BY ALAN D.M. RAYNER
Deep in the heart of much human psychological, social and environmental distress
is an oppressively singular rationalization of the individual ‘self’, analogous
to a cardboard cutout model. This ‘free agency’ is a paradoxical artefact
of the objective abstraction of the material ‘content’ of nature out of spatial
context. It is dislocated from the receptive space of its natural neighbourhood,
and so held to be ‘independent’ and fully responsible and culpable for its
own behaviour. But at the same time it is confined within an imaginary 3-dimensional
structural frame, where it is embroiled in a relentless ‘struggle for existence’.
This artefact is sustained in human cultures by the desire for power over
sources of fear, which leads to the imposition of definitive ‘barriers to
love’ that provide a false sense of security and control.
All movement is thereby reduced to the translocation of independent bodies
in discrete numerical intervals of distance and time, as a reaction to or
effect of the imposition of causal force or action. In life forms, this causal
force must be situated on one side or other of a fixed bodily boundary, either
within some internal executive control centre or in the external environment:
the so-called ‘nature or nurture’ dichotomy.
In natural fluid flow, however, boundaries are transitional, ever-forming
and reforming places of dynamically coupled relationship and distinction
- not places of severance, which isolate subject from object. Here, self-identity
forms from the complex dynamic involvement of local and non-local realms
and so cannot be extricated from its natural evolutionary neighbourhood.
How Objective Simplification Makes Life less Involved and more Oppressive
As modern human life becomes more and more demanding in terms of the variety
of competencies that we each have to acquire as individuals, so our
fear of involvement in relationships with one another and the natural world
seems to grow apace. It is as though civilisation’s escape from ‘the Jungle
out there’, whence our animal nature evolves, leads only into an even more
perplexing ‘Jungle in here’, full of mythical constructions of our own making
that rule our lives far more oppressively than any ‘Lion King’.
This conundrum arises because in attempting to make life more comfortable,
convenient and predictable, we have tried to extricate ourselves from involvement
in natural processes by means of a simplifying method that ironically only
serves to obstruct and complicate this involvement. The method consists,
quite literally, of a very particular and partial way of seeking precise
factual Knowledge about the world: our much-vaunted objective rationality.
It is deeply embedded in the very foundations of many of our philosophical,
mathematical, scientific, theological, historical, linguistic, governmental
and educational endeavours. It has led much of our thinking and practice
to become unrealistically definition-driven and hence deterministic or stochastic
(fate- or chance-based). It lies at the root of much psychological, social
and environmental damage and distress. Not least of its damaging manifestations
has lain in the development over the last 30 years of ‘sociobiology’, based
on the application of the definitive neo-Darwinian concepts of ‘individual
selection’ and ‘selfish genes’ to all kinds of social organization, human
and non-human.
Much as we may yearn for more naturally simple and sustainable ways of living
and loving, objective rationality makes us Fall out of correspondence with
our natural human neighbourhood (cf. Taylor, 2005). Far from making us ‘impartial’
in our observations and judgements, as many might think, it actually leads
us to take a very partial - selective and prejudicial - view of our world
and one another. We define ‘things’ as discrete objects that cannot be anything
other than themselves and use this as the basis for the divisive logic of
the excluded middle – ‘to be or not to be’. Through this logic, we inevitably
set everything in opposition to everything else because, by definition, there
is no way in which anything can be both ‘A’ and ‘not A’.
In effect, objective rationality reduces Nature into a cardboard cutout model
in which every distinct form or ‘figure’ is excised from the ‘ground’ of
its dynamic spatial context and re-located within a fully framed stage set
as a cast of independent ‘actors’. Due to being isolated within their own
boundaries and ‘individual property’, these actors are somehow magically
animated entirely from within, whilst being pushed and pulled about by purely
external forces. Their interrelationships can only be transactional - a set
of equal and opposite actions and reactions distinguished as ‘cause’ and
‘effect’ in a linear time frame. There can be no bodily sharing of common
space, no room for the inductive receptivity of Agape (loving openness to
other).
This is the cold, self-referential, cubical cubicle world of Newtonian mechanics.
The position and momentum of independent material bodies are plotted within
a fixed Euclidean (3-dimensional) structural framework of x, y, and z co-ordinates
stretching to infinity, with void space abstracted as constant empty background
and, like time, divided up into equal, discrete intervals. As Henri Poincaré
(1905) recognised, it makes for great mathematical convenience, but cannot
adequately represent the natural dynamic relationships of more than two distinct
forms moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence.
In actuality, the notion that any thing can be defined as a discrete object
is inconsistent both with contemporary scientific findings implicit in quantum
mechanics, relativity and non-linear theory, and with our everyday human
experience of dynamic relationship with one another and nature. Ultimately,
this is because space, as an omnipresence of structural absence, permeates
everywhere - nowhere has any evidence been found for the existence of an
indivisible solid particle or discrete structural limit that absolutely isolates
one part of nature from any other. Indeed, were there any such limit, we
could have no knowledge of what lay beyond or within it.
Adverse Nature: the Distress of Dislocation from Natural Neighbourhood
Nonetheless, we persist in trying to apply such definition to everything,
including our own self-identity and personal property. As we do so, we sentence
ourselves to a loveless life in adversity in which we are up against ‘it’
and against ‘them’, forming alliances only through our identification of
common enemies who we can take sides against. We sacrifice our capacity for
love to an oppressive struggle for power that can only be resolved by the
elimination of one or the other. We ‘take arms against a sea of troubles’
in the vain belief that we can ‘by opposing, end them’.
It is as though we are driven to abstract definition by a perception of something,
which is reinforced in its turn by our definition-driven accounts of nature
and ourselves. So, what could this ‘something’ be? Ultimately, I think it
is our perception of ‘something wrong’, a fearful aspect of Nature and the
nature of ourselves that has us run for cover but in the process of covering
‘it’ up predisposes us to conflict. It is whatever we perceive that brings
pain, death and uncertainty. We may define it as ‘Evil’ and often as ‘Darkness’,
which we contrast absolutely with ‘Good’ and ‘Light’. We split both Nature
and the nature of our ‘Self’ into two, each of which rages against the other.
In doing so, we alienate what are as naturally vital to each other’s co-expression
as the ridge and trough of a wave.
In other words, by thinking that there is something wrong with Nature and/or
human nature, and trying to define it in order to eliminate it in terms of
absolute Knowledge of Good and Evil, we actually manufacture something wrong.
We construct intellectual facades within which to single out the human ‘Self’
from its natural neighbourhood, and attribute to this dislocated entity a
paradoxical and oppressive ‘free agency’. We set about trying to perfect
this agency by eliminating its imperfection, in much the same way that Darwinian
individual selection is held to enhance competitive fitness. The actual effect
of such selection is, however, to open the way for eugenics and holocaust
in the pursuit of an unattainable ‘ideal’, some future ‘end’ or ‘goal’ deemed
to be desirable in terms of prescriptive ‘values’.
In the midst of such self-imposed, definition-driven free agency, our distress
grows ever more palpable. We feel alone in our struggles and vacant in our
isolation - unable to trust or love any that would be our rival. So we look
elsewhere to satisfy or mollify our animal cravings.
A Matter of Habit: Barriers to Love
Once we define ourselves as free agencies that have something intrinsically
wrong with their nature, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy that traps
us in recurrent loops of obsessive and compulsive behaviour. We simply cannot
see the hidden potential that our definitions wittingly or unwittingly exclude,
and so get caught in the crossfire of a vicious circular war of one definition
against another. We may hence feel compelled to take sides on behalf of our
idealisation of freedom or security. Alternatively, we may seek a way out
of this war by retreating further into our sense of meaningless isolation,
and/or through various forms of escapism, that serve only to entrap us ever
more deeply. These are the burgeoning forms of self-oppression that our modern
culture has come in many instances to define as ‘addictions’. Many, if not
all of them are correspondingly treated as if they are illnesses, ‘something
wrong with us’. But many of them may more realistically be understood as
desperate attempts to replace the hidden potential that our definitions exclude:
they are symptoms of ‘something wrong for us’, which originates in absolute
definition.
So what is this ‘hidden potential’, which addiction to absolute definition
obscures from our view? I think it is no less than what goes missing when
an objective frame is imposed upon Nature and around our selves. It is ‘the’
indefinable, all pervasive, receptive, ‘Mother-Space’ of Nature, everywhere.
In another word, ‘it’ is ‘Love’. When we liberate ourselves from Love, through
our assertion of free agency, we subject ourselves to an extraordinarily
powerful form of oppression; a liberty we impose both upon others and ourselves,
which drugs our consciousness into compliance. We join the crowd that declares
in unison, ‘we are all individuals’, even though some non-conformist at the
back may say ‘no, I am/we are not’. The crowd is very hard of hearing when
it comes to appreciating the need for receptivity. It therefore perpetuates
its own prophecy of individuals struggling to be the best conformists - dedicated
followers of fashion, hooked on prescriptive definition. These individuals
paradoxically need prescriptive moral codes and laws to govern the selfish
extremes of behaviour that they assume would arise from their free agency
in the absence of natural loving influence. As Richard Dawkins (1989) once
put it: ‘let us try and teach generosity and altruism, because we are born
selfish’!
Getting Out of the Habit: Warming the Boundaries of Cold Geometry
If objective definition gets us hooked upon oppressive notions of freedom
and security within fixed ‘barriers to love’, what gets us ‘unhooked’ is
clearly to relax these definitions through the natural inclusion of receptive
space (Rayner, 2006). In this way, the fixed boundaries of objective form
are transformed into fluid dynamic distinctions of ever forming, deforming
and reforming complex identities of ‘one within other’, not one or other,
or even one and other. Each of these identities can be thought of as a local
‘somewhere’ that is a dynamic inclusion of non-local ‘everywhere’; they are
distinct flow-forms, not discrete fixed forms. They cannot therefore have
independent fixed ‘executive centres’ of local government; they can only
have dynamic local foci of spatial influence, like our bodily ‘centre of
gravity’ or the ‘eye of a hurricane’. These are simultaneously both sources
and sinks for energy flow betwixt inner whirls and outer whirls in the universal,
non-linear whirl of the indefinable cosmos. Their boundaries are transitional
places of dynamically coupled relationship and distinction - not places of
severance, which isolate subject from object. They cannot be physically extricated
as discrete entities from the natural evolutionary neighbourhood of the non-local
field flow that they both locally include and of which they are dynamic inclusions.
Such extrication is an artefact of mental abstraction, not a physical reality.
Natural inclusion correspondingly opens up the creative evolutionary possibilities
implicit in the dynamic relational involvement of interdependent flow-forms,
not the stultification of independent free agents. Our awareness of natural
inclusion hence enables us to participate in the release of a deeper spirit
of natural communion and creativity, which liberates us from oppressive modes
of thought and governance. In other words, we become free from oppression
- ‘unhooked’ and ‘unaddicted’ - by accepting, and indeed welcoming our lack
of absolute free agency in the inescapable pooled togetherness of our common
space. Like William Wordsworth, we can appreciate that ‘in nature, everything
is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent singleness’.
Had the intended recipient of this message, Erasmus Darwin, and his grandson,
Charles, been receptive to it, the oppressive notion of our evolutionary
‘struggle for existence’ might not have arisen, and we could have relaxed
instead in the wonderful vision of the kinship of all life.
In effect, the natural inclusion of receptive space, like love, has a warming
influence on our understanding of living in dynamic relationship. It melts
geometrical ‘form’ from something frozen into a fixed interval of abstract
time and space - a ‘snapshot’ - into somewhere continually unfolding and
enfolding.
What we perceive through our explicit senses as ‘form’ is a ‘derivative’
of ‘flow’, i.e. ‘flow-form’, not the precursor of flow. Evolutionary flow
is not the animation of temporarily fixed ‘forms’ (a temporal-sequential
‘changing’ from one form to another form, due to the imposition of external
force in a three-dimensional box), but rather a continual process of ‘forming’.
This fluid dynamic geometry extends from microcosm to macrocosm and differs
radically from the hard-line abstractions of Euclid. It is primarily non-linear
or curved, due to the inductive receptivity of space, giving rise to spheres,
ellipsoids, spirals and tubes. Linear structure emerges secondarily from
this geometry, as in the cylinders formed by trees or the hexagonal arrays
formed in honeycombs and the regular surfaces of crystals. This natural geometry
is also ‘nested’, with smaller domains contained within and communicating
with larger domains. The simplest form of expression of this geometry would
be a set of concentric perforated spheres, but has the potential to become
extremely ‘involved’ or ‘complex’.
Community in Diversity: Our Natural, Co-creative, Dynamic Neighbourhood
Hence we may begin to appreciate the natural communion that is the essence
of natural communities of diverse flow-forms pooled together in common space.
A forest is not a discrete mathematical set of uniform trees, but a seething
variety of herbs, shrubs, trees, animals, fungi and bacteria that participate
in the fluid dynamic transformation of solar energy, water, minerals and
carbon dioxide into organic circulations of growth, death, decay and re-growth.
Like it or not, we human beings are inescapably caught up in such circulations.
So we might as well enjoy the ride whilst we may, rather than forever try
to close the door on their inspirations and expirations.
From Power Struggle to Loving Receptivity
So the possibility arises of a very different understanding of the evolution
of nature and human nature, which frees us from the oppression of our dislocated
liberty, and allows our shared experience to prosper. We unhook from Darwin’s
‘preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’, and regain our
confidence in ‘natural inclusion’ as the co-creative, fluid dynamic transformation
of all through all in receptive spatial context. We seek not to perfect individuals
through a process of competitive elimination, but share in the delight of
perfecting complementary relationship, a process of learning how to hold
our uniquely situated contributions in dynamic balance, where none gets absolutely
out of hand. We ask not, ‘what can I do about this’ as a context-free agency,
but ‘how may I respond receptively in this situation?’ We appreciate what
it means to be involved, not complicated.
Is this ‘natural inclusion’ just another Utopia, an unattainable idealisation
of human beneficence and social order? I don’t think so, because it makes
no pretence of regarding humanity as other than natural, or of regarding
natural life as without pain, death and uncertainty. But I do think it’s
what can liberate us from those partial visions that fail to account for
the vitality of what it really means to be human and natural and so have
us chasing our tails forever in demented loops of individual perfectionism.
It allows us to frequent a world where what may rationalistically be deemed
to be individual imperfection – something wrong with us – is transformed
into the dynamic foundation for our loving, receptive, co-creativity. I think
it’s simply what common sense really means - what comes from the absence
of those barriers to love that we love to impose in the pursuit of unnatural
power over natural influence.
That it’s a tall order to let go of all that has driven our culture to addictive
abstraction, I don’t doubt. But all that’s needed to resume our sense of
natural inclusion is to relax, stop teaching ourselves that we are born selfish
and allow ourselves to love our natural neighbourhood as the energy source-sink
that sustains our complex identity. Transformation can be rapid, once the
floodgates are open to receptive-responsive possibility. We include ourselves
in the picture from which our objective eyesight singles us out, along with
many others. We also recognise that to sever what’s natural to improve our
personal property, only serves to expose our personal property to view from
elsewhere. Be careful with that axe, Eugene!
References
Dawkins, R. (1989). The Selfish Gene. New edition. Oxford University Press.
Poincaré, H. (1905). Science and Hypothesis. Dover Publications. Walter
Scott Publishing Company Ltd.
Rayner, A.D.M. (2006). Natural Inclusion: How to Evolve Good Neighbourhood.
Self-published on CD.
Taylor, S. (2005). The Fall. Winchester, UK, New York, USA: O Books
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