This week’s discussion brings into conversation the stubborn legacy of bully in a box logic and the coercive inanity of holistic thought.
Reducing material content to a set of independent particles and spatio-temporal context into a determined and determinate container that the particles compete amongst themselves to fit into is implicit in Darwinian theories of evolution. This competition culminates in the victory of the most favored race in a battle for supremacy or ‘survival of the fittest’. An idea that effectively narrows diversity via the preservation of the fitted whereby individuals and groups of individuals are abstracted from their spatial context and time is fixed in place to establish a frozen freeze-frame in order to measure post hoc viability. Such a mechanism, if it were evolutionarily feasible, would eventually limit out in monopoly. Darwinian and neo-Darwinian adherents ignore this consideration by introducing random mutation as an agency of change. Hereby, Nature becomes the absolute, independent selector with its Expressions racing to adapt or die; unable to preserve its precious hereditary calx. “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes” proclaimed Richard Dawkins.
If there is a lesson to be learned from a theory used to justify racism, eugenics, imperialism, and class inequality it is that natural generation of variation precedes any derivation of individuation. Life is dependent upon making openings for creative exploration and the evolution of varied patterns and relationships is a continuing dynamic process of diversification. In The Origin of Life Patterns Alan Rayner wrote “Life and the cosmos evolve through the receptive natural inclusion of what’s possible in changing circumstances, not the competitive elimination of what’s impossible in a fixed arena’. Is our current culture’s empty feeling of what is wanting ~ what is needing anticipating an evolutionarily innovative philosophy of natural inclusionality?
Perhaps the popularity for the preservation of the favored races in a struggle for life is abetted by the notion that individual identity is self-contained. Even Albert Einstein who appreciated the immensity of imagination stated “The environment is everything that isn’t me”. By regarding individuals or particles as discrete entities discontinuous with their surround, either/or boundaries are established leading to the rationalization of individualistic competition and collectivistic co-operation. How do ensembled life-forms mutually attune with and contribute to the diverse, complementary, and evolving inhabitants of their neighborhood?
