure and function of life forms. As one observer notes,

“whereas species selection puts the forces of change on environmental

conditions, the Effect Hypothesis looks to internal parameters that

affect the rates of speciation and extinction.”

The notion of small, gradual point mutations (a theory that accord with

the Victorian mentality of strictly fortuitous evolutionary changes) can

be challenged on genetic grounds alone. Not only a gene but a

chromosome, both in varying combinations, may be altered chemically and

mechanically. Genetic changes may range from “simple” point mutations,

through jumping genes and transposable elements, to major chromosomal

rearrangements. It is also clear, mainly from experimental work, that

permutations of genetically determined morphological shifts are

possible. Small genetic changes can give rise to either minor or major

morphological modifications; the same holds true for large genetic

changes.

Trager’s observation that the “fittest” species may well be “the one

that most helps another to survive” is an excellent formula for

recasting the traditional picture of natural evolution as a meaningless

competitive tableau bloodied by the struggle to survive. There is a rich

literature, dating back to the late nineteenth century, that emphasizes

the role played by intraspecific and interspecific symbiosis in

fostering the survival of life forms on the planet. Kropotkin’s famous

Mutual Aid summarized the data at the turn of the century, and may have

added the word “mutualism” to the biological vocabulary on symbiosis.

Buchner has written a huge volume (1953) on the endosymbiosis of animals

with plant microorganisms alone. Henry has compiled a two-volume work,

Symbiosis, that brings the study of this subject up to the mid-1960s.

The evidence for interspecific symbiosis, particularly mutualism, is

nothing less than massive. Even more than Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid,

Henry’s work traces the evidence of mutualistic relationships from the

interspecific support relationships of rhizobia and legumes, through

plant associations, behavioral symbiosis in animals, and the great

regulatory mechanisms that account for homeostasis in planet-wide

biogeochemical relationships.

“Fitness” is rarely biologically meaningful as mere species survival and

adaptation. Left on this superficial level, it becomes an almost

personal adaptive enterprise that fails to account for the need of all

species for life support systems, be they autotrophic or heterotrophic.

Traditional evolutionary theory tends to abstract a species from its

ecosystem, to isolate it, and to deal with its survival in a remarkably

abstract fashion. For example, the mutually supportive interplay between

photosynthetic life forms and herbivores, far from providing evidence of

the simplest form of “predation,” or heterotrophy, is in fact

indispensable to soil fertility from animal wastes, seed distribution,

and the return (via death) of bulky organisms to an ever-enriched

ecosystem. Even large carnivores that prey upon large herbivores have a

vital function in selectively controlling large population swings by

removing weakened or old animals for whom life would in fact become a

form of “suffering.”

Ironically, it cheapens the meaning of the real suffering and cruelty

inflicted by society, reducing them to pain and predation, just as it

cheapens the meaning of hierarchy and domination, to deinstitutionalize

these socially charged terms and dissolve them into the individual

transitory links between more or less aggressive individuals within a

specific animal aggregation. The fear, pain, and commonly rapid death

that a wolfpack brings to a sick or old caribou are evidence not of

suffering or cruelty in nature but of a mode of dying that is integrally

wedded to organic renewal and ecological stability. Suffering and

cruelty properly belong to the realm of personal anguish, needless

affliction, and the moral degradation of those who torment the victim.

These notions cannot be applied to the removal of an organism that can

no longer function on a level that renders its life tolerable. It is

sheer distortion to associate all pain with suffering, all predation

with cruelty. To suffer the anguish of hunger, psychic injury,

insecurity, neglect, loneliness, and death in warfare, as well as of

prolonged trauma and terminal illness, cannot be equated with the pain

associated with predation and the unknowing fact of death. The spasms of

the natural world are rarely as cruel as the highly organised and

systematic afflictions that human society visits upon healthy, vital

beings—animal as well as human—afflictions that only the cunning of the

hominid mind can contrive.

Neither cruelty, aggression, nor competition – all anthropomorphic terms

– satisfactorily explains the emergence and evolution of life. For a

better explanation we should also turn to mutualism and a concept of

“fitness” that reinforces the support systems for the seemingly

“fittest.” If we are prepared to recognize the self-organizing nature of

life, the decisive role of mutualism as its evolutionary impetus obliges

us to redefine “fitness” in terms of an ecosystem’s supportive

apparatus. And if we are prepared to view life as a phenomenon that can

shape and maintain the very “environment” that is regarded as the

“selective” source of evolution, a crucial question arises: Is it

meaningful any longer to speak of “natural selection” as the motive

force of biological evolution? Or must we now speak of “natural

interaction” to take full account of life’s own role in creating and

guiding the “forces” that explain its evolution? Contemporary biology

leaves us with a picture of organic interdependencies that far and away

prove to be more important in shaping life forms that a Darwin, a

Huxley, or the formulators of the Modern Synthesis could ever have

anticipated. Life is necessary not only for its own self-maintenance but

also for its own self-formation. Complexity and subjectivity are more

than the effects of life; they are its integral attributes.

The grandeur of an authentic ecological sensibility, in contrast to the

superficial environmentalism so prevalent today, is that it provides us

with the ability to generalize in the most radical way these fecund,

supportive, interrelationships and their reliance on variety as the

foundation of stability. An ecological sensibility gives us a coherent

outlook that is explanatory in the most meaningful sense of the term,

and almost overtly ethical.

From the distant Hellenic era to the early Renaissance, nature was seen

primarily as a source of ethical orientation, a means by which human

thought found its normative bearings and coherence. Nonhuman nature was

not external to human nature and society. To the contrary, the mind was

uniquely part of a cosmic logos that provided objective criteria for

social and personal concepts of good and evil, justice and injustice,

beauty and ugliness, love and hatred – indeed, for an interminable

number of values by which to guide oneself toward the achievement of

virtue and the good life. The words dike and andike—justice and

injustice—permeated the cosmologies of the Greek nature philosophers.

They linger on in many terminological variations as part of the jargon

of modern natural science—notably as “attraction” and “repulsion.”

The principal fallacies of archaic cosmology generally lie not in its

ethical orientation but in its dualistic approach to nature. For all its

emphasis on speculation at the expense of experimentation, ancient

cosmology erred most when it tried to co-join a self-organizing, fecund

nature with a vitalizing force alien to the natural world itself.

Parmenide’s Dike, like Henri Bergson’s elan vital, are substitutes for

the self-organizing properties of nature, not motivating forces within

nature that account for an ordered world. A latent dualism exists in

monistic cosmologies that try to bring humanity and nature into ethical

commonality – a deus ex machine that corrects imbalances either in a

disequilibriated cosmos or in an irrational society. Truth wears an

unseen crown in the form of God or Spirit, for nature can never be

trusted to develop on its own spontaneous grounds, any more than the

body politic bequeathed to us by “civilization” can be trusted to manage

its own affairs.

These archaisms, with their theological nuances and their tightly

formulated teleologies, have been justly viewed as socially reactionary

traps. In fact, they tainted the works of Aristotle and Hegel as surely

as they mesmerized the minds of the medieval Schoolmen. But the errors

of classical nature philosophy lie not in its project of eliciting an

ethics from the natural world, but in the spirit of domination that

poisoned it from the start with a presiding, often authoritarian,

Supernatural “arbiter” who weighed out and corrected the imbalances or

“injustices” that erupted in nature. Hence the dark ancient gods were

there all the time, however rationalistic these early cosmologies may

seem; they had to be exorcised in order to render an ethical continuum

between the natural world and humanity more meaningful. Tragically, late

Renaissance thought was hardly more evolutionary than its antecedents,

and neither Galileo in science nor Descartes in philosophy performed

this much-needed act of surgery satisfactorily. They and their more

recent heirs separated the domains of nature and mind, recreating

deities of their own in the form of scientistic and epistemological

biases that are no less tainted by domination than the classical

tradition they demolished.

Today, we are faced with the possibility of permitting natural

evolution—not Dike, Justitia, God, Spirit, or an elan vital—to open

itself to us for ethical purposes on its own terms. Mutualism is a good

by virtue of its function in fostering the evolution of natural variety.

We require no Dike on the one hand or canons of “scientific objectivity”

on the other to affirm the role of community as a desideratum in nature

and society. Similarly, freedom is a good; its claims are validated by

what Hands Jonas so perceptively called the “inwardness” of life forms,

their “organic identity” and “adventure of form.” The clearly visible

effort, venture, indeed self-recognition, which every living being

exercises in the course of “its precarious metabolic continuity” to

preserve itself reveal—even in the most rudimentary of organisms—a sense

of identity and selective activity which Jonas has very appropriately

called evidence of a “germinal freedom.”

Finally, from the ever-greater complexity and variety that raises

subatomic particles through the course of evolution to those conscious,

self-reflexive life forms we call human beings, we cannot help but

speculate about the existence of a broadly and latent subjectivity in

substance itself that eventually yields mind and intellectuality. In the

reactivity of substance, in the sensibility of the least-developed

microorganisms, in the elaboration of nerves, ganglia, the spinal cord,

and the layered development of the brain, one senses an evolution of

mind so coherent and compelling that there is a strong temptation to

describe it with Manfred Eigen’s term, “inevitable.” It is hard to

believe that mere fortuity accounts for the capacity of life forms to

respond neurologically to stimuli; to develop highly organized nervous

systems; to be able to foresee however dimly, the results of their

behavior and later conceptualize this foresight clearly and

symbolically. A true history of mind may have to begin with the

attributes of substance itself; perhaps in the hidden or covert efforts

of the simplest crystals to perpetuate themselves, in the evolution of

DNA from unknown chemical sources to a point where it shares a principle

of replication already present in the inorganic world, and in the

speciation of nonliving as well as living molecules as a result of those

intrinsic self-organizing features of reality we call their

“properties.”

Hence our study of nature—all archaic philosophies and epistemological

biases aside—exhibits a self-evolving patterning, a “grain,” so to

speak, that is implicitly ethical. Mutualism, freedom, and subjectivity

are not strictly human values or concerns. They appear, however

germinally, in larger cosmic and organic processes that require no

Aristotelian God to motivate them, no Hegelian Spirit to vitalize them.

If social ecology provides little more than a coherent focus to the

unity of mutualism, freedom, and subjectivity as aspects of a

cooperative society that is free of domination and guided by reflection

and reason, it will remove the taints that blemished a naturalistic

ethics from its inception; it will provide both humanity and a natural

world with a common ethical voice. No longer would we have need of a

Cartesian—and more recently, a neo-Kantian—dualism that leaves the

natural world mute and mind isolated from the larger world of phenomena

around it. To vitiate community, to arrest the spontaneity that lies at

the core of a self-organizing reality toward ever greater complexity and

rationality, to abridge freedom – these actions would cut across the

grain of natural evolution, deny our heritage in its evolutionary

processes, and dissolve our legitimacy and function in the world of

life. No less than this ethically rooted legitimation is at state – all

its grim ecological consequences aside—in achieving an ecological

society and articulating an ecological ethics.

Mutualism, self-organization, freedom, and subjectivity, together with

social ecology’s principles of unity in diversity, informed spontaneity,

and non-hierarchical relationships, coheers into an ethics of

complementarity that sees human beings in a rational, ecological society

as playing the creative role of “nature” rendered self-conscious. Aside

from the ecological responsibilities this ethics confers on our species

as the self-reflexive voice of nature, it literally defines us.

“Nature,” conceived as natural evolution, does not “exist” for us to

use; it legitimates us and our uniqueness ecologically. Like the concept

of “being,” these principles of social ecology require no explanation,

merely verification. They are elements of an ethical ontology, not

“rules of a game” that can be changed to suit one’s personal needs.

A society that cuts across the grain of this ethical ontology raises the

entire question of its very reality as a meaningful and rational entity.

“Civilization” has bequeathed us a vision of otherness as “polarization”

and “defiance,” and of organic “inwardness” as a perpetual “war” for

self-identity. Whatever its validity in the past, this vision now

threatens to utterly subvert the ecological legitimation of humanity and

the reality of society as a potentially rational dimension of the world

around us. Trapped by the perception of a “nature” that stands in

perpetual opposition to our humanity, we have redefined humanity itself

to mean strife as a condition for harmony, control as a condition for

consciousness, domination as a condition for freedom, and opposition as

a condition for reconciliation.

Yet an entirely different ethical, philosophical, and social

dispensation can be read from the concept of otherness and the

inwardness of life. Given a world that life itself made conducive to

evolution – indeed, benign, in view of a larger ecological vision of

“Nature” – we can formulate an ethics of complementarity that is

nourished by variety and creative participation in the natural world

guided by reason and empathy, rather than one that guards individual

inwardness from a threatening, hostile, invasive otherness. Indeed, the

inwardness of life can be seen as an expression of mutualism, not as

mere resistance to entropy and the terminus of all activity. Entropy

itself can be seen as one feature in a larger cosmic metabolism, with

life as its anabolic dimension. Finally, self hood can be viewed as the

result of integration, community, support, and sharing without any loss

of individual identity and personal spontaneity.

Civilization as we know it today is more mute that the nature for which

it professes to speak and more blind that the elemental forces it

professes to control. Indeed, civilization today lives in hatred of the

world around it and in grim hatred of itself. Its gutted cities, wasted

lands, poisoned air and water, and mean-spirited greed constitute a

daily indictment of its odious immortality. A world so demeaned may well

be beyond redemption, at least within the terms of its own institutional

framework. The thermonuclear fires and the ecological disasters that may

engulf our planet will render it irretrievably inhospitable to life—a

dead witness to cosmic failure. If only because this planet’s history,

including itself human history, has been so full of promise, hope,

creativity, it deserves a better fate than what seems to confront it in

the years ahead.