Or so it seems. I’ve often been puzzled, and bemused, when the extremists in some debate once again are found to be half right, and half wrong. What is it that seems to drive us to the go to the opposite poles and put us at loggerheads, whatever that may mean? (According to my dictionary, it means that all parties are being “block heads.”)
I suspect the reason is that most arguments are not, at heart, about finding the truth but about being proven “right”. In fact, all manner of selfish interests may be at stake – our personal prestige and the respect of others, political status and influence, material and financial benefits, and so forth. Also, our attitudes and perspectives are inevitably shaped by differences in our personalities and in our life experiences. And if somebody else opposes us, then a competitive psychology can take over the argument to the point that we will give no quarter even if it means saying things that we know are not true, or only partially true.
So the middle-ground between various verbal combatants is often where the truth lies undefended, and the onlookers may be asked to choose sides between two simplistic extremes. What our politics these days seems to lack is a “radical middle” – an open-minded, truth-seeking constituency that will aggressively attack the “Jacobins” of the left and right (the political terrorists) and reject their self-righteous prescriptions.
Thought for the day: I saw a bumper sticker recently that updated the famous line in Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural address: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” The bumper stick read: “We have nothing to fear but the fear-mongers.”
An Introduction
In his path-breaking book, Beyond Reductionism (1969), the famed novelist and polymath Arthur Koestler remarked that "true innovation occurs when things are put together for the first time that had been separate." He was talking about synergy, of course, a phenomenon that is still greatly underrated and vastly more important even than Koestler imagined. I call it "nature's magic."
Synergy is in fact one of the great governing principles of the natural world; it ranks right up there with such heavyweight concepts as gravity, energy, information and entropy as one of the keys to understanding how the world works. It has been a wellspring of creativity in the evolution of the universe; it has greatly influenced the overall trajectory of life on Earth; it played a decisive role in the emergence of humankind; it is vital to the workings of every modern society; and it is no exaggeration to say that our ultimate fate depends on it. Indeed, every day, in a thousand different ways, our lives are shaped, and re-shaped, by synergy.
All of these grandiose-sounding claims are discussed in detail, with many hundreds of examples, in three of my books: The Synergism Hypothesis (McGraw-Hill, 1983), Nature's Magic (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Holistic Darwinism (University of Chicago Press, 2005), as well as in many of my articles for professional journals. Some of these publications are available at my website: http://www.complexsystems.org/
The purpose of this blog is to provide a continuing update on synergy and an opportunity for some dialogue on this important and still underappreciated phenomenon, along with commentaries on various topics - political, economic, and social -- from a synergy-monger's perspective. The tag-lines for each entry, with a "thought for the day," are the unregulated firecrackers that go off in my mind from time to time.
Peter Corning pacorning@complexsystems.org
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Synergy is in fact one of the great governing principles of the natural world; it ranks right up there with such heavyweight concepts as gravity, energy, information and entropy as one of the keys to understanding how the world works. It has been a wellspring of creativity in the evolution of the universe; it has greatly influenced the overall trajectory of life on Earth; it played a decisive role in the emergence of humankind; it is vital to the workings of every modern society; and it is no exaggeration to say that our ultimate fate depends on it. Indeed, every day, in a thousand different ways, our lives are shaped, and re-shaped, by synergy.
All of these grandiose-sounding claims are discussed in detail, with many hundreds of examples, in three of my books: The Synergism Hypothesis (McGraw-Hill, 1983), Nature's Magic (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Holistic Darwinism (University of Chicago Press, 2005), as well as in many of my articles for professional journals. Some of these publications are available at my website: http://www.complexsystems.org/
The purpose of this blog is to provide a continuing update on synergy and an opportunity for some dialogue on this important and still underappreciated phenomenon, along with commentaries on various topics - political, economic, and social -- from a synergy-monger's perspective. The tag-lines for each entry, with a "thought for the day," are the unregulated firecrackers that go off in my mind from time to time.
Peter Corning pacorning@complexsystems.org
__________________________________________________
Monday, November 26, 2007
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