The Ecological AgeRichard Ostrofsky(November, 2005)

To call our period “modern” or “post-modern,” says nothing at all. The adjective “modern” is defined as “of the present or recent times,” so post-modern means merely “just after the most recent times.” On that definition, every epoch of history is both modern and post-modern. To know more clearly who and what we are, it might help to have a clearer sense of when we are; and this question of a suitable tag for our present epoch has bugged me for quite a while now. Some years ago, I wrote a piece for OSCAR called What Comes After Modern,1 suggesting the name “Diasporan Age” which nicely captures the diffusion and scattering so characteristic of this era; but today I think I can do better. I suspect that future historians will distinguish between a Mechanical Age, that began to end in the 19th century, and an Organic or Ecological Age that began to emerge in the late 20th.

What I would call the Mechanical Age is usually known as the Scientific, the Industrial or the Modern, but none of these terms serve to draw the contrast with what is happening now. A real change of world view is occurring, but there is no sign that either science or industry are being superseded although their character is changing. We could speak of an Information Age – and do – except that the concept of information is too abstract to capture many people’s imagination, while the glamor of information technology is already waning. The real paradigm shift is from a Newtonian, clock-work universe, designed and governed from the top down, to a spontaneously evolving, holarchic, ecological universe self-organizing from the bottom up.

We think of the Mechanical Age as having commenced intellectually with the discoveries of Galileo and Newton. Similarly, we can see the first glimmerings of a new Ecological Age in Adam Smith’s recognition of the self-organizing properties of a market, in the concept of democracy (sovereignty and mandate flowing upward from the people), and in

1 See previous article.

Darwin’s idea of natural selection as the driver of adaptive change in biological organisms. But these early departures from the paradigm of mechanism were only the beginning. We are coming to understand all the fundamental processes of life as instances of organic self-organization: the development of the fertilized egg into a foetus and finally into an adult organism; the spontaneous adaptation of a brain to the world it has to cope with; the self-motivated, self-integrating evolution of technology, language, culture and society; the dynamic balance and self-consistency of the bio-sphere as a whole. From sub-atomic particles to galaxies and, it may be, to whole universes,2 the same principles of bottom-up self-organization can be discerned at every level. Paley's notorious “watchmaker argument” falls down. As it turns out, you don’t need an injection of intelligence from the outside to build complexity in a system; order can arise and accumulate spontaneously due, most fundamentally, to a single very simple tautology, that “Longer lasting patterns last longer than patterns that last not so long,” in Gregory Bateson’s words. Of this very general principle, Darwinian natural selection is only an important special case. Self-organization in general is something we are still just beginning to understand.

If by “God” we mean the “supreme context” of life and the universe, following Gordon Allport's definition which puts this ancient, vexed concept in exactly the right light, then the principle of self-organization has explosive theological consequences. While it need not do away with our ideas of spirituality, or even with organized religion per se, it revises their traditional concepts almost completely. Its political consequences are still more interesting, as we are led to understand government as an institution that societies evolve spontaneously, in much the same way and for the same reasons that some biological systems evolved brains. For systems-theoretic reasons, the idea of a centrally planned society cannot be feasible; but the idea that a society of post-modern complexity can do without significant central coordination is equally silly. My belief is that we have no inkling yet what kind of government our global, technological pan-human society requires and will evolve for itself. The implications of self-organization for political philosophy are left to the reader’s imagination and, as I hope, to future writings.

2 See Lee Smolin’s book, The Life of the Cosmos.