Progress is anti-evolutionary and is the anti-Way

" ... Such is my awful Vision:
I see the Four-fold Man, The Humanity in deadly sleep
And its fallen Emanation, The Spectre and its cruel Shadow.
I see the Past, Present and Future existing all at once
Before me. 0 Divine Spirit, sustain me on thy wings,
That I may awake Albion from his long and cold repose;
For Bacon and Newton, sheath'd in dismal steel, their terrors hang
Like iron scourges over Albion: Reasonings like vast Serpents
Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations.
I turn my eyes to the Schools and Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,
Wash'd by the Water-wheels of Newton; black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every nation: cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which
Wheel within Wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace."
   William Blake

"We have not stumbled into the arms of Gog and Magog, we have progressed there."
   Theodore Roszak

"Do you think you can take the world and improve it?
I do not think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it.
If you try to help it, you will lose it."
   Lao Tzu

In terms of the world-view of modernism and of the associated paradigm of science - the changes brought to the ecosphere in the name of progress by modern man, with the aid of science, technology and industry - are part and parcel of the evolutionary process. No distinction is made between the process which leads to the development of the world of living things, or the ecosphere, and that which leads instead to the development of the technosphere.

On the contrary, these two obviously very different and indeed conflicting processes are seen as one and the same. If they differ at all, it is only insofar as one type of evolution is seen as 'endosomatic', in that it involves the modification of organs and of behaviour, or the emergence of new organs and behaviour; while the other, referred to as technical or 'exosomatic' evolution, proceeds largely by the making of new 'organs' outside of the organism.

Sir Peter Medawar makes fun of a student who asks if humans "might not evolve to possess wings and so make it possible to fly?" He responds that

"This is a foolish question ... it is obvious that human beings have already acquired some of the capabilities of both birds and fish - capabilities which they owe to their own special style of evolution, the 'exosomatic'." [1]

Julian Huxley actually believed that the historical and particularly the industrial age have created a heightening of human evolution in psychological and social terms. Even ecologists see things in this way. Ramon Margalef, for instance, tells us that "industrialisation has brought mankind a marked acceleration of evolutionary processes". [2]

Jantsch goes farther. For him, progress or economic development "forms a meaningful and integral part of a universal evolution", and he sees mankind as "an agent of this universal evolution, and even an important one". [3]

Another ardent supporter of this view is Peter Russell who invites us to

"sit here and wonder at the whole evolutionary process, which has, step by step, resulted in me and you, in farms, automobiles and computers, in men walking on the moon, in the Taj Mahal, the Emperor Concerto, and the Theory of Relativity." [4]

For Russell, one of the most powerful tools that modern science makes available to this version of evolution is genetic engineering. This will enable us to create "completely new species" and, as a result, evolution will no longer have to follow "the slow process of trial and error, and natural selection". Instead, new species will be "consciously designed and created within a matter of months". Atomic physics, he assures us, will also contribute to our further evolution. It already has, for

"with the advent of particle accelerators, scientists once again became more than just passive observers. They were now able to change some elements into others, or even create completely new elements, by bombarding the nucleus with atomic particles and thereby changing its structure." [5]

The invention of the solar cells, he also insists, "represents an evolutionary development as significant as that of photosynthesis 3.5 billion years ago". [6] Moreover, we shall soon be able to influence our evolution by means of our growing ability to colonise space, "a development as significant as the colonisation of land by the first amphibians 400 million years ago". [7]

Russell is so impressed by all these technological developments that he is led to ask whether "the rapid acceleration so characteristic of today is heading us towards an evolutionary leap?" [8] Indeed he asks: "Could we be on the threshold of a leap as significant as the evolution of life from inanimate matter?" [9]

Those who support the notion that economic and technological progress is part and parcel of the evolutionary process usually regard the early stages of evolution as instinctive, while the later stages that we associate with technological progress are seen to be conscious and purposive. This seems to be the standard position of today's mainstream scientists.

Indeed some of our most brilliant theoretical biologists, among them Julian Huxley and Waddington, see progress in this way. For them 'human evolution', as they refer to it, is the latest phase of evolution and it is principally the product of the development of mind, consciousness and reason. Because they considered man to be endowed with these three unique attributes, he is free to determine his own evolution - unencumbered, they clearly intimate, by any obligation to subject his progressive activities to any social, ecological or cosmic constraints.

In the light of the analysis provided in this book, however, what they call human evolution or progress is the very negation of evolution or the Gaian Process and is best referred to as anti-evolution. Since evolution can be equated with the Way, serving as it does to maintain the critical order and hence the stability of the ecosphere, progress or anti-evolution can be equated with the anti-Way - serving to disrupt the critical order of the ecosphere and to reduce its stability.

To neo-Darwinists - who see evolution as a random process heading in no particular direction and hence just as capable of giving rise to a climax ecosphere as to a highly developed industrial technosphere - the very notion of anti-evolution is meaningless; but this is not so if we view evolution in terms of an ecological world-view, in the light of which it is a goal-directed process, tending towards the increased stability of the Gaian hierarchy.

It then suffices to show that economic development or progress tends in the opposite direction - towards ever greater ecospheric instability - to justify regarding it as anti-evolutionary or as corresponding to the anti-Way. Let us see why this must be so.

As biological, ecological and social systems develop, they become more complex and also more diverse; though in ecosystems, complexity and diversity tend to stop increasing shortly before a climax state is reached. Increasing complexity enables a system to assure its homeostasis in the specific conditions in which it lives; whereas increasing diversity enables it to hold its own in a wide range of conditions, dealing with challenges that are less probable in terms of its evolutionary experience.

Biological evolution has led to the development of highly complex forms of life, such as man, and also to the most complex ecosystems. It has also given rise to some 30 million different plant and animal species and countless varieties of these species. Social evolution has led to the development of complex social groupings and to a wide diversity of different ethnic groups, each perfectly adapted to the specialised environment in which it lives. There are said to have been at least 120 different tribes in California alone and possibly 700 in New Guinea.

With progress, the culture of all these ethnic groups is disrupted and their members transformed into a homogeneous mass of alienated people, most of whom today are condemned, within a decade or two, to living in the growing slums that will soon accommodate most of humanity. In the meantime, climax forest ecosystems are destroyed and replaced by a series of ever less complex and diverse systems: secondary forests, then plantations of fast growing exotics, and then pasture - and they are eventually paved over to accommodate urban development.

Increasing complexity and diversity that accompany evolution are closely associated with increasing co-operation between the constituents of the ecosphere. Indeed, with evolution competition gives way to co-operation, or what ecologists call 'mutualism'. However, as the anti-evolutionary process gets under way and complexity is dramatically reduced, so mutualism gives way to competition.

In a human society, the same is true. The co-operation that obtains among the members of an extended family and the vernacular community of which they are part is so great, and contributes so much to the quality of their lives and indeed to their survival, that it is best regarded as 'social wealth'.

With progress, on the other hand, social wealth is rapidly dissipated as social co-operation is replaced by interpersonal competition and aggression. The social wealth lost in this way cannot be compensated for by state services or economic wealth, which can only satisfy a small proportion of human needs - and heterotelically at that.

As evolution proceeds, there is a reduction in randomness and a corresponding increase in order. This order is maintained by the homeotelic behaviour of the parts towards the whole. Thus, in a climax society, education is homeotelic to society, to the natural world and to the cosmos itself. So are settlement patterns, technology, economic activities, religion and government itself. The efforts of the differentiated parts to maintain the integrity of the whole, outside of which they have no meaning, is complemented by the efforts of the whole to maintain the integrity of its parts, without which it would not survive.

The units of homeotelic activity are the natural social units within which human beings evolved: the family, the community and the society. When these units disintegrate under the impact of economic development or progress, they are replaced by corporations and institutions, whose behaviour is increasingly heterotelic or random to the goal of maintaining the critical order of society and of the Gaian hierarchy.

Thus education no longer serves its basic function of socialising young people so they can become homeotelic members of their families and communities; settlement patterns cease to be designed to reflect social structure and the structure of the cosmos; technology and economic activities in general cease to be embedded in 'social relations', and rapidly spin out of control, eventually becoming the principal agents of social and ecological destruction.

Religion becomes universal and otherworldly and no longer serves to sanctify social structure or the structure of the natural world, leaving them open to exploitation and destruction. Government, instead of being a normal communal function, is fulfilled by the state, an external body, that is only preoccupied with its own short-term interests which are necessarily in conflict with both those of the society it is called upon to govern and of the natural world.

As evolution proceeds, systems also become increasingly self-sufficient: Eugene Odum notes that the perfecting of a system's recycling mechanisms is an essential means of increasing self-sufficiency. [10] As ecosystems develop, they are endowed with ever more elaborate methods for recycling materials: this is particularly true of tropical rainforests. A vernacular society, too, becomes increasingly committed to the careful recycling of all materials.

Again, progress or anti-evolution puts this process into reverse. The waste products of one process, rather than serving as the raw material for the next, are being simply released into the environment in the cheapest possible way, without any regard for the pollution and the shortages to which they must inevitably give rise. Worse still, xenobiotic materials of which the biosphere has had no experience and cannot recycle homeotelically, are released to it in ever greater amounts, further reducing its critical order.

Societies, as they evolve, also learn to produce for themselves the basic necessities of life. Trade (and hence dependency on external sources of supply as well as on external markets for the sale of their produce) is limited to products that are of secondary importance to them. It is only in this way that they can insulate themselves against external changes that could deprive them of their livelihoods.

Once again, with economic development or progress, this evolutionary process is also put into reverse, until the world eventually becomes one vast free-trade zone in which all the social and ecological imperatives to which economic activities are normally subjected, are now systematically subordinated to the short-term interests of the transnational corporations that control the world market - the most fundamental cause of the social and ecological devastation that is fast making this planet uninhabitable for complex forms of life.

Also, with evolution, living things become increasingly adapted biologically, socially, cognitively and psychically to their respective environments, just as societies and ecosystems are to theirs. As economic development or progress occurs, however, they become, on the contrary, ever less well adapted to their respective environments.

The result is an increase in discontinuities of all sorts: such as crime, delinquency, alcoholism and drug addiction at the level of the alienated individual; social chaos at the level of society, which is ever less capable of running itself and falls increasingly into the hands of dictatorships; floods, droughts and epidemics, at the level of the ecosystem; global problems such as climate change and the erosion of the ozone layer, at the level of the ecosphere itself.

Significantly, both Margalef and Odum note that the changes brought about by industrial man are unquestionably reversing ecological succession. Margalef also points out that man's interference with the functioning of ecosystems must return them to a lower and more unstable successional stage - one Odum refers to as a "disclimax" (a disturbance climax) or an "anthropogenic sub-climax". This is difficult to reconcile with Tansley's notion of the superiority of the anthropogenic climax over the natural climax; it is also incompatible with the very notion of economic development or progress as a means of improving human welfare.

Today, with the globalisation of progress, we are rapidly heading towards a global ecospheric disclimax in which modern man will have effectively reversed 3 billion years of evolution to create an impoverished and degraded world that is ever less capable of sustaining complex forms of life. Medawar admits that our hopes have not worked out: "every folly, every enormity we look back on with repugnance can find its equivalent in contemporary life". But still, for him, this does not invalidate the principle of progress:

"There is no need to be dismayed by the fact that we cannot yet envisage a definitive solution of our problems, we can obviously do better than this." [11]

In any case,

"it is a bit too early to expect our grander ambitions to be fulfilled ... human history is only just beginning ... there has always been room for improvement; now we know that there is time for improvement too." [12]

But is there really time? Is history only just beginning, or is it coming to an end? Is there really any reason to suppose that "we can do better" if we continue to misinterpret our ever more terrifying problems, as we must do, if we insist in continuing to see them in the light of the highly flawed paradigm of science and the world-view of modernism that it so faithfully reflects?

The argument put forward in this book is that we can only conceivably do better if, among other things, we set out to re-interpret our problems in the light of a very different world-view - the world-view of ecology - inspired as it must be by the chthonic world-view entertained by our remote ancestors who knew, as modern man no longer knows, how to live on this planet.

References