The Way - a synthesis

It must be clear to all thinking people that the policies adopted by governments just about everywhere to solve the problems that confront us today, such as poverty, unemployment, homelessness, disease, malnutrition, crime, drug addiction and environmental degradation, do not work. If they did, then these problems would not be increasing as they all are, and at an unprecedented rate.

This being so, the only responsible - indeed the only honest - course of action, must be to step back to reconsider the basic assumptions on which these policies are based.

Such assumptions, we would find, are closely interrelated - so much so that together they constitute a very coherent world view, one that in my book The Way I refer to as the world view of modernism.

A world view is the "conceptual framework" to use Michael Polanyi's expression, into which society's knowledge is organized, and in the light of which its individual members and the groupings into which they are organized - families and communities in the case of a traditional society and corporations and state institutions in the case of an atomised industrial society - and the society itself - seek to understand their relationship to the environment (in particular, the man made environment in the latter case), i.e. to the world of which they are part and to the all-encompassing cosmos or the world of the gods and spirits.

It is on the basis of such a purely subjective world view and that of its 'constituent paradigms' that a society's behaviour pattern, and - in modern society - its political and economic policies are mediated. It is on the basis of them too that such policies are rationalized and hence legitimized.

Thus Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations showed that it is by behaving in the most egoistic way possible that we maximize not only our own material interests but also those of society at large - a cheerful philosophy which rationalized the individualism and egoism that marked the breakdown of society during the industrial revolution. Darwinism was rightly described by Oswald Spengler as "the application of economics to biology", Darwin's "natural selection" being but a biological version of Smith's "invisible hand" and serving, above all, to legitimize the Promethean enterprise of our modern society by making it appear to be a natural process.

To modify a world view is very difficult, since it constitutes a highly coherent and self-consistent whole, and thereby enjoys great credibility regardless of whether or not it reflects a society's relationship with its environment with any sort of accuracy.

Its coherence is largely due to the fact that, like all organizations of information in the natural world (such as a genome or a mind), it exerts a determinant influence on the nature of its constituent parts. Thus each of the disciplines into which modern knowledge is divided depicts its subject matter in terms of a specific paradigm, one which slavishly reflects the worldview of modernism. Thus the living world, at every level of organization, is seen as made up of discreet particles that are individualistic, competitive, and geared only to maximizing their individual interests and their survival, without any regard for the interests and survival of the larger natural systems of which they are, in effect, but the differentiated parts, and whose very existence is often denied.

What also makes a world view difficult to modify is that individuals and societies themselves have a psychological stake in maintaining the integrity of their world view in the face of any new knowledge that might serve to discredit it. The American anthropologist A. F. C. Wallace refers to this as "the principle of the preservation of cognitive structure".

It can be shown that the same is true of professionals who seek to preserve that paradigm in terms of which they see their particular discipline, long after it appears, in the eyes of most sensible people, to have been totally discredited.

What is more, theories that do not conform with an established paradigm, and hence with the world view as a whole, tend sooner or later to be moulded into that shape that enables them to do so. Thus, in the last 60 years, the behaviourists made psychology conform to the paradigm of science. The neo-Darwinians and, even more so, the sociobiologists did the same for theoretical biology.

Modern sociology has also become mechanistic and reductionistic, and the development of the New Ecology in the 1940s and 1950s has given rise to what is in effect a Newtonian ecology, that, rather than provide the theoretical foundations for the environmental movement of today, as most environmentalists tend to believe, serves instead to rationalize and hence validate the very process of economic development or progress that is the principal, if not the only, cause of the environmental degradation that it strives so ardently to combat.

In this way our academic knowledge has been made, Procrustean-like, to conform to the paradigm of science, and hence to the world view of modernism, stretched or shrunk to fit an atomized and mechanistic vision of the world in which people are no more than machines and their needs purely material and technological - precisely those that the state and the industrial system are capable of satisfying.

What is more, knowledge that cannot be moulded into the desired shape, however true and important it might be, is by the same token ruthlessly rejected. This disposes of all theories based on the assumption that the world is orderly and purposive rather than random, organized rather than atomized, co-operative rather than purely competitive, dynamic, creative and intelligent rather than passive and robot-like, self-regulating rather than managed by some external agent such as the State or the corporation, and tending to maintain its stability or homeostasis rather than geared to perpetual change in an undefined direction. It disposes, in fact, of any knowledge that might enable us to understand the true nature of the world we live in.

It follows that in terms of this aberrant world view we can never correctly interpret the problems that threaten our survival, nor determine what must be the policies needed to bring to an end the destruction of the planet nor develop a non-destructive and fulfilling way of life. An ecological world view in the light of which all this becomes possible must thereby be a most urgent requirement.

I have tried in my book The Way: an ecological world view to state what must be the basic principles underlying it. These principles are all closely interrelated, forming an all-embracing and self-consistent model of our relationship with the world in which we live as well as an associated explicit or implicit set of instructions designed to lead those imbued with it to adopt the associated pattern of behaviour.

It was always clear to me that the inspiration for this world view must come from the world view of the earliest period when people everywhere really knew how to live in harmony with the natural world. I have often been criticized on this score. However, it seems to me highly presumptuous to postulate an ideal world view, as it is to postulate an ideal society for which there is no precedent in the human experience on this planet, and whose biological, social and ecological viability has never been demonstrated.

If Karl Marx made that mistake, so too do today's adepts of economic development or progress, who seek to create a man-made technological world without asking themselves whether we are capable of adapting to it or whether the ecosphere is capable of sustaining it for more than a few decades. (see The Way)

What has struck me more recently is that the basic principles underlying the world view of early vernacular societies were everywhere the same, as is emphasized by Mircea Eliade in his many books, and by the proponents of the Perennial Philosophy, such as Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon, Titus Burckhardt, and others, and that these principles must also necessarily underlie a truly ecological world view. The first of these principles is that the living world or ecosphere is the basic source of all benefits, hence of all wealth.

The second is that the ecosphere [1] will only dispense these benefits if we religiously preserve its critical order. From these two fundamental principles follows the third, which is that the overriding goal of an ecological society must be to preserve the critical order of the natural world or of the cosmos. I will not say very much about the first of these principles as it is implicit to the other two. I will deal briefly with the second principle though this is also implicit in the third, the only one I shall deal with in any great detail.

Order is a basic feature of the Gaian hierarchy, as traditional man fully understood. His own body, his home, his temple, his society, the natural world and the cosmos itself he saw as organized according to the same plan, governed by the same law, and hence as constituting a single organized whole. [2]

The word 'cosmos' itself originally meant order. In many cosmologies, as Mircea Eliade notes, the cosmos came into being once God had succeeded in vanquishing a vast primordial monster or dragon that symbolized the original chaos. Often, the monster's body served as raw material out of which the cosmos was fashioned.

Thus Marduk fashioned the cosmos out of the body of the marine monster Tiamat, and Yahveh built the cosmos out of the body of the primordial monster Rahab. However, so as to prevent the cosmos from reverting to the original chaos, that victory had to be re-enacted every year. [3]

Order is usually defined as the influence of the whole over the parts. Rupert Riedl sees it as "an expression of conformity to law". [4] I prefer to define it as

"an expression of the constraints that are imposed on the whole by the parts, which the latter must observe if they are to fulfil their homeotelic [5] functions within the larger systems of which they are part, and thereby maintain their integrity and stability."

That the world is orderly is evident. If it were not, we could not understand it. There could be no science of any kind, however we wished to define the term. To quote Rupert Riedl once more, "A world without order would have no meaning. It would be neither recognizable nor conceivable". [6]

Evolution and its constituent life processes build up order. Individualistic systems become organized, differentiated, and hence specialized in the fulfilment of various functions. As this occurs, so competition yields to co-operation, so the incidence and severity of discontinuities is reduced, and so the systems become more stable. Indeed, order implies organization, differentiation, specialization, co-operation, and stability. They are but different ways of looking at the same fundamental feature of the living world.

But order cannot increase indefinitely. There is an optimum degree of order at each level of organization of the Gaian hierarchy, for the natural systems that make up the Gaian hierarchy must, in different conditions, display a specific degree of order. Organisms must display a higher degree of order than do families, which in turn must be more orderly than the communities of which they are part, and which must in turn be more orderly than societies which in normal conditions tend to be loose organizations of families and communities. The ecosystems of which they are all part must also be more loosely organized and hence display a still lower degree of order.

These differences must be respected, or those key natural systems would become incapable of fulfilling their respective homeotelic functions that they alone, at their particular level of organization, are capable of fulfilling.

The ecosphere, of course, exists in time as well as space. It is best seen as a spatio-temporal entity. The spatial aspect is but an abstraction, as is its temporal aspect. Ludwig von Bertalanffy sees structures as "slow processes of long duration" and functions as "quick processes of short duration". [7]

If we accentuate the temporal aspect of a natural system and see it more as a process than as a structure, then a disordered or random process is one that can move in any direction. Its behaviour is unpredictable. As order builds up, however, the process becomes subject to the influence of the whole of which it is a part. Its range of choices becomes limited as it becomes a differentiated part of the larger ecospheric process committed to the achievement of a single overriding goal. Hence purposiveness is just another word for order or organization as applied to life processes. The two are inseparable.

Indeed, animals will eat and drink and reproduce because these processes are as much part of them as are the organs that assure these purposive functions. The same is true for families, communities, ecosystems and the ecosphere itself. As the biologist Colin Pittendrigh notes "organization without purpose is an absurdity". [8]

In terms of an ecological world view the hierarchy of the ecosphere must be seen as displaying a single spatio-temporal order, and its structure and function must be governed by a single set of laws, whose generalities apply equally well to biological organisms, vernacular communities, societies, ecosystems and the Gaia herself. Vernacular man knew this. Thus Radcliffe Brown tells us that while for us the order of nature is one thing, and the social order is another, to the Australian (aborigine) they are part of a single order - as indeed they were, for all traditional peoples who were imbued with the chthonic world view.

If the order of the living world, whether seen spatially or temporally, is not apparent to reductionist science, it is that unless one sees a natural system holistically within its correct field - as part of the hierarchy of larger systems in which it evolved, to which it is homeotelic and to whose influence it is subjected, one cannot see that it is orderly and hence purposive.

Critical Order

Equally important is the critical nature of the order displayed by the natural systems that make up the ecosphere. Thus, clearly the structure of an organism, like that of any other natural system, is critical: its various body fluids, for instance, must have the 'normal' chemical and biological composition, or what would be the point of pharmacological tests? The basic features of a human community are also critical. However much it may differ in its details, it must be composed of extended families, and intermediary social groupings which link people together to form a cohesive unit of social behaviour capable of maintaining its homeostasis in the face of change.

A cultural pattern must also display a critical order and cultural traits can only be understood in accordance with their functions within it. The suppression of vernacular customs and institutions because they appear undesirable, when judged by our particular standard of morality, can have fatal results on the culture involved, very much as the extraction of a key organ can result in the demise of an organism.

If societies have a critical order, so too must ecosystems. They must be made up of green plants that are capable, via photosynthesis, of mobilizing the energy of the sun, herbivores that can feed off the plants, predators that can feed off the herbivores, applying quantitative and qualitative controls on their populations, and decomposers that can break down biological material into its constituent parts to serve as the raw materials for the perpetuation of the whole cycle.

The ecosphere itself, the overall ecosystem, must for the same reason display a critical order. That the earth's atmosphere must do so at a chemical level is clearly noted by James Lovelock. Among other things, its carbon dioxide content is critical; if it were too low, the earth would be too cold, and if too high, its temperature would exceed that which most forms of life could support. Its oxygen content is also critical; if it were too low, then some species would not be able to breathe, while if it were too high, the earth's atmosphere would become so inflammable that a single spark could set off uncontrollable fires.

It must follow that adaptive changes occurring to any natural system are those that serve to maintain its critical order and hence its stability within the context of the critical order or stability of the whole Gaian hierarchy.

Vernacular man when imbued with a chthonic world view fully realized this, so much so that his main preoccupation was to maintain the critical order of the cosmos, for he knew that it was by doing so that his welfare would be maximized. The corollary of this was that to violate the critical order of the cosmos could only lead to the most terrible calamities. Hence, the elaborate system of 'taboos' or prohibitions that prevailed in all vernacular societies.

This all-pervading fear of disrupting the critical order of the cosmos is reflected in the taboos set up in all tribal societies against mixing things that are seen as belonging to different classes or provinces into which the cosmos is seen to be divided. This goes a long way towards explaining food taboos. Thus it is taboo to eat pork among the Hebrews, this is because the pig, as Mary Douglas notes, "is put into the class of abominable, unclean creatures" [9] along with water creatures that do not have fins and scales.

They do not fall into natural cosmic categories either. Nor do air creatures that do not fly or hop on the earth, and do not have wings and two legs. To eat such creatures can only reduce a person's vital force and simultaneously threaten the critical order of the cosmos. Mixed marriages between people from naturally exogamous social groups are seen in the same light; they threaten the critical order of society and thereby that of the cosmos of which it is part.

Among the Igbo of Nigeria, according to Emefie Ikenga Metuh, "deviations which disrupt the natural order are called Aru; literally, abominations". The word Aru, however, also means "crime against nature". Such crimes include a number of unnatural acts that defy normal behavioural categories, such as a man having sexual intercourse with his father's wife or with an animal. The birth of twins and a hen hatching but one chick also fall into this category. These taboo events are Aru because the Igbo believe "that they transgress the laws guiding the ontological order and will therefore bring disaster to the community". [10]

Unfortunately, economic progress cannot occur without disrupting the critical order of the natural world, so, not surprisingly, as the world view of modernism and the associated paradigm of science slowly developed to rationalize and hence validate this anti-evolutionary enterprise, the idea that the world was orderly and that this order was critical was slowly abandoned. Instead the ecosphere was increasingly seen as random, in particular its temporal aspect - and also as highly malleable. Thus for Descartes, living things in general - and for John Locke, the human mind itself - are but pieces of wax: "flexible, malleable, ours to shape as we please" as Passmore puts it. [11]

Most modern historians and sociologists also see society in this way. H. A. L. Fisher, for instance, tells us that man does not have a nature, only a history, rationalizing in this way his contention that history is but a series of random and unconnected events. Edward O. Wilson also talks of the "extreme plasticity of social behaviour", implying that we can adapt to living in just about any social and environmental conditions, including of course those that economic development or progress impose upon us.

When ecology developed, partly as a reaction against the reductionist and mechanistic paradigm of science, (12) it sought to re-establish the essential notion that the ecosphere is organized or orderly, and that this order is critical. This notion was largely embodied in the principle of the 'balance of nature', which was then seen as a basic principle of ecology. Thus S.A. Forbes saw "an ideal balance of nature as one promotive of the highest good of all the species". [13] W. C. Allee and the other principal members of the Chicago school of ecology in the 1940s also accepted the principle of the balance of nature, according to which "the community maintains a certain balance, establishes a biotic order, and has a certain unity paralleling the dynamic equilibrium and organization of other living systems". [14]

In the 1930s and 40s however, ecology was systematically perverted so as to make it conform to the paradigm of science and hence to rationalize economic development or progress, and ecologists sought to discredit the concept of the balance of nature in the same way as they questioned the established ecological principles: that ecological succession leads to a climax, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and that complexity gives rise to stability.

Stability

A natural system at any level of organization that is capable of maintaining the basic features of its critical order in the face of internal or external challenges, is referred to as 'stable'. A stable system is not thereby geared towards change but towards the avoidance of change. Change occurs not because it is desirable per se, but because in certain conditions, it is necessary, as a means of preventing larger and more disruptive changes. It follows that stability is not the same as immobility. An immobile system is not stable because it is not capable of adapting to environmental challenges, and its order is thereby vulnerable to large-scale disruption.

Needless to say, mainstream science as well as mainstream ecology accentuate change - perpetual change - so as to make it appear that economic development or progress is a natural process. Needless to say, the opposite is true. Stability has been the most striking feature of the world of living things.

The great biologists C. H. Waddington and Jacques Monod, among others, were impressed by the constancy of living things, as was the Cambridge ethologist W. H. Thorpe, who fully realized that the constancy of certain biological forms is more difficult to explain "than it is to account for their evolution". He notes for instance that

"The Wagtail (Motacilla) there in the garden was here before the Himalayas were lifted up! This constancy is so extraordinary, that it seems to demand a special mechanism to account not for the evolution but for the fixity of some groups." [15]

Paul Weiss also realized this. There is so great a preoccupation with change, he noted, that we have totally neglected the less glamorous but more fundamental constancy of the living world.

"In our educational system we are acting very much like newspaper editors, who highlight the spectacular and neglect the far more constant phenomena".

Thus we accentuate evolution, but we do not impress on our children that the most fundamental features of all living things are exactly the same and "have remained the same from the simplest living system that we know, all the way up to man". They should all be told that

"all the biochemical mechanisms of macromolecular synthesis, energy utilization, respiration, storage, proliferation, cell division, membrane structure and function, contractility, excitability, fibre-formation, pigmentation, and so forth, have all remained unaltered in essence through the ages." [16]

What is true of biological evolution is true of social evolution as well. [17] The main feature of vernacular societies, within which man has spent well over ninety per cent of his experience on this planet, has been their stability. This is particularly true of hunter-gatherer societies. During the old stone age, for instance, flint-chipping techniques did not change for some 200,000 years, nor did the lifestyle of Australian Aborigines for at least 30,000 years. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner writes,

"The Australian ethos appears to be continuity, constancy, balance, symmetry, regularity. The value given to continuity is so high that they are not simply a people 'without history.' They are a people who have been able, in some sense, to 'defeat' history, to become a-historical in mood, outlook and life." [18]

It is probable that the same could be said of all hunter-gatherer societies and tribal societies in general when living in the environment to which they have been adapted by their social evolution.

Homeostasis

Biological organisms are self-regulating cybernetic systems capable by their own efforts of maintaining their stability in the face of internal and external challenges - a quality referred to as 'homeostasis'. The French physiologist Claude Bernard - one of the first scientists to note the capacity of living cells to maintain their constancy in the face of change considered that it was the goal of all living things to do so. The term was later coined by the physiologist Walter Cannon in his seminal book The Wisdom of the Body. He was struck by the fact that organisms

"composed of material which is characterized by the utmost inconstancy and unsteadiness, have somehow learned the method of maintaining constancy and keeping steady in the presence of conditions which might reasonably be expected to prove profoundly disturbing." [19]

An obvious example is the ability of mammals to maintain the constancy of their body temperature in spite of external changes.

Interestingly enough, Cannon considered that the mechanisms he found in biological organisms may be operative in other natural systems which could also explain their constancy. A comparative study, he suggests, might show that every complex organization must be capable of "more or less effective self-righting adjustments in order to prevent a check on its functions, or rapid disintegration of its parts, when it is subjected to stress". [20]

Eugene Odum notes how ecosystems are endowed with the necessary mechanisms for self-regulation and hence homeostasis.

"Besides energy flows and material cycles, ecosystems are rich in information networks comprising physical and chemical communication flows that connect all parts and steer or regulate the system as a whole. Accordingly, ecosystems can be considered cybernetic in nature, but control functions are internal and diffuse rather than external and specified as in human engineered cybernetic devices." [21]

Roy Rappaport was probably one of the first anthropologists to show that tribal societies are capable of such behaviour. In his seminal book Pigs for the Ancestors, he interpreted the ritual cycle of a small social group in New Guinea in cybernetic terms, showing it to be above all a means of controlling its impact on its natural environment so as to assure its sustainability or stability. [22]

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, quite independently of Rappaport, interpreted the cultural pattern of the Tukano Indians of Colombia in much the same way. Thomas Harding also sees tribal societies as capable of homeostatic behaviour and thereby of maintaining their stability.

"When acted upon by external forces a culture will, if necessary, undergo specific changes only to the extent of, and with the effect of preserving unchanged its fundamental structure and character." [23]

James Lovelock, in his seminal book Gaia: a new look at life on Earth, shows that Gaia herself displays homeostasis. He was also struck by the extraordinary stability of the earth's relationship with its atmospheric environment. As Sagan and Margulis note, it must have been maintained very much as it is now at least "since the time that air-breathing animals have been living in forests" - or for about 300 million years. Fossil records show that the climate has changed very little since life first appeared on earth about 3,500 million years ago. Yet the output of heat from the sun, the surface properties of the earth, and the composition of the atmosphere have almost certainly varied greatly over the same period. [24]

What is missing however from the whole discussion of homeostasis is the realization that natural systems are integral parts of the Gaian hierarchy, and that a system cannot maintain its homeostasis and hence its stability unless the hierarchy of natural systems of which it is part is also capable of doing so. There is no stable economy, for instance, within an unstable society, no stable society within an unstable ecosystem, and no stable anything when the ecosphere itself is being destabilized, as is happening today. Hence for a natural system to maintain its homeostasis, its behaviour must be homeotelic to the Gaian hierarchy, which means subordinating all other considerations to that of maintaining the critical order or stability of the ecosphere.

Homeorhesis In spite of the basic tendency in nature towards relative immobility, living things are changing dynamically all the time. Thus a fertilized egg develops into a foetus, a child into an adult, a pioneer ecosystem into a climax ecosystem and unicellular organisms (sometimes) into multicellular organisms. How does one reconcile this tendency towards change with the thesis of overall stability?

From the evolutionary point of view these processes of change do not violate the principle of stability so long as one sees them holistically. Individual generations or ontogenies can be regarded as feelers enabling the long term evolutionary process - the Gaian process - to monitor its interactions with and thereby permit its adaptation to its spatio-temporal environment. [25]

Seen cybernetically, ontogenetic development occurs along a closely integrated constellation of set paths which Waddington refers to as "chreods" (from the Greek root chre (it is necessary), and odos (a route or path)). The total constellation of chreods along which a system develops constitutes what Waddington refers to as the "epigenetic landscape" - the developmental path the system is constrained to follow by virtue of the instructions with which it is endowed and the homearchic (26) constraints imposed upon it by the larger systems of which it is part. A developing system thereby displays "a certain lack of flexibility"; its development has "a strong tendency to proceed to some definite end point".

This ability has been noticed by many students of development, among them Driesch who noted the remarkable "equipotentiality" of the sea urchin embryo. He and others also pointed to the ability of a fertilized egg to develop into a normal embryo even after undergoing severe amputations. This goal - seeking behaviour of a developing embryo remains inexplicable in terms of mechanistic science.

The tendency of a developing system to maintain itself on its preset path along its constellation of chreods and to correct any disturbances that might divert it from its path, Waddington refers to as "homeorhesis" (from the Greek homeo (same) and rhesis (flow)). Homeorhesis is the principle of homeostasis applied to a predetermined path or trajectory rather than to a fixed point in space-time. [27] The ecologist G. H. Orians refers to it as "trajectory stability", which he defines as "the property of a system to move towards some final end point or zone despite differences in starting points". [28]

Of course, this process is subject to homearchic control by the Gaian hierarchy. It is Gaian homeostasis which homeorhetic systems seek to achieve - since this is a prerequisite of their own stability. In this essay I shall seek to show that all life processes are homeorhetic regardless of the level of organization at which they occur. It is with those occurring at the level of a vernacular society that I shall be particularly concerned with.

Homeotely

As we have seen, natural systems, as differentiated parts of the Gaian hierarchy, share the common goal of maintaining its critical order or stability, for only in this way can they maintain their own critical order and hence their own stability. It is significant that there is no word in the English language that makes explicit the essential purposive and whole-maintaining character of life processes, so I have had to coin a new word - 'homeotely', from the Greek homeo (same) and telos (goal).

The principle of homeotely must clearly apply to all natural systems. Thus von Bertalanffy accentuates the "whole-maintaining character" of life processes at the level of the biological organism:

"The most convinced representative of an ateleological point of view must admit that actually an enormous preponderance of vital processes and mechanisms have a whole-maintaining character; were this not so the organism could not exist at all. But if this is so, then the establishment of the significance of the processes for the life of the organism is a necessary branch of investigation." [29]

He cites E. Ungerer as being so impressed by the "whole-maintaining" function of life processes that he decided to replace the biological "consideration of purpose" with that of "wholeness". [30]

The same principle applies to a community and a society. At least some anthropologists of the 'functional' school saw cultural behaviour as ensuring the integrity and stability of social systems. For Radcliffe-Brown the function of a behavioural trait is the contribution it makes "to the total activity of which it is part", while "the function of a particular social usage is the contribution it makes to the total social life as a functioning unit of the total social system". [31]

It must be clear that the teleological nature of life processes only becomes apparent when one sees them holistically in terms of their relationship with the spatio-temporal whole of which they are part. Mainstream scientists, who insist on looking at them in isolation from the whole, continue to insist that they are random, goalless and self-serving. This could not be better illustrated than by the preposterous writings of Professor Richard Dawkins at Oxford University.

The coordination of homeotelic processes is particularly impressive. Radcliffe-Brown saw the essential "functional unity" of a society as

"a condition in which all parts of the social system work together with a sufficient degree of harmony or internal consistency, i.e. without producing persistent conflicts which could neither be resolved nor regulated."

He notes that this view of society is in direct conflict with the view that culture is no more than a collection of "shreds and patches" for which there are "no discoverable significant social laws". [32] Without the coordination required to prevent "persistent conflicts," life processes, however, could not conceivably achieve their common goal of maintaining the critical order of the Gaian hierarchy.

As I have already mentioned, living things behave homeotelically towards the Gaian hierarchy because it is the only way of maintaining its integrity and stability and hence their own integrity and stability. This is clear if one realizes that they are but the differentiated parts of such systems in isolation from which they have no meaning, cannot survive or, in the case of a loosely integrated system, can survive only imperfectly and precariously. As Eugene Odum writes,

"because each level in the biosystem's spectrum is integrated or interdependent with other levels, there can be no sharp lines or breaks in a functional sense, not even between organism and population. The individual organisms, for example, cannot survive for long without its population, any more than the organ would be able to survive for long as a self-perpetuating unit without its organism." [33]

From another perspective, they must behave homeotelically to the hierarchy of larger systems of which they are part, because the latter provides them with their 'field', i.e. the environment to which they have been adapted by their evolution and upbringing and which, as Stephen Boyden points out, must best satisfy their most fundamental needs. [34] For these reasons, one can go so far as to say that in a stable biosphere, behaviour that satisfies the requirements of the whole must also be that which best satisfies the requirements of its differentiated (as opposed to random) parts. I refer to this as "the principle of hierarchical mutualism".

Of course, with the increasing social and ecological disintegration that occurs under the impact of economic development or progress, behaviour ceases to be homeotelic; it becomes misdirected, and though it may continue to serve, superficially at least, some of the interests of the parts, it no longer serves those of the whole Gaian hierarchy. I refer to such behaviour as heterotelic (from the Greek, hetero (different) and telos (goal)).

I think we can say that just about all the policies adopted in our modern industrial society fall into this category. All are technological and institutional, and though some may seem superficially to serve the interests of individual people, they are designed above all to serve those of the state and the corporations, without any regard whatsoever for their invariably destructive effects on society, the natural world and the ecosphere as a whole.

The critical distinction between homeotelic and heterotelic behaviour, or between normal and abnormal behaviour, is foreign to the paradigm of science. If behaviour is looked at reductionistically, there is no way in which its purposive and "whole-maintaining" function can be established, and hence no way of distinguishing between behaviour that serves to maintain the critical order of the ecosphere and that on the contrary that serves to disrupt it. Reductionist science is thus above all an instrument of scientific obscurantism and mystification-among other things, it prevents people from understanding the true nature of the conflict between their interests and those of their political and industrial leaders.

Education

Education in a normal vernacular society is socialization and ecologization (if such a word exists) i.e. a process whereby a child born with a potential for becoming a member of almost any family, community, society, or ecosystem, learns to become a member of a specific family community, society and ecosystem. From the point of view of the society it provides the means of renewing itself, or progressively reproducing itself by integrating successive generations into its critical spatio-temporal structure.

A functionally similar process occurs at all levels of organization. Thus a cell, immediately after division, is endowed with the potential for becoming a member of a large number of possible tissues or organs, and slowly learns to fulfil its specialized functions within that tissue or organ in which it is situated. The process of cell development or differentiation is also the means whereby the organ or tissue, and indeed the organism itself, can reconcile the necessarily short life span of its constituent cells with its overall goal of maintaining its stability and that of the biospheric hierarchy of which it is part.

Not surprisingly, the educational process is governed by precisely the same general laws that govern the differentiation of a cell, the development of an embryo and indeed all other homeorhetic life processes at different levels of organization. One such law is that behaviour proceeds from the general to the particular. It is during the earlier phases that the generalities of a child's behaviour pattern will be determined. It is these earlier stages which are the most important and that is why the mother is the most important educator and the quality of the family environment the most significant factor in determining a child's character and capabilities.

Another complementary law is that behavioural processes are sequential, their various stages occurring in a specific order. If one is left out, it must follow then the subsequent ones will either not be able to occur at all, or will occur at best imperfectly. Thus what a child learns during its formal institutionalized education cannot make up for any deficiency in the earlier phases of its upbringing. This is the conclusion that most serious studies have revealed.

J. S. Coleman for instance, whose massive study led him to examine the career of 600,000 children, 6,000 teachers and 4,000 schools, reported in 1966 "that family background differences account for much more variation in achievement than do school differences". [35]

As the educational function has been usurped by state institutions and increasingly today by corporations, it has been disembedded from the social process and ceases thereby to serve its normal social and ecological functions. Instead children are imbued with the world view of modernism which must necessarily lead them to adopt a heterotelic way of life, disrupting rather than preserving what remains of the critical order of the ecosphere.

Settlements

The structure of the settlements of vernacular man reflected above all that of the societies whose physical infrastructure they provided. The basic social unit was undoubtedly the extended family and it is this that must first of all be accommodated, but the settlements must also accommodate the lineage group and the community. Each of these social groupings, moreover, must have the element of privacy required to maintain its identity and integrity, which is essential to maintain the critical order of the ecosphere.

In an Australian Aboriginal encampment, for instance, we find that each family has its own space-the area that the family sweeps several times a day. This place is protected by a windbreak (wiltja) and at the edge of it there is a fire. The family spaces are grouped around a larger central space. In the darkness of the night they cannot see each other and thereby have the privacy they require, further enhanced by the custom that once it is dark people do not leave their family space - for fear of malignant spirits that lurk around it. [36]

The cities of the Yoruba of Western Nigeria are also divided into areas inhabited by different extended families, which are further organized into neighbourhoods inhabited by closely related families. Those inhabiting adjoining areas are also related, although less closely. The traditional city is thus a hierarchical system of houses, compounds, neighbourhoods and clusters of neighbourhoods of related people: these are closely built and larger spaces separate less closely related groups. In this way the settlement pattern reflects the society's social structure.

Conversely, a number of anthropological studies have noted the socially disastrous consequences of modernizing the settlements of stable societies to satisfy market requirements. Jaulin has shown how such changes led to the disintegration of the society of the Motilone Indians. Claude Levi Strauss has also described the same process as it affected the Bori Indians of Brazil.

However, to accommodate critical social structures is not enough - a settlement must be sanctified if it is to be preserved. Among other things this means that it must be made to reflect, in the eyes of its members, the whole structure of the cosmos. Thus vernacular man could not consider living in a house, village or city, that had not been sanctified and hence ritually integrated into the cosmic hierarchy.

Thus before a wild and uninhabited area could be inhabited, sacred rites had to be performed so as to "cosmicize" it. Ananda Coomaraswamy tells us that in the Rig Veda, the word vima, meaning to 'measure out' or to 'lay out', is used to refer to "the bringing into being of inhabitable space", or the laying out of "abodes of cosmic order". [37]

To build a new village or city meant first building a holy house or temple, on the cosmic model. In this way, the settlement that surrounded it was integrated into the cosmic hierarchy. The traditional ceremony performed for that purpose was, as Eliade puts it, a re-enactment of the original act of creation, or cosmogenesis.

Thus when Romulus founded Rome, he dug a small ditch in the form of a circle. He threw into it some sacred earth that he brought with him from the town where his ancestors were buried, and each of his companions did likewise. In this way, Rome remained terra patrum. The ditch was always known as mundus, which apparently referred to the place the manes or ancestors lived, and which also meant the world or cosmos.(38)

Believing that he, his artefacts and his settlements were integral parts of the cosmic hierarchy, chthonic man saw them all as designed on the same basic plan. According to Fred Eiseman, in Bali

"man is a tiny part of the overall Hindu-Balinese universe but he contains its structure in microcosm. Man's body has three parts-head, body and feet just as the universe, the macrocosm, has three parts; the upper world of God and heaven, the middle world of man, and the underworld. Man is a kind of scale model of the universe, with exactly the same structure - as is the island of Bali and each village, temple, house, compound, building and occupant of it." [39]

By seeing his body, his house and his settlement as reflecting the same critical order, which is also that of his society, of the natural world and of the cosmos itself, it becomes clear to vernacular man that his life is subject to the same single law that governs the cosmic hierarchy, and that he is a participant in the great Gaian enterprise, whose goal is to maintain the critical order of the cosmos.

Needless to say, during the industrial age, those who have planned and built our cities have almost totally ignored such considerations. Over the last fifty years particularly, our settlements have been designed almost exclusively with purely economic and utilitarian ends in view, and the results, as we all know, have been catastrophic.

Economics

I like George Dalton's view of economics as dealing with the provision of material goods to satisfy biological and social needs. This is what Karl Polanyi refers to as the "substantive" use of the term economics as opposed to the "formal" use. I propose a still more general use of the term 'economics' to refer to the study of how resources are distributed within a natural system. In this way we could extend the use of the term to include the economics of biological organisms, ecosystems, vernacular societies and the ecosphere itself.

Clearly all require resources of various sorts such as nutrients to ensure their sustenance and hence to preserve their critical order or stability. In addition, if we accept the thesis of von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory, we may also suppose that the same fundamental laws govern the distributions of resources in all natural systems regardless of their level of organization.

The most fundamental of such laws - and this must be the basic law of a realistic economics - is that resources must be distributed so as to maintain the integrity and stability of the system within which they are distributed, which also means helping to maintain the integrity and stability of the Gaian hierarchy of which the system is part. This is clear at the level of a biological organism. Thus, oxygen is transported via the red corpuscles to all parts of the body in accordance with the latter's requirements; so are the various nutrients that the body requires.

The principle becomes even clearer when scarcity occurs. In such conditions, a natural system is perfectly capable of setting up its own very effective rationing system, and one that clearly reflects its priorities. Nutrients are provided to the parts in accordance with the importance of their contribution to the preservation and hence the stability of the living whole.

Thus in cold weather, as Ralph Gerard notes, a rationing system becomes operative in preserving the necessary temperature of the critical parts of the body. To begin with, there is a reduction in the blood flow to the surface of the skin, reducing radiation and conduction. This may proceed so far that the skin is frozen and dies, the subordinate unit sacrificed "for the protection of the larger unit". [40] Such behaviour is an essential part of an organism's homeostatic mechanisms.

That resources are distributed in a vernacular society (as in all stable natural systems) in such a way as to assure the integrity and stability of the Gaian hierarchy, rather than to maximize economic development or GNP in accordance with modern economics, has many implications.

To begin with it means that modern economics, which is entirely based on the economic behaviour of modern heterotelic societies, simply does not apply to the behaviour of vernacular societies any more than it does to that of any other stable natural systems.

This is the thesis of the economic historian Karl Polanyi in his seminal book The Great Transformation (1944), much to the discomfiture of the economics community. He noted that in the vernacular world, homo economicus is conspicuous by his absence, and economic activities are largely conducted to satisfy social rather than commercial goals. In the language of Karl Polanyi they were "embedded" or "submerged" in social relationships.

This means that such an economy was under social control, and thereby designed to satisfy the social requirements and hence maintain the society's integrity and stability. Once social relations actually become embedded in the economic system, as is the case today, then the latter ceases to be under control, becoming random to the society and to the ecosphere and disrupting their critical order.

How the economy was once embedded in social relationships is clear. Vernacular families were organized into extended families and small communities that were often loosely organized to form larger social groupings. However, it was at the level of the family and the community that most social and economic functions were fulfilled. It was at those levels that the children were brought up and educated, the old and the sick cared for, the rituals and ceremonies organized and conducted and law and order maintained, (the latter via the force of public opinion that faithfully reflected the society's traditional values).

It was also at the levels of the family and the community that the functions of government itself were carried out, largely by the council of elders, sometimes by a chief or village headman, but almost always by people, who were integral parts of the community and thereby imbued with its cultural pattern and traditional values. It was also, at the level of the family and the community that what we regard today as the economic activities were fulfilled, i.e. that the food and artefacts were produced and distributed.

Economic functions fulfilled in this way occur without any external inducements - no money needs to change hands. Thus a mother looks after her children, because by doing so she is satisfying her own psychological needs, but by the same token because she is assuring the integrity and stability of her family, hence of the community of which it is part.

Whether she is doing this consciously or not is totally irrelevant to the argument. We are in any case largely unconscious of our true motivations and the reasons we give to explain them tend to be but pure rationalizations, as is generally accepted. Members of cohesive vernacular communities tended to behave homeotelically towards their community for the same reasons, thereby contributing in the same manner towards maintaining the stability and integrity of the whole Gaian hierarchy.

In such a society, as Sahlins notes, a man does not act as a purely economic animal. "He produces in his capacity as a social person, as husband and father, brother and lineage mate, member of a clan and village". He works as an integral member of these social groups, as a "whole man". [41]

This means that the modern concept of work used in modern economics, simply does not apply to people living in such a society. Not surprisingly there is no word for it in their vocabularies. As Mungo Park wrote towards the end of the 18th century "paid service is unknown to the negro, indeed, the African language ignores the word". [42] Jean Liedloff tells us that though the Yequana Indians of Venezuela, with whom she lived for two and a half years, did have a word for work - tarabajo, it obviously came from the Spanish word trabajo, pointing to its relatively recent origin. [43]

If primitive economic behaviour is largely an aspect of kinship behaviour, as Sahlins puts it, then it must be "organized by means completely different from capitalistic production and market transaction" [44] - and also, one might add, from socialist production and distribution via a state bureaucracy.

Polanyi sees the distribution of food and other products in a vernacular society as governed by two basic principles; reciprocity and redistribution. [45] When a hunter kills a game animal he will not sell it or even store it for a rainy day; instead, he will give a feast. In a sense this will provide him with all the advantages he could have derived from selling or storing it, because he knows that his hospitality will one day be reciprocated.

At the same time, it contributes, as does reciprocity, to social cohesion. It also prevents the accumulation of goods that might otherwise be translated into capital leading to the development of large-scale economic enterprises that are no longer subject to effective social control, and also to the development of the market with the corresponding reorganization of the society and of its natural environment to satisfy its exigencies.

Economic behaviour in a stable society serves, in other words, to fulfil essential social and ecological functions. Malinowski came to this conclusion after his exhaustive study of the Trobiand Islanders. He regarded their elaborate system of reciprocity and redistribution as "one of the main instruments of social organization, of the power of the chief, of the bonds of kinship and of relationship in law". [46]

Technology

In a vernacular society, technology is also 'embedded' in social relations-in other words, it is under social and hence ecological and Gaian control. The technology used by a vernacular society in the production of its artefacts or in the cultivation of its fields is not that which maximizes productivity, but that which best suits the strategies that the society exploits for achieving its goal of maintaining its homeostasis and hence the homeostasis of the ecosphere itself. This technology is also rationalized and legitimized by its mythology.

All economic activities in vernacular society are highly ritualized. Every stage in an economic activity is marked by a ceremony that endows it with a cosmic meaning enabling it to contribute to maintaining that wider critical order on which the survival of every society depends. That this was the case among the ancient Greeks is made clear by Hesiod in his Works and Days. The art of agriculture, in order to be effective, he tells us, must above all be in keeping with the Nomos, or the traditional law, and hence with nature's course. As Cornford puts it, "Man must keep straight upon the path of custom (Nomos) or right (Dike) or else the answering processes of natural life would likewise leave the track". [47]

Thus the technology of vernacular man was not designed to dominate or transform the environment, but rather to enable him to live with it. Reichel Dolmatoff notes how this is true of the Tukano Indians of Colombia. They have

"little interest in new knowledge that might be used for exploring the environment more effectively, and there is little concern for maximizing short term gains or for obtaining more food or raw materials than are actually needed. But there is always a great deal of interest in accumulating more factual knowledge about biological reality and, above all, about knowing what the physical world requires from man. This knowledge, the Indians believe, is essential for survival because man must bring himself into conformity with nature if he wants to exist as part of nature's unity, and must fit his demands to nature's availabilities." [48]

He notes how highly developed is the Indian's knowledge of ecology and animal behaviour.

"Such phenomena as parasitism, symbiosis, commensalism and other relationships between co-occurring species have been well observed by them and are pointed out as possible methods of adaptation."

They are also well aware of what would be the consequences for them of violating basic ecological laws. Thus their mythology describes how various animal species have been punished and occasionally made extinct

"for not obeying certain prescribed rules of adaptive significance. Thus, gluttony, improvidence, aggressiveness and all forms of over-indulgence are punished by the superior forces to serve as examples not only to the animal community, but also to human society. Animals, then, are metaphors for survival. By analysing animal behaviour the Indians try to discover an order in the physical world, a world-order to which human activities can then be adjusted." [49]

Robert Fernea, who describes the traditional irrigation system of the El Shabana tribe of Mesopotamia, accentuates its sustainability and contrasts this with the non-sustainability of modern irrigation methods. He believes that all the ancient tribal societies who once practised irrigated agriculture in Mesopotamia achieved a "congruence of fit" between their methods of cultivation, their land-tenure systems and "the nature of land, water and climate" which modern society cannot begin to emulate. [50]

It is among other things because vernacular society adapted its technology to its environment that it was sustainable, which modern industrial society, by seeking, on the contrary, to adapt its environment to its technology, cannot conceivably be.

The Way

Like the developing embryo in the womb, each life process must follow an appointed constellation of chreods or path, or Way, if it is to achieve its end-state and thereby contribute to maintaining the critical order of the cosmos. Thus one can talk - as does Rupert Sheldrake - of "behavioural chreods" and also of "cultural chreods", in that a society, by means of its specific cultural pattern, is capable of maintaining itself on its path by correcting any diversions from it-so long as they occur within its tolerance range (i.e. so long as its environment does not diverge too drastically from that to which it has been adapted by its evolution) and hence its field.

The Way a society must follow is that which conforms to its traditional law which the ancient Greeks referred to as the Nomos. The Way was also referred to by them as Dike, which meant justice, righteousness or morality. Jane Harrison tells us that Dike was also "the Way of the world, the way things happen". [51]

The Way was also referred to as Themis, which Jane Harrison regards as "that specialized way for human beings which is sanctioned by the collective conscience". [52] So Themis was also taken to be the Way of the Earth, and sometimes the Way of the cosmos itself, that which governed the behaviour of the Gods. Later, when these concepts were personalized, Themis became the goddess of law and justice, and hence of morality. The Way was also seen to coincide with Moira, the path of destiny or fate. The Chthonic gods were subordinated to Moira, as they were to Dike, the two actually coinciding with each other.

Thus for Anaximander, all things are attributed to different provinces that provide the basis of the critical order of the natural world "according to what is ordained", [53] a concept in which, according to Cornford "necessity and right are united". In Homer, the gods are seen as subordinate to Moira, and indeed to Dike - cosmic forces that are older than the gods themselves and that are moral. Against fate, and hence against the moral law, the gods can do nothing.

As Homer tells us in the Odyssey, the gods cannot even save a man whom they love, if the "dread fate of death" is upon him. [54] Herodotus tells us that "it is impossible even for a god to avoid the fate that is ordained". [55]

The Way to be followed by all human beings was the same as that which must be followed by society as a whole, by the natural world, by the cosmos and therefore by the gods themselves. There is thus a single law which governs the behaviour of the whole cosmic hierarchy. As Pythagoras writes,

"Themis in the world of Zeus, and Dike in the world below, hold the same place and rank as Nomos in the cities of men; so that he who does not justly perform his appointed duty may appear as a violator of the whole order of the universe." [56]

The higher the status of an individual, and hence the greater the vital force with which he was endowed, the more important it was that he should rigorously follow the Way. Thus Odysseus tells us that when a blameless King maintains the Dike

"The black earth bears wheat and barley, and the trees are laden with fruit, and the sheep bring forth and fail not, and the sea gives store of fish and all out of his good guidance, and the people prosper under him." [57]

Among the Chinese the concept of Tao refers at once to the order and to the Way of the cosmos. The term is applied to the daily and yearly "revolution of the heavens" [58] and of the two powers of light and darkness, day and night, summer and winter, heat and cold. E. de Groot tells us that

"It represents all that is correct, normal or right (ching or twan) in the universe; it does, indeed, never deviate from its course. It consequently includes all correct and righteous dealings of men and spirits, which alone promote universal happiness and life." [59]

Feng Yu-Lan sees the Tao as the all-embracing first principle of things. All living things, including humans, are part of this all-embracing natural order, subject to the Tao which is its governing principle. [60] Tao, as the order of nature, Yu-Lan Feng writes, governs their very action. Humans follow the Tao, or Way, by behaving naturally. Wing-Tsit Chan writes,

"When all things obey the laws of the Tao they will form a harmonious whole, and the universe will become an integrated organism." [61]

A similar concept existed in Vedic India. It was referred to as R'ta. As Maurice Bloomfield writes,

"The processes whose perpetual sameness or regular recurrence give rise to the representation of order, obey R'ta or their occurrence is R'ta." [62]

R'ta also stands for the truth, though in a philosophical context truth is usually Satya. Untruth, though it is sometimes Asatya, is usually expressed as an An-R'ta, hence as a divergence from R'ta or the Way.

The Vedic poet, as Krishna Chaitanya notes, fully realizes that to obtain nature's bounty, man must obey R'ta:

"for one who lives according to eternal law, the winds are full of sweetness, the rivers pour sweets. So may the plants be full of sweetness for us."

The great Vedic Hymn to the Earth clearly expresses the belief in man's dependence on the order of the cosmos and in man's role in maintaining it by observing the ancient law. In this hymn, the poet expresses his faith in the eternal order and in man's duty to preserve it.

It is this order which has bound "rock, soil, stone and dust" in such a way that "trees, lords of the forest, stand very firm". It is this order that maintains in "unfailing flow, day and night, the waters that are common to all" and nurtures "cornfields that nourish quadrupeds and bipeds". In all this the poet displays a respect that unites the spiritual and the practical:

"Whatever I dig from thee, Earth, may it have quick growth again. O purifier, may we not injure thy vitals or thy heart." [63]

Later, the concept of Dharma was also used by the Hindus in the same way. A. M. Hocart writes,

"That regularity, that normality of the universe, which produces good crops, fat cattle, peace and contentment is expressed by the word Dharma which etymologically means 'support', 'upholding'. It describes the way in which animals, men or things are expected to behave; it is natural law. The sun is sometimes identified with Dharma because it regulates the seasons; sometimes it is considered to be regulated by it."

Among the Gods, Varuna is the Lord of Right, who lays down ordinances for the universe. The king on his accession is seen to have become to his people what Varuna is to the gods. For that reason, he too is known as the "Lord of Right". [64] In Balinese Hinduism, Eiseman writes, Dharma is seen as

"the organizing force that maintains order, the organization that governs the universe as a whole, the relationships between various parts of the universe and actions within the various parts of the universe." [65]

The concept of Dharma was also taken up by the Buddhists who brought it to China where the Dharma of Mahayana Buddhism was identified with the Tao. De Groot describes the Buddhist Dharma as the universal law which embraces the world in its entirety.

"It exists for the benefit of all beings, for does not its chief manifestation, the light of the world, shine its blessing on all men and all things?" [66]

When a Buddhist Lama sets his prayer wheel turning, he is performing a ritual that has deep meaning both in terms of the Dharma and the R'ta. Not only are the prayers printed on it repeated by his audience, but as Jane Harrison notes,

"he finds himself in sympathetic touch with the Wheel of the Universe; he performs the act, 'Justice-Wheel-Setting in motion'. He dare not turn the wheel contrariwise; lest that were to upset the whole order of nature." [67]

If to follow the Way is to maintain the critical order of the cosmos - then a society can be seen as doing so when its behaviour pattern is hemeotelic to the Gaian hierarchy. When, on the contrary, it is heterotelic, then a society must be seen as following the anti-Way, that which threatens the order of the cosmos and must thereby give rise to the worst possible discontinuities.

Thus in the Vedas, as Chaitanya notes, we read that R'ta, though benign, can also be "stern and fierce" when it comes to transgressions. [68] "Brihaspati rides a fearsome chariot of R'ta for destroying the wicked", [69] meaning those who violate the eternal laws and so threaten the critical order of the cosmos. The latter are best seen as following the Anti-Way, or in Vedic India, the An-R'ta, the opposite to the R'ta, and later, among the Buddhists, the adharma, the opposite to the Dharma.

Our modern society has quite clearly set out systematically to diverge from the Way. Its overriding goal is economic development or progress, the supreme heterotelic enterprise, which can only be achieved by methodically disrupting the critical order of the ecosphere so as to replace it with a totally different organization: the technosphere, which derives its resources from the ecosphere and consigns to it its ever more voluminous and more toxic wastes. Technospheric expansion is thereby but another way of looking at ecospheric disintegration and contraction and the pattern of behaviour that must be adopted to achieve this suicidal goal is the anti-Way.

Vital Force

Vernacular man follows the Way even in those societies in which the concept has not been clearly articulated. Many have developed an associated concept, that of vital force. Cornford tells us that in the classical world, a place was regarded as sacred because of the presence in it of a dangerous power which made it sacrosanct - "not to be set foot on by the profane". [70]

Sacred things had to be treated with great respect, indeed with trepidation. They were the source of every benefit but also of all misfortunes, for sacred things contained dangerous energy or 'vital force'. Most traditional society had its word for it: Mana among the Melanesians and Polynesians; orenda among the Sioux and muntu among the Baluba - to name but a few.

Durkheim regards vital force as "the source of all religiosity". He sees "the spirits, demons, genii and gods of every sort" as "the concrete forms taken by this energy". It is partly, at least, because they are endowed with this vital force that they are sacred and have become objects of religious cults. The sun, the moon and the stars are also worshipped for this reason.

"They have not owed this honour to their intrinsic nature or their distinctive properties but to the fact that they are thought to participate in this force which alone is able to give things a sacred character, and which is also found in a multitude of other beings even the smallest." [71]

"the very ancient term which is found in all Semitic languages to express the idea of 'god,' one of the various forms of el (Hebrew), ilu (Babylonian), Rah (Arabic), originally denoted the vague force which was the source of all strength and life. [72]

Vital force is seen as powering the whole living world. To acquire it personally is the only sure avenue to success. Among the Baluba, vital force is referred to as muntu. A powerful man is described as 'muntu mukcdumpe', a man with a great deal of muntu, whereas a man of no social significance is referred to as a 'muntu mutupu', or one who has but a small amount of muntu. [73] A complex vocabulary is used to describe all the changes that can affect a man's stock of muntu. All illnesses, depressions, failures in any field of activity are taken to be evidence of a reduction in this vital force and can be avoided only by maintaining one's stock of it. A man with none left at all is known as mufu. He is as good as dead. [74]

Vital force was not just accumulated by individuals; it is usually seen as flowing through the cosmos and concentrating in certain things and beings, and in so doing, forming a pattern of power and hence of sanctity - a philosophy known as Hylozoism. Paul Schebesta tells us that for the Pygmies of the Ituri forest in Zaire, vital force or megbe

"is spread out everywhere, but its power does not manifest itself everywhere with the same force nor in the same way. Certain animals are richly endowed with it. Humans possess a lot more of some types of megbe but less of other types. Able men are precisely those who have accumulated a lot of megbe: this is true of witch-doctors." [75]

Significantly, the amount of vital force residing at the different levels of social organization reflects the extent to which the society is integrated or centralized. Thus in a very loose society, individuals and families are endowed with a considerable proportion of the society's vital force. On the other hand, in highly centralized traditional kingdoms such as ancient Egypt, or the old kingdom of Benin (now in Nigeria), the vital force becomes concentrated in the person of the divine king, who was divine precisely for that reason.

In such a society, what is more, the welfare of all the inhabitants is regarded as totally dependent on the fulfilment of the important rituals and ceremonies designed to preserve and increase the king's stock of vital force, and on the observance of the many taboos surrounding his person.

The relationship between things and beings at different echelons in the hierarchy of the cosmos is not symmetrical. Vital power flows downwards to vitalize and hence sanctify things and beings at the lower echelons, though it will only do so if the latter fulfil their obligations towards the higher echelons and hence towards the cosmos as a whole.

It is thus understandable that so many of the rituals and ceremonies of a traditional people - and indeed, their whole way of life-should be designed to maintain the correct distribution of vital force at each level in the cosmic hierarchy. In this way they can maintain the critical order and stability of the cosmos, and thereby enable the people to follow The Way.

To neglect the performance of these sacred rituals and ceremonies worse still, to break the sacred laws that govern their performance - is to violate a taboo. This can only lead to a disastrous change in the distribution of vital force within the cosmic hierarchy. An act is taboo, according to Roger Caillois, because it disrupts

"the universal order, which is at once that of nature and society [and as a result,] the Earth might no longer yield a harvest, the cattle might be struck with infertility, the stars might no longer follow their appointed course, death and disease could stalk the land." [76]

Once we abandon tribal man's notion of vital force, and the closely associated notion of the sacred, we go a long way towards desanctifying society and the natural world; in doing so, we leave it wide open to the depredations of modern industrial man who follows the anti-Way. Thus one has to agree with Hans Jonas that what is most required today is to restore the category of the sacred, which he regards as that which has been most thoroughly destroyed by the scientific establishment.

The Gods

The deities of chthonic man were above all the guardians of the critical order of the cosmic hierarchy. As such, they personified the laws that were seen as governing the cosmos and that man had to observe if he was to assure the preservation of its critical structure. This meant that by observing those laws man was also fulfilling his obligations to the appropriate deities. Thus to follow the Way in Vedic India was to fulfil one's obligations to Varuna, the God who personified the R'ta; in ancient Egypt to Re, who personified the Maat, in Greece to Themis, once the cosmic force bearing that name came to be represented by that Goddess.

The Gods also personified the vital force that flowed through the living world, reflecting its critical structure and sanctifying it. Jane Harrison notes that, originally, the gods of the Romans were impersonal and ill-defined, and that rather than being referred to as dei or gods, they were seen as numina, the plural of numen which meant 'vital force', [77] suggesting along with Marett [78] and later Durkheim and Lods that the notion of vital force preceded that of the gods and spirits.

Whether this is so or not, the two concepts are complementary. It is probable that, as the gods grew in importance, so did they in turn reinforce the sacred nature of the vital force with which they were imbued. In this way, they sanctified each other as well as the structure of the living world which their organization faithfully reflected.

The role of the gods of vernacular man in sanctifying and hence in preserving the critical order of society is particularly well documented. 'ancestor worship' seems to be common to all known tribal peoples throughout the world, though the term is misleading, for the ancestors were not worshipped as modern man worships his gods. His relationship with them was rather one of mutual obligations.

The gods had needs, and their principal need was for the living to fulfil their ritual and ceremonial obligations, observing the laws that the ancestors had enacted in illo tempore. [79] For their part, the living and their families, clans and tribes, needed the gods to protect them from malnutrition, disease, enemy invasions and other disasters. In Japan, as Lafcadio Hearn puts it,

"The happiness of the dead depends upon the respectful service rendered them by the living; and the happiness of the living depends upon the fulfilment of their pious duty to the dead." [80]

- a clear case of hierarchical mutualism. Thus rather than pray for favours, tribal man reminded his gods instead that he had fulfilled his obligations towards them and expected them to do likewise. He would even curse them if they did not reciprocate. Jomo Kenyatta prefers to refer to this relationship as "communion with the ancestors". [81]

Underlying this form of religion is the principle that a dead ancestor, or a deity, remains a member of his family, his community and his society, rather than gravitating to some distant paradise-a concept unknown to chthonic man. In this way, the ancestral gods in chthonic society are as much part of society as are the living-a point made particularly eloquently by William Robertson Smith some 80 years ago.

Significantly, the gods of vernacular man, like his vital force, were seen as faithfully reflecting the hierarchical structure of his society. E. Driver shows how the differences in the organization of the gods among North American Indian societies could be explained in terms of their degree of integration or centralization:

"There was a strong tendency to arrange gods in a ranked hierarchy in areas where people were ranked in a similar manner, and to ignore such ranking where egalitarianism dominated human societies. Thus the people of meso-America carefully ranked their gods, while those in the sub-Arctic Plateau and Great Basin believed in large numbers of spirits of about equal rank. Other areas tended to be intermediate in this respect. Among the Pueblos where many spiritual personalities were widely recognized to be designated as gods, there was little tendency towards ranking, just as there was more equality among human beings." [82]

The Swazi, on the other hand, have developed a cohesive and hierarchically organized society and, according to Hilda Kuper, their gods are organized in exactly the same way:

"In the ancestral cult, the world of the living is projected onto a world of spirit (emadloti). Men and women, old and young, aristocrats and commoners, continue the patterns of superiority and inferiority established by earthly experiences. Paternal and maternal spirits exercise complementary roles, similar to those operating in daily life on earth; the paternal role reinforces legal and economic obligations; the maternal exercises a less formalized protective influence. Although the cult is set in a kinship framework, it is extended to the nation through the king, who is regarded as the father of all Swazi. His ancestors are the most powerful of all the spirits." [83]

The ancestral gods and thus the vital force which they personify are organized in such a way as to reflect the critical order of vernacular society. just as the spirits of nature are organized to reflect that of the natural world. In this way, the critical structure of the ecosphere is sanctified and its human members forced to preserve it, come what may for fear of incurring the most terrible penalties.

Robert T. Parsons, writing on the Kono of Nigeria, sums up the nature and function of vernacular religion: it is

"not only an organization of human relationships, but it includes also the relationships of people with the earth as a whole, with their own land and with the unseen world of constructive forces and beings in which they believe. Religion brings them all into a consistent whole." [84]

What is more, the behaviour pattern associated with such a religion must be that which serves to maintain the critical order of "this consistent whole", i.e. of the whole cosmic hierarchy.

However, chthonic religion dies as society disintegrates. The Olympian Gods were the products of this social disintegration. Whereas the behaviour of the original chthonic deities was subjected to the great powers that governed the cosmos (the Moira, or fate, which once also referred to the spatial order of the cosmos. and Dike, or justice, which was responsible for assuring its temporal order), the Olympian Gods were set above these cosmic powers. Their behaviour and indeed that of the disintegrating society whose organization they reflected was no longer subject to the constraints that previously served to maintain the critical order of the cosmos.

As social disintegration proceeded still further, the Olympian gods ceased to have any relationship with society, for society was no more. The accent was then on the cult of a national God and eventually on that of the universal God. As society further disintegrated, the only remaining vernacular social grouping was the nuclear family and, not surprisingly, the universal god acquired a wife and a child so that the now truncated pantheon faithfully reflected the newly atomized society.

As society further disintegrates and religion becomes increasingly 'other-worldly', as man is severed from nature and indeed from the entire Gaian hierarchy, so his behaviour towards his Gods ceases to occur within its correct field - that provided by the Gaian hierarchy of which he is part. Instead, it becomes misdirected or heterotelic to this hierarchy, ceasing to fulfil its true social, ecological and cosmic role, and leads man even further along the anti-Way.

Correcting divergences from The Way

Developing natural systems can only maintain themselves on their course or along their constellation of chreods if they can deal effectively with any external or internal challenges that might divert them from it. To do this, they must either isolate themselves from such challenges or, alternatively, correct diversions from their path or Way, which requires that they interpret the problems caused -by such diversions correctly.

Vernacular man in the classical world understood, as Hughes notes, that "hunger, ill-health, erosion, poverty and general ruin" were only different forms "that the Earth's revenge could take for the terrible mistreatment meted out to her by man" - punishments for having diverted from the Way in pursuit of the anti-Way or what the ancient Greeks would have called the ou Themis. The only way to combat these ills, therefore, was to treat the earth with greater care, which meant to return to the Way of the ancestors who lived in the Golden Age when such ills were unknown. [85]

Vernacular people invariably interpreted disease in this way. Thus among the Tukano of Colombia, as Reichel-Dolmatoff notes,

"Illness is taken to be the consequence of a person's upsetting a certain aspect of the ecological balance. Overhunting is a common cause and so are harvesting activities in which some relatively scarce natural resource has been wasted. The delicate balance existing within the natural environment, between nature and society, and within society itself, is bound to affect the whole.

"To restore this 'delicate balance,' the shaman as a healer of illness does not so much interfere on the individual level, but operates on the level of those supra-individual structures that have been disturbed by the person. To be effective, he has to apply his treatment to the disturbed part of the ecosystem. It might be said then that a Tukano shaman does not have individual patients: his task is to cure a social malfunctioning." [86]

He does this by re-establishing the rules that "will avoid overhunting, the depletion of certain plant resources and unchecked population increase".

Quite clearly then, the shaman is more than a medical practitioner. He is a "truly powerful source in the control and management of resources", [87] for he can really affect the incidence and severity of diseases over which the modern medical practitioner, with his very limited brief, has no control whatsoever.

The philosophy underlying this interpretation of disease and the means of curing it is even more explicit in the case of the Qollahuaya diviners of the community of Kaata in the Bolivian Andes. They see their community as an integral part of an ayllu - conceptualizing their mountainous territory as a human body, with communities living on the high ground, the central areas and in the lowlands. According to Joseph W. Bastien, the head of the ayllu is the "moist puna area ... where herders graze alpacas, llamas, sheep and pigs; the grasses that grow there are its hair; its eyes are the lakes of Apacheta. Its trunk is formed by the sloping terraced fields of potatoes, oca and barley".

The Kaata also has a heart, and a liver, which produce blood and fat and are the "principles of life and power". They are circulated by the diviners throughout the community and in particular into the "earth shrines" by means of rituals and ceremonies in which the sick people "eat with the mountain". For the people of Kaata, human health is thereby identified with the integrity of their ayllu: it follows that when people, their society and its environment "work together to form one body, the bodies of sick individuals become whole" and the sick are restored to health.

The body metaphor provides in this way "a systemic model in which there is an analogy between the human body and the environmental and social bodies". Diseases are diagnosed as "signs of disorders between man and his land, or between his vertical ayllu and Ayllu Kaata". The disease is then combated "not by isolating the individual in a hospital away from his land" but instead by "gathering the members of his social group in ritual and together feeding all the parts of Ayllu Kaata".(88)

Bastien sees this as being very much the approach to disease of the people of the Andes in general. For them disease

"is an organic, cultural, environmental and social phenomenon ...By means of the body metaphor, diviners not only examine, but also interrelate the complex networks of environmental factors and social structure with physical distress. This often prevents subsequent illness because action is taken to change social and environmental causes of the sickness." [89]

In this manner, vernacular man correctly diagnoses heterotelic diseases as the symptoms of social and ecological maladjustments brought about by diverging from the Way, and thereby violating the laws of the cosmos and disrupting its critical order. What is more he fully realizes that maladjustments can only be eliminated by correcting such a divergence and returning to the Way.

Modern man, on the other hand, interprets problems in terms of cause and effect relationships on the basis of which a disease is attributed to a discreet event such as the action of a bacterium, virus or other pathogen - which must be eliminated, usually by waging chemical warfare against it.

The same is true of all the other ever more daunting problems that confront our society today, such as crime, delinquency, drug addiction, poverty, unemployment, etc. All are interpreted in such a way as to make them appear soluble by the expedients that science, technology and industry can provide and whose application is rationalized and hence legitimized in terms of the world view of modernism. Needless to say, everywhere the incidence of all these problems is escalating.

That is the essence of the Great Misinterpretation - the ultimate manifestation of modern man's cognitive maladjustment to the industrial world that he has created. It draws us into a chain-reaction leading to ever greater social and environmental destruction, from which we must waste no time in extracting ourselves if we are to have any future on this planet.

The Great Re-interpretation

No amount of empirical or theoretical evidence is likely to persuade mainstream scientists or other protagonists of the world view of modernism to accept any of the principles of the world view of ecology. What is more, if they are eventually accepted, it will not be because they will have been 'proved' to be true in the scientific sense of the term, but because the 'reigning paradigm' or 'canonical knowledge' will have changed to such an extent that they will have become consistent with it.

Similarly, no amount of empirical or theoretical 'evidence' as to the untenability of the basic ideas of today can lead scientists to abandon them if they are part of 'current wisdom', the 'reigning paradigm', or 'canonical knowledge'.

Clearly then, so long as we argue from within the accepted 'conceptual framework', or the reigning paradigm, or the canonical knowledge of the day, we can never dissuade people either to accept new ideas or to abandon old ones. "Demonstration", Polanyi insists, "must be supplemented ... by forms of persuasion which can induce a conversion". [90] Such a conversion, or generalized paradigm shift, involves a profound rearrangement or recombination of the knowledge that makes up our world view. It must affect its very metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic foundations.

In the same way the members of a society are converted to a new religion or world view when that with which they are imbued proves to be unadaptive to the new conditions - in particular the social and ecological chaos caused by colonialism and economic development. The new religio-political movements to which they are converted is generally referred to as 'millenarian'.

They proliferated in Europe during the 10th century, a period of socio-economic change that caused very serious social stress. Many of the movements which sought to establish new cultural patterns during those troubled times were convinced that the year 1000 presaged the end of the world and they called upon their adepts to prepare themselves spiritually for this momentous event.

Such movements are also referred to as 'messianic' in that they are often led by a prophet who sees himself as divinely inspired-as a re-incarnation of a previous great religious figure, or in the case of movements of this sort occurring among the Jews, as the Messiah himself. These movements have proliferated throughout the Third World, during the colonial period in particular. In Lagos, there has been such a proliferation of messianic cults that their leaders went so far as to set up the world's first trade union of messiahs. Anthony Wallace refers to such cults as "revitalist". [91]

The increasing failure of all policies based on the world view of modernism and its derivative paradigms - those of science and modern economics in particular - to satisfy our most fundamental psychic needs or indeed solve any of the worsening problems that threaten our very survival on this planet gives rise to psychic conditions increasingly propitious to the emergence of revitalist movements.

The chances are that such movements will be affected, among other things, by ecological ideas that are increasingly in the air and whose relevance is becoming ever more apparent to even the blindest among us. There are signs too, that such movements are likely to preach a return to the vernacular way of life.

Thus while the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Moslem world and of Hindu fundamentalism in India can be seen as an unpleasant trend towards chauvinism, bigotry and intolerance, these movements are clearly also a reaction against Western economic imperialism and the disruption of the cultures and traditions of Moslems and Hindus by Western science, technology and industrial development.

Significantly, too, a considerable proportion of the revitalist movements that have so far sprung up in the Third World have been 'nativistic' - which is to say that they correctly attributed the ills against which they were reacting to the way of life imposed upon their members by their colonial masters, and preached a return to the Way of their ancestors.

Many such movements have been violent and unpleasant, of that there is no doubt. Usually too, they have been put down with equal violence and unpleasantness as their ideas were rightly seen as a threat to the established order. However, there is reason to hope that the ecology-based revitalist movements of the future will seek to achieve their ends in the true Gandhian tradition. It could be that Deep Ecology, with its ethical and metaphysical preoccupations, might well develop into such a movement. So could the Earth First movement in the U.S.A., whose religious and metaphysical basis has recently been described by Bron Taylor. [92]

We cannot afford to wait and see whether such movements will develop into revitalist cults that are powerful enough to transform our society. Instead, we should work towards their development by helping to create the conditions in which they are likely to emerge. Let us remember that the world view of ecology is very much that of a vernacular community-based society, whereas the world view of modernism is that of an industrial society.

We must thereby set out to combat and systematically weaken the main institutions of the industrial system - the state, the corporations - and the science and technology which they use to transform society and the natural world. At the same time, we must do everything to help recreate the family and the community, and above all a localized and diversified economy based on them, reducing in this way our increasingly universal dependence on a destructive economic system that, in any case, is in decline and may well be close to collapse.

As we multiply our efforts in these directions, so we must create the terrain in which ecological ideas can take root and flourish. May they inspire those who will lead us back to the Way, and thereby restore and preserve what still remains of the beautiful world we have been so privileged to inherit.

References