A Vision: The re-enchantment of Humanity
by Stuart Kauffman.
Written April 2nd, 2024
The Disenchantment of Humanity
The disenchantment of the Western Mind slipped unnoticed into existence in the 1330s AD. Wallingford installed his mechanical clock in St. Albans Abbey. The monks failed to come to prayer on time.
Before the Wallingford Clock about 700 years ago, Europeans lived with the wind, tide, seasons, ducks, mutton, and sails. The hours of the day were longer in summer than in winter.
Within half a century, modern humans in the West witnessed wondrous mechanical clocks on clocktowers all over Europe. Was the World a clockwork machine? Was that possible? Was that reality?
The First Transition in Science was the dawning of this new question: “Is the World a Clockwork?” The hint of this dawning arose in the 1330sAD. The Second Transition occurred with Newton’s invention of classical physics in 1687AD, 352 years later: Indeed, the World is a clockwork:
In 1543AD Copernicus wrote the Pope to explain his new clockwork revolution of the World revolving about the sun, not the earth. The book was published on his deathbed. In 1569 Francis Bacon published Novum Organum, urging scholars to abandon reading Aristotle and look at the Book of Nature to discover her secrets. Put Nature on the rack and wrest our due.
Then Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, 1687AD. The World is, in brute yet wondrous fact, a massive clockwork. Gone are miracles and a theistic God, on to the Deistic God of the Enlightenment. This was the Second Transition in Science.
With these massive steps of the imagination, we in the West strode ever further toward disenchantment. The World had become a machine. The World was a vast impersonal machine. The Laws of the world can be
known. Knowing the Laws, as Bacon urged, we could attain mastery and control of Nature for the ever-benefit of ever-prospering humanity. And with this knowledge humanity truly had dominion over Nature.
Yet the World became meaningless: “Science with its Rule and Line” lamented the English Romantic poet Keats in the 18th Century. “The more we know of the universe, the more meaningless it appears”, Nobel physicist Stephen Weinberg not long ago.
We are disenchanted. The twins of Dominion and disenchantment underpin, along with our vast and ever- growing technology, our extractive 21st Century Capitalism. We are paving over the planet in the name of ever-progress. Terrestrial biomass is about 80% humans, our cattle and corn. 60% of the terrestrial surface is used to feed the 8 billion of us. We are driving climate change and a mass extinction event. We seek exponential ever-economic growth, 2% per year and full employment, on a finite planet.
“We are reduced to price-tags,” said Gordon Brown when Prime Minister of the U.K.
The Re-Enchantment of Humanity.
The first Axial age spanned from 800 BCE to 200 BCE. Across the globe the human mind transformed from the god of the hunt. Confucius, Lao Tse, the I ching, Buddha, Jeremiah, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: “The un-examined life is not worth living”. “The Good, the True, and the Beautiful”.
Humans always live in what we have taken to be reality. 11,000 years ago, in Finland and Estonia, the ancient oral tradition of Kalevla told of the lone woman wandering alone. Homer tells of the gods loosing thunder sinking the ships of Odesyus. Eros, the god of chaos and creativity and Logos, the order of the heavens, in the Greek mind.
Think of the Church in 1600AD, safe in the rotating concentric spheres of the Heavens, God and Angels above, we humans – the very Center of God’s Creation - with us the animals, plants and worms, below us Cervantes’ concentric spheres of Hell.
Then Galileo, “e pur si muove’, Kepler and Newton.
Newton taught us how to think. The Newtonian Paradigm: i. Identify the relevant variables, often in physics position and momentum. ii. Write Laws of Motion, differential equations coupling the relevant variables, Newton’s Three Laws of Motion and Universal Gravitation. iii. Define the boundary conditions, for example the shape of the billiard table upon which the balls will roll. These boundary conditions specify all possible combination of the values of the relevant variables, for example the positions and momenta of the balls on the table. The set of all possible positions and momenta is the phase space of the system. iv. Specify the initial conditions, for example the initial positions and momenta of the balls on the table. v. Integrate the Laws of Motion starting with the initial conditions to obtain an entailed trajectory of the system in its phase space.
This Newtonian Paradigm is foundational to all classical and quantum physics. Thus, the Newtonian Paradigm is the basis of all the “hard sciences” based on physics, such as chemistry, astrophysics, cosmology, astrochemistry, minerology, and geology.
The World of Hard Science is exactly the meaningless world of which Stephen Weinberg speaks. More, Eros, the god of chaos and creativity, is dead.
Re-enchantment starts with this: The wonderful Newtonian Paradigm fails entirely for the evolution of life and mind – including we Humans. The reason is profound. The Newtonian Paradigm demands that we “state ahead of time”, or prestate, the fixed and knowable phase space of the system. But it is not possible to do this for the evolving biosphere without or with inventive mind. If we do not know the shape of the billiard table which keeps changing in ways we cannot deduce, we cannot solve Newton’s equations. We do not know the phase space.
We do not know and cannot even deduce the ever-changing phase space of the evolving biosphere, global economy, or forms of art. Not only do we not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen. If we do not know what can happen, we cannot reason about it. We must make our way forward without knowing what can happen. As Kierkegaard said, we live our lives forward into mystery. No laws entail the evolution of the biosphere, let alone the global economy. The evolving biosphere is vastly creative in ways we cannot even say before it arises. Eros is, and always has been, alive creating.
The implications are transformative. We cannot deduce the evolving biosphere. We are participants in its creativity. We co-create with the rest of life on a living plant. We have no Dominion. We have never had Dominion to put living nature on the rack and wrest our due. We are Of Nature, not Above Nature.
We are not price tags. We never were.
To Re-Imagine the World and Act in New Ways.
Now is almost 2025AD. A quarter of the hopeful new 21st Century has passed. We pave over the planet in search of ever-economic growth on this finite planet. The dream cannot survive, else we and much of life will perish. Climate change may recover in thousands of years. Extinctions require millions of years. We – almost mindless and almost heedless – are stubbornly driving an extinction to rival the Permian when 96% of life died.
We humans are co-creators of the reality that will become. What will we choose to do? What will we choose to become on this finite planet? What will we, a species 300,000 years of age, with our shared humanity and diverse cultures, create together?
Life emerged on earth almost four billion years ago. Life has evolved and flourished along this enormous history, 30% of the life of the universe, with the roughly constant input of solar energy. The evolving biosphere has flourished with a constant energy input because it has been and is circular. Sun, ecosystems of bacteria and fungi co-evolving in the soil, photosynthesis, plants, animals, food cycles, re-cycled life forever cycling.
Modern humanity doubles its per capita energy use every 40 years. Were we to achieve fusion, we would - heedless – pave over the rest of the planet.
Roland Fletcher, noted Australian archeologist, has a remarkable belief: In two hundred to three hundred years, machines will be a technology of the past. More, he claims, harbingers of the major transitions over the past 300,000 years were always present and not noticed long before the ensuing transition.
Perhaps the harbingers are among us now, to be noticed. If the evolving biosphere can flourish with constant input from the sun, surely we can as well, and the rest of life with us.
We are invited to learn to collaborate with the evolving biosphere, not rape it.
What might it mean to come to earn our livings, as do ferns and humming - birds, with Nature, Of Nature, not Above Nature?
In ways to be imagined and re-imagined, to collaborate with Nature is, somehow, to learn to make our livings among life, not despite life.
How, literally in our world, might we make our livings among life? Somehow, like everyone else: rooted in the soil and what comes forth each Spring when Zephyrus eke with his sweet breath.
Living soil, evolving for four billion years has been and is, with the sun, the root of all life on this planet. And we the moderns, have and are destroying the soil.
Then practical action is required. Now, soon, globally. We have at most a decade or perhaps two decades. There are growing engineering plans to consider. But evolving life is emergent not engineered – so caution. We do not know what can happen. How can we know if we are unleashing a vast catastrophe with solar screens in the sky, salt seeded clouds, and iron seeded seas?
Safer and faster for evolving life solve our problems. Life has evolved and sustained itself without our intervention for four billion years and is vastly more creative that we.
“Re-Imagined” with the harbingers includes: i. Global soil restoration. ii. Earning our livings with living nature in new ways. iii. Education to do so with global means to obtain and share ever-new knowledge to find our way, uncertain, into mystery.
A Program in Collaboration
A practical vision must be globally scalable. It must envision new means for very many of us to make our livings in true collaboration with evolving Nature.
It can start with global soil restoration and spread as a quiet undercurrent in our 21st Century Capitalist global economy.
Global Soil Restoration
The Green Revolution and many contemporary farming practices have and are destroying the soil. It can take thousands of years for soil to form. That soil can be depleted and destroyed in 30 years. Across the globe soil has become less productive, in turn demanding the increased invasion of native habitats that in turn drives pandemics.
Soil is the most ancient and most rapidly evolving earth-life ecosystem. Bacteria, fungi, viruses, worms, insects. We cannot deduce what this global ecosystem will become next, as it has become for four billion years. Yet – yet – we can begin to learn how to collaborate on local and larger scales with the vast capacity of microbial life to co-evolve and adapt to each local environment.
We can begin to learn how to help Nature solve its and our problems: i. Increase carbon in the soil. ii. Increase water retention in the soil. iii. Improve nutrient recycling. iv. Reduce the needs for nitrates in chemical fertilizer and moderate use of phosphates that, if over-used, can shut down soil. vi. Evolve well-chosen bacterial fungal soil communities to improve yield of compatible plants in any locale. vii. Evolve soil communities to stably sequester atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
Then this aspect of a practical vison is based on learning to co-evolve soil communities to achieve the aims above. The Johnson-Su bioreactor and compost is one good starting soil community. An initial aim must be to test this initial and hopeful compost on a wide variety of crops to obtain convincing statistical evidence that: i. The living soil community drives the positive results. ii. The living soil community already achieves some of the aims above. iii. For those crops where this initial compost works, the relevant seeds can be coated with the soil microbiological community and used later. Such seeds can be created or sold. For those crops where the compost works, the compost can be sold, the compost can be mixed with chemical fertilizer and sold, the compost can be inoculated into biochar or woodchips that can be sold, the inoculated biochar or woodchips can be mixed with chemical fertilizer and sold. iv. The initial Johnson-Su soil community can co-evolve to improve simultaneously on most or all the aims above and get worse on none of the
aims. The evolving biosphere has done this for four billion years. Such co- evolution achieves Pareto optimal solutions. No better solutions exist. v. Create and co-evolve local soil communities from around the world.
A Global Creative Commons – Distributed Peer Learning Network.
The vision is to create a global computational network where farmers can upload and own their data, share that data with chosen others, and learn by sharing information how to learn together in a distributed way. Standing up such a Global Creative Commons is transformative. Such a Commons can ultimately link millions of farmers that enables a global human community to form. We will learn to earn our livings in collaboration with the biosphere. We will come to care as a global community.
The Global Creative Commons can become a vast network for education. Perhaps more important, the Commons becomes a platform for storytelling. We find our ways by storytelling, as did the Finns and Estonians with Kalevala. Storytelling is how human culture evolves.
Smart Villages and Education
In Thailand, rural grandparents care for their grand-children. The parents are working in Bangkok for higher waves. A recent program, “Homeward Bound”, has convinced local rural farmers to abandon monoculture rice farming and convert to polyculture. The diverse produce is sold in local rural markets. Rural income has increased. The parents are coming home to take care of their children.
Across much of the world just such a transformation is both possible and urgent. A vison is to increase rural income, typically on very small farms. Because local farmers can easily create, own, and sell their ever-improving composts, rural incomes can further increase. We come to earn our livings in collaboration with Nature.
Smart Villages, in which education is central, is achievable globally. Doing so globally depends upon a Global Creative Commons.
To transform: Learn to co-evolve local soil communities with compatible polyculture crops sold locally to increase local income. Create the Global Creative Commons to share data, learn to learn together and to tell stories. Weave these to Smart Villages and education.
With the above, let us reach out carefully, globally, and quietly, to enable transformation.