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CADRE Library
"The Biology of Globalization"
Copyright 1997 by Elisabet Sahtouris
http://cyberjournal.org/.../Biology-of-Globalization.txt
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(continued...)
Practice did not bear out theory.
While we believed in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--
convincing in the first decades following WWII, our Congresses
were gradually bought off by corporate interests. As Paul Hawken
pointed out, "Washington D.C. has become a town of appearances and
images, where sleight of (political) hand has largely replaced the
clumsy system of payoffs, outright bribes and backroom deals of
old....One percent of American society owns nearly 60 percent of
corporate equities and about 40 percent of the total wealth of
this nation. These are the plutocrats who wield the power and
control this pre-eminent "company town" while trying to convince
the other 99 percent of the citizenry that the system works in our
best interests, too." (The Ecology of Commerce, Harper Collins, NY
1993, p. 111) Not that outright bribes are obsolete, given the
average of eight junket trips per congressional season that each
member of the House of Representatives is treated to by corporate
benefactors. When is the last time you bought your Congressman a
hotdog, or took up a community collection to buy him a competing
vacation golfing in Bermuda with your City Council?
In biological terms, megacorporations, now globally legitimized by
the WTO and the GATT, are overriding the interests of their
embedded holons: nations, local communities and individuals. As
Nader points out, "Under WTO rules, for example, certain
*objectives* are forbidden to all domestic legislatures [national,
state, county, city] ... including [objectives such as] providing
any significant subsidies to promote energy conservation,
sustainable farming practices, or environmentally sensitive
technologies."
Take the living system most intimately familiar to all of us: the
human body. We've long known that our bodies behave as a community
of cells. It has a central nervous government that continually
monitors all its parts and functions, ever making intelligent
decisions that serve the interest of the whole enterprise, and an
immune defense system to protect its integrity and health against
unfamiliar intruders.
More recently, microbiology has revealed the relative autonomy of
individual cells in exquisite detail: every cell constantly making
its own decisions, for example, of what to filter in and out
through its membrane, and which segments of DNA to retrieve and
copy from its nuclear gene library for use in maintaining its
cellular welfare. Hardly the automatons we had thought them to be!
It is abundantly clear that the needs and interests of individual
cells, their organ "communities" and the whole body must be
continually negotiated to achieve their dynamic equilibrium,
commonly called balance. Cancer is an example of what happens when
this balance is lost, with the proliferation of individual cells
outweighing the needs of the whole. In the same sense a mature
ecosystem-- say a rainforest-- is a complex ongoing process of
negotiations among species and between individual species and the
self-regulating whole comprised by the various micro and macro
species along with air, water, rocks, sunshine, magnetic fields,
etc. As Soros recognizes: "Species and their environment are
interactive, and one species serves as part of the environment for
the others. There is a feedback mechanism..." among levels.
It should be obvious by now that I have a respectful view of life
in evolution as a self-organizing enterprise-- nature may stumble
at times in its improvisational dance, or make crude moves,
especially on the part of young aggressive species, but it is far
too intelligent to proceed by accident. One can discern in
evolution a repeating pattern in which aggressive competition
leads to the threat of extinction, which is then avoided by the
formation of cooperative alliances.
New biological information on nucleated cells, multicellular
bodies and mature ecosystems as cooperative enterprises challenge
our ingrained view of antagonistic competition as the sole driving
force of evolution, which was adopted as the rationale for
capitalist competition. (Note that the cooperative side of
evolution was emphasized in the Soviet Union.) As Soros says,
"there is something wrong with making the survival of the fittest
a guiding principle of civilized society. This social Darwinism is
based on an outmoded theory of evolution."
What is it that prevents your cells, or your organs, from pursuing
their self-interest competitively such that relatively few "win"
and most "lose?" The obvious answer is that they are part of a
cooperative-- a multicelled creature, a whole entity that began as
a single cell, but is more than the sum of all the cells cloned
from it. That creature, like every cell comprising it, is
autopoietic; that is, self-creating and self- maintaining, thus
necessarily self-reflexive and self-interested.
Oddly this notion of simultaneous self-interest at several levels
of living systems is not yet popular among evolutionists. Darwin,
as we all know, held the competitive individual to be the driving
force of evolution (the capitalist version), while later
biologists countered with the alternative of species
self-interest, wherein individuals demonstrated altruism and
self-sacrifice for the common good (the communist version). Then
along came Richard Dawkins saying both sides of the debate were in
error because competition among selfish genes drove evolution
(micro-capitalism?).
This is a pervasive either/or syndrome in our society, exemplified
by setting ourselves the choice of capitalism or communism, and
often enough between thinking and acting locally or globally. It
seems to me that all these evolutionists are right, but not right
enough. The evolution of living systems, as well as their ongoing
livelihood, is an improvisational dance of negotiations among
individual parts and levels of organization -- among the holons in
a holarchy. This dance is energized by the self-interest of every
part and level, choreographed by compromises made in the tacit
knowledge that no level may be sacrificed without killing the
whole. At its best it becomes elegant, harmonious, beautiful in
its dynamics of non-antagonistic counterpoint and resolution.
This, I believe, is the Popper/Soros vision of the Open Society,
where the interests of all levels would be open to discussion and
thereby harmonized.
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An Inspirational Tale of Ancient Times
In studying the Earth's evolution, the most fascinating story I know is
that of ancient beings who created an incredibly complex lifestyle,
rife with technological successes such as electric motors, nuclear
energy, polyester, DNA recombination and worldwide information systems.
They also produced - and solved - devastating environmental and social
crises and provided a wealth of lessons we would do well to consider.
This was not a Von Daniken scenario; the beings were not from outer
space. They were our own minute but prolific forebears: ancient
bacteria. In one of his popular science essays, Lewis Thomas,
estimating the mitochondrial descendants of ancient bacteria in our
cells as half our dry bulk, suggested that we may be huge taxis they
invented to get around in safely (Lives of a Cell, 1974).
From whatever perspective we choose to define our relationship with
them, it is clear we have now created the same crises they did some two
billion years ago. Further, we are struggling to find the very
solutions they arrived at - solutions that made our own evolution
possible and that could now improve the prospects of our own far
distant progeny, not to mention our more immediate future. I owe my
understanding of this remarkable tale to microbiologist Lynn Margulis,
whose painstaking scientific sleuthing traced these events back more
than two billion years.
The bacteria's remarkable technologies (all of which still exist among
today's free-living bacteria) include the electric motor drive, which
functioned by the attachment of a flagellum to a disk rotating in a
magnetic field; the stockpiling of uranium in their colonies, probably
to heat their communities with nuclear energy; perfect polyester
(biodegradable, of course) and their worldwide communications and
information system, based on the ability to exchange (recombine) DNA
with each other.
Yet, like ourselves, with our own proud versions of such wondrous
technologies, the ancient bacteria got themselves deeper and deeper
into crisis by pursuing win/lose economics based on the reckless
exploitation of nature and each other. The amazing and inspirational
part of the story is that entirely without benefit of brains, these
nigh invisible yet highly inventive little creatures reorganized their
destructively competitive lifestyle into one of creative cooperation.
The crisis came about because respiring bacteria (breathers) depended
on ultra-violet light as a critical component in the creation of their
natural food supply of sugars and acids, while photosynthesizing
bacteria (bluegreens) emitted vast quantities of polluting oxygen which
created an atmospheric ozone layer that prevented ultra-violet light
from reaching the surface of the Earth. Cut off from their food supply,
the hi-tech breathers, with their electric motor rapid transport, began
to invade the bodies of larger more passive fermenting bacteria
(bubblers) to literally eat their insides-- a process I have called
bacterial colonialism.
The invaders multiplied within these colonies until their resources
were exhausted and all parties died. No doubt this happened countless
times before they learned cooperation. But somewhere along the line,
the bloated bags of bacteria also included some bluegreens, which could
replenish food supplies if the motoring breathers pushed the sinking
enterprises up into brighter primeval waters. Perhaps it was this
lifesaving use of solar energy that initiated the shift to cooperation.
In any case, bubblers, bluegreens, and breathers eventually contributed
their unique capabilities to the common task of building a workable
society. In time, each donated some of their "personal" DNA to the
central resource library and information hub that became the nucleus of
their collective enterprise: the huge (by bacterial standards)
nucleated cells of which our own bodies and those of all Earth beings
other than bacteria are composed.
This process of uniting disparate and competitive entities into a
cooperative whole- a multi-creatured cell, so to speak-- was repeated
when nucleated cells aggregated into multi-celled creatures, and it is
happening now for a third time as we multi-celled humans are being
driven by evolution to form a cooperative global cell in harmony with
each other and with other species. This new enterprise must be a
unified global democracy of diverse membership, organized into locally
productive and mutually cooperative "bioregions," like the organs of
our bodies, and coordinated by a centralized government as dedicated in
its service to the wellbeing of the whole as is the nervous system of
our bodies. Anything less than such cooperation will probably bring us
quickly to the point of species extinction so that the other species
remaining may get on with the task.
-- adapted from Elisabet Sahtouris' "The Evolution of Governance"
IN CONTEXT, #36, Fall 1993;
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC36/Sahtour.htm
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My hope lies in the fact that life is resilient and that the
greatest catastrophes in our planet's life history have spawned
the greatest creativity. Ancient bacteria once blanketed the Earth
by themselves, inventing all the ways of making a living still
employed today (fermentation, photosynthesis and respiration) and
devouring its "resources" with downright human thoroughness. (See
box) Finding themselves in crisis, they invaded each other for new
"resources" in a phase of bacterial imperialism we echoed so much
later in our ignorance. This phase led to renewed crisis, because
their early attempts at "globalization" into huge communities
lacked protection for all participating members' wellbeing. But
somehow they finally managed to hit on the cooperative scheme we
call the nucleated cell, a huge bacterial community with a
peaceful division of labor-- all this without benefit of brains,
in time to avoid the extinction of all Earthlife eons ago. In
fact, their invention of these huge cells is what makes you and me
possible, for each of our cells is one of their descendant
cooperatives, as microbiologist Lynn Margulis has so elegantly
shown us (Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, 1981; Early Life, 1982).
To see one of the actual cooperative evolutionary steps to
multicelled creatures, watch the slime mold. It silently plays out
its cyclic dance beneath many a rotten log, alternating its phases
as individual cells with phases of communal creaturehood brought
on by crises, as if to remind us of our own evolution as
multicellular biological beings and to inspire us to our own next
step.
Dynamics of Natural Democracy:
Let's explore this driving dynamic a little further. As
Aristophanes said of marriage partners a long time ago, "can't
live with 'em; can't live without 'em." Couplehood has its own
interests, frequently in conflict with those of either partner. Or
as one Indian creation myth has it, the cosmos began as a sea of
milk in which a tiny wavelet formed, torn ever after between
wanting to be itself and longing to merge back into the sea. Both
are metaphors of individual and community in the endlessly
creative dialog and metalog of self-expression, already recognized
in ancient times. What matters in this dialog is that the
contradictions do not become antagonistic.
No one denies that we humans are social/communal creatures as
surely as ants and gorillas, or that both capitalism and communism
are social systems-- one cannot practice either as a hermit. Had
we just a little vision we would see them both as experiments and
evaluate them both as having imbalanced the interests of
individual and community respectively, by making one subservient
to the other, rather than putting them in balance with each other.
It is of considerable interest here to observe that capitalism and
communism both were in part inspired by the democratic political
economy and social structure of the Native American Haudenosaunee,
a union of native nations the Europeans called Iroquois. Ben
Franklin, influential with the other founding fathers of the USA,
on one side and Friedrich Engels, who influenced Karl Marx, on the
other were inspired by this unique democracy. As Paula Underwood,
herself of an Iroquois tradition, points out, "My tradition helps
us learn that... individual and group needs must be met in ongoing
ways for the People to survive as a People." She continues, "As we
try to consciously and conscientiously fit economics and business
back into a holistic approach to life and living; there is much
that can be learned from societies and communities that have never
forgotten that wholeness;... communities that understand Life as
flows of energy,... [in which] everyone receives basic support....
everyone contributes... no part is separate from any other part..
[and the] health of the whole enables the health of any part
thereof... [and] sickness of the smallest part impacts the whole."
(Creation and Organization: A Native American Looks at Economics;
World Business Academy Journal, vol 10 no 4, 1996). Unfortunately,
neither the capitalist nor the communist systems inspired by the
Haudenosaunee ever really thought in these terms.
It is nevertheless a lesson to be learned from many native
cultures that humankind is but one holon within the Earth
holarchy. In such awareness, we all would see clearly the
advantage in negotiating (not eliminating) our human differences,
and we would also cease and desist immediately our denial of
planetary interests and our profligate destruction of that natural
entity sustaining us with ever more difficulty.
If we were an intelligent species-- and I suspect aliens would
have to judge us otherwise given our knowing destruction of our
own life support system and our ridiculously juvenile antagonisms
over what belongs to whom-- we would look to the planet that
spawned us for guidance in human affairs, as was the original
purpose of natural philosophy in ancient Greece. It would then
become obvious that human affairs have reached the danger level at
which cooperation must restore the imbalances of aggressive
competition and hoarding if we are not to go extinct along with
the tens of thousands of other species we are knocking out of the
game each year.
(continued...)
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