Unexpected Harmonies: Self-Organization in Liberal Modernity and Ecology

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The Great Forgetting

Why did the modern world enter into a “great forgetting” about the more-than-human world so many indigenous peoples took for granted? Second, how can this previous knowledge be reacquired without rejecting the very real accomplishments of the modern mentality? Many deep ecological writers have done extraordinary work on this second question. I will focus on the first, and use its analysis to add some insights regarding the second.Central to the argument I will make is how language both empowers us and to some degree separates us from direct experience of the other-than-human world. Western languages are particularly prone to reinforcing this separation. Equally central will be a discussion of how media of communication rooted in language further distances us from direct encounter. Also important will be work in contemporary biology and ecology exploring how deeply interconnected all life forms are. The traditional Western idea of individuals, be they plants and animals or human beings, are ultimately irreducibly distinct from their environment has been shown to be mistaken. Individuals have been shown to be made up of simpler individuals who, in relationship with one another, enable emergent qualities to arise at ever greater levels of complexity. Further, while genuinely individual, they cannot be understood without reference to relationships outside what are normally considered individual boundaries.By seeking the foundations of morality and other values in theology, reason, or will, many moderns are blinded to the fact values supporting morality and beauty exist immanently within the natural world. There is no need to import them from elsewhere. By way of conclusion, I reverse direction and describe one method available to the reader how a ‘remembering’ can come about experientially. This remembering will reconnect with an indigenous and sometimes shamanic perception of the world as alive and connected

Boundaries and Conflict Between Social and Ecological Emergent Orders: A Left-Hayekian Perspective

This paper will describe how feedback principles define boundaries of emergent processes within human society and the natural world. As such, these processes are theoretical simplifications from the larger more complex whole, for each order exists simultaneously with all the others. By initially separating them out, we can better explore how they interact with one another. To illustrate this approach the emergent social processes of the market, liberal democracy, and science will be specified based on their feedback generating principles, each of which includes certain abstract ethical principles. They will be contrasted with biologically based feedback generating principles which generate ecosystems. The lack of fit both within social systems and between these systems and natural ecosystems helps pinpoint several current ecological and social crises: first that social emergent processes are not in harmony with one another, and sometimes undermine one another rather than existing harmoniously, and second, that these systems collectively and individually are not in harmony with natural processes, and while stronger in the short run are dependent in the long run on the well being of natural processes. Social emergent processes are characterized by ethically “thin” principles that cannot be harmonized on their own with actions required to maintain a sustainable relationship with the natural world nor a social order amenable to the full complexity of values characterizing human life. However, the more complex emergent order of civil society, and institutions rooted within it, do hold open the possibility of establishing such relations. Watershed Restoration groups and democratic land trusts will be described as examples of such ethically deep institutions. In terms of the panel, this paper specifically addresses the status. Limits and legitimacy of knowledge regarding complex systems, system based ethics, systems and the social sciences, and systems and human subjectivity