Nature and Ideology I

A scientific view.

Knowledge.

What is it good for?

Knowledge about ourselves, for instance. About who and what we are. Real-world fundamental scientific hard-core facts that we tend to show a momentary interest in as some sort of curiosity and then summarily dismiss. We don’t like what science tells us about ourselves. That we are exclusively a product of the natural world, that our presence here was not inevitable and our existence is not necessary. We like that science can find cures for diseases, give us technological gadgets for work and play and afford us comfortable lives but refuse to believe that science has anything to offer with respect to the human condition.

There are those who adamantly believe that science should have nothing whatsoever to do with the realm of the humanities. They believe that one’s worldview should be a matter of ideology alone — one’s preferred ideology should supersede any view of the world offered by science. That is, at best, a naïve sentiment. For, if our ideologies are kept separate from a demonstrable view of the world how can one’s worldview be relevant? How can one’s worldview have real value unless it is viable with the way things are? Shouldn’t one’s worldview be instructed and informed by knowledge as a matter of course?

We would rather think of ourselves as being absolutely free to ally with one ideology or another than accept our biological determinism, which is arguably responsible for how we choose to align ourselves to, say, conservatism or liberalism in the first place.

To be so aligned as a matter of how we are wired, however, means that a conservative or liberal perspective cannot be what they are claimed to be by their adherents, that is, totally free-standing concepts about which people are totally free to make up their minds.

To hold to such a claim one must insulate oneself from real-world-knowledge because when one examines the nature of things with respect to conservative and liberal characteristics one finds they are ubiquitous in natural systems from the quantum world to the classical world, from the formation of stars to the formation of life, from groups of hunter gatherers to the advanced civilizations of today.

The definition of liberal is — not bound by orthodox tenets or established forms, more permissive, a letting go, allowing for deviation from the norm. Conservative is defined as — strict adherence to established forms, low tolerance for change, defending the status quo and even returning things to the way they were in the past.

Now, the universe exists by virtue of the forces of gravity and dark energy. The repulsive force, dark energy, is responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe. The gravitational force is resistant to that expansion. The repulsive force is a force for liberal change that pushes things apart while the gravitational force is a force for a conservative constancy that seeks to hold things together.

For a universe to exist only the repulsive force could be dominant. For, if gravity were dominant things would have remained totally conservative and unchanging. The dominance of gravity would not have provided a meaningful role for the repulsive force. A dominant repulsive force, however, allows room for things to happen, allows for change and allows gravity a partnership in the revelation of what we know as our universe.

The same holds true for the political field, as well. An ultra-conservative government, like a dominant force of gravity, would not allow for change and any sign of liberalism would be crushed.

Governments based on the free play of contesting ideologies allow for periodic dominance of either the liberal or conservative tendency. The liberal tendency seems to be generally dominant in free societies as it allows room for what is seen as necessary change.

Of course, it should be noted here, that an ultra-liberal system alone, allowing change for change sake, cannot work. It would lack the necessary continuity to hold itself together and would not be able to form an altogether cohesive society.

So, like the formation of our universe, our political realm is defined by a liberal/conservative dynamic. And, again, such a dynamic is found throughout the nature of things.

Galaxies, for example, began as a liberal free-for-all of hydrogen and helium atoms that became trapped in pockets of conservative gravity. The action of the gravitational force within this liberality defined particular galaxies and formed their individual stars.

Stars themselves are masses of chaotic liberal change held in place by the force of gravity. A star is formed when an enormous amount of hydrogen gas collapses in on itself around a particular center of attraction. As it contracts the gas heats up and becomes a force for expansion. A balance between expansion and contraction is arrived at and the result is a controlled ongoing nuclear explosion. A star, in a sense, is in a liberal rush to change into something other than what it is. It seems hell bent on burning out as fast as possible, to self-destruct, to let go of itself completely while its gravitational force serves to conserve it as a nuclear furnace through time. Also, there are extremely liberal formations of new atoms being forged within a star which could not take place without its conservative gravitational force holding it together.

In a dying star the liberal and conservative forces go their separate ways. The star explodes and some of its matter, liberated from the conservative restraints of the core, is jettisoned into space. The core of the star can then become an ultraconservative neutron star, or black hole. Through its enormous gravitational pull a black hole reduces all the matter around it back into fundamental particles, like it’s trying to take things back to conditions that existed at the time of the big bang. That is as reactionary as anything can get.

The material world is made up of particles that are also formed by a conservative/liberal dynamic. For example, what goes on inside a proton, a particle forming the nucleus of an atom, is extremely chaotic. The three essential quarks inside a proton continually conspire to go off on their own and, as it were, do their own thing and be free of the constraints of the conservative strong force which continually reins them in, eternally corralling them within a certain radius. This ongoing chaos of constant change produces an extremely stable, conservative object for which any variance in its ongoing consistency has yet to be detected. The proton’s stability has been calculated to continue for ten million million million million million years.

Also, individual atoms adhere to a very conservative make-up. Each one of a particular kind of atom is precisely identical to any other of that kind. The rules that govern the linking of atoms to one another are also very conservative. The resulting molecular structures, however, amount to a very liberal array of material forms. Everything that exists, then, is a result of a dialogue between conservative and liberal tendencies.

DNA and the proteins they code for are highly conservative in structure and performance while the resultant biosphere is highly liberal in its resplendent variety. Also, the overall integrity of the DNA process is maintained between liberal and conservative elements, as in molecular agents that favor mutation — liberal. And those that favor invariance — conservative. A workable balance between the two elements must be maintained in order for life to endure and evolve.

If agents in favor of invariance were too conservative life could not have evolved passed the cellular colony stage. If the liberal elements, the agents for mutation, had held sway, every cell reproduced would have been so radically different from the previous one that no agreeable constitution could have been arrived at in order to produce a coherent life form beyond those of individual cells.

The same holds true for social organisms. If our primitive ancestors were overly conservative in their ways, not allowing for any changes whatsoever in the way things were done, we could not have evolved out of the Hunter/Gatherer stage. Or, if the tribes were overly liberal and allowed every one of their members to continually change things according to whatever whimsy they concocted then cohesive units could not have been formed and, again, social evolution would not have been possible.

The body’s immune system offers another example of the liberal/conservative dynamic at work.

The T-cells of the immune system patrol through the bloodstream on the lookout for invading organisms. They must be able to distinguish between organisms which do and do not belong to the body they are protecting. Once a threat is identified a signal is sent to the B-cells to produce the appropriate antibodies with which to destroy the threatening microbes. The T-cells also call off the attack once they recognize the threat is eliminated.

The activities of T-cells are carried out within liberal and conservative margins. For instance, they can be too liberal in identifying what belongs to one’s body and allow for any number of illnesses to take hold of one. Or, as in autoimmune diseases, they can be too conservative in their assessment in what does not belong and identify some bodily tissue for destruction that is vital to one’s health.

Similar judgments must be made by the body politic concerning what is and is not harmful to a social organism. A Stalin, McCarthy or Pol Pot are examples of overly conservative assessors of what is and is not a threat to society. They, and others like them, see all those who deviate from their view of society as harmful and seek to destroy all those who do not conform to it. On the other hand, too liberal an outlook allows for harmful deviations to become acceptable. In order to be accurate, our assessment of what is and is not a threat to our social organisms must be contained within the bounds of conservative and liberal margins. That is a law of nature.

A society, a social organism, must have confidence in its ability to accurately identify and effectively rid itself of any and all threats to its well-being. It must, in effect, deploy a well informed, judgmentally sound immune system as is found within a healthy body.

Our freedom lies in using our intelligence to determine how the liberal/conservative dynamic can best be configured at any given time. That is, constantly evaluating the optimal positions between liberal and conservative margins. This could be achieved by tempering our perspectives with the knowledge that neither liberalism alone nor conservatism alone qualifies as a stand alone perspective. Such a regimen would serve to eliminate the extraneous noise in the political arena due to unwarranted claims of absolute righteousness from either side of the aisle. It would also encourage a more realistic overview of political organization and its relationship to society as a whole.

Political perspectives are not objective. They will always and forever fall short of the claims attributed to them by their adherents. Neither one by itself can show us the way to an optimum social organization. No particular ism is above the social landscape. They are part of it. No ism is capable of molding a viable society according to its precepts alone. History has demonstrated this fact time and again but it’s a lesson we seem incapable of learning. That alone is enough to indicate that one’s absolute allegiance to one ideology or another has more to do with one’s wiring than rational decision making.

Isms are not solely a priori intellectual inventions. They are a distillation and elaboration of the natural scope of things. We can no more effectively rule our societies by exclusively employing a particular ism than we can effectively rule ourselves by employing only selected areas of our brain.

The truth is we are caught up in a moronic power game. Politicians seek power to impose their particular one-sided view on society rather than to use their power to benefit society as a whole. Presently we are much too factionalized, too much at war with ourselves, with politicians and pundits wielding particular isms like clubs to browbeat the population into believing that they must choose the one over the other.

That is entirely bogus.

We need to be able to see how isms need to work together so as to benefit us all.

That is where the real power lies.