Thermodynamics or ecodynamics?

Biospheric order and homeotely

Order is defined as the influence of the whole over the parts and as this influence is exerted, the parts become specialised in fulfilling the specific differentiated functions required to ensure the stability, and hence the survival, of the whole. If our bodies function properly, it is that our various organs and tissues and their component cells and molecules, are organised in this way. They thereby all tend in the same direction – and are homeotelic.

This is clearly true of such natural systems as the family and the community, though in these cases the influence is not quite so pronounced and the sub-systems are not so highly specialised. From this consideration alone it must follow that the structure of a natural system is not random but highly directive or purposive, i.e. it must be that which best favours the survival of the whole.

It is not only true of natural systems in which the dominant form of behaviour is co-operative, but of those in which competition dominates i.e. in ecosystems. The structure of an ecosystem is such that it favours all its overall conservation or stability. This means that predators for instance are behaving homeotelically to the ecosystem when they consume their prey. It is only by doing so that they maintain the qualitative and quantitative controls on the prey populations, which they must do if the ecosystem’s basic structure and viability is to be preserved.

Now this relationship is not just a one-way one. (There are few one-way relationships in the natural world, which is one of the reasons why the physicist’s concept of ‘causality’ is unacceptable). If the behaviour of the parts is that which satisfies the requirements of the whole, then the behaviour of the whole must also be that which satisfies the requirements of the parts. In other words, the structure of a natural system is a mutualistic one (of course I am using the term in a wider sense than it is usually used in biology). The reason should be clear. Systems develop to fulfil specific functions in a specific environment.

A cell for instance, is slowly adapted during the course of its development to fulfil its specific functions within a specific environment – our liver for instance. A child as it grows up, is progressively ‘socialised’, i.e. learns to become a member of its specific family and community. That is what education in a stable society means.

Assuming that the environment to which adaptation occurs is similar to those to which previous generations have learnt to adapt (i.e. to which the general information which both the cell and the human baby inherit, permits them to adapt to), then one can say that the specific environments to which they have been adapted are those which best satisfy their genetic and ontogenetic (in the case of a child one might say cultural) requirements.

Environmental conservation

It must follow that the optimum satisfaction of their needs and their optimum welfare (if the term can be applied to a cell) are best assured by conserving their self-generating or vernacular, in the sense in which they, together with their environment, constitute. One can formulate a subsidiary law (The Law of Hierarchical Mutualism) to the effect that, in the natural world, behaviour that satisfies the requirements of the whole, also satisfies that of the differentiated parts and vice versa. It will not of course be true of random parts which, in any case, natural systems will seek to eliminate.

This means that the behaviour of any subsystem must serve to maintain or increase the stability of the relationships between all the interrelated parts of the smaller systems that compose it and the larger system of which it is part. Each response, in other words, contributes to the solution of all the problems of its internal and external environment. Each can be referred to in fact, as a solution multiplier.

In the technosphere the opposite is true. Expedients are exploited for dealing with individual problems without reference to their effect on the stability of the other parts of the internal and external environment, which in any case our scientists are incapable of predicting. The problems are thereby ‘solved’ at the expense of creating a host of new problems. Each technospheric ‘solution’ can thus be seen as a problem multiplier.

It is also convenient to see technospheric responses as ‘heterotelic’ (from the Greek hetero = different and telos = goal) as opposed to homeotelic. Rather than tend in the same direction, towards increasing overall stability, they tend in different directions towards the solution of individual problems, even if this is incompatible with the achievement of the overall goal of maintaining biospheric stability. Rather than being environmentally conservative they can also be seen as environmentally destructive.

The Fourth Law of Ecodynamics

Behaviour will only satisfy the requirements of the first three laws of Ecodynamics if it is spontaneous, self-generating or vernacular in the sense in which Illich uses the term. Control, which is what behaviour achieves by maintaining a system on its correct course – that which leads to increased stability – must be self-control or auto-control, or to use a very current expression, self-regulation. This means the system cannot be run, controlled or regulated externally or asystemically by an external agent of any sort, in the way our society is controlled by the state and the market.

It is only if a system is self-regulating that the necessary feedback loops which link it to its environment, at many different levels of organisation, are capable of functioning properly and thereby assuring its adaptation to its environment, by bringing about those changes to the particularities of its behaviour that are seen to be required, in order to assure the conservation of its generalities – those that assure the conservation of its basic structure.

It is only if a natural system is self-regulating that it will seek to satisfy all the requirements of the larger system and thereby behave homeotelically so as to maintain its optimum structure and that of its environment (see the Third Law of Ecodynamics). A system regulated from the outside by the state or the market will seek to satisfy a goal that is random to it and to the larger systems of which it is part.

To say that a system is self-regulating implies, too, that it is self-powering in the sense of being capable of obtaining the energy it requires in a renewable way and in one that favours, rather than adversely affects, the proper functioning of all the other parts of the system of which it is part.

It also means that it is capable of providing itself with all the necessary resources it requires in a sustainable way and of behaviour that enables it to contribute to, rather than detract from, the normal functioning of the biosphere and its component subsystems. It also means that it is capable of disposing of its waste products in such a way that these do not accumulate or interfere with the functioning of the other parts of the biosphere.

Vernacular self-regulating systems are also self-motivating. They fulfil all their necessary functions because they are designed to do so by their evolution and upbringing and because it is by doing so that their basic needs are best satisfied (see the Third Law of Ecodynamics). For this reason the notion of ‘work’, as an activity that is not fulfilled spontaneously but which people must be induced to fulfil – by paying them to do so, for instance – is unknown in vernacular self-regulating, i.e. tribal, societies. The very word does not exist in their vocabulary. As vernacular self-regulating functions are taken over by institutions, instability must set in at all levels of organisation. Let us see why.

If a system’s behaviour is to be adaptive, it must, among other thing, be able correctly to identify the environmental challenge to which it is responding. It need of course always be able to. In nature, mimicry is a well known phenomenon. Certain beetles, for instance, that feed on the larvae of a specific species of ants, learn to imitate those ants that have become specialised in looking after the larvae. In this way, they obtain access to the larvae, which they promptly eat.

Mimicry is, in this case, assuring the success of parasitic behaviour which is homeotelic, in that it permits the application of normal qualitative and quantitative controls on the host population and thereby serves to maintain the optimum structure of the biosphere.

Once a system breaks down, however, its internal environment and thus the environment of its sub-systems, undergoes change and the latter are faced with new conditions which they can only interpret in terms of their past experience – and which they must now interpret incorrectly.

In a sense, the new environmental conditions created by the system’s disintegration mimic those that prevailed when the system was functioning normally and hence homeotelically. In the new conditions, responses which are designed to satisfy, to a varying degree, the requirements of the subsystems are no longer those that satisfy the requirements of the larger system. Behaviour is thereby heterotelic rather than homeotelic.

Let me provide an obvious example. A man, in a stable society, will have been designed by his evolution and his cultural upbringing to fulfil those functions within his family that will assure its stability and survival. He fulfils them spontaneously, because it is by doing so that he best satisfies his own individual requirements. Thus the husbandly behaviour he displays towards his wife, which he must display if the family is to survive, will also satisfy, by the same token, a host of basic individual needs such as sex and companionship.

In aberrant conditions, these same needs may be satisfied by displaying similar behaviour towards a woman who is external to the family unit and who may be regarded as ‘mimicking’ his wife. Husbandly needs are thereby satisfied heterotelically. This means that a mechanism designed to hold together the family unit has been mobilised to do exactly the opposite. The family unit, as a result, will become highly precarious. A one-parent family is very unstable and does not provide a satisfactory environment for the children.

In a traditional society, where the family will be of the extended type, other family members are likely to step in to compensate, in different ways, for the father’s defection, and other different social groupings within the community will do likewise. Not so in an industrial society, however, in which the extended family has disintegrated, as has the small community.

In normal conditions, after a period of chaos, new social structures will emerge associated with new cultural patterns that assure their adaptation to the changed conditions. The massive literature on Messianic or ‘Revitalist’ cults, as they are referred to by Wallace, [30] shows how this occurs.

In our industrial society, however, these biospheric ‘healing’ processes are prevented from occurring. The state, together with the market, conspire to perpetuate the state of social disintegration – and hence poverty or social deprivation, which is the form it takes in the industrial West – by seeking to fulfil, by external or asystemic or institutional means, those functions that were previously fulfilled spontaneously in a vernacular way.

Thus, children who can no longer be looked after by their mothers who have to go to work, often many miles from their homes, or by elderly relatives who have been consigned to some institution for the aged, may be left to spend all day at a crèche. When the family breaks down, social workers step in to try to repair it. If they cannot help, the children are then consigned to some special institution.

Later, like other children, they must attend some vast factory-like compound that we dignify with the title of ‘school’. Children will thereby tend increasingly to be brought up by institutions that cannot hope to satisfy their real needs to the same degree as the extended families and small communities in which they were previously brought up.

As a consequence, the socialisation process simply does not occur and rather than become differentiated members of a family, community and a society, they constitute an unabsorbed disorganised mass of alienated people – mere randomness from the point of view of society, increasingly, too, from the point of view of the economy which, once it ceases to grow, will become ever less capable of absorbing them.

Thus institutions are heterotelic to the individuals, families and communities whose behaviour they seek to control.

Right wing political ideologists have glorified the State to whose interests those of its members they insist should be mercilessly subordinated. Liberal ideologists, on the other hand, have glorified the individual at the expense of the State. Our choice, in reality, is not between the State and the individual, but, as Clastres [31] points out, between the State and society.

The State is a new development. It has never played a role in the strategy of nature, i.e. in evolution – only in anti-evolution. The state is an institution that is external to society. Society and its constituent communities, on the other hand, are spontaneous, vernacular and self-regulating. As de Tocqueville writes;

“Ce sont les hommes qui ont fait les royaumes, mais la commune semble sortir de la main de Dieu.” [32]

Whereas there is a constant conflict of interest between the State and the individual, harmony reigns, between society, its constituent communities and the individual citizens. The relationship between them is severed by the principle of hierarchical mutualism. This means that behaviour that satisfies the requirements of the former must also satisfy those of the latter.

At the same time, institutions by usurping the functions that are designed to be fulfilled by natural systems, cause the latter to disintegrate and atrophy. As this occurs so do we become correspondingly more dependent on and indeed addicted to the services that institutions provide. Seen in more general terms, as instability increases throughout society and its environment so is there a greater need for the institutional activity required to maintain some semblance of order, however superficial (see the Great Misinterpretation).

The problem is that these institutional controls are increasingly difficult to provide. As we have seen they are not self-powering as are vernacular ones; nor are they capable of providing the resources they require from within the system, by efficiently recycling them, as do natural systems; nor are they self-motivating, which means that the people working in the institutions must be paid. To maintain the required social controls thereby, requires an ever increasing amount of energy, materials, work and of course finance which for well known reasons must be in ever shorter supply.

For these reasons institutional behaviour can only replace vernacular behaviour very temporarily. It is only the latter that can display any permanence because it alone satisfies the requirements of the Third Law and hence of the First and Second Laws of Ecodynamics.

References

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2.	See Edward Goldsmith, “Complexity and Stability in the Real World”. The Ecologist Quarterly No. 4 Winter 1978.
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16.	Jacques Monod, Le Hazard et la Necessite. Seuil, Paris 1970.
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22.	Wolfgang Kohler, quoted by Michael J. Apter in Cybernetics and Development. Pergamon Press, Oxford 1966.
23.	Ludwig von Bertalanffy, “General Systems Theory”. General Systems Yearbook Vol. 1 1956.
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27.	Sir Julian Huxley, Issues in Evolution. London.
28.	Ramon Margalef, quoted by Erich Jantsch in The Self-Organizing Universe. Pergamon Press, Oxford 1980.
29.	Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe. Pergamon Press, Oxford 1980.
30.	Anthony Wallace, “Revitalisation Movements”. American Anthropologist Vol. 58 pp.264-281, 1956.
31.	Pierre Clastres, La Societé Contre L’Etat. Les Editions de Minuit. Paris 1974.
32.	De Tocqueville, quoted by H. Tschani in Profil de la Suisse. Spes. Lausanne, 1972.