61. The Abandonment of a Model
Once a system’s responses becomes sufficiently counterproductive as to menace its physical survival, its most adaptive strategy is to abandon the model on which the responses are based. The cognitive vacuum that this gives rise to provides conditions particularly favourable to the development of a new and more adaptive model.
Pavlov showed that the dogs that were continually frustrated would develop neuroses before having what is best interpreted as a nervous breakdown.
Sargent regards a nervous breakdown as an adaptive response to a situation to which one’s behaviour pattern is unadaptive. 43 He points out that in particular stressful conditions, such as those obtaining in the front line during the trench warfare of the First World War, some broke down immediately, others did not break down at all. In general, both such categories of people were abnormal. The normal person broke down after a few weeks if left there that long.
He also points out that religious conversion (when it means really modifying fundamental beliefs rather than simply changing the terminology used during religious practices) is achieved by subjecting people to traumatic experiences likely to cause a temporary mental breakdown – such things as prolonged chanting, and frenzied dancing, the rhythmic beating of drums, fasting, self-mutilation.
Sargent also points to the similarity of conversion to the sort of brainwashing carried out to obtain confessions. The victims are prevented from sleeping, continually harassed, starved and subjected to trauma-inducing threats at regular intervals. In a mental hospital, the behaviour pattern of particularly unadaptive patients, is broken down in a similar way by giving them insulin injections, electric shock treatment and by the administration of drugs.
When a society is faced with an environment to which it is incapable of adapting because its worldview no longer represents it adequately, the most adaptive strategy is to abandon this model and adopt a new and more adaptive one. Imagine a society that earns its living exclusively by fishing. Such a society is likely to have developed a worldview that has perfectly adapted it to a fishing way of life. Among other things it would have favoured the development of a hierarchy of which the top positions would be occupied by the best fisherman, and in which all the social occasions and religious rituals revolved around ceremonies associated with various fishing activities.
What would happen if for some reason there were no longer any fish to catch? Clearly the society’s culture would collapse. This is precisely what happened to the Herrero in South West Africa, whose whole way of life revolved around the possession of cattle. Once the Germans deprived them of their cattle, their culture could only collapse. Significantly, in spite of the persistent efforts of talented missionaries, the Herrero had hitherto resisted conversion to Christianity. Now they were converted en masse. Their now defunct worldview had to be replaced by another.
It should be clear that the very specialised conditions required to sustain an industrial society, which must include the availability of massive and cheap energy supplies and other non-renewable resources, the availability of a convenient sump (such as provided by rivers, seas, the atmosphere, abandoned salt mines, holes in the ground, etc.) for the disposal of the waste, the availability of land that can be brought under the plough to help feed expanding populations, and of other empty areas to which surplus people can be consigned, etc., are rapidly ceasing to be obtainable.
Under such conditions it is not surprising to see the rapid breakdown of that highly specialised worldview that has given rise to industrial society. One can predict the total breakdown of this worldview in the next few years as industrial society slowly grinds to a halt. This means that one can expect to see in the ensuing chaos the development of new cultural patterns.
Back to top62. The Reintegration Principle
Once a system has disintegrated, adaptive behaviour will only occur at the level of organisation of its particular parts or sub-systems. If the latter can adapt themselves to the disorder of their new environment, then such a situation can persist until such time as environmental challenges induce the further integration of the system.
If they are not so adapted, i.e. if they depend for their survival on being subjected to a more ordered environment, i.e. that with which the now defunct system once provided them, then there will be an immediate tendency for them to recreate such a system, though the one that will emerge will tend to be better adapted to its changed environmental conditions.
At a cultural level, individuals find it difficult to survive when deprived of that highly structured environment consisting of a family and a home, a community and a village, and enemies known and unknown. In the absence of such an environment, they will be forced to seek short-term substitutes to satisfy those of which they have been deprived. These substitutes will include taking drugs, drinking, cheap entertainments, anything, in fact, that will render their unenviable lot slightly more tolerable.
At the same time, they will be particularly susceptible to new doctrines that might enable them to re-establish new social structures, and hence that environment to which they have been adapted by millions of years of evolution. Thus during periods of social disorder, revolutionary movements of one sort or another (usually of a ‘messianic’ or ‘millenarist’ nature) will proliferate. It is significant that there are 7,000 such movements in Africa at this moment, and that in Lagos there is actually a trade union of Messiahs.
Such movements are best regarded as reintegrative. They tend towards the development of a new integrated social system from the chaos or social entropy in which they arise. It is to such a movement that we must look for the development of a viable post industrial society. [44]
Back to top63. The Solution Multiplier Principle
On the other hand, by setting about to reconstitute or imitate the environment to which a system has been adapted phylogenetically and ontogenetically, one is ensuring the increasing stability and the better functioning of considerably more than one specific system. Homeotelic responses will thus do far more than solve only those problems one may be temporarily concerned with.
In fact, as they are adopted, so must other systems, temporarily in disequilibrium, fall back into place, for so will the biosphere function that much more closely to the way it has been designed by thousands of millions of years of evolution.
What are the homeotelic solutions to the problems that confront us today? As I have already pointed out, the heterotelic ones are becoming increasingly counterproductive. One of their principle features is that they are costly in terms of money, resources, and environmental damage. With the energy and resource crisis hitting us sooner and more abruptly than expected, they are becoming increasingly impracticable. No one will be able to afford them.
What, then, are the homeotelic solutions? They are exceptionally simple. Consider poverty. There are not enough resources to provide more than a minute fragment of the world population with the energy and resource-intensive way of life of the citizens of Los Angeles. What, then, do we do?
If we accept that for those who live in Los Angeles, air-conditioned houses with vast quantities of labour-saving devices, two or three motor cars per family, etc., are required, then we simply cannot afford a Los Angeles. The city must be bulldozed and replaced with small decentralised communities in which biological and social needs can be satisfied with considerable less energy and resources.
Such a society is not a figment of one’s imagination since well over 99 percent of all the people ever born lived in such conditions. Los Angeles is an aberration, as are its cheap imitations throughout the world. In addition, by proceeding in this way we will be contributing towards the redevelopment of that environment to which man is but a long-term adaptive process and would, by the same token, be helping to solve many of the other diseases of maladjustment, of which the problems we think we are faced with are but the symptoms.
Consider unemployment. There was no unemployment in primitive society, so much so that it was very difficult to find labour for the plantations and mines set up by western colonialists. That is why Bihars had to be imported into Assan, and Tamils into Ceylon, etc. The family was the basic economic unit, though sometimes they cooperated with other families to perform particularly challenging tasks.
As industry develops, so do the commercial enterprises take over from families and communities as units of economic activity, thereby creating all sorts of social maladjustments. Also, so does it become increasingly capital-intensive, thereby systematically reducing the number of jobs that can be provided at a given level of capital investment.
There is no longer anything like the available capital and resources to provide more than a fraction of the jobs required in the world today at the present level of capital intensiveness of industrial undertaking. The answer can therefore only be to replace machines by men, and to restore the family and community as the basic economic units.
In this way many more problems will be solved. Homelessness, for instance. This is the result of a combination of facts, including the population explosion, urbanisation, mobility and the disintegration of the family unit. The last is possibly the most important. In Britain, in Victorian times, there were 8 or 10 people to a house. Today, there are little more than two, which means four to five times more houses. Necessary housing cannot be provided either in this country, still less in the Third World.
The answer is to re-establish the family unit and this can only be done by deindustrialising and creating a decentralised society in which the family and the community are the basic economic units. It is also in this way that mobility can best be reduced and that cultural controls that once kept a check on population growth can be recreated.
Consider the problem of ignorance. Throughout the world illiteracy is increasing despite the massive investments in capital-intensive education. Ignorance is not something that can be combated by capital-investment. Herding our youth into vast factory-like compounds and teaching them all sorts of things which are totally unconnected with their everyday life will not solve this problem.
Education is but another word for socialisation. It is the information that must be conveyed to a child so that he can learn to fill his functions as a member of his family and community. Ignorance is but a deficiency in this process. You cannot socialise people if there is no society to socialise them into. In such conditions education is an illusion. Regardless of the capital spent on it, it can do no more than to provide children with random information.
Once more the solution must consist in decentralising society, reducing mobility and allowing local cultural patterns to re-emerge. When this happens, local communities will be in a position to redesign their educational programme to that which will enable their youth to be imbued with its particular set of values.
Take the problems of crime, delinquency, drug-addiction and other symptoms of social disintegration. These are largely absent in traditional societies, and even in the more remote villages of the industrialised world. At present, the US is spending 20 billion dollars on fighting crime heterotelically, with more burglar alarms, more armoured cars, more private detective services, etc. This has no significant effect on the crime rate. The only way to prevent crime is homeotelically, by recreating the social conditions in which it does not occur, and this once more means decentralising and deindustrialising society.
Consider the problem of disease. In spite of massive investments throughout the world, infectious disease has not been conquered, nor is it likely to be since we are fighting the symptoms, not the causes. One of the most widespread myths ever perpetuated is that infectious disease is caused by germs and that it can be combated by simply killing them off. Infectious disease is the result of ecological maladjustment that cause germ populations to explode. Man is effected when the delicate balance between man and the bacterial populations with which he is and always will be in contact with has broken down.
The homeotelic solution is to prevent the disturbance of ecological systems in the first place and maintain the balance between man and the bacterial populations. This must mean reducing mobility which causes people to find themselves in contact with germs against which they have not developed any resistance and to do away with the vast urban conurbations which provide a perfect niche for massive germ populations.
So it must be with all the problems that beset us. Each can only be solved by recreating those conditions that most closely approximate those to which man has been adapted. If these problems are but the symptoms of deep maladjustment at every level of organisation – which in turn is the result of the impact of our activities on biological, social and ecological systems – then the only solution must be to reduce their impact, thereby restoring the proper functioning of these symptoms and eliminating the present maladjustment of which our problems are but the manifestations. There is no other way in which they can be solved.
Back to topConclusion – The Principles of ‘Culturalism’
The preceding analysis should provide the basis for a Philosophy of Social Control, of which the main points are the following -
- A culture is a control mechanism.
- It provides an integrated pattern of information and instructions.
- This is alone capable of giving rise to an integrated pattern of behaviour.
- Only a society that is governed systemically by its culture rather than asystemically by means of some external agency can display the correct degrees of order, variety, and complexity.
- Only such a society is capable of maintaining a stable relationship with its environment.
- Cultural controls are the only ones that are, in fact, effective.
- They are the only ones that can be sustained.
- They are the only ones capable of providing people with a satisfying social environment.
- They can only function under certain conditions. One of these is that the environment should not diverge too radically from that in which the human species evolved phylogenetically.
- As it so diverges, so there is systemic disruption at different levels of organisation giving rise to a corresponding set of maladjustments. It is only in terms of these maladjustments that one can understand the problems facing man today.
- Since external controls are ineffective, the only solution to these problems consists in recreating an environment that approximates as closely as possible that in which we have evolved.
References
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25. E. Goldsmith, “Social Disintegration and Its Causes”, The Ecologist, Vol.1, No.13.
26. Steven Boyden, op. cit.
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32. Mahlon B. Hoagland, “Nucleic Acids and Proteins”, Scientific American (1959).
33. Bronislaw Malinowski, The Dynamics of Cultural Change (The Yale University Press, 1965).
34. Konrad Lorenz, “Gestalt Perception as Fundamental to Scientific Knowledge”, General Systems Yearbook Vol.7 (1962).
35. S. Zuckerman, The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes (Kegan Paul Trench and Trubner, London, 1932).
36. Richard Lee and Irvin De Vore, Man the Hunter (Aldine. Chicago, 1968).
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38. C. C. Hughes and J. M. Hunter, “Development and Disease in Africa”, The Ecologist Vol.2, Nos. 9 & 10.
39. Michael Allaby, “Miracle Rice and Miracle Locusts”, The Ecologist Vol.3, No. 5.
40. Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society.
41. Anthony Wallace, Culture and Personality (Random House, 1963).
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43. W. Sargent, The Battle of the Mind (Heinemann, London, 1957).
44. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium (Secker and Warburg, London, 1957). See also Vittorio Lanternari, Les Mouvements Religieux des Peuples Opprimés (Maspero, Paris, 1962).
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