At least the» core,» the tropical and temperate regions, surface and atmosphere [temperatures 1 are skewed from the values deduced by interpolating between values for Mars and Venus, and deviations are in directions favored by most species of organisms. Oxygen is maintained at about 20 percent, the mean temperature of the lower atmosphere is about 22°C, and the pH is just over 8. These planet-wide anomalies have persisted for very long times; the chemically bizarre composition of the Earth’s atmosphere has .prevailed for millions of years, even though the residence times of the reactive gases can be measured in months and years. With a number of other considerations, this leads [Cairns-Smith] to the idea of a form of crystallization process as the printing machine, with some kind of crystal defects as the pattern-forming elements. We can conceive of teleology as the actualization of potentiality-more precisely, as the end result of a phenomenon’s immanent striving toward realization that leaves room for the existence of fortuity and uncertainty. Here, teleology expresses the self-organization of a phenomenon to become what it is without the certainty that it will do so.
WITH MINION RUSH
In summary, it is not in the diminution or expansion of needs that the true history of needs is written. Rather, it is in the selection of needs as a function of the free and spontaneous development of the subject that needs become qualitative and rational. Needs are inseparable from the subjectivity of the «needer» and the context in which his or her personality is formed. The autonomy that is given to use-values in the formation https://datingrated.com/ of needs leaves out the personal quality, human powers, and intellectual coherence of their user. It is not industrial productivity that creates mutilated use-values but social irrationality that creates mutilated users. At the risk of an excursus, which may try the reader’s patience, I would like to discuss the issue of scarcity in somewhat general terms and then return to my more concrete account of the emergence of hierarchy.
Stuart
The buyer-seller relationship — a relationship that lies at the very core of the market — became the all-pervasive substitute for human relationships at the most molecular level of social, indeed, personal life. To «buy cheaply» and «sell dearly» places the parties involved in the exchange process in an inherently antagonistic posture; they are potential rivals for each other’s goods. The commodity — as distinguished from the gift, which is meant to create alliances, foster association, and consolidate sociality — leads to rivalry, dissociation, and asociality. A similar role was played by the guilds of medieval Europe, the yeomanry of Reformation England, and the peasantry of western Europe. Well into the twentieth century, farmers in townships (or comparatively isolated farmsteads) and urban dwellers were locked into clearly definable neighborhoods, extended families, strong cultural traditions and small, family-owned retail trade. These systems coexisted with the burgeoning industrial and commercial apparatus of capitalist America and Europe.
The immensely complex food web that supports a blade of grass or a stalk of wheat suggests that biotic processes themselves can replace many strictly mechanical ones. We are already learning to purify polluted water by deploying bacterial and algal organisms to detoxify the pollutants, and we use aquatic plants and animals to absorb them as nutrients . Relatively closed aqua cultural systems in translucent solar tubes have been designed to use fish wastes as nutrients to sustain an elaborate food web of small aquatic plants and animals. Thus, natural toxins are recycled through the food web to ultimately provide nutrients for edible animals; the toxic waste products of fish metabolism are reconverted into the «soil» for fish food. To call classical, mechanistic, evolutionary, and relativistic forms of science «complementary» may very well miss a crucial point.
The entire being of the Hopi individual affects the balance of nature; and as each individual develops his inner potential, so he enhances his participation, so does the entire universe become invigorated. Schjelderup-Ebbe, who discovered the pecking-order of hens, enlarged his findings to a Teutonic theory of despotism in the universe. Schjelderup-Ebbe called animals’ ranking «dominance,» and many [research] workers, with an «aha,» recognized dominance hierarchies in many vertebrate groups. Despite the lurking dangers, a general peace prevailed, and plenty existed for the gods, men, and all living things.
Later, the concept of a free, productive, communistic community draws its primary, although by no means exclusive, inspiration from economic motives that involve the fostering of self-interest («class interest») and technical innovation. In contrast to visions of a golden age and the Last Kingdom, the realm of freedom is seen not as a backward-looking world of the past but a forward-looking world of the future in which humanity must fashion itself — often in conflict with internal as well as external nature. But organic society, despite the physical limitations it faced (from a modern viewpoint), nevertheless functioned unconsciously with an implicit commitment to freedom that social theorists were not to attain until fairly recent times. To be assured of the material means of life irrespective of one’s productive contribution to the community implies that, wherever possible, society will compensate for the infirmities of the ill, handicapped, and old, just as it will for the limited powers of the very young and their dependency on adults. Even though their productive powers are limited or failing, people will not be denied the means of life that are available to individuals who are well-endowed physically and mentally. Indeed, even individuals who are perfectly capable of meeting all their material needs cannot be denied access to the community’s common produce, although deliberate shirkers in organic society are virtually unknown.
Sooner or later, both would have had to confront each other as tyrannical chiefdoms, or the Nazca would have been compelled to defer to the Moche. Given sufficient exposure to external forces, a process of negative selection on the level of political life has always been at work to favor the expansion of ruthless cultures at the expense of the more equable ones. What is surprising about social development is not the emergence of New and Old World despotisms, but their absence in large areas of the world generally. It is testimony to the benign power inherent in organic society that so many cultures did not follow the social route to Statehood, mobilized labor, class distinctions, and professional warfare — indeed, that they often retreated into remoter areas to spare themselves this destiny. Yet at the political level of social life, a democratic confederal structure of five woodland Indian tribes obviously differs decisively from a centralized, despotic structure of mountain Indian chiefdoms.
The devolution of reason from an inherent feature of reality into an efficient technique of control yields the dissolution of objective reason itself. The very source of objective reason, notably objective reality itself, is degraded into the mere materials upon which instrumental reason exercises its powers. Science, cojoined with technics, renders the entire cosmos into a devitalized arena for technical colonization and control. In objectifying humanity and nature alike, instrumental reason becomes the object of its own triumph over a reality that was once laden with meaning.
What has largely replaced the sinews that held community and personality together is an all-encompassing, coldly depersonalizing bureaucracy. The agency and the bureaucrat have become the substitutes for the family, the town and neighborhood, the personal support structures of peoples in crisis, and the supernatural and mythic figures that afforded power and tutelary surveillance over the destiny of the individual. With no other structure to speak of but the bureaucratic agency, society has not merely been riddled by bureaucracy; it has all but become a bureaucracy in which everyone, as Camus was wont to say, has been reduced to a functionary. Personality as such has become congruent with the various documents, licenses, and records that define one’s place in the world. More sacred than such documents as passports, which are the archaic tokens of citizenship, a motor vehicle license literally validates one’s identity, and a credit card becomes the worldwide coinage of exchange.
Which specific ethical imperatives we draw from an ecological interpretation of nature (as distinguished from the abstract, meaningless, de-subjectivized nature that chilled the Victorian mind by its «stinginess» and «brutality») depend ultimately on our exploration of a future ecological society. Here is a problematic whose answers can be supplied only by a society capable of rendering them into a living praxis. An ecological nature — and the objective ethics following from it — can spring to life, as it were, only in a society whose sensibilities and interrelationships have become ecological to their very core. The nature we normally «create» today is highly conditioned by the social imperatives of our time.
To this system, humanity owes not only its labor, imagination, and tools but its wastes as well. It is difficult for us to understand that political structures can be no less technical than tools and machines. In part, this difficulty arises because our minds have been imprinted by a dualistic metaphysics of «structures» and «superstructures.» To dissect social experience into the economic and political, technical and cultural, has become a matter of second nature that resists any melding of one with the other. But this tendency is also partly due to an opportunistic political prudence that is wary of confronting the stark realities of power in a period of social accommodation. Better and safer to deal with technics as tools, machines, labor, and design than as coercive political institutions that organize the very implements, work, and imagination involved in the modern technical ensemble. Better to deal with how these means achieve certain destructive or constructive forms on the natural landscape than to explore the deformations they produce within subjectivity itself.
In any case, it is only in the use of reason rather than in rationalizing about reason that mind reveals its promises and pitfalls. It would be better to use our rational faculties and reflect on them later than to lose them altogether to a dark heritage that may obliterate mind itself. Only when social life itself undergoes hierarchical differentiation and emerges as a separate terrain to be organized on its own terms do we find a conflict between the domestic and civil spheres — one that extends hierarchy into domestic life and results not only in the subjugation of woman, but in her degradation. Then, the distinctively «feminine» traits, which primordial society prizes as a high survival asset, sink to the level of social subordination. Man’s »masculine» traits are also transformed. His courage turns into aggressiveness; his strength is used to dominate; his self-assertiveness is transformed into egotism; his decisiveness into repressive reason. His athleticism is directed increasingly to the arts of war and plunder.
People require no protection or rule; their every desire can be satisfied without technics or the need to bring other human beings into personal or institutional subjugation. In the sheer splendor of this plenty and the givingness of nature, the «pleasure principle» and «reality principle» are in perfect congruence. Pleasure is the rule, abundance enables desire to replace mere need, because every wish can be fulfilled without exertion or technical strategies. Christian historicism,with its promise of an early utopistic future, taken together with the Church’s appeals for direct popular support against anticlerical abuses by lay authority, had a strong influence on radical social movements of medieval and early modern times.
Nonviolent and playful wars will occur in Harmony, and captives, held for several days at most, will be obliged to obey their captors even in performing sexual tasks that may be onerous to them. Despite Fourier’s basic detestation of authority, however, he toyed with the notion of a world leader at the summit of his vague functional hierarchy, a position he variously offered to Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I. Imagination as a socially creative power found its voice not in the prevalent radical social engineers of the nineteenth century but in the rare, luminescent utopian works that flashed annoyingly around «scientific socialists» of all kinds. Occasionally, the irridescence of these works dazzled them, but more often than not, they were embarrassed by these fanciful flights into new realms of possibility and responded with vigorous disclaimers.