Chapter Five: Alternative Narratives in Contemporary Science
Introduction
In earlier chapters, we looked at how the master narrative constructs identity, thereby influencing our thoughts and directing our decisions. The ego idea conflates individuality with separation. It confines freedom to arenas of competition. The ego imperative requires thinking oneself better than someone else. It defines success, personal worth and purpose in terms of exercising power over others, taking as much as one can get, winning. Our present master narrative represents the World as an object, the Universe as a place. It dissociates us from Nature, maintaining that Will and Consciousness are uniquely human phenomena. It justifies an economic system based on inequality and upheld by violence. It would leave us resigned to our condition, insisting that there is no other way, that this is the best we can do.
In Chapter Four, we investigated alternative discourse located in religious and cultural traditions. We found ideas and practice opposed to the ego concept of ourselves. Some pointed to the wrong of inequality. Some presented guidelines for creating community. Others offered methods and techniques for delivering our Selves, our lives, from the ego mentality. We saw religious narratives that suggest a redemptive role for humanity in creating the longed for paradise — right here and now.
In this chapter, we consider alternative threads in the narrative field of contemporary science. As was necessary when we looked for such discourse in religious and cultural traditions, we must begin by acknowledging certain problems. First of all, in dealing with a vast and highly specialized literature, we must of course simplify and reduce. We hope that scientists as well as non-scientists will find what we do here useful and true enough to outweigh issues of oversimplification.
Secondly, we must observe how scientific discourse and practices are deeply implicated in the master narrative. On a crude level, we find political power brokers seeking to control scientific discourse through hirings, firings and other forms of outright coercion. Both macro- and microtheatres of power tend to support science projects that serve the ego idea and to obstruct those that don't. Research for weaponry, for instance, receives virtually limitless funding. At the same time, competition among scientists for name recognition hampers our collective pursuit of scientific knowledge by pressuring individual researchers to hide information from one another.
In more subtle ways, the master narrative determines what can be considered legitimate realms of study, how scientists approach their subject matter and the vocabulary used to think about and present their conclusions. Sign systems affect science — and not only because scientists must use language. Mathematics, too, consists of no more than a chain of signifiers only arbitrarily connected to the Referent. Moreover, mathematics is severely limited in what it can represent. No mathematical equations exist for consciousness, will, meaning, freedom and love. Based on mathematics, science reduces the Universe to a mechanical structure of separable parts, its workings all determined by laws of cause and effect. We intend this chapter, however, to set aside the negative and focus on the possibilities that science offers for a new understanding of ourselves and our Universe.
The history of modern science begins with quasi-heroic opposition to institutionalized hierarchy and unquestioned tradition. While the Inquisition was still burning people at the stake for heresy, science had begun developing methods for distinguishing knowledge from belief. The authority of science grew as society moved toward recognizing that tradition, political power or birth to particular families did not in themselves add value to ideas. Given education, any individual could benefit the collective conversation that generates human knowledge.
Today, the scientific approach remains much the same. Those who wish to contribute to the endeavor submit their findings to the community at large. Whether the evidence supporting their theory be found in layers of rock, fossils, laboratory experiments or living organisms, it must be available to everyone. The on-going narrative builds on earlier understandings and undergoes constant revision.
The information science generates may turn out confusing, even illogical — for the scientists themselves. As technology develops and permits more extensive exploration of our Universe, ever deeper mysteries appear. Scientists live with paradox. And despite the fact that science prides itself on drawing conclusions from evidence, scientists almost never reach an absolute consensus. The story science tells remains open ended — and thus, on a most fundamental level, works against the master narrative's insistence that the case is closed.
Common sense is often cited as the basis for the ego identity. We look at our world and one another and conclude that our selves and interests do not extend beyond our individual bodies. Science has long challenged us to re-think what our limited senses report, however. Centuries ago we stopped believing that the earth is flat, or that it is the sun's movement we observe as it crosses our sky. During the 20th century, an array of discoveries — particularly in the fields of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Ecology — provided striking evidence that we belong to a World much more rich, complex and wondrous than common sense reports.
We assume, for instance, that we live in time. When we question what time itself is, we reply with the intuitive sense of something independent of us, something out there. If we give it further thought, perhaps we agree with the ideas that time is a category of our mind or a forward moving dimension in which a series of events can occur. Whatever concept we choose, our common understanding of time (in which one thing follows another) does not permit a past event to remain forever in the present, nor the future to occur before the past. The discovery that the speed of light is unchanging, however, required radical revision of such concepts of time, as well as space. As Einstein brought forward, time in the Universe contradicts our everyday understanding of it.
Einstein's friend, Kurt Gödel, demonstrated that Special Relativity rendered clocks irrelevant. If time is relative, he reasoned, then there can be no clock with which to “set” our own. Known to scientists for the rigorous logic with which he explored the foundations of mathematics, Gödel demonstrated that General Relativity makes traveling backward in time a real possibility. By implication, time does not exist — except for practical purposes in our frame of reference, such as arranging a meeting or constructing a narrative of events. These understandings do more than generally undermine faith in common sense — a mode of reasoning and perception that tells us we are separate entities. Relativity specifically counters the master narrative by asserting that the World is other than a place in time.
The activity of sub-atomic particles led scientists to equally revolutionary insights. The observation that particles and waves behave indistinguishably at the quantum level, for example, led to the discovery that two or more particles, if once together, remain connected even when separated by great distances. Some go so far as to suggest that given the original connectedness of all particles at the beginning of the Universe, everything is somehow “entangled.” Some researchers in psychology and neurophysics suggest that quantum mechanical phenomena may represent the nexus of matter, energy and consciousness itself. Such findings discredit the ego narrative's most fundamental assumptions of separation.
When contradictions arose between Relativity Theory (equations for studying the ultimately large) and Quantum Mechanics (equations for studying the ultimately small), String and Superstring Theory emerged. Rather than imagining the smallest building blocks of the Universe as particles, String Theory suggests that the smallest possible units be thought of as tiny vibrating strings. The solution resolved the original contradictions, but required the possibility of more than four, perhaps eleven dimensions to our Universe. Everywhere, physics is telling us we are living in a much more complex world than the master narrative would have us believe.
The same holds true in the life sciences. Early efforts to understand evolution explained the appearance of new species as the effect of chance and natural selection in a competition for survival. Later theory shifted the locus from chance at the level of the organism to chance at the level of the genes. Both approaches assumed a fixed, mechanical environment into which organisms inserted themselves, the luckiest proving the most fit. In the 1960's, “ecology” and the “web of life” entered our vocabulary. More recently, the study of complex dynamic systems has helped us understand much more profoundly how every Life form plays a role in our diverse Living World.
Complexity Theory abounds in counter-narrative threads. It helps explain change in complex dynamic systems through the phenomenon of self-organization. Such systems have no preordained blueprint, yet spontaneously generate ordered patterns and structure from apparent chaos. In ecological systems, for example, change emerges as the result of micro-interactions that entwine cells, organisms and the larger environment. The parts effect the whole as the whole effects the parts. The smallest action by the smallest part can have a system-wide effect, even bring about a phase transition — a change in which the entire system moves from one state to another. Similar processes are involved in small-scale phase transitions, such as water turning into ice; or grand-scale phase transitions, such as the appearance of Life on Earth.
Complex systems retain continuity and create identity by repetition of successful patterns, so that such pathways become deeply embedded in every system. When threatened with destruction, a system searches through all its possibilities for a solution. Often the answer contradicts the present dynamics and activities to the point of improbability, near impossibility, before being adopted. Yet the answer never departs entirely from the recurring patterns by which the system came to exist.
In the Beginning
Based on the observed outward movement of the galaxies, an omnipresent field of background radiation and laws that describe the behavior of matter, contemporary science believes the Universe broke open some 14 billion years ago. Most versions describe this moment as the “Big Bang.” What existed before this beginning remains hidden. Logic, language, mathematics, measurement, observation all collapse when space and time, as we know them, do not exist. Does something come from nothing? Is the Universe a bud of a larger Cosmos? Does the admission of extra-dimensions suggest the Ground of Being has no Beginning? Science has no answers for such questions.
What we presently know about matter suggests that prior to the Big Bang the tiniest particles that could possibly exist were meeting with mirror images of themselves, “anti-particles,” and together annihilating. Matter was being extinguished by anti-matter. Differentiation from Being as a fixed entity, in an unchanging state, could not endure. All remained an endless symmetry of matter/anti-matter. Perfect chaos/infinite Being. Force carriers and particles, what is and what can be, all unified. Every possibility and none.
Particle accelerators permit what most agree are glimpses of the conditions that existed during the infinitesimal micro-seconds of the Beginning. The “Top” and “Bottom” quarks may have been the initiating particles, since reproducing them requires such enormous amounts of energy. Energy such as was ambient at the Beginning. The Top and Bottom quarks, however, do not last long. The Top quark massively outweighs the Bottom quark with which it attempts to pair. It is unlikely that any information moves between them at all. Nothing holds the two together. In less than a nanosecond, they disappear.
Almost immediately, two other quarks appear. This time, they are both less massive and closer to each other in size. The so-called “Charmed” quark is only about ten times greater than its partner, the “Strange.” Briefly, the two engage. When they do, a multitude of new entities, “mesons,” emerge. But the bonding between the Strange and the Charmed proves unstable. We can reproduce such pairs in high energy laboratories — but only fleetingly before they fall back into non-being, as they did before the first nanosecond of the Universe had passed. The second attempt at existence through association, like the first, ends in failure.
As the Universe approaches the first ten thousand millionths of a second, another generation of quarks appears. This time they are of nearly equal mass and bound together — not in pairs — but in sets of three. Two “Down” quarks are holding together with an “Up” quark or two Ups together with one Down. Most importantly, they are bonding by passing the differences in their energies back and forth to one another. The Ups are giving off energy, the Downs taking it Up. In other words, the Ups are giving energy to the Downs; the Downs receiving energy from the Ups.
At first, the rapid exchange of energy amongst the trinities makes the Ups and Downs almost indistinguishable. Are they a cluster of two Ups and a Down or two Downs and an Up? The giving and receiving proves both reliable and sustainable however, and slowly the trinities stabilize. We've named two Ups and a Down, “protons;” two Downs and an Up, “neutrons.” Their dance becomes the foundation of the Universe. Here at this most fundamental level, then, we find a pattern totally opposed to the ego idea — a pattern of giving and sharing.
The physical forces that we know, beginning with gravity, also arose with relationship. Before there was an in-between, nothing mattered. Gravity developed as the Top and Bottom quarks attracted mass (theoretically named the Higgs particle). The Strong force holds atomic nuclei together. It appeared briefly with the Charmed and Strange quarks, then permanently with the Ups and Downs. The Weak force is responsible for the changing of particle identity, as when the Ups become Downs and Downs become Ups. The Electromagnetic force — photons, light, electromagnetic radiation — emerges as neutrons and protons stabilize. By the first one hundred thousandth of a second, particle relationships have generated the four known physical forces.
Before the first second of time has passed, infinite chaos is well into a phase transition. The matter/anti-matter symmetry, broken by the Top and Bottom quarks, has given way to a dense, super-hot plasma. The brief relationship of the Charmed and Strange quarks further transformed this primordial energy field. With the Ups and Downs, space and time rapidly expand. The Universe emerges.
The proton and neutron, quark trinities, quickly find that the energy they're exchanging with one another (“gluon” particles) exceeds what they require to stay together. Thus, even though the clusters of two Ups and a Down display a positive charge — which should cause them to repel one another — the excess of their Strong bonding force permits them to meet and hold together with one another as well. They begin fusing.
At about 100 seconds, with temperatures about a billion degrees, protons and neutrons are combining to create Hydrogen, Helium and Lithium nuclei. These positively charged nuclei then begin attracting negatively charged particles, “electrons.” At this stage, however, the electrons can only remain for a moment or two before the super hot plasma sweeps them away. Meanwhile, more and more Ups and Downs are engaging. And matter continues to coagulate by virtue of their relationship. The Universe is expanding and cooling. Now, however, our narrative jumps from speaking in fractions of seconds, to thousands and millions of years.
It is not until the Universe is about 300,000 years old that the ambient energy levels finally permit electrons to establish permanent orbits around proton/neutron groups. The first atoms appear. About a 100 million years later, with electrons orbiting in shells, hydrogen, helium and lithium atoms have materialized and begin drawing together in deeper relationship. At first, their gravitation causes simple fluctuations in the density of the fields they occupy. Gradually, however, as more and more atoms congregate, they create clouds of gases — nebulae. The strength of some gravitational fields increases so strongly that they begin contracting. Dense clumps of matter tighten and thicken until hydrogen nuclei begin fusing into helium. In this process, stars are born. With matter contracting, space opens — and photons are able to course out across the Universe as light.
The appearance of stars establishes Belonging as one of the most salient and repetitive characteristics of our Universe. Stars gather into galaxies. Galaxies come together in clusters. And depending on the pathway individual stars take, their lifetimes unfold other modes of Belonging. Large stars explode toward the end of their lives in supernova events, sending out a range of elements into space. As the simple proton-neutron groups of a supernova fuse, they produce a wide range of complex nuclei. Electrons, passing photons around and through these complexities, create new atomic forms. Those that prove stable retain their identity even while binding together with others. Molecules form by exchanging or sharing the electrons in their outermost shells.
It may have been a nearby supernova about 4.6 billion years ago that sent a cloud of gas and dust spinning into what became our own solar system. As the cloud spun faster, the center drew together. Soon a disk-like whirl took shape, thick and hot at the core, thinner and cooler along the edges. The center became our sun. Small pieces of matter became comets and asteroids. Larger clumps coagulated into planets.
Earth
To reconstruct the story of Earth, nuclear physics and astronomy step aside as chemistry, geology, paleontology, microbiology, botany and zoology take center stage. Piecing together the geologic record, astronomical observation and basic principles of chemistry, scientists generally agree that our Mother Planet — like the Universe — was born in chaos. Earth's erratic orbit echoing a system in complete disarray. Planets whirling in unsettled forms and rhythms. A huge asteroid collides, tilting Earth and becoming our moon. Falling meteorites and crashing comets rock the molten planet even before it has solidified. And on the surface — a crucible. Unimaginable heat. A magma ocean. Shock waves. Ultraviolet radiation.
Yet, as is always the case with chaos, self-organizing processes are at work. Heavier elements of the molten sphere are sinking, lighter elements and molecules floating to the surface. As hot liquid swirling iron gathers at the center, it begins to generate a magnetic field.
About a half-billion years after coalescing from stardust, Earth has formed a skin or crust. Although volcanoes are still spewing clouds of steam, ammonia, sulfides and carbon dioxide into the air, meteorite showers are beginning to subside. In what will prove a fortuitous development, Earth's nascent atmosphere and moderating temperature permit water to liquefy. The retention of these conditions will later distinguish our planet in a solar system where water exists elsewhere as gas or ice. As Earth's temperatures slowly fall, the precious liquid increases. Clouds condense into rain, creating lakes and oceans.
Life
In some of Earth's oceans, most likely near hot lava vents, oily droplets appear. Within these tiny bubble-like structures, a semblance of calm prevails. The protective domes create an environment where molecules and macromolecules begin to relate. In simple self-generated dynamics, they reiterate behavior patterns of their atomic/nuclear/quark ancestors.
After hundreds of millions of years, such molecules are actively engaging one another. Initially, long chains simply pass smaller molecules back and forth to each other. As the more complex chains learn which molecules the simpler chains require to engage in the activity, they begin acting like enzymes — passing exactly the needed molecules. These first steps from chemical activity into metabolic practice represent another great phase transition: the Beginning of Life on Earth. In a powerful counterpoint to the ego narrative, Life begins with giving and doing for others.
Where droplet walls permit additional molecules to enter, activities intensify. More and more complex varieties of the interacting molecular chains evolve. Some acquire the skills of improvement and repair. The droplets may smash into rocks and split apart, sometimes destroying, but often multiplying the proto-metabolizers.
These earliest life forms survive by fermentation, consuming the sugars that pass through their droplet walls. After about a billion years, however, this food supply begins to dwindle. Pieces of polymer chain are no longer just floating around in the ambient waters and easily obtained. To sustain life, cells have to cross a chasm from how they had been living to a new way. Some inventive strains turn to the sun.
Using light for energy, they find they can obtain hydrogen by breaking down water. For carbon, they learn to break apart carbon dioxide, abundant at the time in the atmosphere. Some acquire the skill of packaging and storing energy in molecules called ATP. Once these new ways take hold, heat loving cyanobacteria bloom. Photosynthesizers of all sorts evolve and proliferate, alongside the fermentators.
Among cells that maintain the pattern of gathering from the environment, some develop parasitic behavior. Exploitative cells invade and live off the labor of others. The method can work, but poses problems. It can prove fatal if the parasites go too far in harming or consuming their hosts. Some parasites, however, learn they can increase their chances for survival — even improve their lives — by serving their host cell. Symbiotic relationships appear. Some guests develop the ability to memorize the molecular sequence of the host. Information in the form of RNA now gets passed from cell to cell. Innovative cells with new skills materialize and are reproduced. One group learns to swim. Red, blue, green, purple, orange microbial life blankets the planet.
As this diverse assortment of cells convert the thick carbon dioxide in the air into oxygen, a collective dynamic evolves between ocean and atmosphere, reducing global temperatures. Additionally, the oxygen by-product of the photosynthesizing begins to form an ozone layer around the planet. A shield that protects delicate gene sequencing from damage by solar radiation. After four hundred million years of impressive success, however, these bacterial life forms have depleted the carbon dioxide that they breathe and filled the atmosphere with oxygen — which is toxic to them. Around 2.5 billion years ago, they face a global crisis.
The very life processes of the matured bacterial cells are now poisoning them. Where yellow, red, blue, black, green, orange celebrations once stretched across seas and crawled up mountainsides — fields of gray misery and death now spread. Entire genealogical families are being wiped out. Life on Earth has arrived at the edge of disaster. Either the bacteria open a path to a new way of being or the miracle created over billions of years falls back into chaos.
Among the life forms that existed at the time, one species had developed the rather peculiar and dangerous behavior of playing with the toxic oxygen molecules. After millions of years of this activity, the bacterial cells of this species were no longer poisoned by the oxygen; but rather had learned to use it. The larger ecosystem had tolerated these Purple Oxygen Breathers, but had kept them at the periphery. Now the strange creatures represented the answer.
It was the mobility of another species, however, that would bring the solution forward. Millions of years earlier, an ancient family of Thermoplasts (heat lovers) had merged with Spirochettes (eel-tailed swimmers) in a process of consuming without digesting the other. The result was a heat loving mobile bacteria with an innovative reproductive process — passing on genetic information through daughter cells that split into new cells with entire sets of genes.
The Purple Oxygen Breathers and the Mobile Heat Lovers cross the threshold from crises to solution by coming together in an entirely new life form. The emergent being does much more than combine the abilities of the two species. Beyond all patterns of expectation, the innovative cell has a nucleus. Rather than the knowlege essential for its life and reproduction being dispersed throughout, critical intelligence is now gathered in one central location. With the nucleus processing information and communicating with all parts of the cell, the creature is exponentially better-suited for quickly responding to changing needs.
Almost inconceivable before it happened, the shift from the non-nucleated or “prokaryotic” cell to the nucleated or “eukaryotic” cell represents another major phase transition. Here again, we see a countering of the ego narrative, as two independent species come together and cooperate to save Life on the planet. The episode begins a whole new chapter of Life on Earth.
Within about a billion years, the pathway has proven viable. More elaborate and articulated nucleated cells are appearing everywhere. A special variation of reproduction appears in which only half the information is passed to each of two new cells with the promise of fertilization at a future rendezvous. This innovation permits genes to more easily rearrange themselves in response to new information. New functions, new responsibilities, more refined behaviors evolve. Patterns and dynamics that could never have been imagined or achieved by non-nucleated cells move evolution onto the fast track.
About one billion years ago, individual cells — themselves complex communities of internal wonders — are meeting up with other such independent cells. Flotillas bring together a diversity of skills and labors. Soon communities of multiple cell gatherings are finding mutual benefit in collective association. But as the individuals in such groups move toward forming permanent relationships, they encounter a formidable obstacle.
Cells in these primitive alliances reproduce independently. Equally important, they are potentially immortal. They can die accidentally — by being dashed on rocks, poisoned, starved, dried up or consumed by someone. But in themselves, they live forever. Thus the cell groupings are locked into their existent states, limited in adaptability by the independence and immortality of their members. Opening a pathway that will permit these associations to become greater than the sum of their parts, the cells program themselves to age and die. What stronger evidence against the ego narrative than this self-generated invention of aging and death in order to open a new horizon of belonging? The results are astounding.
Thick layers of cells now begin metamorphosing into tissue. Soon segments of tissue are recasting themselves to meet other needs. From cell groups performing specialized tasks come primitive organs of a single creature. Colonies are transforming into organisms. When a group learns to utilize calcium, shells and skeletal structures appear. As these activities spread, ever more complex bodies emerge.
By 500 million years ago, Earth’s Life has burst open in what paleontologists have come to call the Cambrian Explosion. Hearts beat. Trilobites swim about on the ocean floor. Boned and sharp teethed sea creatures continue the pattern of eating and being food for one another. Algae and insects leave the sea and begin living on the land.
Toward the end of this miraculous period, a mass extinction occurs — one of four major setbacks in the on-going creation of Life’s wonders. While scientists do not know the exact reasons for these catastrophic events, they suggest possibilities such as climate change, abrupt habitat destruction, meteorite collisions. Associated with the third mass extinction, some 245 million years ago, Earth’s previously unified landmass, “Pangaea,” broke into continents. The fourth such event wiped out the dinosaurs along with 85% of other species. In each instance, recovery takes at least 25 million years.
By 400 million years ago, armored fish and invertebrate marine life forms populate the oceans. The first forests cover the land. Ferns grow beneath the trees. Plants with seeds have appeared. Insects and spiders crawl about.
Around 360 million years ago, using fins for limbs, the tetrapods ventured forth from the sea. For 100 million years these vertebrate amphibians linger on the shoreline, slowly metamorphosizing with the world they’ve entered. They develop aerial respiration, re-organize their eyes, ears and noses, evolve new kinds of skin to keep themselves from drying out, shelled eggs to lay on land. Some expand their brains. Others come up with new arrangements of skull, jaws, teeth, body, limbs and fingers. Salamanders, frogs, turtles, crocodiles, lizards, dinosaurs and mammals will all evolve from the tetrapods.
During the Jurassic Period, 208 million to 146 millions years ago, huge plant-eating dinosaurs roam the land. Carnivores feed on the herbivores. Later, birds appear. The land hosts flowering plants. Mammals continue to diversify.
Crocodiles, turtles, lizards, birds and several mammals number among the species that survive the dinosaur extinction. From the mammals, two groups emerge. Marsupials give birth to offspring with a short gestation period, their young living in pouches. Placental mammals give birth to young after a long gestation period, their babies fully developed. The latter method proves so successful that within 25 million years, Earth abounds with animals that run, leap, walk, trot, jump, glide, soar, burrow, creep, climb, crawl, graze, grasp. A continuum of individuation with ever deepening brain power.
Around 8 million years ago, ape-like animals appear. Approximately 5 million years after that, some of them free their hands by standing up on their hind legs. Some of these develop a distinctively brainy self-reflection. Their descendants will create sign systems, opening a whole new level of communicative possibilities — and ultimately leading to civilizations, with refined art forms, institutions, technology.
In a short 100,000 years, humans have completely transformed the appearance of Earth. City lights locally turn night into day. Satellite systems web the continents together. Pipelines, cables, power towers, expressways and autobahns crisscross the landscape. Although our success is so unevenly distributed that millions of humans are still dying of hunger and poverty, human population growth taxes the planet’s capacity to support us. By-products of our activities pollute the air, the oceans, the land. We are consuming unrenewable resources at a rate that will exhaust them within 100 years. We’ve invented weapons of mass destruction capable of obliterating all of Life. Human beings have brought Earth to a crisis point. Without another phase transition, we and many other life forms will perish.
Conclusion
The narrative we have presented here draws on recent discoveries and the life work of researchers, teachers and writers across several fields of study. Our account has emphasized implications, hints and occasional admissions that intelligence could be one of the driving forces of Life itself, rather than a mysterious quality, the quirk of an isolated species. When we view Person — that is: free will, consciousness, intelligence and creativity — as one of the essential attributes of the Universe, a cohesive story unfolds.
From this perspective, we see that the boundary between the Beginning and what preceded may have been crossed when the smallest possible particle moved beyond the matter/anti-matter go-round. In that eternal hallway of mirrors, identifying with being some fixed Thing inevitably elicited from Free-will and Consciousness the response, “I am not that.” By seeking relationship with an Other, a particle would have harmonized with the unlimited Possibility of Being. A transition we might characterize as a turning away from “what” to “Who.”
If there are reasons for a “before” and an “after” this moment, primary among them might be risk. If one could identify with an Other, would this Belonging set a limit on the possibilities of Being by producing a state of dependence? Mightn’t the particles meet with annihilation as they had with the mirror images of themselves? Or would the two particles become one, obliterating the idea of individuality altogether? And finally, how would an Other respond to this quest for identity through relationship?
In the story of the quarks, we see that Belonging opened unexplored Horizons of Being. Hierarchy proved untenable and giving produced the stable relationships that became the foundation of the Universe. Billions of years later, when the prokaryotic cells faced imminent death, the Thermoplast Spirochettes and Purple Oxygen Breathers followed the same pathway which the long chain polymers had cut when they made the transition from chemical molecular activity to metabolic biological life — the same trail that the Ups and Downs had blazed when they founded the Universe. Sharing power and doing for one another conditioned these three great phase transitions.
Now global warming and other kinds of environmental destruction threaten innumerable Life species with extinction. Conflict generated by extreme inequality and the existence of weapons of mass destruction further jeopardize our children’s future. The outcome is not a matter of fate. We are not doomed. But neither can we expect deliverance if we passively watch events unfold.
We can make the necessary changes in our institutions and systems, but only if we create a new master narrative that holds each of us dear, sees us as connected with Nature, emphasizes cooperation and celebrates altruism. Admiration for property accumulation and the exercise of power over others must become a thing of the past. We need an identity that will provide the foundation for an economic system based on equality, serving one another, non-violence and responsibility for the environment.
If what we need sounds utopian, idealistic and impossible, this fits the description of a phase transition. Such change in complex dynamic systems happens not by force or imposition from above, but by the free response of the parts. In human societies, that means all individuals, whatever their social position, have something important to do. Contrary to popular belief, people with wealth and influence can choose to divest themselves of privilege and move resolutely toward transforming our world. In our present situation, we all must.
An outdated and mistaken master narrative keeps us from creating the institutions and systems of a whole new World of Belonging. We are an inventive and ingenious species. Rather than erasing ourselves by insisting on the ego idea, we can follow pathways established and well maintained by Nature, since the Beginning. We can make a great phase transition.
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