Humanities: problematic. Process philosophy & systems ecology: Awesome.

The following is an example of the sort of stuff I write for school. Thus it's marching to a bit of a different drum than the mad-science-poetics elsewhere on the blog - but there's a lot of thematic overlap, so I thought I'd share.

This is a formatted-for-blog excerpt from an essay in response to the question "can evolution explain religion?" I figured some of y'all fractal-loving types would dig it, and maybe throw some dirt at me... or something. Obviously the essay question is necessarily problematic... it wouldn't be academia if it weren't! lol. I began by stating the need to define "evolution" and "religion" for the purposes of answering the question. Religion is pretty much taken to mean religious behavior - and in particular group behavior. Next, it is clear to me that 'evolution' as a concept should not be treated as an irreducible unit with static semantic value. Evolution is an popular abstraction shaped in part by consensus in the evolutionary sciences, and also by bulldada (the media). Mmm.. mission-oriented science mixed with propaganda...delish!

Dictionary: [evolution is] the process by which different kinds of living organisms are thought to have developed and diversified from earlier forms during the history of the earth.

So. It's a process. That we know. Eeeeeexcellent!

It is the nature and nuances of this process which continues to be parsed and redefined by scientific research. We must keep in mind that science is not only a body of knowledge (and a relatively open-source one at that), but a method. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired Magazine, wrote "Science is the structuring of knowledge...most importantly, science is the method whereby knowledge is structured so that it can be structured further." In the evolutionary sciences, we seek to identify algorithms, reconcile patterns, find the units and currencies that code for form and function - essentially, to articulate a biological cybernetics. Since Darwin set the bar over a century ago, there has been an investigation into what units and forces are driving the evolutionary process. The way we conceptualize this process is often honed by how science articulates causation, and how much is attributed to certain causes. The "scientific story" of genes and heredity has taken the floor as a conceptual engine for evolution, and perhaps invited a degree of focus on the individual, isolated organism that has occluded attention to group and system-level selection. More recently, epigenetics has gained attention as a field exploring ontogenic phenotypic differentiation that is not necessarily coded by DNA as such. So evolution is a process, and our articulation of that process is dynamic and ongoing. Then, bearing in mind that we shouldn't consider 'evolution' to be a static, irreducible concept, what we must ask here is can evolutionary science explain religious behavior?

Implicit in this question there is the question of whether evolutionary science can currently explain religious behavior, and then there is the question of whether science can ever explain religious behavior. Ummm...let us turn to the former, because I'm a simple creature. Can evolution explain any behavior? Well, yes, it can certainly point us to the reasons for transmission of individual behaviors, like courtship rituals, for example, or the development of spoken language. And it can most certainly explain the emergence of physiological structures that enable certain behaviors. However, I think the explanatory scope of evolutionary science is limited partially because it can really only sufficiently explain process. Perhaps then evolutionary science can help refocus questions in many academic fields by illuminating certain edges of knowledge, perhaps at least reserving an autonomy (= temporary autonomous zone) for uncertainty in complex systems. Such a project need not be restrictive to the academic community. Indeed, development and quality of knowledge should be emphasized over quantitative accumulation. Concepts that we are learning from studying evolution and ecology like emergence, uncertainty, and complexity in nature could have transdisciplinary application, and also help to check a tendency toward reductionist analysis. Let us briefly survey some of these concepts as they are relevant to evolutionary ecology. Like the insights granted by refocusing the Darwinian lens from the individual to the group and discovering how group-level activity may occur, applying evolutionary concepts on the systems-levels promises to stretch the mind even further to conceptualize how systems made up of multiple plants and animals achieve "functionality". By functionality I mean generally providing conditions suitable for the perpetuation of more life. So uncertainty, for example, is a statistical concept used to illustrate that in a given process or situation, possible outcomes are known, but not the probabilities of those outcomes. Thus we may have an idea of potential futures, but we have no basis for calculating the likelihood of them happening. Uncertainty can also refer to situations where we don't know anything about the possible outcomes or the probabilities. This concept, whether it is formally acknowledged or not, abounds in ecosystem analysis (and de facto economic analysis) because of the simple fact that our scientific knowledge of how ecosystems work is limited. A large reason for this is that we do not have the data to account for webs of cause and effect operative in ecosystems, and moreover we haven't fully grasped the extent and shape of those webs. I can't resist giving the example of the recent research on mycelium, which are potentially vast underground networks of fungal filaments, of which mushrooms are the fruiting bodies. It has been found that mycelium plays a huge role in forest ecology - as far as scientists can tell it is able to function as a communication system between trees - a veritable "nervous system". It is thought to have a role in synchronizing budding in the springtime among a stand of trees as well as even being able to allocate nutrients to nutrient-deficient trees. I won't digress any further, but I'll simply say that this sort of awareness about the 'cybernetics' of ecosystems completely challenges our ability to sufficiently study anything living in isolation. (I had to sort of "rein it in" since this is being read by hoomanities professorz. Please forgive me, punks. I got mycelium some play, and for that I am thankful.) Back to our discussion about uncertainty. Risk is a related measure referring to a situation where we know possible outcomes and can calculate the probabilities of attaining those outcomes - a classic example would be the case of a dice roll, where we know all the ways a die could land and can also calculate probability because the geometrical shape of the die gives equal opportunity to each possible outcome. Often people colloquially use the word "risk" when they really mean uncertainty. Next, the concepts of complexity and emergence are related. Complexity here can describe the state of complex systems, where a large number of elements interact in fairly simply ways, and these localized relationships aggregate to form larger-scale patterns. These elements could be plants, animals, or even molecules - or some combination thereof. They could have a higher degree of agency, in the case of bees in a hive, or simply be plants performing physiological functions that affect surrounding organisms - like releasing chemicals from their roots or respirating. I think complexity, particularly complex adaptive systems, like forests or ant colonies, are interesting in a study of evolution because they represent levels of organization that are enabled by the physiological characteristics of the flora and fauna that comprise them - and in particular the sorts of relationship that these characteristics permit. Low-level behavior and interaction is able to be optimized because of an organism's physical and in some cases cognitive architecture, which has been honed by the process of natural selection. Emergence refers to the phenomenon wherein such systems develop irreducible properties that are dependent on network interaction, or relational order. This is where reductionist approaches really start to fall apart, because emergent properties are brought about through relationship and interconnectivity, and cannot be predicted or explained based on examining an element or 'node' in the network. For example, a classmate of mine was talking about research in neuroscience and said "they (scientists) have opened up the brain countless times and have yet to find the mind". In a theory of emergence, the mind (intelligence, awareness, etc.) emerges from connections between neurons, and not from the neurons themselves. Neurons do not contain "intelligence". Thus if one was able to put someone's brain in suspended animation, or make all neurons stop firing, would consciousness happen? I dare say it wouldn't, and neither life, for that matter! I think the paradigm-shifting potential of complexity and emergence (particularly with respect to biological life) lays in the fact that we need to bring scientific attention to process, not just components and mechanics. We are here because of dynamism and complexity. If intelligence is an emergent property, and social networks (or groups, which are vessels for meme transmission, thus consensus) can produce unpredictable patterns and activities, are they not an instance of emergence from emergence? Most importantly, by studying these systems we can hope to peer in on the evolution of relationship, and gain a better, if humbled, understanding of its power in nature. In Breaking the Galilean Spell, Stuart Kauffman waxes rather poetic about the pedagogical (and it seems, implicitly spiritual) virtues of emergence. He writes that "[e]mergence says...while no laws of physics are violated, life in the biosphere, the evolution of the biosphere, the fullness of our human historicity, and our practical everyday worlds are also real, are not reducible to physics nor explicable from it..." and he emphasizes that "[s]cience cannot foretell the evolution of the biosphere, of human technologies, or of human culture of history."

I wonder, what is the necessary data for us to have for something to be "explained"? I'd venture to say that explanation is a culturally contextual thing, which in the Western scientific worldview is achieved by largely reductionist methods. As mentioned before, such methods consist in describing complex phenomena solely in terms of constituent lower-level phenomena. As we discover new methods of information transmission in biological and cultural systems, we must acknowledge that when we identify units, agents and forces of transmission (like genes) we risk engaging in reductionism by granting them more causative power than they actually have. It seems like in the history of science there are such cycles of 'over-attribution' immediately following new discoveries.
Furthermore, it seems that scholars from different fields have different ideas of what constitutes explanation when it comes to religion. Those steeped in economic theory have devised rational-choice theory as an explanatory tool, whereas cognitive scientists feel that the stacking of cognitive modules like theory of mind, agent detection and minimally counterintuitive representations can 'explain' religion. Then we have the sociobiologists, who explain how group organization occasions and transmits religious behavior. When Anne Clark (a UVM professor and unequivocally my mentor!) came as a guest-speaker to our seminar she emphasized the extent to which a given scholar of religion's intention will dictate to what extent they will be able to use knowledge and methods from evolutionary science to answer their research questions. It is necessary to consider what, in the vast body of scientific knowledge, is helpful to scholars of religion. Considering evolutionary time, which encompasses the progression of biological life on this planet, may not be particularly useful for, say, an historian of medieval religion. It is also useful for me to consider if when we say evolution we can or should include cultural evolution. Indeed, there is debate about to what extent cultural evolution (the transmission of ideas and technologies) is predicated on patterns and orders of biological evolution. It is evident that the rate of cultural or "memetic" transmission is a bit higher than the rate of biological evolution, which is at least in a genetic dimension temporally staggered by the procession of generations. The history of human civilization as we know it presents us with a panorama of events that may not necessarily need the language of evolutionary biology to explain their cause and effect. To paraphrase Professor Sugarman, we must ascertain the correct distance from which to view something; if we stand with our eyeball an inch away from a large painting, we may not really succeed at seeing the painting, although we may be seeing something (and perhaps look rather special while doing it...). We can say with certainty that biological evolution, through the development of animal brains (since, as we've reviewed, humans aren't the only animals that have "culture"), has truly occasioned cultural evolution. William Irons wrote "[religion] is largely a cultural institution which rests on a psychological foundation." Two fields within evolutionary science that seem to be properly "sized" for use as hermeneutic tools for studying "religion" are cognitive science and sociobiology. For a scholar of religion to be optimally informed by the 'fruits' of Darwinian thinking, tools from cognitive science can be useful when parsing universal features of religious behavior. However, cognitive science seems to encourage us to consider individual brains, and to properly study religion we need to consider the aggregate effects of groups of brains in relational networks. As mentioned earlier, the universality of individual religiosity ("belief") is questionable - much more arguable is the universality of group religiosity. This points back to process; "religion" is something that arises from relationship! Although we may be able to argue how individual brains are optimized for religion (which is what cognitive science attempts to explain), I don't think we can locate religion in the individual any more than we can locate the mind in the brain. Perhaps we can locate aspects of religion, like we can study religious behaviors in an individual and examine how cognitive modules perhaps create feedback loops of reinforcement that motivate those behaviors... but these behaviors are naturally orientations toward things outside of oneself. I want to emphasize that these things to or from which religious behaviors are oriented - beside sometimes being supernatural agents - are other people - other members of the species homo sapiens! This is truly where sociobiologists can offer insight. As we've learned from our reading of David Sloan Wilson's work, group-level behavior historically presents cases where individual interests are checked and modulated by some sort of ethical system, often a religious one. One of Wilson's key arguments for the adaptive value of religion is that it has modulated group solidarity and provided mechanisms by which groups can enforce certain regulations that check individual behavior that may be exploitative to other group members or their shared habitat. Thus he has provided a strong case for natural selection operating at the group level, and religion often being a proximate factor in that selection historically. Humans have evolved to be social primates and indeed, and our history has literally been written by warfare, kingship and religion; essentially groups of humans interacting with other groups.

To reiterate, in effect "religion" consists of relational networks of behaviors that represent not just 'social circuitry', but 'ecological circuitry' as well. An organism is not a closed system, and neither is a group of organisms! The curious thing about religion is that it does dozens of other things beyond just the world-construction (mapping) function that we discussed earlier (this cited part was snipped for reasons of length, feel free to contact me). !Attention eco-design punks: Religion is an emergent characteristic of human culture that performs many functions and is supported by many elements. This is why, in the light of evolutionary science, it seems problematic to divide human culture up into categories like religion, art, science, music, language, etc. The universal acid of Darwin's idea - as Dennett characterizes it - seems to want to eat through the boundaries we've set up between these categories. When we try to extract religion from our social ecosystem to throw it under the microscope, we may find ourselves having to sever connective tissue that we didn't know existed. This occasions what I believe is a strikingly isomorphic comparison - that of human cultures to ecosystems. Let us envision "culture" as a social ecosystem that contains these various aforementioned aspects; music, art, technology, religion, etc. If we compared a human culture to a forest ecosystem, we could compare these "cultural functions" to various ecosystem functions like nutrient cycles, waste absorption, and climate maintenance, to name a few. Ecosystem functions are one of the more elusive things to define by the current scientific paradigms, but they can be best described as the aggregate effect of the complex interactions between ecosystem components. An example is the function a rainforest provides of maintaining climate patterns through the cumulative effect of so many trees alternatively absorbing and transpiring moisture. Moreover, many ecosystem functions grow out of each other or form feedback loops between each other. Ecosystem functions can't be deduced by their constituent low level interactions, and moreover their net effect is as far as we know non-linear; it isn't reached by a linear chain of cause and effect. Because of this we really have no idea to what extent we will disturb an ecosystem if we extract certain quantities of natural resources from it. Moreover, if we "extracted" one of these ecosystem functions, the entire system would be thrown into relative disequilibrium -- well, actually, it would completely fall apart. Similarly in human culture, there is interconnectivity and feedback between cultural functions that we seem to want to separate - for example between religious behavior and musical, artistic or gastronomic behavior.

[[insert open-source conclusion here]]

Personal Meaning and Cultural Relativism Aren't at Odds

...Or, Dismantling the Existential Anxiety in Contemporary American Socio-Political Drama that's Getting Really Old By Now.

Coastal wolves in the Pacific Northwest who live off of fish and seaweed and seal carcasses aren't real wolves, they're like, wimpy wolves. REAL wolves are Arctic and Gray wolves and they live off of muskoxen and caribou and elk. So, Coastal wolves should actually hunt in packs and kill big game so that they can be true to what real wolves are.

The above paragraph is clearly psychobabble, yes? Well that's what it sounds like to me when I hear the idea that one denomination or sect of a religion is right and another is wrong, or even when I hear similar squabbling between atheists and theists. Within Christianity or Islam, it's about who is a real Christian or Muslim and who isn't. Within the wider arena of atheism versus theism, it seems surreptitiously about who is the more humanistic (or humanitarian) or who is more true to the original ideals of philosophy and ethics. Because of the ecological diversity of earth, nature requires diverse adaptation of its creatures that seek to survive and thrive. Culture is, somewhere in place and time, bound to the earth; a reflection of earth's geological, biological, and topographical diversity and the uniqueness of place. Homogeneity does not lend itself to adaptation to life on such an earth. If difference is bad and there’s only one truth, I guess the whole earth should go to hell, then? If this is the ultimate conclusion of a particular theology, the benefit of that theology to humanity becomes quite suspect, to say the least. 

 Some fundamentalist interpretations of religion are ideological forms of ecocide because they fail to acknowledge that non-human systems much more broad and encompassing than our individual selves and communities are what give rise, ultimately, to difference. Difference is not something we necessarily choose through rational self-interest or some concept that Ayn Rand wrote about. To some degree difference is chosen for us by systems larger than ourselves, and it is manifested and built upon in various ways throughout our lives. 

Some secular atheist ideologies, at least the positivist and science-obsessed ones, are ultimately ecocidal and just as un-compassionate as what they purport to decry because they, also, cannot acknowledge the ecological component of cultural relativism. It’s not just some “fundamentalist extremists” that have dangerous, dominating views about nature, but it’s also privileged sectors of secular neo-liberal society that do not know how to acknowledge the effect that “nature” has on people because they grew up sheltered from “nature,” or perhaps only experiencing the light, transcendental, wind-chimey side of nature and not the darker, grittier sides. Nature is much more than the context for a spiritual (or, for the secularists out there, extreme) experience.

My hope is not that we can all agree. My hope is that we can work toward ways, within our cultures and worldviews, to acknowledge the “seams” where culture is knit to nature, and honor them (which can look many different ways). And maybe acknowledge that they aren’t really seams after all, but merely transition zones...

I feel like lately I’ve been hearing so much of this extreme caricaturing of “postmodern/cultural relativism” (neo-liberal/progressive caricature) versus “taking a moral stand” (more conservative or libertarian or radical caricature) as if we have to pick one. Well, we don’t, and I don’t, and I don’t get why we can’t be a little more nuanced in our thinking. Acknowledging ecological-cultural diversity doesn’t mean we all have to passively accept, say, when genocide is occurring in another society. You can still take a moral stand, born from compassion and loving protectiveness, and also acknowledge the ecological and resource-based contingency of cultures. Just because diversity, difference, and multivocality are real doesn’t mean personal meaning isn’t. The problem some of us 'moderns' seem to have is that we seem to think that non-action (in terms of foreign policy) equates to not taking a moral stand. Obviously some of us need to read the Tao-Te-Ching, for a little perspective if nothing else. Cultures tend to dictate normative, "right" or "best" ways to enact one's agency, yet it is possible to care, to "take a moral stand," without following the script thrust in your face (just don't expect to be acknowledged for it). If you always need to mark the external world with the track of your values, you will overlook the important skill of remaining true to yourself regardless of external circumstances. People are clearly terrified of the sort of non-action (really inaction) that comes from existential perplexity or overwhelm. They are terrified of the part of themselves that can empathize with the experience of inaction, and eager to smugly crucify those who seem immobilized by it, while what the latter most need instead is likely compassion and empathy since they have at least taken the bold step of beginning to process the grief and trauma suggested by much of post-modern and post-colonial analysis.

The indecision that comes from overwhelm and that often can evolve into apathy indicates that one has been unable to set proper psychic and emotional boundaries. Personal boundaries have long been transgressed and there is potentially repressed anger there that needs to be channeled in a healthy and meaningful way. In this case it is not just personal boundaries that are transgressed, but the boundaries of the heart and soul of the world that some feel called to protect, which have been transgressed by the countless acts of silencing, rape, murder, and dehumanization that one learns about and empathizes with when they begin to see outside one singular story of history. We falsely believe that the solution to this apathy and repressed frustration is an act of heroism or sacrifice, a sort of redemption or insurance policy protecting us from more apathy. But we are being played by the old savior complex. That complex is very entitled and can be a colonizing force that does unpredictable harm. What about a middle road, a hard road that involves learning how to grieve (as Martin Prechtel suggests in Grief and Praise?)  If we have to pick between (selfish) expression and repression, we will never learn this middle path. Grieving is a lost ceremonial art, an endangered ancestral skill along with basketmaking and starting a fire with sticks.

This is all coming up because of how we're relating to ISIS and militant Islam, and it's forcing the West to have something of an identity crisis as it tries collectively to reconcile the disparate results of some of its cultural ideals and still maintain a stable identity. I.e. Western cultural ideals produced the liberal-academic intelligentsia with its views on cultural relativism, but those same ideals also produced ideas about what a free society looks like that seem at odds with the former. Well, Good. I'm all in favor of initiation. All the hallmarks of it are present.

"And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand."

• Mark 3:25. Good comment on the necessary death that initiation (of communities, of cultures, of individuals) requires.

***

I am guilty of having conjured up the caricature of the abstract postmodern hipster-philosopher who doubts any claims to truth or meaning. Let's start holding ourselves accountable for this polemical caricaturing. For me, this critique is at its root directed at inner aspects of myself (perhaps my past self or a possible self that I can identify with) as well as external examples. The thought that we can 'so easily' slip down a rabbit hole of meaninglessness and despair (and out of what were initially good intentions too) is pretty scary and threatening... We need as scholars, educators, and visionaries, to track our own inner journeys of grappling with the complexities of analysis and methodology and pay attention to how they affect our perspectives, otherwise we'll always be caught in these cycles of differentiating ourselves from others who trigger us. Perhaps that kind of discursive identity formation is somewhat inevitable but that doesn't mean it should go unacknowledged.

Unfortunately some theoretical lenses get taken to an extreme a lot. That's what happens with potent ideas. They run; they even fly. It’s unfortunate that this reflects a lot of people's experience in academia (including mine to some extent, though I think that often when we encounter examples of people who take certain methods of analysis to extremes within our academic community, we disproportionately remember them because the experience is emotionally upsetting. Well, it should be...We've gotta get jolted into 'speaking our truth' somehow. We need to stop shying away from meaningful confrontation and writing it off as oppressive "conflict.") I've learned so much from poststructuralist, post-colonial, and derridean criticism, but to me they are merely tools in a toolbox... I don't identify with them. To paraphrase something the anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan wrote, an extreme postmodernist analysis can ultimately (emotionally) destroy the subject doing the analyzing. Is it truly a surprise to any of us that that sort of ironic methodologically-driven apathy and inertia has been generated? It's as predictable as the weather if you read the last 100 years of Western history with an attunement to the trauma that has occurred, and the subsequent attempts at recovery and healing. In that vein, there is a great article by the medievalist and historiographer Gabrielle Spiegel that would by all accounts be considered high theory, but it discusses the theory of Derridean deconstruction as emerging from the context of the trauma of the holocaust. Yet the article's methodology is not Jungian or the like as one might expect, but thoroughly (in my view) post-structuralist and "post-modern" and in fact an exemplar of the amazing abilities of these theoretical lenses, because it turns the theory back in on itself--it uses the theory to hold the theory-makers accountable. It remains one of my favorite academic articles of all time. Does that make me a postmodernist-or-whatever? Ah, I don't know or really care. Getting caught up in labels belies the unsettling reality that groups that need to distinguish themselves from each other are, in the scheme of things, really quite similar, and perhaps share a lot of common resources and territory (ecological, cultural, or both).

That is to say, our culture is pretty entrenched in cycles of trauma, addiction, and escapism. I think certain theoretical lenses can absolutely be commandeered to serve 'escapist' needs, rather like how some spiritual philosophies can be utilized by people to escape from suffering in ultimately immature and irresponsible ways. There was a great book written recently on the latter phenomenon called "Spiritual Bypassing" by Robert Augustus Masters, and I think some of his critique could of course also be applied to philosophy. To me the main points of the postmodern theoretical lenses are cultural relativism and the situatedness of meaning. I myself have grappled with the concerns that this brings up--namely, how do we achieve things like liberation, initiation, community resilience, etc., in light of some of the ramifications of postmodern thought? At this point I feel that it is only ourselves we have to blame if we cannot acknowledge both meaninglessness and the relativity of meaning along with the deep personal meanings in our own lives. To me postmodern thought shouldn't have to  suggest that there is no ultimate meaning, it just suggests that meaning and truth is ecologically situated—in other words it changes the definition of what "ultimate meaning" is (a nice trick!) This doesn't invalidate meaning or truth, but actually highlights it in a way. But a lot of that theory is incomplete because it threw out the importance of myth. In my view I hope these theories come around to a new understanding of myth, meaning, and symbol, otherwise it'll remain a half-truth. At this point I'm as tired of the endless rhetorical crucifixions of Joseph Campbell and Eliade as I am of the dismissal of pomo thought.