Natural Religion 09
Chapter nine — A religion of love
A religion of love
“Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.”
What is love? Love is not a thing. Love seems to be a force, a force that binds. But not any force that binds. Love is not gravity, for example. Bound by the gravity of their mass, hydrogen atoms collapse to form galaxies, stars and planets. But — as far as we know — love is not needed in the process.
In a star, gravity prevents the gas atoms from drifting away — and instead makes them spin around one another at increasing speeds until they become hot enough to start a thermonuclear explosion. Stars are essentially big clumps of burning gas atoms, and planets are just fragments of such stars which got stuck in their orbit, and are now cooling.
As we have seen, most of the visible portion of our universe is made up of these self-organizing or morphodynamic phenomena that emerge spontantaneously when enough energy-mass gets to undergo gravitational collapse, enforcing the emergence of certain definite forms or patterns of coordination and correlation among the energy particles involved within the local system.
But as we’ve also seen, the local increase in order is more than made up for by a net increase of disorder in the system’s surroundings, mostly via radiation. Stars — as all regularizing processes — are actually entropy maximizers, and those marvelous forms they create in the sky are really the most efficient way that energy finds to dissipate itself. Yet if the entire universe is really just a Big Bang exploding, a huge cosmic firework lightning up in the darkness of space, then where is the love?
In chapter 3 we introduced the concept of constraint, whose Latin etymology literally means “that which binds together”. In statistical thermodynamics, a constraint is that which determines the energetic potential of a system by restricting the total number of its possible states or ‘degrees of freedom’. The Helmholtz and Gibbs energies, for example, are “the energies available in a system to do useful work when the temperature and volume or the pressure and temperature are fixed, respectively.” In colloquial terms, a constraint can be understood as some limiting factor which reduces the options available.
So how can a limitation of freedom produce a creative potential? As counter-intuitive as it may seem, that’s how it actually works. Take your car’s engine, for example: when the gasoline explodes in the combustion chamber, the hard metal cylinder constrains the explosion’s possible paths (which would otherwise spread out incontrollably in all directions, as for the 2nd Law). The cylinder imposes constraints which limit the explosion’s tendency towards irregularity, and channel its energy into regularized (=useful) work.
While the metal cylinder is an extrinsic constraint appositely designed and set up by the engineers, constraints can also be intrinsic: in the case of your leg, for example, the knee is an articulation that effectively limits your leg’s range of possible movements, but also what gives you the ability to walk, jump, etc.
In Incomplete Nature, Terrence Deacon enigmatically defines constraints as
“what is not there but could have been”:
“It is precisely by virtue of what is not enabled, but could otherwise have occurred that a change can be forced.” — he argues — “whenever new constraints are generated, a specific capacity to do work is also generated.”
The advantage of this new, “negative” way of assessing order and organization is that it’s far more scientific than all the previous metaphysical speculations about archetypical forms and ideas, so popular with the old Axial Age philosophers.
The constraint-based approach doesn’t rely on any kind of observer-dependent criteria for establishing what ‘order’ is, since it can evaluate objectively any increase of similarity (order) within a system by measuring the reduced possible differences in state (disorder) brought upon by some emergent constraint.
“If not all possible states are realized, variety in the ways things can differ is reduced. Difference is the opposite of similarity. So, for a finite constellation of events or objects, any reduction of difference is an increase in similarity.” Order can thus be understood “as simply fewer total differences”.
The higher precision made possible by this new method of enquiry proved to be especially useful for dealing with the mystery of life and consciousness. In the second half of the 20th Century, after the discovery of DNA by Crick and Watson in 1953, many thought that life’s secret had finally been revealed: genes — the units of information coded at the heart of each organic cell and carried forward from generation to generation — were the key to explain it.
Deacon reports: — “In a 1968 paper entitled “Life’s Irreducible Structure”, the philosopher-scientist Michael Polanyi argued that the crucial difference between life and chemistry is the constraint that DNA imposes on the range of chemical reactions that tend to occur in an organism.
Genetic information introduces these constraints by virtue of the ways that it generates molecules which either act as catalysts to facilitate certain chemical reactions or serve as structural elements which minimize certain other molecular interactions. Polanyi argues that this formal influence is what separates life from nonliving chemistry, and distinguishes both man-made machines and living organisms from other physical systems.
For this reason, he argues that this formal aspect cannot be reduced to chemistry. This is an important insight, but it falls short of resolving the issue of life’s ententional features”: who is the self interpreting the code?
Most scientists today believe in natural selection as the fundamental driver of biological evolution — in Richard Dawking’s words “The Blind Watchmaker” orchestrating an endless struggle for resources among selfish lineages of genetic codes. Genes are seen as self-replicating patterns competing to get themselves copied, and organisms are just the medium through which they get to influence their odds. But how are genes actually performing their function? How do they do it? At a closer look, DNA molecules are just long but relatively inert molecules which cannot autonomously self-replicate nor possess any intrinsic property aiding their replication. Like viruses (DNA fragments) need a host cell to reproduce, genes need to be inserted in the complex dynamics of a living organism in order to function and be replicated.
As Dawking pointed out himself, any terminology implying agency such as “selfish” or “active” in relation to genes is to be intended only metaphorically. Deacon notes that “there is a curious irony in treating the only two totally passive contributors to natural selection — the genome and the selection environment — as though they were active principles of change.”
Replicator theory assumes that the patterns embodied in the nucleotide sequences along a DNA strand are information in themselves, analogously to the bit strings entered into digital computers to control their operation. Just like bit strings stored in computer memory, genetic information can be copied again and again with minimal loss because of its discrete digital organization. The genetic data is then transcribed into the body’s chemical operations in an analogous way to how bit strings are transcribed into electrical operations by computer circuits. In this sense, genes are a bit like the organism’s software.
But what the computer analogy misses out is exemplified in the person of the human being — which in relation to a computer represents both the engineer who created it and the end user for whom it was created.
If computers were not built in such way that they could read the strings of bits and interpret them correctly, those strings would carry no relevant information whatsoever and would represent only random patterns of signals. Likewise, the information carried in a genetic code becomes relevant only if the nucleotide sequence is embedded within a very special kind of dynamical system with certain unique characteristics (self-generation, maintenance, and reproduction of its functional constraints) — which is able to interpret the code and make some use out of it.
Taken apart from its dynamical setting, a DNA macromolecule would be little more than a special case of crystallization. Information needs to be interpreted by someone in order to effectively become information about something. Genes don’t work. It is the living cell, with its metabolism, which does all the chemical work necessary for genes to be replicated. And it is again the living cell which utilizes the genetic code as an instruction manual to synthesize all the proteins necessary to perform its build and repair function.
A physical entity able to do all of the above must therefore be present before evolution by natural selection (differential replication of patterns) can even begin to take place. Its dynamical setup is not trivial: as Goodenough and Deacon have explained in a 2008 paper, the process of life differs from the simple massing of atoms in other self-organizing processes since while the latter are self-undermining (their tendency is to dissipate as fast as possible the energy gradients on which they depend), “life basically works by maintaining the conditions wherein such cycles can operate reliably.”
We have seen already how two of these morphodynamic processes — an autocatalytic cycle and a self-assemblying capsid — could end up reciprocally constraining one another so that each one prevents the demise of the other. In the autogen hypothesis, the autocatalytic cycle is stopped short of completion by a capsid that forms as a byproduct of the cycle itself, and freezes the catalytic reactions by temporarily isolating the catalysts from the surrounding reactants. But by keeping the catalysts close together, the capsid also retains their energetic potential, so that when the capsid gets broken the cycle will resume, and subsequently regenerate once again the capsid itself.
“In this configuration each self-organizing process would reciprocally contribute to conditions promoting the stability, persistence, or recurrence of the other.”
With the autogen, entropy production does increase but not to a maximum, since the complementary constraints that each morphodynamic process generates with respect to the other get locked up in a synergistic coupling:
“Full dissipation is prevented at a point where optimal conditions for rapidly reinitiating the process are achieved. An autogen is thus effectively a negentropy ratchet. This ratchet effect, which conserves constraint at the cost of stopping entropy generation prematurely, is the secret to life’s tendency to preserve information about past adaptive organization. This enables both the adaptive fine-tuning and the complexification of life by making it possible to build on previous successes. [As seen in chapter 4,] this retained foundation of reproduced constraints is effectively the precursor to genetic information.”
Autogens and their descendants — living organisms — do not maximize the rate of entropy production/energy dissipation. Instead, they use the available energy to constantly regenerate their synergistic constraints, which ultimately divert and slow down the entropic process by increasing the amount of useful work they can extract from it.
So, whereas other dissipative processes merely propagate and amplify their constraints, living processes additionally preserve and reproduce them. This is the common theme of both life and evolution.
No wonder it was so hard to find reciprocal love, aka “the secret of eternal life”: love cannot be reduced to some material part, since love is a special kind of constraint — something that does not occur — a formal quality of the living process as a whole and not a specific molecule nor a chemical reaction.
Love is more exactly that synergistic coupling in the autogen’s dynamic which tends to regenerate itself. For Deacon and team, the synergistic coupling is both the original self (see soul or elan vital) and the original purpose (continuation or not ending). In the autogen case, the synergistic coupling happens to maintain itself and this provides, for the first time in the universe, “the basis for describing its behavior as both means and ends. Its means are the synergistic coupling; its ends are the maintenance of that synergistic coupling.”
The old mechanicistic paradigm was inadequate to grasp this dynamical reciprocity between parts which characterizes the nature of all living processes, and which is irreducible to the material components simply because a dynamic constraint is not a “thing” but rather “the absence of possible states not being realized”, and thus it cannot be further reduced or eliminated.
“The life of an organism doesn’t reside in its parts, it is embodied in the global organization of the living processes. […]
Something critical is ignored in the analytic effort to collapse a systemic relationship down to one of its apparent component parts”:
Rational analysis segregates the complex whole of a living system into simpler parts, but while this procedure doesn’t remove anything from life’s material substrate, it loses on the way what’s most important: its “organic wholeness.” In life, as we’ve seen — every part is there for the sake of the other, reciprocally as end, and at the same time as means. — The so-called parts of an organism (the individual molecules, organelles, cells, tissue types, and organs) are not parts in the sense of machine parts. An organism is not composed of separate parts assembled together, since each part is the result of a series of developmental and evolutionary processes which happened diachronically (over time) and during which progressively new differentiations and recombinations of the synergistic constraints have emerged from a prior, less-differentiated state.
“The boundaries and divisions do not correspond to relationships between functional units, because the functional units are synergistically integrated processes, not distinct parts.”
As we’ve explained in chapter four, living organisms have evolved from the minimal autogen as tangled hierachies of teleodynamic processes emerged from the original synergistic coupling. A proto-consciousness in the form of self-representation appeared with the template autogen. Single cells merged into multicellular organisms. Subjectivity came about as the nervous system developed, and culture followed as individuals subjects coalesced into social groups. The evolution of living consciousness is a long history of trials and errors, where organisms tried to interpret the world around them as best as they could in order to stay alive, and natural selection progressively refined their expectations by eliminating the mistakes. In Karl Popper’s words:
“From the amoeba to Einstein, the growth of knowledge is always the same: we try to solve our problems, and to obtain, by a process of elimination, something approaching adequacy in our tentative solution”.
But consciousness (or mind) is not the source of life. It emerged later, as an instrument for life’s continuation. That’s why there’s no such thing as a “disembodied consciousness”, neither in the mystical sense of absolute spirit nor in the technological sense of artificial intelligence. The ententional or teleodynamic nature of living processes depends on the synergistic constraints which keep the individual organisms and their social organizations together.
As Jeremy Sherman puts it, living beings are neither ghosts nor machines: they are self-perpetuating dynamical systems. Purposefulness, or teleology, emerges as a direct consequence of the autogen’s synergistic dynamics and thereby is not a mere illusion — as thought by materialistic science — nor is it some ineffable metaphysical substance — as believed by the ancient religions.
Life and consciousness are also not inherent properties or preconditions of the entire universe, as supposed by many panpsychist traditions from the Vedas to certain modern interpretations of quantum physics. Since we are intrinsically teleological as living organisms (we have purposes, goals), we tend to project our end-directedness on the external world and conclude that everything else must also have a purpose and goal. This led to a series of misunderstandings:
Initially man mistook natural phenomena like storms or earthquakes for “enraged spirits wanting to destroy his village”. Later he become convinced that the entire universe had come into existence for the divine intercession of an almighty God. Then he figured how on a scale of “purposefulness” no other living creature was as “purposeful” as a civilized, enlightened human spirit! Only humans had free will, reason and some great plans for the future. Only humans had “no constraints” , as proclaimed by Pico della Mirandola in his 1491 “De Dignitate Hominis” — where God tells man:
“All other beings are constrained by the natural laws I have imposed upon them. You will determine them yourself, constrained by no limits, if not by your choices, to which only you must respond. […] I’ve put you at the centre of the world”.
This exhalted anthropocentric perspective elevated the human subject to god-like status and brought us to consider the rest of life as a means and human progress as the only end. The objectification of Nature, seen by humanity as a totally measurable and disposable resource, was thus set to become one of the fundamental axioms of the modern age.
Among the advocates of this approach were some of the enlightened fathers of the scientific method, such as Sir Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei and Renè Descartes. In their eyes, Nature looked like a giant mechanical clockwork. Given enough knowledge — they thought — everything natural could be explained rationally, hence the knowledge equals power equation.
Knowledge was seen as the greatest power because by methodically extracting all her secrets one by one, Nature could finally be subdued by human reason, whose ultimate goal was the achievement of an all-knowing intelligence (as in Laplace’s demon) to establish its rational order over the entire natural world.
In some infamous passages, Bacon and his friends end up arguing that Nature “must be taken by the forelock”, “bidden to your service” and “made your slave”. The scientist’s work is to “shake her to her foundations”, to “conquer and subdue her”. She must be “put on a rack”, and “her deepest secrets tortured out of her”.
But on a theoretical level, the modern paradigm collapsed under the deadly blows of the same experimental method that had once aided its own birth. First Einstein’s relativity theory and then Heisenberg’s discovery of the uncertainty principle in quantum physics completely debunked the old mechanistic models of reality. And on a practical level, as soon as the power of mankind went beyond the pillars of Hercules represented by the physical atom and the biological cell, came the first signs of a retaliation from the Gods.
The power over Nature — power as cognitive and practical domination — extended itself to the point when Nature started insurrecting to free herself from the human yoke. The overconfident progress of our sciences awakened a higher power that is now imposing some long forgotten limitations for the sake of biospheric equilibrium.
As explained by Hans Jonas in his “The Responsibility Principle” (1979):
“The profound paradox of power determined by knowledge, that Bacon couldn’t grasp, is that such a power, although effectively establishing a kind of ‘dominion’ over nature (by increasing its use), has brought at the same time to the complete submission of ourselves. Power became autonomous, but its promises turned into threats, its prospects of illimitate progress into apocalyptic scenarios”.
The problems began because the analytical approach was unable to grasp the structural interconnectedness between humanity and the rest of nature, which is not reducible to the simplifications of a purely quantitative method. The reality of a natural element is not in its detachment, but in its correlation with the other elements. Rational analysis, while sectioning the whole into parts, loses along the way the living web of reciprocities, a web that won’t be possible to recompose later on by the synthetic association of dead parts.
Nature’s breakdown, following the reckless expolitation to which humanity has put her through, is the warning sign that something essential eludes our mind when we try to define reality by cutting out linear chains of cause and effect isolated from their ecological context.
The complex organization of the biosphere derives from the fact that each one of its parts is a whole system operating within a larger whole. This fundamental property is called holism, for which every element assumes its significance in relation to the entire set, and the entire set is constantly re-defined by the interactions between its parts, in a fractal entanglement which binds together the single cells within the organism, the individual organisms within their species, and the many species within the biosphere.
Individual holons (organisms) and collective holons (societies, ecosystems) are thus not ‘the sum of their parts’ but wholes resulting from the reciprocal relations among the parts. In a certain sense, as we’ve seen, this principle of structural correlation among the parts isn’t valid only within the cosmic island of the biosphere, but extends to the entire universe originated in the Big Bang. And yet — while it is true that life is in itself dependent upon a larger universal whole — it is only for living beings that existence is purposeful. Only living beings have feelings, aims and values. Only living beings try to stay alive.
A rock is not a holon but a heap: a random mass of atoms and molecules kept together by chemical bondings. Even a bunch of logs (dead trees) is a heap, while a group of living trees (forest) is a collective holon. The difference is in the level of interaction between living trees which transcends the mere physio-chemical interactions at the atomic and molecular level. Similarly, man-made machines such as computers or airplanes are not holons but artifacts, whose structure and function is derived from the holon’s agency.
The exclusive organic cohesion within the biosphere means that in living systems parts are for each other reciprocally, both as means and as ends. Life’s unique synergistic coupling allowed the emergence of a self — a dynamical entity with localized interiority which is aware and respondent to its surroundings. Living beings are the first “observers” and the first “agents”. Life is the only known phenomenon that opens the door to awareness and perception, and hence to consciousness and subjective experience. That’s why it makes little sense to attribute subjective and intersubjective awareness also to prebiological compounds such as atoms and molecules, as it’s done by the panexperiential school of thought from Whitehead to Wilber.
The ‘observer effect’ discovered by quantum mechanics revealed that the act of observing is not merely a passive reception of information, but is rather a creative act that transforms the same world it is observing.
Knowledge, hence, shouldn’t be mistaken for a static reflection of the outside world, and should instead be considered for what it is: a mental construction that interprets the world, and by doing so affects the same reality it is trying to explain.
Unfortunately, to postulate a conscious observer as the precondition for explaining objective reality doesn’t really help understand neither objective reality nor subjective consciousness. It only mixes them up, making it harder to tell one from the other. Even when presented in scientific terms (as in the Von Neuman-Wigman interpretation of quantum theory where consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function) this view only leads to a resurrection of the old Upanishads’ idea of a cosmic consciousness pre-dating the universe.
But on a scientific level, such claims are premature at best and misleading and wrong at worst. And on a moral and cultural level, they mostly lead towards solipsistic or nihilistic views about reality and life.
It is essentially the big flaw of Eastern traditions, which produced static cultures suffering from a sort of chronic fatigue. No new-age interpretation or post-modern rationalization of these old myths is today any useful to humans, since it only reinforces our old bias: in either case, it would just be another version of the old anthropocentric delusions mistaking the projections of our perceptive apparatus for objective reality, and giving us the intellectual illusion that some kind of perceptive apparatus is the necessary pre-condition for the existence of reality itself.
Life and consciousness are not preconditions of the universe. Nor they are made of some different, ineffable substance. Rather, they emerged from the unique physiochemical conditions of our planet at a specific point of time, which today is estimated at about 4 billion years ago. It could well be that, somewhere else in the vastity of space, other forms of life and consciousness have also emerged — but the chances that they’re at a close enough distance and with similar enough consciousness and technology to establish some kind of communication with us are so astronomically small that indulging with the prospect becomes little more than an exercise in wishful thinking.
Much more promising seems to be the prospect of establishing a meaningful communication with our fellow species here on Earth. The incredible variety of forms and modes of life on this planet, still largely unexplored, represents the typical treasure-in-the-backyard waiting to be discovered before we even think of venturing out on some interplanetary journey. In fact, what we can retain from the ancient animistic traditions is their habit of considering Nature as a Subject, and the human condition as natively interdependent within an intricate plurality of living subjects which may generously provide us with everything we need if we approach them with love and respect of the limit, but that instead close themselves — or better extinguish themselves, preparing also our extinction — if our approach is aggressively utilitarian.
“He was familiar with the secrets of things”
said of St. Francis his first biographer, Tommaso da Celano.
Living things have indeed their ‘secrets’, and they keep their mouth stubbornly shut in front of someone approaching them with a dominating attitude, willing to isolate a part from its context to best perpetrate his cognitive rape: just by doing that one is in fact compromising the possibility of understanding the true nature of their secret, which hides in their web of reciprocal relations.
In a sense, we’re all born selfish. Our individual bodies have their own biological needs, and our survival instincts urge us to satisfy them at all costs. The self starts off by dividing everything in the outside world under two categories: opportunities or obstacles. But very soon we begin to realize that we are not alone in this world. That with and around us live other subjects, other selves, each with their own needs and personality. We realize that we are dependent on them for our survival, and that they are accessible not in terms of possession, but of reciprocal openness. The recognition of the other is thus the first milestone in our journey towards a moral consciousness.
As we grow older and start reflecting about life from a wider temporal perspective, we understand that our own existence as individuals is only a temporary passage. Life’s testimony was passed onto us by our parents, and likewise we must pass it on to our children. Each one of us is a link in the self-perpetuating chain of life, and the natural miracle by which life keeps regenerating itself is always a synergistic coupling, an act of reciprocal love.
Before and after every ‘I’ there is a ‘We’. Life is a plural unity. On a material level, the individual bodies emerge from the collective body of Earthlife and to that planetary body they return at the time of death. On a biological level, every organism is a manifestation of the phylogenetic tree of its species, and on a cultural level it is the product of the interaction with its fellow specimen. The same etymology of the word “consciousness” *(from Latin con-scientia and Greek sun-eidesis, joint knowledge,) opens a window on this relational structure of the self: at its roots, consciousness is a co-existential awareness, the awareness of existing as an organic whole with a common purpose.
Recent findings in the field of epigenetics, for example, have shown that gene expression is regulated by a very complex interaction with proteins and RNA molecules. In molecular biology, we are moving from a paradigm where DNA was seen as a rigid program directing our bodies from within to a view of DNA as potential information which was transmitted to us by the previous generations and which today we can express in many different ways according to the new information coming in from the environment.
In the environment we may consider two fundamental aspects: one is that of our natural context, such as the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. The other is that of our emotions and our personal relationships. Both can deeply alter the expression of our genetic code, so that for instance the emotions of a pregnant mother can influence the genetic expression of the offspring up to 3 generations down the line. From the reciprocal interactions between our genetic potential and our psychic experience that unique bundle of memories and aspirations which defines our subjective consciousness is formed: our connectome — as neurophysiologists now call it — the sum of all the neural connections we’ve made in the course of our individual lives.
The marvelous implication of these discoveries is that we have a chance to modify the deepest parts of ourselves — even our genetic and neural wiring — not with complex biotechnologies but simply by changing the way we live and the fabric of our relationships. The power of a look, the power of a smile, the power of a caress can effectively change the biological information carried within us, because our DNA is adaptive and learns from our experiences. Our connectomes shouldn’t be seen as isolated from their context but as nodes within an interpersonal network made of memories, feelings and emotions.
A few years ago, in a groundbreaking lecture, neuroscientist Sebastian Seung had declared: “I am not my genes, I am my connectome.” We might now say:
“I am the love with which my connectome was raised, and with which I can feed and nurture my connectome and that of those around me.” — Erica Poli, TED Reggio Emilia
In fact, the idea that life’s evolution is the result of a struggle for survival that selected the strongest and eliminated the weakest is only a superficial part of the story: a careful examination of the web of reciprocal interconnections binding together every living being — from the simplest to the most complex, from the grass blade to the thinking human — will persuade us that at a deeper level exists a continuous vital exchange, a sort of planetary symbiosis.
Living beings are made for each other more deeply than they are made against each other.
Under the cruel surface of the kingdom of fear is active, less evident but ubiquitous, the vibrant community of love.
When our individual minds are able to see through the filter of separation, we begin to see ourselves in every living being. We realize that to know ourselves is to recognize the common self under the lens of our personal reflection, and we learn to “expand our circle of awareness and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature”— as Einstein once wished. This symbiotic solidarity reaches beyond the boundaries of organic death and binds every generation past and future around one ever-present responsibility.
Our priority is now to understand how this common responsibility can be translated into common practice:
how can we, as human beings, effectively treat each other and other living creatures with love and respect — as ends and not as mere means.
When we are in love with someone, we don’t want our love to end. But for love to continue, we must be constantly working to keep the relationship going and to maintain the environment in which our relationship is set. Of course even love cannot escape the entropic process, which is fundamentally tied to the direction of our universe: the entropic curve is the inescapable frame of our finiteness.
And yet, love operates in anti-entropic fashion, by naturally integrating our individual lives in the larger context of life’s evolutionary journey and by placing the common interest before personal profit, in harmony with other living beings.
The metaphysical sense of self-transcendence that inspired so many spiritual traditions in the past, can today be translated in a conscious subordination of the individual self to the self-regenerative cycle of life, a cycle for which death is only a temporary season.
Every human can indeed transcend death, to the condition of loving the process of life in its entirety,
and within life also every living being, even the most insignificant:
to the condition, hence, of being a loving caretaker and not a master of the earthly garden.
The struggle for survival — that shaped the transformations of the species — and the struggle for power — that guided the clash of human civilizations — left in each of us a residual aggressive impulse whose primary expression is self-affirmation and repulsion of death. Subconsciously, in every destructive action and thought, every human being is desperately fighting against death.
But the acceptance of one’s own death as a congenital measure of the life process has the effect of dissolving the separation between the individual self and the concert of the creatures, allowing our primordial fear of the void to be filled with the symphony of life.
It is the ‘perfect joy’, disclosing the secret of life and weaving together the purpose of human existence with life’s original purpose, in a common evolutionary thread which combines and transcends our individual lives.
The Canticle of the Creatures is not only the result of the mystical experience of St. Francis; it is an experience attainable by the consciousness of every human being, once it learns to see beyond the individualistic mindset. The only commandment of a religion of love could thus be summarized as:
“Love all life as yourself”.
The concept of biophilia (literally love for life) was coined by social psychologist Eric Fromm (1964) and later popularized by the eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson. In his homonymous book dated 1984, Wilson argued that humans — as all living creatures — are born with a natural affinity to interact and connect with other life forms, and suggested that every human should consciously cultivate a healthy relationship with nature in order to foster its loving attitudes towards all life, and avoid falling back to the destructive behaviors subconsciously driven by the fear of death.
This is not to say that it’s wrong to fear death. It is natural. If we see a snake crawling on the floor besides us and we’re scared of it, our self-preservation instincts are not wrong. Most probably, we inherited those reflexes from the old days in the jungle, when snakes were to all effects our dangerous neighbours.
Even our aggressiveness, both when directed towards other species and when caused by intraspecific conflicts is not morally wrong in itself, otherwise the whole of nature would also have to be wrong. If our aggressiveness is evil, then evil is something deeply ingrained in our nature and we must learn to deal with it. Instead of fighting our own nature and trying to repress it, we should try to understand why and how it came to be. Indeed, there’s a lot of extra aggressiveness in humans which is precisely the result of millennia of psychological repression, where badly-placed constraints ended up arousing and even magnifying those destructive tendencies they were meant to control.
Fear and aggressiveness are natural instincts and shouldn’t be repressed. When they arise the only thing we can do is to prevent their degeneration to pathological forms by walking away from mimetic rivalries after they reach a certain threshold. And the rest of the time we can just try to avoid as much as possible the conditions that set them off, for example by refraining ourselves from provoking unnecessary conflicts of interest and causing harm to others.
The strategy of fighting against evil is fatally flawed. As we said in chapter 5, it became an evil in itself. Instead, humans should learn to embrace their dark sides, forgive their shadows, love their ‘demons’ and learn to transform themselves gradually, with lots of patience and good will. There is no other way.
It’s the ancient discipline of “eudaimonia”, the art of living well with oneself, what already Aristotle and the Stoics considered to be the noblest goal in life. At the individual level, it requires a constant effort of self-examination and self-discipline towards a deeper awareness and understanding of our own psychological processes. Preconditions for following this method are the
- Realization of the inter-relational nature of the self.
- Recognition of the need of self-limitation for the wellbeing of others.
- Acceptance of death as a necessary measure for the continuation of life.
On a social level, violence — both private and public — is a residual of the evolutionary phases when intraspecific competition was the priority of the species. If today violence has become morally unacceptable, it is because we’ve realized how useless it is, and how it’s only making our problems worst.
The only human way to solve conflicts is to convince each other: if we try to impose our reasons, either with physical or verbal violence, we have already lost, the conflict and our humanity with it.
The true weapon to heal our enemies from the mistakes or wrongdoings that we attribute to them is to take upon ourself the pain they should be suffering. Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha (literally holding onto truth, or truth-force) is a good example of non-violent resistence which — in open contrast with all the modern ideologies of the 20th Century — was able to put in practice the great moral teachings of the past (from Socrates, to Buddha, to Jesus), and give a tangible proof of their validity and effectiveness applied in the real world.
“If you do that, I will kill you!”, declared the militaristic culture which made the greatness of Western Civilization.
“If you do that, I will die”, taught instead the sages of the East, from which Gandhi has derived his own ‘truth’. Taking charge of the enemy’s violence — suffering, if necessary, until death — is no longer a principle reserved to the mystics, but the principle on which to build the authentically human society of the future. The force behind this revelation is an irreducible faith in the human potential, a love for humanity that can see beyond its present shortcomings and feels an urge to assist and encourage the fulfillment of what is still inexpressed.
Nonviolence is not just a better strategy than war, its is also the manifestation of a new planetary ethics — for which humans are members of a planetary human society, itself part of a larger planetary ecosystem: the biosphere.
On this pebble thrown out in space, life emerged, and from life humanity — a species able to understand its past, predict its future and change itself accordingly. We realize that the entire sense of our cultural evolution was to prepare the coming of this moment of planetary awareness, when the human species would finally become conscious of the complex system of which it is part.
The ecological crisis we provoked is now pressuring us to change. Our futureis not written anywhere: it is in our hands. No almighty God is going to come to our rescue. At this point, it makes little sense for us humans to sit and watch the ecological collapse unfolding. We must try to prevent it and reverse it, by changing the way we live — individually and collectively — before it’s too late.
This revelation (apocalypse) — initially confused and with little arguments — has emerged as the absolute priority over the last two decades: we are the last chance for humanity!
In order to survive the present century, human society has to undergo a complete reset, with new political and economic models to replace the present one, and new cultural and ethical values to guide us as we embark, together as a species, on the most extraordinary process of transformation since the Neolithic revolution. This is not an utopistic dream: this is the Great Turning or Transition — and we must make it happen in our lifetimes. Our end goal can be summarized by this Buckminster Fuller’s quote:
“to make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”
In presenting his new book “A Systems View of Life”, Fritjof Capra explained:
“As the twenty-first century unfolds, a new scientific conception is emerging. It is a unified view that integrates, for the first time, life’s biological, cognitive, social, and economic dimensions. […] The universe is no longer seen as a machine composed of elementary building blocks. We have discovered that the material world is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships; that the biosphere as a whole is a living, self-regulating system. […] Evolution is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for existence, but rather as a cooperative dance in which creativity and constant emergence of novelty are the driving forces.
Both the current geopolitical setup, with sovereign nation states competing for dominance, and the neoliberal market economy, with mega corporations competing for monopoly, are based on the old theories of Neo-Darwinism, in which life was seen as a mere “struggle for existence”, where a bunch of selfish individuals are fighting against each other over the scarce available resources.
For eco-philosopher Daniel C. Wahl, transitioning from an exploitative culture to a regenerative culture will require a radical shift in our underlying socio-economic narrative, from competitive scarcity to symbiotic cooperation:
“If we want to re-design economics based on what we know about life’s strategy to create conditions conducive to life, we need to question some basic assumptions upon which the narrative underlying our current economic systems is built. The narrative of separation has predisposed us to focus on scarcity, competition, and the short-term maximization of individual benefit as the basis on which to create an economic system. Life’s evolutionary story shows that systemic abundance can be unlocked through collaboratively structured symbiotic networks that optimize the whole system so human communities and the rest of life can thrive.”
As maybe never before in history, our common destiny beckons us to seek a new beginning. This requires a change of mind and heart. It requires a new sense of planetary interdependence and common responsibility. And this is where the planetary ethics reveals its deeper dimension of Religio Naturalis:
The natural religion of love rests upon the compassionate interdependence between every element of the biosphere.
We must recognize at once the symbiotic relationship that binds together every human being and every living creature in our natural environment. Between humanity and nature exists a level of reciprocity that stands before the utilitarian level of a production system. It’s a free-love relation analogue to that running between two human beings — who before the imprisonment into a master/slave relationship are facing each other as two equal subjects.
“As we cease to be paralyzed by the fear-driven cycle of separation, scarcity and the struggle for control and power, we will begin to unfold the potential of a compassionate, empathic and collaborative culture of creativity and shared abundance, driven by biophilia — our innate love for all of life.”
If we transcend the individual perspective which holds us prisoners inside separate bodies, we realize that we are one living being.
Nature is the dynamic system we all belong to, this island of life floating in the abyss of space, our home, our world.
Love is the force that keeps it together — the holy spiritthrough which life is constantly regenerated — as the rays of father Sun meet the womb of mother Earth.
We are indeed the creators of life and consciousness — we are the Gods! — but we are not almighty and we are not immortal.
We are the carriers of the living seed, and love is the force through which we plant it, give it birth and help it blossom.
We must treat Nature as our lover — with care and respect — and not as a slave. She loves us and we love her, and we are the same One. Together, we are the fertile creators of all life.
The old theologians and philosophers used to place this community of love either at the mythological beginnings or after the end of times. Today, the realization that a world community united by love is needed without delay and that we are the ones who must bring it about (!) hits our consciousness with apocalyptic force and urges us to do whatever it takes to make it happen.
As foretold by Karl Marx over a century ago:
“It will become clear that the world has long since dreamed of something of which it only needs to become conscious, in order to possess it in reality.”
The planetary community of life is already here. Its disclosure coincides with the end of an epoch, and the beginning of a new chapter in the human story. The time has come to realize that the home of all living creatures is one, and that it can be saved from destruction only if — in a collective act of transcendence of the old cultures and religions — a humanity united and inspired by the natural religion of love will step up and take the helm.
NATURAL MUSIC — by Robinson Jeffers
The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,
(Winter has given them gold for silver
To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)
From different throats intone one language.
So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without
Divisions of desire and terror
To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger smitten cities,
Those voices also would be found
Clean as a child’s; or like some girl’s breathing who dances alone
By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers
UNENDING LOVE — by Rabindranath Tagore
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.
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