TWENTIETH-CENTURY PARADIGM

 

Note: All posts are interconnected, so you are requested to read the previous posts before reading this post. 

Twentieth Century has witnessed a series of revolutionary developments in science, seriously challenging the Newtonian Vision of the Universe as a Giant Machine. The worldview emerging from the twentieth-century developments could eventually lead to a 'holistic' or 'humanistic' worldview. In this and onward sections, we shall attempt to bring out the salient features of this emerging paradigm from various domains of science. 

Deductions from Ecological Studies

 Ecological Principles showing dynamic interconnectedness:

In 1866, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel came up with the term ecology derived from the Greek word oikos (household) implies the study of Earth household and defined as the comprehensive science of the organism’s relationship with their environment. Hereafter, various authors proposed several definitions of ecology. The intention behind all the definitions is to understand the relationship of an organism with its environment. Thus, we can say that Ecology is the systematic and scientific study of organism-to-environment interactions. The environment includes both biotic (living organism) and abiotic (non-living organism). Ecology is not only biology but also an interdisciplinary science dealing with the totality of living organisms and their connections with the surroundings.

A fundamental concept of Ecology is that each living organism has a continuous relationship with all the rest that makes up its environment. The total sum of the biotic and abiotic environment is called the ecosystem such as ponds, forests, mountains, etc. The whole Nature is a collection of such ecosystems that are interconnected with each other and dynamic in time and space. This is known as ecological balance.

From a network perspective, Ecology may be seen as a network of interrelated networks in the form of a web of life where interactions between an organism and its environment can only be understood with the understanding of networks. It means that each node of the network is a network itself. Thus, the perspective implies that nothing can be understood in isolation due to the web of networks. Capra brings out the following six fundamental principles of ecology to account for the sustainability of Nature:

 (i)  Interdependence (Networks)

Each member of an ecological community is interdependently entwined in a complex web of interactions. Their existing properties and survival are an outcome of their interactions with the rest. The sustainability of each member depends on the sustainability of the whole while the sustainability of the whole depends on the sustainability of its members. Interdependence exists due to inherent relationships that can be visualized through a perceptional change – from the parts to the whole, from objects to relationships, and from contents to patterns.

(ii)  Cycles

Cycles play an important role to feed the whole ecological community. There is no waste in ecosystems due to interconnected cycles that help matter and energy to flow from one place to another place. One’s waste becomes input (food) for another.

(iii)   Solar Energy

The ecosystems use renewable sources of energy. The primary source of the energy is Sun. The sun’s energy is transformed into chemical energy through the process of photosynthesis and drives all ecological cycles. 

(iv)   Partnership

Partnership implies an inherent tendency to cooperate, recognition of relationships, and mutual support which are pervasive in ecosystems. In fact, the conductive environment for living organisms is an outcome of cooperation, partnership, and networking.

(v)  Diversity

Diversity helps ensure the stability and resilience of the ecosystem. More diversity means more networks that result in more resilience. For example, When a particular species is wiped out by a severe disturbance, a varied community can survive and rearrange itself, because other links in the network can perform at least some of the functions of the wiped-out species.

(vi)  Dynamic Balance

An ecosystem maintains itself dynamically with the help of multiple feedback loops.  

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The Closing Circle

Ecologist Barry Commoner in his book “The Closing Circle” mentions the complex relationships and interdependencies in ecological systems on the basis of the following considerations;      

(i) Everything is connected to everything else 

(ii) Everything has to go somewhere 

(iii) Everything is always changing 

(iv) There is no such thing as a free lunch. Let us look at these in some more detail.

‘Everything is Connected to Everything else’

This law indicates the existence of intricately interconnected networks of relationships among organisms and their physicochemical environment. He explained the first Law through examples like food chains and webs. The source of energy on Earth is Sun. Energy from the sun goes to plants and is consumed by the primary consumers (herbivores) which are, in turn, consumed by the secondary consumers (carnivores). In a similar manner, the mouse eats hundreds of various plants and an owl consumes mice along with various other animals. In this way, both animals and plants are linked by hundreds of food chains making a complex food web. For common people, the chain may seem rather disorganized but actually, it is highly structured and stable.

‘Everything has to Go Somewhere'

This law emphasizes that there is no ‘waste’ in ecosystems. One’s waste becomes food for others. For example, animals release carbon dioxide as respiratory waste, an essential nutrient for green plants. Plants excrete oxygen, which is used by animals. Animal organic wastes nourish the bacteria of decay. Their wastes, inorganic materials such as nitrate, phosphate, and carbon dioxide, become algal nutrients.

‘Everything is always Changing’

The species found in a community of plants and animals do not remain the same forever. This transition is called the succession of ecology. The first phase in succession, called the pioneer stage, starts with lichens growing on bare rock. Eventually, enough soil is generated to provide the nutrients needed to support grass and herbal production. Seeds from briars, shrubs, vines and trees are blown or transported to the site by animals or water, where they can germinate eventually. Soon the trees and shrubs begin to grow, the grasses and herbs compete, and a new forest begins. Changes in plants occur until the last stage of succession, a climax group, is reached. The animal population is also witnessing several changes when one successive phase transitions to another. In the grasses and herbs of early succession, rabbits, meadow mice and groundhogs etc. seek abundant food. When grasses and herbs are replaced by shrubs and trees, deer and grouse are increasing in numbers. Thus, the species are undergoing constant change.

‘There is no Such Thing as a Free Lunch’

This signifies that the exploitation of nature always carries an ecological cost. From a strict ecological standpoint, human beings are consumers more than they are producers. And if this continues, environmental degradation becomes inevitable. The dominant pattern of modern development is clearly counter-ecological. In this development, all social relations between people and all the relationships of humans to nature are reduced to mere economic relations. Everything we eat, wear and use during our lifetime has only monetary and environmental costs.

Commoner says that the ecosystem is like a net, in which multiple strands connect each knot to another. Such a fabric can withstand collapse better than a straightforward, unbranched circle of threads, which breaks down as a whole if cut anywhere. Botkin and Keller call this interconnectedness as ‘Environmental Unity’ which implies that nothing can be changed individually, everything effects everything else. Various examples showing interconnectedness are mentioned in their book - ‘Environmental Science: Earth as a Living Planet’ . An excerpt from the book is quoted below;

“When cities, such as Chicago and Indianapolis, were developed in the eastern and midwestern United States, the clearing of forests and prairies and the construction of buildings and paved streets increased surface-water runoff and soil erosion, which in turn affected the shape of river channels—some eroded soil was deposited on the bottom of the channel, reducing channel depth and increasing flood hazard. Increased fine sediment made the water muddy, and street and yard runoff chemicals polluted the stream. These changes affected fish and other life in the river and terrestrial wildlife that depended on the river. The point here is that land-use conversion can set off a series of changes in the environment, and each change is likely to trigger additional changes.”

The Rise of Mechanical Philosophy

 

Note: All posts are interconnected, so you are requested to read the previous posts before reading this post. 

After the Renaissance, the spirit of open inquiry mainly flourished outside of the Church. The book De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was published just a few days before his death in 1543 and is often praised as the forerunner of the spirit of free inquiry. Copernicus advocated a heliocentric view of the cosmos (i.e., a stationary sun with other planets, including the earth, revolving around it) in this book, as opposed to Ptolemy’s geocentric theory (i.e., stationary earth at the center with other heavenly bodies, including the Sun, circling around it), which was believed as Church’s ‘official’ theory. This view was a serious attack and a challenge to Christian Philosophy. So, Copernicus's theory was pronounced “false and altogether opposed to Holy Scriptures”.  A similar case was with Galileo when he was imprisoned in 1633. It was a period when a lot of confrontations took place between the Church and the protagonists of free inquiry (the scientists). Over time, the Church was finally proven to be incorrect, and it was forced to make an unseemly retreat from its position. The Church ultimately adopted the heliocentric perspective in 1982 and Darwin’s theory of evolution in the late twentieth century. As a result, the intellectual authority of the religious thinkers was utterly shattered within a few centuries, thereby putting the Christian worldview to rest. 

     During the 16th – 17th century, scientific development gave birth to a new worldview where that of the world replaced the notion of interconnectedness, underlying unity, purposefulness, interconnectedness, etc., as a mechanical system, i.e., an only machine with no purposefulness. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton actively contributed to spreading this worldview. Bacon can be credited to the advent of this worldview mentioned in his classical book Novum Organum  in 1620. Unlike Aristotle and Plato’s philosophy, Bacon’s approach was based on experimentation, data gathering, and analysis to unravel Nature’s truth systematically and organized. He believed science is a tool for only the betterment of human beings at any cost paid by Nature. Therefore, he stressed that rather than asking the metaphysical ‘why’ of things, the science of learning should be committed to the ‘how’ of things.

     Renes Descartes (1596 – 1650), another analytic philosopher, a great scientist and mathematician, systematically initiated the task of explaining the ‘how’ of numerous phenomena already known by the seventeenth century. He believed in breaking up problems and thoughts into smaller parts and then rearranging them systematically in a logical order. This theory became an essential characteristic of science and prevailed in the scientific community. However, the theory spread a ‘reductionist’ and ‘fragmentary’ approach, unlike an integrated and wholeness approach that prevailed during the earlier Greek philosophers. The process originated a completely new mode of thinking that has come to be known as Mechanical Philosophy. Basic to this mechanical philosophy is Cartesian Dualism. “All of reality, he argued, is composed of two substances. What we may call spirit is a substance characterized by the act of thinking; the material realm is a substance the essence of which is an extension. Res-cogitans and re-sextensa – Descartes defined them in a way to distinguish and separate them absolutely. To think of substance one cannot attribute any property characteristic of matter – not extension, not a place, not motion. Thinking, which includes the various modes which mental activity assumes, and thinking alone, is its property. From the point of view of natural science, the more important result of the dichotomy lay in the rigid exclusion of any and all psychic characteristics from material nature (Westfall, 1971). ” To Descartes, the matter was thus really dead and possessed no activity except motion derived from God in the beginning. He visualized the whole Universe from the same perspective. He concluded that Nature is made of various disconnected parts and can be completely described in terms of the movements and arrangements of its parts.  This mechanistic visualization of Nature became a widespread dominant paradigm in the then scientific community in every emerging field,  for example, living organisms: the seventeenth-century’s physiologists tried to explain bodily functions such as digestion, blood flow etc. from the same perspective; Cell Theory: the biologist recognized that all animals and plants are made of cells and compared body as a factory where cells are produced, assembled and distributed in body; Genes: the biologists of twentieth-century found that all the biological structures could be understood in terms so molecular structures unlike cells during nineteenth-century; Mechanistic Medicine: by concentration on the smallest part of any organism, the healing of human body shifted to cell and then finally to molecules which lost the vision of human being as a whole. Descartes visualized even organic phenomena from the same perspective. He described men as a machine that performs all physiological functions of a man – circulation, digestion, nourishment, growth and perception. Newton intensely participated in the same direction by introducing the concept of force to already existing notions of matter and motion. Newton saw particle forces as ontological realities, and he was modest enough to concede that he had no idea what caused them; in fact, he linked them directly to God’s intervention. But his French followers believed that the Newtonian system only validated the Cartesian vision of reality as a great machine. The references to God made by Newton and Descartes were quickly dismissed as superfluous and overshadowed by the successes of their mathematical mechanics. Newton had called God’s mercy to restore order to the solar system after it had become drenched, either due to external factors (comets etc.) or due to its inherent character. When Laplace demonstrated that disturbances caused by mutual forces or external bodies like comets were only transient and that the Solar System was intrinsically stable, it was considered as another ‘evidence’ of God’s redundancy. All of this resulted in a resurgence of materialism – a belief that hard stuff in unyielding lumps is the Universe’s solitary ultimate reality.

Impact of the mechanical philosophy on Social thought

The application of mechanical philosophy to sciences dealing primarily with human and social institutions resulted in the materialistic worldview.

    One of the first systematic attempts of this kind was made by John Locke in the late seventeenth century. He was so much influenced by the ‘reductionist’ or ‘fragmentary’ approach that he visualized society from an atomistic perspective. He considered an individual the smallest unit (basic building block) and tried to understand the ‘natural laws’ governing individual behaviour. He found the natural laws, including personal interest, to protect and allow for the increase of the property of its members, freedom, etc., denying any connection between people and God. In this way, he successfully separated religion from people’s activity as well as integrated concerns related to society.  The consequences of this monumental is best put in the worlds of Rifkin and Howard:

“Having removed God from the affairs of people - as Bacon had removed him from nature – Locke was left with human beings all alone in the Universe… Now, men and women became just what Bacon, Descartes and Newton had made of nature: mere physical phenomena interacting with other bits of matter in the cold, mechanical Universe. This being the case, on what basis could a social order be formed?... Once we cut through useless custom and superstition, argued Locke, we see that society, made up solely of individuals creating their own meaning, has one purpose: to protect and allow for the increase of the property of its members. Pure self-interest thus becomes the sole basis for the establishment of the state, … for reason leads us to conclude that this is the natural order of things…”

In this way, the personal goal of salvation during the medieval ages shifted to achieving things and ensuring personal interests. This ensued the idea of progress.

    Adam Smith, a Scottish economist of the eighteenth century, also recognized selfishness as something ‘natural’ and did not like the idea of erecting social and moral barriers to its pursuit. Smith, based on Locke’s idea, formulated a theory of economics and concluded laissez-faire- the general principle of non-interference with the free action of the individual, is the most efficient method of economic organization and instead believed that there was an ‘invisible hand’ of ‘Providence’ which governed the economic processes so as to “make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal proportions among all its inhabitants”. Unfortunately, the “invisible hand” of ‘Providence’ did not act as Smith had predicted, and his laissez-faire philosophy simply served to promote the pursuit of material abundance to meet physical demands, with little regard for ethics. This ethical evasion became the trademark of all subsequent mainstream economists, resulting in the assumption that what is ‘pleasant’ is ‘good’ and what is ‘unpleasant’ is evil. By this way, under the influence of Newtonian physics, the human movement was considered merely a physical movement under the various forces of attraction or repulsion. The overall philosophy of utilitarianism, which was first articulated by an Englishman named Jeremy Bentham, is based on these ideas, and is summed up in Bentham’s famous phrase:

“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we should do ”

The message of Bentham’s phase is very clear that men should act in a manner that maximizes their ‘pleasure’ and minimizes the ‘pain.’ It implies a theoretical framework justifying a materialistic worldview. When social philosophers like Herbert Spencer interpreted Darwin’s theory of evolution to sanctify the philosophy of ‘survival of the fittest ’ as a law of Nature, the journey of modern civilization to the pinnacle of a materialistic worldview was nearly complete.

Renaissance

 

Note: All posts are interconnected, so you are requested to read the previous posts before reading this post. 

The Renaissance bridges the middle and modern ages. Classical literature written by Greek and Roman philosophers was rediscovered during this period, which gave birth to Humanism – a philosophy that keeps humans and their potential at the centre and flourished in Italy due to its less adamant environment. The exposure of Greek and Roman ideas encouraged the rationality of all the then rational people and prepared a conducive environment to spurt rational and scientific frame of mind.  In the late Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a pivotal figure. He made significant contributions to engineering, architecture, physics, urban planning, mapping, philosophy, and anatomy throughout the Renaissance and is considered one of the greatest artists of all time. As an artist, he presented his knowledge visually, which appealed to many. He propagated that an artist is able to project an intimate connection between the form and the understanding of its underlying principle.