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Authority

East Berlin Wall, 1987

We must resist any inclination to fall under authoritarianism’s spell during challenging times, and history’s tendency to pull us into its spiral. Nineteenth-century mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead states there must be clear limits to state control, in his essay titled “From Force to Persuasion” (1935):

“The compulsory dominion of man over man has a double significance. It has a benign effect so far as it secures the coordination of behavior necessary for social welfare. But it is fatal to extend this dominion beyond the barest limits necessary for this coordination” (1935, p. 289).

Adolf Hitler’s ill-conceived and reprehensible likening of different people’s ethnicity to distinguishing between different animal species underlay the rhetoric of his manifesto, “Mein Kampf” : “Every animal mates only with a representative of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the wolf the wolf, etc.” (1939, p. 285). This outlook encouraged an authoritarian approach to treating people themselves as animals, perhaps not unlike the more recently cattle-prodded detainees in the Chinese prison system, as documented by reporter, author, and poet Liao Yiwu :

“I was left with the guard who touched me with his baton and pulled the trigger. Bright blue sparks stretched out into an arc. The electricity ground through my scalp as if it were pulling out all my nerves and battering my brain with a cudgel. Instinctively, I buried my head between my knees to cover my ears. The electric current surged from my neck to my feet, and my body trembled uncontrollably” (2013, p. 172).

“Officer Yu’s stun baton landed squarely on the back of his head and shoulders. His belly and legs convulsed violently. After officer Yu walked away, total silence descended upon the cell. Dead Chang’s face was purple. He sat down in a corner for quite a while, limp as a drunkard. He asked a cellmate to help him take off his sweat-soaked undershirt. “The jabbing is good treatment for my cold”, he murmured with a halfhearted laugh. The sinister groove between his eyebrows became more pronounced” (2013, p. 181).

In his novel “The Orphan Master’s Son” (2012), author Adam Johnson has new recruits to a North Korean police station consider its similar various nefarious implements: “And Q-kee took possession of a cattle prod by rapid-firing the trigger so fast that our room strobed blue” (2012, p. 233).

Philosopher Carl Cohen states that only one system of government can reconcile autonomy with authority:

“Democracy alone – of all possible systems of government – can reconcile the autonomy of the citizen with the authority of the state. No aristocracy or despotism, however benevolent, can effect that reconciliation. Every authoritarian system must and will deny the moral autonomy of its citizens” (1982, p. 470).

Cohen, C. (1982), Autonomy and Authority – The Solution of Democracy, in Minton, A. J. & Shipka, T. A. (Eds.), (1990) Philosophy: Paradox and Discovery, Third Edition, (pp. 467 -475). New York, United States: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.

Hitler, A. (1939), Nation and Race, from Mein Kampf, in part. Boston, United States: Houghton Mifflin Company, reprinted in Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (Eds.), (1946), Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (pp. 285 – 286). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

Johnson, A. (2012) The Orphan Master’s Son. New York, United States: Random House.

Liao, Y. (2013) For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet’s Journey Through a Chinese Prison, translated from the Chinese by Wenguang Huang. Boston, United States: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt.

Whitehead, A. N. (1935), From Force to Persuasion, in Adventures in Ideas, reprinted in Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (Eds.), (1946), Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (pp. 287 – 289). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

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Pattern

“A pattern is a regularity in the world, in human-made design, or in abstract ideas. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner” (Wikipedia, retrieved May 2021). What role do engagement, habit, and addiction play in keeping us numb within our patterns of behaviour, “spinning our own fates, for good or evil, and never to be outdone” (1890, p. 127), as philosopher William James said?

As a society, do certain of our collective habits become our patterns, and thus our nature, leading mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead to refer to them as the very symptoms of its failure? To mitigate against such, he states what is instead needed is a cultivation of sensitiveness to ideas, a curiosity, an interest in adventure, and a desire for change, and therefore civilization “survives on its merits, and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections” (1935, p. 106).

Do we not periodically seek out patterns in the form of organization and tradition, so as to provide security from our erstwhile hostile selves? English botanist Frank Kingdon-Ward observes: “When change threatens, men rally to the support of the traditional… It is a phenomenon as elemental as the clustering of sheep in their fold when a thunderstorm threatens” (1940, p. 212).

Can there come a point in one’s life when paring things down to their barest simplicity, the entire nature of existence can be seen as a series of nodes, where certain facts become clear, and the otherwise complex, obfuscating nature of their origins enable them to stand up in sharp contrast against the background noise? Can these signals, when then assembled and read together in sum reveal a different narrative than what is often hidden by the patterns of habit and regularity? To this end, Whitehead echoes a reverence for,

“that power in virtue of which nature harbours ideal ends, and produces individual beings capable of conscious discrimination of such ends. This reverence is the foundation of the respect for man as man. It thereby secures that liberty of thought and action required for the upward adventure of life on this Earth” (1935, p. 109).

A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions | Hinduism:
“This is the high religion which wise men esteem: the life-giving breaths of other creatures are as dear to them as the breaths of one’s own self. Men gifted with intelligence and purified souls should always treat others as they themselves wish to be treated” (1946, p. 309).

Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (Eds.), (1946), A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions, in Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (pp. 309 – 310). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

James, W. (1890), Habit, in The Principles of Psychology, Volume I, Chapter IV, (pp. 122 – 127). New York, United States: Henry Holt and Co. [HTML document] retrieved May 2021 from https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin4.htm

Kingdon-Ward, F. (1940), Freedom for Education, in Anshen, R. N. (Ed.) Freedom: Its Meaning (pp. 210 – 218), New York, United States: Harcourt, Brace and Co., Inc. [PDF document] retrieved May 2021 from https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.276029/page/n223/mode/2up

Whitehead, A. N. (1935), From Force to Persuasion, in Adventures in Ideas (pp. 105 – 109). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company

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Wholeness

According to Wiktionary, the first recorded uses of the word holy are a literal translation of “wholly”, as healthy and whole, in both Proto-Germanic, and Proto-Indo-European languages. This use predates more recent Old and Middle English ecclesiastical meanings of the word.

Physicist David Bohm points to scientific evidence for the wholeness of the universe as lying in two theoretical frameworks. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity whose key tenet that the universe is a continuous, dynamic space-time field, out of which particles emerge as singular, strong regions and whose stable pulses gradually merge with other particles, describes an underlying unity where space and time are themselves relative aspects of the whole. The second framework, Quantum Theory, describes three particular characteristics of wholeness. First, its processes, such as electricity and magnetism, are themselves whole and indivisible; second is the wave-particle duality which, dependent on the observational context, describes a wholeness from different perspectives; and third is the notion of non-locality, where particles exhibit properties of interconnection, hence wholeness, despite being physically apart.

These two broad frameworks run counter to classical Newtonian physics, if only in the sense that the latter highlights the study of the part, whereas Relativity and Quantum theory look instead at the primacy of the whole. Bohm illustrated this difference by equating a description of Newtonian physics to the apparent random behaviour of particle-like people at a busy downtown intersection, each moving under their individual directives; as compared to the fluid, quantum-mechanical motion of dancers in a ballet, where the whole is given salience, and thus points to pattern and process as integral to larger systems.

Philosophers Baruch Spinoza and Alfred North Whitehead, each a naturalist in their respective times, described a wholeness, a God, in nature, and vice versa in their Panpsychic worldviews. Big-thinking renegade biologist Rupert Sheldrake extends this notion all the way up to Space, arguing that celestial bodies and stars, including our own sun, possess a form of consciousness. Such speculation suggests large, self-organizing space-time systems as exemplary of an even greater unity, not unlike James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis of planet Earth as a large, self-regulating system.

Despite our best intentions in attempting to perceive things from broader Systems Theory perspectives, a tendency to fragment and compartmentalize can arise due to an incomplete recognition of the wholeness, which is often hidden beneath layers of complexity and interdependence. When complicated challenges such as anthropogenic climate change are faced, Nobel laureate economist William Nordhaus describes the vexing issue of comparing present and future costs and benefits of climate change mitigation strategies, and a tendency to discount “the benefits of the societal value of reduced damages in the future” (2013, p. 182). In key environmental spheres of thought, meaningful opportunities at climate change mitigation are said to be nearly lost, with some suggesting the most cost-effective approach at this point is one of societal adaptation to its effects.

Bohm believes that a central incoherence which arises from failing to properly recognize wholeness, in all of its forms, is due to communication. The nature of language, according to Bohm, is that it has been developed to emphasize the part over the whole. Regardless, language can be used differently, as in the case of poetry, not to mention all of the various potentials held by new communication technologies. If we then draw parallels between naturally occurring systems and larger, more complex ones, does Bohm’s random crowd versus ballet metaphor not have particular relevance today? As a society, are we exercising our potential to behave quantum-mechanically, as coordinated dancers in a ballet, or rather as objects in a Newtonian space; each on our own separate path?

Nordhaus, W. (2013) The Climate Casino. New Haven, United States: Yale University Press