Civilizations and Other Living Systems

by Susan Wenger and Win Wenger, Ph.D.
<< Books Online Index

Title Details

First Edition published in 1973 under the title “The Organic Analogy in Human Society: A Re-Examination”

Prepared for the “Civilizations as Systems” Session of the December 1972 Conference in Washington, D.C. of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, together with International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations. session chaired by Prof. Carroll Quigley.

[This theory] “…makes more sense than anything I’ve heard!”
— Dr. Carroll Quigley, one of America’s leading historians

[Dr. Wenger is] “…a new American (Arnold) Toynbee!”
— Dr. Matthew Melko, leading sociologist, still a prime mover in the ISCSC, and now a professor at Wright State University

Second Edition: 1977, published by MCM Press.
Third Edition, 1993, published by Project Renaissance.

<< Return to Contents

Summary

Oswald Spengler’s “Organic Analogy” does not seem to have been subject to formal investigation during the past few decades for several reasons which, perhaps, are incidental to the basic questions raised by that analogy. The same interval has seen a manifold expansion of biological, historical and sociological knowledge, and birth of the thermodynamic sciences of systems and information, all of which seem to bear directly on Spengler’s analogy.

There may thus be at least a residual chance that, at base, Spengler’s analogy is useful and that we may gain information from linking the study of large civilizations to the study of living metazoan organisms (via the study of systems). Even if such a prospect is very slight indeed, matters at stake seem weighty enough to merit further investigation.

Following some review of those aspects of systems and information science which seem to bear most strongly on the question (pages 9-29), the writers state a case for a form of the analogy (from page 30 on) as forthrightly as they can, to facilitate criticism and possible development of more substantive information.

This paper suggests that similar structures behave similarly, despite some differences stemming from differences in material, in size, and in system-level. It further suggests that advanced civilizations take on structural features similar in kind to those of highly organized metazoan organisms; that these latter age and die of old age precisely because of those structural features, and that it is these same structural features which cause advanced civilizations such as ours to exhibit phenomena resembling those of metazoan aging and dying of old age. And just as general biological entropy-resisters such as anti-oxidants and inosines have in the laboratory retarded and in some instances even reversed major elements of the metazoan aging process (a direct result of leads suggested to researchers by the thermodynamic sciences), so also may there be at least a respectable chance that a thermodynamic study of civilizations may yield some solutions to some of the current felt problems of our society. More specifically:

Because a biologic metazoan’s components are specialized and wholly intra-dependent for their needs on the well-being of the whole system, when one component fails (as will always happen sooner or later, according to the Second Thermodynamic Law), a corresponding and accumulating strain is placed on the rest. This appears to explain why, among all terrestrial lifekind, only metazoa age and die of aging. Advancing civilizations, for a wide range of reasons, tend to hypertrophy their institutions and scale of organization until they take on this “metazoan” structure. As in the metazoan, to the extent that a civilization organizes its components into a high degree of specialization and profound intra-dependence for their needs on the well-being of the whole system, the same structurally defined process of aging may occur.

While treating with the problems of declining civilizations as entropy-increase in the most general sense, we also find seven equally general ways to combat entropy-increase, goal-homing negative feedback/homeostasis being among the most powerful of these. Unique among these ways is selection process: selection reduces entropy; entropy-increase itself is its own universal entropy-reducer, selecting in favor of homeostatic and other superior entropy-resistant systems. Almost every non-random arrangement, pattern, structure, whether in the physical universe or in human affairs, is obtained via some selection processes). This lends a common evolutionary character to both spheres, one also shared by biology.

Given initially chaotic or unformed conditions, by reason of longer survival of the stablest interactions one finds an evolution of increasingly sophisticated and complex negative-feedback homeostats and goal-homing behaviors oriented toward self-preservation. This and other functional parallels in the evolution both of organisms and of human societies, may give us some accounting for common structural features to be found in both types of entity.

<< Return to Contents

Author’s Preface to the Second Edition

Our activities for some years have been predicated on the notion that the factors which cause entire civilizations to rise and fall are a matter for more than merely academic study. As to whichever theory eventually proves to be correct – as to why entire civilizations appear to commit suicide and why ours bears promise of unusually rapid denouement along the same lines: one very general description would be that people, individually and collectively, accumulate problems faster than they solve them until the burden becomes too great and everything rips.

With reference to that burden we have for some years been devising means to get people’s resources back into their own hands, get them back on top of their own lives and competent to deal with problems; their own problems and problems around them as well. One aspect of this is a guaranteed problem-solving service. Another aspect is our self-teaching invention and creative problem-solving course text, Your Limitless Inventing Machine (Sunshine Press, 1978). Another aspect is reflected in the new “Creators’ Cooperative” which has already pooled several thousand prospective inventions. Our thinking here is that no matter what the exact nature is of the destructive problems carrying our civilization downhill, these problems can be expressed only through an ongoing socio-economic-psycho-cultural matrix. If that matrix is constructively changed abruptly enough, those destructive processes would be rendered temporarily irrelevant, buying time in which to find the exact nature – and more elegant solution – to the problem. A sudden flood of value-contributing inventions, which we are (hopefully) in the early stages of instigating, might suffice to supply that positive jolt. We can now take almost anyone and in hours train him into being able to function as a prolific inventor.

Incidentally, we believe we have found an answer to a matter which has puzzled us for some time. Like the rest of us, we had always thought we had centuries to study the problem before our civilization kicked itself apart, and we were somewhat stunned at the imminent pace of events. The source of this historical anomaly is, we suspect, this: a certain unfortunate and (nearly) universal obstetric practice: that of separating mother and child for the first few critical imprinting hours following birth. In every other mammalian species this practice produces insanity and, the higher the species, the more disturbed the results. It may be too late to do anything about it, but it may at least solve the puzzle.

In this paper, a few years ago, we proposed that our chief immediate hazard was the overspecialized network of interdependencies we had built up in our civilization. “The Organic Analogy in Human Society: A Re-examination” was part of a presentation I (Win) made at the 1972 “Civilizations as Systems” ISCSC session with AAAS (the International Society for Comparative Study of Civilizations, with the American Association for the Advancement of Science).
Citing Norbert Wiener’s use of the Laws of Thermodynamics (entropy increase), Edward Gibbons’ observations on the vulnerabilities of centralized arrangements in society, and General Systems Theory. I suggested that our situation is structurally, mathematically similar to previous, self-destroyed civilizations in having pursued economies-to-scale (among other things) into elaborate inter-dependencies whose eventual rupture threatens the survival of all who depend thereon….

The widely-shared impression, customary Schadenfreude aside, is that our civilization is in deep trouble, that time is running out, that recognizable historical analogues to our present situation had outcomes which are unencouraging. Less obvious, perhaps, but somewhat more cogent, is that it is the ideas, arts, things, feelings, and people that we value, that we fought for, that we’ve loved, that we’ve sought to build or protect, whose existence is immediately and totally threatened. The point is that it matters less which theory is correct than that time appears to be running out — not just for us theorizers but for all which civilized men and women value. If we can buy sufficient time, by some means or another, then we can proceed to determine the correct theory and an elegant solution good for the long haul. Is anyone else also addressing this matter of how time can be bought for Western Civilization?…

<< Return to Contents

1992 Foreword

Via this book, this writer in 1972 posed a general model, relating various social theories and history-based theories of civilizational dynamics to (a somewhat ideosyncratic version of) the general theory of systems. This book contains the foundations of his argument that to the extent that human societies and civilizations are structured like complexly homeostatic metazoans, they tend to take on the behavioral characteristics of such metazoans, notably the reflexes of complex homeostasis/”sociostasis.”

This book does not go on to the special form of the theory, published in 1987 under the title A General Theory of Systems: One Man’s View Within Our Universe, which became the bases of sociotectonics and socioquake theory. Nor does it yet incorporate the evolving perceptions of this writer, such as they were, between these two publications. These latter may sometime become incorporated in a new edition of the present book. That they have not been gathered and incorporated to this date is, with apologies, a result of three personal factors:

Until 1973, this writer was deeply involved in an all-out effort to start a new college;
Last-minute destruction of that effort, days before opening, threw the writer into some years of struggle for raw survival, in which he was stripped of some activities and resources while developing new ones. No college or university would take on either a program (of civilizational inquiry) or a former professor/department head who, because he had once tried to start a new college, must by definition be a trouble-maker. Hence, the writer had to move some distance away from academic life.
A fire which swept through most of the writer’s possessions in 1979, consuming most of his notes and manuscripts.

Over time, some of the lost manuscripts and smaller publications have gradually been retrieved from prior incidental distributions— including this present book. Enough other incidental materials, reflecting clarification and evolution of perceptions regarding the topics of this book, have also re-emerged to sometime justify, as time may permit, re-publication of an expanded and modified version of this sociostasis systems model, up to the point from which emerged the 1987 publication on sociotectonics and on such socioquakes as have since engulfed the formerly communist part of world civilization and which may soon also more directly involve us here.

In this present book, we mapped a somewhat ideosyncratic version of general systems theory onto various social theories and history-based theories of civilizational dynamics. Necessarily the main such theory, and the model which this writer believes still to be the high-water mark of the field, is the cyclical model developed inductively by Arnold Joseph Toynbee. It is Toynbee’s model which receives the most attention and critical review during the unfolding of this present general-systems-based theory.

At no point have we committed the fallacy of composition which destroyed Oswald Spengler’s comparison of human societies with living organisms. The entire issue is structural. Although we necessarily, in erecting any theory, must abstract out some factors and details relative to others, and any human societal reality has to be infinitely more complex and somewhat less predictable than any theory model, it IS clear that human societal structures correspond closely to the pertinent elements in other, complexly homeostatic systems (most present examples of which are organic in nature). In turn it is clear that the general behavioral traits of complexly homeostatic systems serve as at least a fairly good basis for predicting some of the more interesting behaviors of human societies including those societies in which we happen to be embedded and including some of those behaviors which we ourselves unwittingly appear to be expressing.

Conspiracy theory has been popular among some counter-cultural elements both in American society generally and even among some historians and social theorists. In specific instances regarding health, education systems and the like perhaps there ARE a few conscious conspirators but nearly all the behaviors cited in conspiracy theories can be accounted for as the unconscious, complexly homeostatic reflexes of societal systems, carried out by people who consciously are acting from high motives rather than conspiratorially. In a sense, then, “conspiracies” are both very narrower (where conscious) and very, VERY much broader (unconsciously involving us all!) than represented by their authors.

Of far greater concern than any particular “conspiracy” is, of course, the overall evolution and prospects of our own highly technologized, all-encompassing global civilization. In the present model, both in this book’s general form and the special sociotectonic form which emerged in 1987, there is room for the possibility that previous cycles of complexly homeostatic civilization, sliding back from dynamic to static equilibrium until unresolved problems overwhelmed them in an orgy of self-destruction, happened more times than we have on record. -That even highly technological societies may have arisen before only to suffer this cycle. —And that the higher the technologies of such societies the more thoroughgoing their self-des-truction, and the less evidence they left behind of their ever having existed! Whether or not such highly technological societies ever in fact existed, this aspect of the model implies a huge basis for concern, and special responsibility, in the instance of the present global civilization and times in which we are now living.

Here, then, is the 1972, more general, version of the model in which various theories of civilization’s evolution and dynamics of behavior are compared to certain aspects of the general theory of systems.

— Win Wenger

<< Return to Contents

The Organic Analogy in Human Society: A Re-Examination

Oswald Spengler’s 1918 suggestion that large societies age and die the way living organisms do enjoyed immense popularity in the late 1920’s, and then became wholly discredited for reasons perhaps not wholly cogent to the basic question: do advanced civilizations in fact suffer from processes of aging (or undergo other organism-like processes) similar enough to those of living organisms to make the study of such organisms useful to the study of human societies and vice versa?

Seeking explanation of what was already an apparent fact to Spengler, he and others made the error of suggesting that because human societies are comprised of living organisms, that these societies take on the characteristics of living organisms. When this “fallacy of composition” became overwhelmingly apparent, the analogy itself became virtually closed to further respectable
inquiry.

To worsen matters, Fascist and Nazi use of related concepts to promulgate their ideal of an organismic state assured that post-war intellectuals everywhere would tend to reject any notion of similarity between living organisms and human societies.

Perhaps professional and intellectual rejection of this analogy was reinforced by continued appeal of the idea at some popular levels, so that scholars’ principal interface with the analogy was with vulgar, ill-considered versions of the notion which were to be dismissed out of hand.

None of these reasons appears especially germane to the fundamental question of parallels between living organdsms and human societies. These less than wholly-germane reasons appear to have wholly discredited that analogy and closed it to formal inquiry for some decades. A re-examination of the matter may well be overdue, since those same decades have seen manifold expansions of biological, historical, and sociological knowledge, some of which would seem likely to bear directly on Spengler’s analogy. More notably still, Systems Science and Analysis, and Information Science, have themselves been born during that interval of decades since inquiry into the analogy was considered respectable, and the writers will propose that these sciences hold a major key to resolving the question of useful parallels between biological organisms and human societies.

We will propose and describe this key as forthrightly as possible, to aid criticism and possible subsequent developing of substantive information – for the purpose of this paper is to launch inquiry, not to prove a point which may, indeed, be erroneous. For even if the chances are only slight that the proposition is a correct one, those chances involve the very survival of our present civilization, and so warrant further investigation. Putting the proposition as baldly as possible will make its errors more immediate. apparent to the reader so that if there is any possibility whatever Left, after criticism, that the case has any possible merits, what we all have at stake would tend to argue for extensive formal investigation.

Despite the sciences which hold this purported key to the analogy having been born only in recent decades, one important lead on that key goes back in time to 1789:

…[In contrast to specialized, highly organized, intra-dependent Rome, Western Society is not likely to fall because: it’s]… more necessary arts can be performed without superior talents or national subordination; without the powers of one or the union of many. Each village, each family, each individual, must always possess both ability and inclination to perpetuate… [many cited arts]… Private genius and public industry may be extirpated, but these hardy plants… [the many arts cited]… survive the tempest, and strike an everlasting root into the most unfavorable soil. The splendid days of Augustus and Trajan were eclipsed by a cloud of ignorance…
— Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Another, more recent observation about history and human societies also will bear on our study of the analogy. In the context of his extensive and sometimes challenged categorizations of entities and processes in history, Arnold Toynbee¹ notes that the best progress of civilizations² appears to occur when those societies are in the condition of sub-division into small, autonomous units such as city-states – free of each other’s limiting controls but enough in contact to imitate each other’s successes and avoid each others’ failures. It seems to be that when a civilization is joined together in a highly-structured, homogenized, universal state, existing at its most powerful, that the civilization most severely goes into acute decline leading to extinction.

A most interesting observation on the nature of living organisas, bearing suggestively on this Study, is that only metazoa age and die of old age.
Protozoa do not age.

Of some further interest is this observation by Norbert Wiener, father of at least 3 major modern sciences, on the nature of everything:

All order, arrangement, organization, tends to increase in entropy – i.e., break down.³
—Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

A further question bearing on our Study is that of the problems of analogy per se. At what point does superficial resemblance become illuminative similarity become underlying common law become identity? At one extreme of the continuum ranging from dissimilarity to identity, almost anything or any event may be superficially compared to almost any other thing or event, but usually not very meanie fully. At the other extreme, we know of no two events or objects which are completely identical to each other – they differ to at least some degree, even from themselves over time. The question we must attempt, should we find the organic analogy fruitful, is whether the structure of laws governing both erganisms and human societies is enough the same to be conceptually (and, possibly, practically) useful.

On this latter question we can, perhaps, be guided in part by Nicholas Rashevski, who observed that a living cell may be analyzed as a set of interacting elements, the product of those interactions, and the whole in interaction with the surrounding environment. A metazoan organism may be analyzed as a set of interacting cells and/or organs, the products of those interactions, and the whole in interaction with the surrounding environment. In that frame of reference, for whichever entity, the mathematics describing its nature and behavior are the same. In this context their behaviors are dictated by the structure common to cell, metazoan, and human society.⁴

What we are seeking, in keeping with Rashevsky’s observation, are parallels in structure such that information about human societies will add meaningfully to our information about biological organisms, and information about biological organisms adds meaningfully to our information about human societies. Seen in this light, should our re-examination of the “organic analogy” indicate some validity to the proposition that civilizations “age and die” in ways like those of biological (metazoan) organisms do, we may have a tool to work with which is more than analogy.

The question of structure, then, is the crucial one.

Some differences in the behaviors of organisms and societies must certainly result from differences in the materials into which that common-featured structure is impressed. Differences in scale and in system-level may result in somewhat differing organizing principles at work. Yet, we must expect fairly similar behaviors to result from closely similar structures, unless some extraordinary effect can be cited which specifically prevents such similar behavior.

On this matter of parallels between human societies and biologic organisms, the set of structure-descriptions which are to be found in Systems Science, Information Science, and System-Analysis (Rashevsky’s observation, above, is very close in fact to being a description of System-Analysis), has proven most generally useful. The writers have found the conveniently-linked structure-statements of all three sciences to apply usefully to every conceivable field of study, and have themselves used those structure-statements to analyze problems ranging from whether⁵ and how⁶ human intelligence may be raised, to control of organic disease and aging.⁷

How the aforementioned structure-descriptions could possibly find applications in all fields of study, however divergent, could be explained one way with the observation that regardless of how many specialized disciplines we use to study it, it is but one natural universe, and the relations of Man to that universe and to himself is the single subject of study. Or, as Toynbee phrased it:

…the study of human affairs is really one and indivisible.
The conventional academic dismemberment of the vast subject into “disciplines”…is an arbitrary surgical operation, and this makes it a serious impediment to the gaining of knowledge and understanding… unless (one’s mind) dares to venture out into the surrounding stretches… it cannot hope to understand the nature even of its own narrow beat.⁸
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History

Once any specialization starts in any field of study, unless special efforts are made to prevent it each specialty will begin inventing its own terminology for the same findings and features which are duplicated from specialty to specialty, and it is easy to see how, without much really new information developed, specialization can by itself produce an “information explosion.” As each specialist narrows his competencies, more and more he has to make accounting in his study for factors which are clear only from outside his frame of reference, so that over several generations we accumulate convoluted, complex, less useful and harder-to-learn explanations rather than the simplifications that science once was leading toward a la Occam’s Razor; a process which, of course, makes still further specialization required until this snowballing fragmentation runs to intellectual bankruptcy. Yet, this self-extending process of Fragmentation may be interrupted if we look to the territory beyond a11 the various maps we have tried to draw of it, and begin to find common names for its various features.

Rather than content ourselves with the above generalities, however, we can find a more immediately useful answer in specifics, if we turn to the aforementioned structure-statements themselves, and to those thermodynamic sciences from which they are drawn. No one can have much hope of fairly representing even the content of one science, much less the rich intricacies of the sciences of systems and information in a few lines – but for purposes of definition and with the tolerance, indulgence, and understanding of the reader, the writers will attempt enough review of certain points of interest in these to throw some light on the central questions of our Study:

Does the structure of the aging process in metazoan organisms have a meaningfully similar counterpart in human societies under some conditions, and if so, what kinds of measure might be undertaken to counter that process in either organisms or societies?

Let us proceed, then, with such review of systems science, syste analysis, and information science as we can in such limited fashion attempt, as follows:

<< Return to Contents

A Brief Look at the Nature of Systems

All things interact with at least some other things. Any Interaction constitutes (as defined in systems-science) a system;⁹ the nature of the interaction(s) defines the nature of the system. All systems in the universe have certain characteristics in common which, thereby, are susceptible to the same analysis whether studied via the disciplines of physics, political science, psychology, biology, chemistry, sociology, electronics or whatever specialty. Special types of system – such as cybernetic or goal-homing systems – have by their defining characteristics additional properties in common, no matter what discipline or under whatever name of phenomena they happen to be labeled.

For example, Hagan¹⁰ reviews systems methodology for analyzing any situation or entity and demonstrates nicely that any subject or “set” can be studied usefully in terms of its elements, the interactions of those elements, and the interactions of the overall set with its surroundings. Kuhn¹¹ demonstrates that such elements need not be discrete objects or forces to be so analyzable, so long as the categories (of what, following Ayer’s usage, may in the abstract be called “point-events”)¹² selected for are those which are identifiably interacting with each other.

In such manner systems-science gives us a descriptive, analytical and recognition frame of reference to work with which accounts for virtually all the elements of any scientific discipline. Instead of learning from scratch an entire new set of behaviors every time we must climb a different set of stairs, so to speak, we are enabled, having mastered the sensory, functional-motor and formal concepts of “stairway” to climb any set of stairs we encounter, whether wooden, metal or stone. Anyone adequately equipped with some such universally applicable, detailable, measurable frame of reference, with descriptive and analytic procedures to match, should be corresponding. enabled to master large sectors of any discipline, with the ease usually reserved for persons enjoying the very highest intelligence.

Being able to account for, and readily recognize, major sectors of the phenomena studied in any particular science, on the face of It should render the whole of that science more accessible to its students.

Norbert Wiener’s¹³ succinct exercise in definitions,¹⁴ originating the science of cybernetics, information science and system-analysis,¹⁵ has served Alfred Kuhn well in integrating the studies, by various psychologists, of human cognitive processes.?¹⁶ Though a logical (i.e. “armchair”) exercise, it is suggestive that the resultant integrative structure and theory does not seem to be one with which any of the psychologists concerned could substantially disagree. Kuhn’s comprehensive study, entailing in one and the same frame of reference biological nervous systems, culture value, transaction analysis, power politics and game theory, language, and almost every other facet of human behavior, is far too extensive to review here,¹⁷ but for this point of our discussion we may draw this salient point from it:

By Wiener’s definition,¹⁸ from which Marshall McLuhan¹⁹ among many others has drawn much fruit: a “message” is any improbable order of events, its information content a function of the improbabilit of arrangement of that order. All orderly phenomena in the universe constitute messages – which we can “read,” if we have the code for printed English, or we can “read” the deer tracks in the snow, if we have the information with which to decode the information presented therein.

(Continuing Kuhn’s salient point): We react hardly at all on currently-presented Information per se: rather, on the interaction of such currently-presented information with prior (and decoding) information stored in the brain. How fundamental this fact is, is Illustrated by the inability of sight-restored patients, previously blind from birth, to distinguish by sight a triangle from a circle for six weeks or longer – it takes that long for building up the requisite visual decoding information.²⁰ It is this stored information, and the functioning structures which store, retrieve and relate it, which raise us above the intellectual level of an amoeba who can only act in relation to immediate, present stimuli. In much the same sense the same fact may account for the stagnant hundred-thousand-years or so duration of Mousterian culture – so little information was present in the culture that it was difficult for Neanderthal Man, probably as intelligent as we today, to decode any new information from his surroundings.

In Kuhn’s analysis, sensory signals act as cues, triggering related concepts, On a crude conditioned association level a la Pavlov: when we see and recognize the paw of a cat behind curtains, we know we are looking at a cat – we infer the other parts of the cat from such a cue. We build our conceptual models much as the sciences build theirs – a lot of observation, bagging those observations into categories, then working out relations within and between those categories, requiring testing for verification and frequently revising those categories into new ones more generally useful. These categories are the key elements of our “decoding” information – one might say, seeing is sorting. The more appropriate, accessible and generally useful our concepts, the more readily can we decode, perceive, and make intelligible the phenomena around us.

If this analysis is correct, then we can find impressive implications for researchers in all disciplines, including history, Sociology, anthropology and related studies, in the decoding facility given us by the universally applicable structure-statements afforded by Wiener’s three sciences. Though we use them here merely to Investigate the question of “the organic analogy” in the study of human civilizations, adaption of such structure-statements for wider use in these and other disciplines is hereby indicated. We can find even more profound implications in the use of these concepts for education, especially early childhood education:

Equipped with the “codes” of the most widely-applicable structure-concepts, one should perceive more, recognize more, take more into account, respond more, and adapt more successfully. Leading psychologists hold that any idea or theory can be taught successfully in intellectually-respectable form to any child at any age or stage of development.²¹ If educators and parents should care to build key concepts of information science, communications science, cybernetics/ systems science, into the modes of perception of very young children, these could bring more of their intelligence, brain and experience to bear on whatever they encounter and each thing they encounter should bring more development-provoking stimulus to bear on more of their Intelligence and associated experience. Among other effects, many disciplines including those engaged irectly in studying the nature and state of Man, would be visited by a new generation of more effective researchers.

Worth noting here is the observation that the truer-to-reality and the better structurally organized is the information programmed into the brain, the more effectively can that brain relate to and adapt the organism to the environment – a biological definition of Intelligence.²² For structurally similar reasons, infusion of such concepts inte our popular culture might, in time, render Western Civilization more viable than it appears to be at present.

Looking more directly at some key points of that universally-applicable cluster of thermodynamic sciences known as systems science, information science and system analysis:

Information is orderly modulation of some medium. The more improbably orderly is the modulation (whether the marks on this page or rabbit tracks in the snow or vapor tracks in a cloud-chamber er a sequence of changes in shape of ancient pottery), the more information is in the “message.” All non-randon arrangements, once one possesses the “code” with which to interpret them, constitute “messages” which can be “read” for the information they contain. This is, in effect, the whole inquiry of all the sciences (with all its implications for intelligent pursuit of all scientific investigations if we build that awareness and expectation into the frame of all young children, typically already enthusiastic about cryptography: the seeing of all orderly phenomena as so many variously-coded books to be opened and read).

The Second Thermodynamic Law describes formally the tendency of all energy to disperse into randomness; “to become unavailable for work,” to “Increase in entropy.” As Wiener observed,²³ matter is but a form of energy; so is organization. A glass of hot water and a glass of cold water poured together into a bucket, when poured back into the glasses tend to be mixed, lukewarm water for the same reasons that all organisms tend to get sick, suffer accidents, age, and die; why all organization tends towards collapse; why messages tend to grow garbled and noisy.

With laws of randomness-increase or entropy-increase being the universal decay process, it seems apparent in this discussion that a few simple definitions would categorize and account for all the possible ways to combat this decay phenomena. This simplification and reduction to a few general cases should lend considerable intellectual convenience for subsequent studies. Of the seven geners. categories defined below, only the first six have been treated in sone form as entropy-combatters by other writers, although the sevent. may be nearly the most significant of them all.²⁴

<< Return to Contents

Seven Types of System, Seven Methods to Resist Entropy

On inspection, the set of seven cases listed below appears to account for every instance of retarding or countering the universal decay process we call the Second Thermodynamic Law. It seems that only these seven general ways exist to combat this general tendency toward randomized destruction:

Running. Withdrawing from the situation immediately threatening destruction – a help in specific external instances, but not against the general process.
Rigidity. Surfaces and structures with no give to them can withstand some degree of impact from randomizing forces, but tend to shatter. Even when engraved in marble, messages tend to erode and/or lose relevance. The Maginot Lines and stegasauran armors of life are able to temporarily withstand or deter misfortune, but do not appear adaptive. A light shield can be picked up and laid down, in emergencies; to depend on rigidity for the long haul appears to have proven disastrous, evolutionarily and historically.
Redundancy. Apparently why, for example, evolution has provided us with two lungs, two kidneys, etc., so that if one system-component fails the entire system need not fail with it. Why, when teaching or learning, we tend to repeat things. Why, when teaching or learning, we tend to repeat things. If entropy in information channels and memory storage tends to be high in any particular message, we can cancel much of it out by duplicating the original message and recording only the common components of the duplicated message. A similar process was deliberately engineered in the first Mariner fly-bys of Mars, according to newspaper and television reports at the time, when a relatively static-free television picture was sent back three times, and only those signals which appeared at least twice registered on the final print-out; very little random static appeared twice in exactly the same points of the repeated signal. But repetition also expends resources; beyond a certain point it can be boring and create, in human settings, morale problems.
Reduction. By simplifying structure or message, reduce that which is vulnerable to entropy-increase or randomizing error.
Redirection. Cause the problem to hit someone else instead, or put the problem over into someone else’s hands. This redirection of entropy-threat moves our consideration back one pace (sometimes), perhaps allowing superior resources to be brought to bear in one or more of the other six ways.
Negative Feedback. Automatic course correction, automatic maintenance of equilibrium; “goal-homing” and homeostatic processes, or best assurance from “rebroadcast by receiver” that messages got across. The entire biological processes of homeostasis and adaptation are negative feedback.²⁵ Negative (subtracting from the effects of disequilibriating events; positive feedback would add to such disequilibriation) feedback at this reading seems to be the most important means generally by which to counter tendencies to break down or become randomized. Instead of merely passively resisting entropy-increase as do the above five measures, negative feedback actively reacts to restore equilibrium, to restore a formerly lower state of entropy – though it may not always be equal to that task.
Selection Process. Not previously examined, so far as these writers know, by cyberneticists and information scientists, although corrects the prevailing view established by Wiener,²⁶ that “no message gains meaning during transmission – it can only increase in entropy and give way to noise.” What happens, though, to the message when a skilled pianist interprets for us a Beethoven sonata? What is happening to the level of randomness in a bucket of mixed marbles, while one sorts the red marbles out into one pile and the black ones into another? What is the universal tendency toward entropy-increase itself, but a process selecting in favor of ever-improved forms of order which can avert breakdown longer and to greater effect – which is but one way to describe the course of evolutionary selection and the rise of higher intelligence?

As the most effective means to combat this universal tendency toward noise, death and disintegration, the last two items of negative feedback and selection process are of most special interest to us in our present Inquiry.

While all two-way or multiple-way interactions involve feedback²⁷ by definition (what affects A changes A’s effect on B, changing in turn B’s effects “feeding back” on A), the feedback may augment or add to the initiating change (positive feedback, in which the effects tend to snowball to explode the situation and change it into something else), or it may dampen out and subtract from the initiating change (negative feedback, stabilizing situations and tending them toward permanence). All stable situations are stable via negative feedbacks;²⁸ all homeostatic and goal-oriented systems likewise (stable with respect to the goal they “home” on, whether temperature-level or blood-sugar level in the human organism, tolerable levels of unemployment, continued leadership in a gang or a nation, keeping a marriage happy, an old neighborhood or village trying to hang on while surrounded by change, or driving a car down the right side of the road). Regarding the incidence of these two types of feedback, we are preponderantly surrounded by negative feedbacks, which tend to perpetuate their interaction-patterns by their very nature of stabilizing: positive feedback situations, by their explosive nature, have mostly eliminated themselves.

(Williams²⁹ identifies hundreds of thousands of biochemical homeostatic mechanisms in the human organism, part of a much larger set of a variety of types of homeostatic mechanisms in that organism.

He concludes from the enormously proliferated range of biochemicals that it is highly unlikely that any individual human anywhere is entirely normal, within the 95% range of norm variability, in all of these hundreds of thousands of features; that each of us is a notable deviant in many such respects. How all these systems remain articulated within their overall larger systems, nevertheless, suggests some of the range and extent of the feedback and entropy and information phenomena we are now discussing. It would, moreover, be unsurprising were we to find that a similarly large range and extent of homeostatic mechanisms prevailed in human society, for reasons which as we will see are similar to the reasons why we find the human organism so richly endowed with them).

Lest we all be totally cancerous, negative feedbacks slow and restrict our growth and development. The only arrangement in biological evolution which worked and was therefore “fit” to survive and propagate, was one in which all our Gompertz -S- curved growths tapered off and stopped: as Crile noted,³⁰ the presence of enough cellular tissue of a certain type generates a chemical signal of sufficient strength to prevent other, as-yet undifferentiated cells from developing into that type. Suppose, for example, we were to continue growing after birth at the same rate as we grew within the womb? Our own weight would crush us to death long before we reached reproductive age, if we didn’t die of other pathologies first.

Once a human group has established someone in the role of, say, leader, or ideasmith, or critic, or thinker, or wheelhorse, or whatever, is it perfectly easy for someone else to move into the already-occupied role or do we have homeostatic devices in human society similar in effect to the chemical signals in tissues which turn off further development of cells? Multifold processes to divert, limit and turn off the development of individuals in human society, including “body language signals,” disapproval, remonstrance, law, and other modifiers of behavior, must play the structural function in human society which is counterpart to biochemical signalling in tissues, for structurally much the same reasons. The long evolution of societies must have weeded out as ruthlessly those cultures whose members were not accommodated into sufficiently limiting roles, as cancer and other organic breakdowns weed out metazoan organisms whose cells get out of hand.

Why are all organs, organisms, and traits so susceptible to being boosted or stunted during periods of most rapid growth? In the simple frame of reference provided by systems-science, the developments and functions of these traits, organs and organisms are regulated by many forms of stabilizing, negative feedback. In the rapid state of flux occasioned by the most rapid, “vertical” part of the Gompertz S-shaped growth curve, some of these negative feedbacks are weakened, “used up, ” or “stretched out” by that flux: there is therefore correspondingly less resistance to whatever other changes happen to come along. In human society the same-structured process has occurred so commonly that we have conceptualized it and brought it into our language, in the expression: “seizing the moment.”

<< Back to Contents

Selection Reduces Entropy

The seventh method of combating entropy-increase, the order-increasing “selection process,” has not yet been described in this context in any formal publication, so far as these writers know, although in other contexts it arises clearly enough from the pens of such writers as Garrett Hardin,³¹ Leslie White,³² and, of course, Charles Darwin.³³ In the broader, thermodynamic context this appears to be a most extraordinarily promising line of inquiry: let us hope that investigations of it can be begun accordingly. Until these can be begun, let us make a very slight step in the direction of such investigations, by noting an aspect or so of selection processes:

Selection reduces randomness and increases order. An example would be the improbable order of responses of a pigeon playing ping pong, resulting from selective behavioral reinforcement. If we could sort hot and cold water molecules with the ease that we can sort red and black marbles, in the example cited earlier, we would be able to take lukewarm water from a bucket and pour hot water back into one glass and cold into the other. So long as there is a universal tendency to increase in entropy, together with systems and entities which differ in quality and susceptibility to this randomization, selection favors the “fitter” systems and entities. If these also prove self-reproductive, with variance among the offspring, selection process is compounded in both effectiveness and extent. Evidently evolution, selecting automatically for increased adaptability and intelligence, 1s a universe-wide phenomenon whose consequences we may sometime have to take into account. How could any cyberneticist say that “no message gains meaning in transmission,” and not consider what it is that a superior conductor does in interpreting the score of a composer? Should any information scientist compare Pierre Monteaux’s interpretation of Le Sacre Du Printemps with that of the late Stravinski himself, could he then say that messages never gain in meaning? (Error, also, can of course be read into such a message, and frequently is – but the technique of redundancy is also with us; sooner or later one can still go back to original sources for a check on all those pyramiding “gained meanings.”)

The salient point, specifically, is this: very little order is randomly arrived at. Once-in-a-decillion chances, such as the emergence of Man from protozoa, by their improbability should rarely come about purely by chance, and hardly could have done so except by intervention of a selection process. Why we are here, along with the fact of existence of virtually every structure and pattern and configuration in the universe, pretty nearly must be this: chance initiates chains of events, some of which fall into stable arrangements sustained by negative feedbacks. Then “evolutionary selection” follows through its own logic, selecting and narrowing the field of directions of development until what was nigh-impossible under strict laws of probability becomes nigh-inevitability. In biological evolution under Cope’s Law of Survival of the Unspecialized,³⁴ in the long run all the possible forms which protean life could take and develop through are narrowed until the emergence of Man – or, at least, some unspecialized, adaptable, intelligent species – is not only no longer a rare chance but well-nigh inevitable.³⁵

Structure, form, configuration represent drastic limits on all the protean possible arrangements which might-have-been, whether sculpted by hand, by some Divine Will, or by natural law. The nature of sculpting by whatever means is the nature of selection process.

Nearly all order was arrived at through selection process (es).

Nearly all order, on the face of it, constitutes “messages” about the selection processes which formed it.

Once such a line of inquiry is opened, what messages may we read about the processes which formed that astonishing quality of order we regard as thinking, informed intelligence – and once we have read some of these messages, what may we make of the processes about which we have read?

Norbert Wiener’s sciences appear to be a most fertile frame of reference in which to work. On even such a point as that of truth or falsity, for example: an intended falsehood, whether conscious or unconscious, generates interference-patterns and thus confusion or “noise” in the human information system – this noise can be read by the polygraph, or by the skilled psychologist or psychoanalyst.

Enough such internal noise and confusion, as anyone can tell us who has ever suffered “stage fright,” severely reduces the sensitivity of the organism to outside stimuli – in effect, the confused and system-noisy individual, from whatever cause, is “Jess intelligent,” less adaptive. In all the instances each of us can recall of public feeling being in a similar state, whether in small group or in society-at-large, surely that public must have become transitionally less sensitive to outside stimuli, less intelligent, less adaptive!

Another application of information science is in the question of how “smooth” the medium is on which the modulations impress information (as per definition of “message”). The smoother, more regular the medium, the more information may be conveyed because the noise of the medium’s own discontinuities will interfere with the message. Compare the ease of tracing messages into fine sand rather than into coarse gravel, or of writing on fine vellum rather than on burlap – or why this monograph is being presented in typed form. A class led consecutively by different students should be more informative because the students are more involved in the information-transfer process – but the discontinuities of jumping from personality to personality, from style to style, each “taking getting used to,” present noise which may well reduce information-transfer below even the rate prevailing in ordinary lectures to classes of passive students. If a person’s information-handling senses are smoothly operating and sophisticated, they will process more information than if the converse were true. A stabilized body temperature was necessary to give Mammalian brains a higher-than-reptile intelligence.³⁶ If the language one speaks in is smooth and sophisticated, and his language also shapes his thinking processes (as noted so well by LeBarre³⁷), how readily may the person handle information with others and within his own skull, in comparison with one whose available language for speaking and thinking is rough, disjointed and discontinuous? Indeed, sociologist Basil Bernstein finds the disjointed “restricted code” of dialect at lower levels of socio-economic ranking to constitute a major, perhaps the chief, element of disadvantage in accounting for lower average intellectual performance there as compared to the rest of society.³⁸

Perhaps nearly everything, as indicated by this rather varied sampling, may be fruitfully explored from the standpoint of cybernetics and information science. The scope of such inquiry is too extensive to discuss here; the writers’ services here are simply to advise that it exists.

<< Back to Contents

Human Societies as Systems

The above review has now equipped us to deal with the point sought earlier in this paper. We may now examine entire human societies as cybernetic and information systems which are prone, by the Second Thermodynamic Law, to error-increase and breakdown, and which are sustained to some extent against these corrosions by negative feedback processes and mechanisms which number in the hundreds of thousands.

The entire evolution of human societies, of Mankind himself, of lifekind generally, and before that the emergence of life in the first instance, may be readily seen as specifically the appearance and selective refinement of goal-homing mechanism. To put the matter more plainly:

If there were no order or structure to begin with, if we assume there was once only chaos, we must nevertheless accept that in such a chaotic state the elements of that chaos must be in collision and interaction with each other. By statistical variance some of these interactions are stabler, and therefore last longer, than others which pass on and yield up their elements to still other interactions. By this selection process, over time the elements of that chaos become caught up increasingly into stable interaction patterns, until chaos becomes ordered. The most stable interaction patterns are negative feedback, goal-homing systems. The most stable of these are those which are homeostatic with respect to meeting the needs which are critical to those systems’ continuing existence. This is the very definition of life, the “Basic Life Postulate”³⁹ — the one feature common to every living organism is that it senses and seeks to respond to its needs.

Why is this “Basic Life Postulate” common to every living organism? Because, what would happen to any living organism which did not sense and/or did not seek to satisfy its needs?

In this light time, and any sufficiently-sized and multi-elemented chaos, must necessarily lead to the emergence of life — to be precise, the emerging of homeostatic self-preservation among complex aggregates of chaotically-formed interactions. In turn, selection among these is in terms of the effectiveness of this homeostatic self-preservation, and thus is a process cumulatively adding refinements to this “Basic Life Postulate” or homeostatic self-preservation.⁴⁰

Even the invention of reproduction may be seen in numerous regards as a form of refinement of this homeostatic process. The invention of reproduction, in turn, made the number of homeostatic entities so great as to introduce competition and other interactions between them as an element of, and drastic intensifier of, this selection process. We now have had, in biologic terms or frame of reference, this increasingly intense selection process cumulatively adding refinements to this “Basic Life Postulate” or homeostatic self-preservation over a tremendously long extent of time – perhaps a billion or more years. It is small wonder that today’s metazoan organism, including human organisms, is a cybernetic and information system which is comprised of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of somehow-integrated negative feedback processes and mechanisms. In terms of human social evolution we have had less time, only a million or so years, to evolve such features above and beyond the more rudimentary primate social patterns, but human social evolution 18 not gene-bound and can proceed much more rapidly, especially more rapidly in advanced, active, extensive and communications-rich cultures.

We can make such comparison, in part, because societies which tend to preserve themselves, like discrete organisms which tend to preserve themselves, tend to survive relative to those which do not so preserve themselves. The roots in society of this self-preserving homeostatic system, which must ramify into immense complexity and sophistication, may be seen in the encounter of two or more formerly unrelated human strangers. Whether his expectations and intentions are commerce, friendship, hostility, leader-follower or whatever, each stranger pursues some sort of strategy in initiating and/or reciprocating interactions with the other. Such elements of that strategy as prove successful are retained, consolidated, added to and deepened into self-sustaining roles. If the strangers fail to relate, they pass on from each other and no social unit is formed. They return to prior, unordered circumstance or continue to other, stabler social units. Such social units comprise, and build up, vast networks of interwoven roles which are covertly (and sometimes overtly) defended by a vast array of means, both blunt and subtle. Simple withdrawal from, and then return to, a social unit by one of its members forces so much rearranging of role-patterns that such a moment historically has proven the most effective time to introduce drastic social changes⁴¹ — at the time when the multifold defenses of the group (its homeostats) are most used-up and weakest from that withdrawal-and-return readjustment of role patterns. Again, social units whose homeostats are too weak to withstand such stresses, are “phased out by evolutionary selection.”

For our purposes the most cogent observation on this homeostatic evolution, and one which carries us to the heart of our Inquiry, is this: protozoa do not age. Individual one-celled organisms may die from a variety of causes, but aging is not one of them. Only metazoa suffer and die of old age.

Why are such multicellular organisms victims of aging, and only those organisms which are multicellular? The answer is not apparent in the mere fact of having many cells, but the glimmerings of an answer begin to emerge in considering what is required for many cells to be able to live together as a metazoan: each cell must specialize in some particular role(s), and each cell consequently becomes wholly dependent for most of its complex, dynamic needs and processes, on the well-being of everything else in the system.

Whenever anything goes wrong in the metazoan organization, all portions of that system undergo various degrees of hardship or stress. Each portion of the metazoan is wholly dependent on the well-being of the total system, and suffers interruption of service of some of its needs according to the nature and degree of breakdown in that system.

<< Back to Contents

Stressed Systems

In keeping with this observation, Hans Seyle,⁴² founder of much of the science of stress medicine, finds that prolonged stress, such as that suffered by a junior executive who gradually and increasingly realizes that he probably isn’t going to “make it to the top” despite his utmost efforts, that he has a slender chance which is fading out of reach, reflects in an increased incidence of almost every disease – cardiovascular, respiratory infection, cancer – almost all of the errors which can slip into the human physiological system. On the other hand, transitory stress, soon relieved, appears to strengthen the organism, reducing the incidence of all types of error in the biologic system – the human organism has grown healthier “by the exercise.” How may we interpret these phenomena?

In part, from the foregoing discussion in thermodynamic context, we may see prolonged stress as “using up” or “stretching out” some of the many homeostatic feedback systems maintaining the body. With many “homeostats” thereby weakened, whatever noise-errors happen at the time to be occuring in the system have much better chance to become established and place new stress on related parts of the system which may fail in turn. In this light the tumor, thrombosis or infection is not the true disease but only symptoms of the real disease: entropy-increase making inroads during prolonged feedback-weakening stress. Once the “symptom” has started its own stress-producing course, then perhaps to cure the original stress becomes too little or too late. If we don’t succumb to one of the several “big” errors sooner, we eventually succumb to an accumulation of countless little errors — “old age.”

In biology and medicine, one analysis of this aspect of systems-failure may take this form: since many or most negative feedbacks in our multi-fold “homeostats” include biochemicals in their makeup, specific biochemical nutrients may become exhausted during prolonged stress, and all we need is for one such feedback system to fail, long enough to permit error to get established.

Transitory, soon-relieved stress, correspondingly, not only does not exhaust these specific nutrients or dangerously wear out the involved homeostats, but initiates one of the very oldest biological negative feedbacks of all – the marshalling of additional resources toward the exercised aspect or portion of the organism. Frequent response, with adequate rest and recovery time in-between, builds up greater muscle. Frequent neuron use, with adequate rest and recovery time in-between, by developing insulating sheathes and synaptic connections, produces a better neuron.⁴³ Frequent brain-use, with adequate rest and recovery time in-between, by the same processes produces in both animal and human brains a greater Information-handling capacity, along with an improved blood-nutrient and oxygenating supply to the brain.⁴⁴ Danger, or other energy-requiring situations, produces a flow of adrenaline to release blood sugar and make more energy available. The spectacular manifestation of sensory hungers produced by a few hours of sensory deprivation,⁴⁵ suggest that actually one of the biological homeostats highly important to survival is an activity homeostat. Every functioning facet of capability appears to be associated with a drive for the exercise of that facet – a drive which, in cases of extreme prevention, can itself reach extreme degrees of pathological disorder – e. g., high entropy-state.

The very extent to which we can see socio-historical counterparts to every biological process cited above, functioning in societies for structurally the same reasons as they function in organisms (for example, the reaction-patterns of a community smitten by some disaster, or the variations caused in these reaction-patterns with repetitions of dis-aster, or with varying degrees of help presented from some outside and/or higher source), points up the matter from one standpoint.

Both living organisms and human societies represent initially amorphous conditions which become structured by selection processes in relation to successful homeostatic self-maintenance. In both living organisms and human societies, intricate and multifold homeostatic systems emerge, at least in part by evolutionary survival-selection. A similar structure – and similar behavior – is demanded of each initially amorphous entity by one and the same set of natural laws. It is evident that loosely-structured, small-scale or relatively undeveloped human societies might be fruitfully studied in terms of bio-structural and behavioral descriptions of single-celled organisms or, perhaps even more so, in terms of such descriptions of colonies of such protozoa up to and including the level or organization of the most primitive metazoa.

Likewise, more formidably-structured higher civilizations, as they approach their respective ages of great nations and/or universal states, may be fruitfully studied in terms of higher metazoa. If the components of a metazoa are highly specialized and wholly intra-dependent for their needs on the well-being of the whole system, we are assured that as one cell or organ fails, a corresponding and accumulating strain is placed on the rest. The Second Thermodynamic Law tells us that, most assuredly, such failures will take place from time to time. It is precisely for this reason that metazoa age and die of old age.⁴⁶ To the extent that a civilization organizes its components into a high degree of specialization and profound intra-dependence for their needs on the well-being of the whole system, we are assured that:

As one component of that society fails as per the Second Thermodynamic Law, a corresponding and accumulating strain is placed on the remainder.
That society, for that reason, begins, like metazoa for that same reason, to age and die. The “organic analogy” at this point is not mere analogy but a structural law.

Gibbon’s⁴⁷ observation for Roman society was cogent. Evolved into a super-state from the age of Hellenic city-states, the late classical Mediterranean world was metazoan in character. Every person, every town, every city, every region depended utterly on Rome’s governance even if, as sometimes was the case, Rome didn’t want the job. Each failure somewhere in the metazoan Empire stressed everything else in the system until the cumulative catastrophe carried all the way through into the profound culture-break of the Dark Ages.

Gibbon’s observation for Western society no longer holds true. We have become more metazoan in character, for reasons cited below. The “hardy roots” have been replaced by the organization of people and resources on a larger scale. The interaction-patterns which define our lives and in which we are enmeshed and supported, have for structural reasons begun to age, even to the point where, perhaps, when anyone thinks about our present civilization he is led to feel older and wearier than he is in other contexts. We still seem to be in a stage of accumulating small errors and consequent stresses in our system, fortunately without the occasional drastic partial systems-failure engendered even early in the days of the Roman Empire, but long-run Prognosis is the same, for structural reasons, both for classical Roman society and for our own today, unless study of the problem produces both solutions and the inclination to use those solutions.

<< Back to Contents

Healthier States and Possible Solutions

From the standpoint of the points raised by Gibbon and Toynbee (although these solutions themselves were not entertained by those writers), solutions would tend on the one hand toward reducing and de-specializing some of our present structures and components, and on the other hand to “seeding hinterlands” with colonies of rudimentarily-developed civilization which can pick up the “cultural torch” without much of a culture-break if the central arrangements of existing society should fail. Some indication is that this latter procedure is what has preserved Western Civilization to this point, through initial failures of a rustic kingdom structure, a city-state structure, and the structure of Western Christendom itself. The trouble with this latter procedure is that we appear to have run out of hinterlands unless space travel can be developed in much more of a hurry than seems to be happening at present. The trouble with both kinds of solution is what seems to be an overwhelming preponderance of tendencies in human society toward escalating size, structure, and component specialization, all of which are correspondingly more vulnerable to entropy-increase. This overwhelming preponderance of tendencies toward the metazoan state could conceivably override any solutions attempted unless we can understand and somehow counter some of these tendencies. With so few students of civilization examining the problem as yet, our information on this point is scanty at best. What little we do as yet recognize of the process seems to run as follows:⁴⁸

<< Back to Contents

Why Does Society Go to Hypertrophy

So long as a civilization remains relatively unorganized, unspecialized, its member parts small and autonomous – a low-order organism, so to speak – initiatives and response to any problem or challenge may originate from anywhere and organize resources appropriate to solve that problem or challenge. Reaction-time, disputes, and bargaining requirements within the hitherto unorganized society make the process of meeting a challenge appear not only inefficient but hazardous,⁴⁹ creating a felt need to retain organization on a large scale. Once large-scale organization exists – once the society has organized itself on a large scale to cope with a problem, these effects develop:

It seems more efficient to continue the organization; to cope with anticipated problems of like nature.
A vested interest now exists – at least the prestige and higher stimulus-value of organization in service to and encompassing most of society – possessed by and possessing those individuals and groups which make up the organization.
Bad taste lingers from whatever aspects of the formative bargaining requirements were least palatable.
There seems to be need, in some instances, to guard against a resurgence of the problem which has been surmounted but not completely eradicated – i.e., a third Persian Invasion of classical Greece or a recurrence in America of the Great Depression.

The upshot of this is that once large-scale organization has be created, society appears to have little choice but to maintain it. 1a some instances it may expand it; in some instances the large-scale order has become a positive ideal to be sought after in other reaches and aspects of society even before a problem is felt.

Society then is more or less forced to put these large entities to some use. For specified areas and activities their existing lines of communication can make for short reaction-time. Socially-approved channels emerge for deliberative processes, checks and balances to steer decisions and keep them from running wild and to limit the power struggles which are an inexorable concomitant of the heightened stakes; institutional safeguards emerge to protect against individual error which could be disastrously multiplied by the sheer size of the organization if not caught (said institutional safeguards, by the way, tending toward robotized bureaucracy wherein both geniuses and idiots must perform the same functions in much the same ways). Conveniences become requirements become dire necessities.

Even when the organization has not sought greater power, society has come more and more to depend on its conveniences and responsibilities for handling certain kinds of situation, As new problems emerge, the handling must go through channels; initiatives from outside “the system,” which reflects deserved credit on the system, freshens that system, and entails that system’s further growth.⁵⁰

<< Back to Contents

Breaking Down

The more people there are in an organization, the harder it is to assure each does his job; with some of the work not getting done, the clear impulse is to add to the resources and numbers of people in the organization so that work will get done… and the situation cycles on a larger scale for subsequent work.

Leaving aside for some other occasion the question of the processes by which the growth of organizations continues and expands and compounds, let’s observe the direct consequences.

One of the most depressing books this writer has ever read is an anthology edited by Chambers⁵¹ on the fall of Rome. In the fall of that empire, and of the remains of Hellenic society generally, it seems that everything which could go wrong, did so: that from top to bottom of that society, every factor which could in any conceivable way lend itself to the destruction of anything which was fair and noble and/or civilized in that society, did so in the worst possible way. Best-intentioned acts (especially those terrible Diocletian “reforms”) led to the worst conceivable consequences. (Similar processes seem to have prevailed in other dying civilizations). Unfortunately, given the degree of organization and specialization and committed interdependence which prevailed in that society, there could have been no other outcome.

By the Second Thermodynamic Law: all arrangements break down, sooner or later.

To the extent that everyone in society becomes dependent on those arrangements, all suffer and/or fail when those arrangements do, in fact, break down – our all-too-metazoan social “organism” has become over-stressed.

If threatened and actual such breakdowns provoke larger and larger efforts to contain the situation within larger structures and strictures – I.e., government controls – the ultimate breakdown is correspondingly more profound – even to the point of producing that degree of culture-break known as the death of a civilization.

The processes by which an entire civilization (Western society, by now encompassing nearly all peoples and nations on this planet, is notably one such civilization)⁵² dies, are not pleasant. Except for the likelihood of engendering human extinction, a thermonuclear wipeout might almost be preferred, since it would get the agony over more quickly. In this writer’s estimation no one, not even a Stalinist or a Peking Communist, would want to live in Diocletian Rome.

Even the many now struggling to replace “the System” or “the Establishment” in our society, have “been there before.” Their counterparts in every self-destructed civilization have been unwitting participants in a long, painful, debilitating process whose end was tragic and ruinous to all.

Useful solutions, although both evident and accessible, are not particularly so unless we examine more closely the processes mentioned above. To begin with, let’s examine history through the eyes of one of its greater students, Arnold Toynbee. According to Toynbee’s model:

<< Back to Contents

Toynbee’s Model in a Capsule

Challenge arouses. Some challenges, if neither too trivial nor too crushing, may stimulate a sense of community. (Some sociologists have commented on this in observing villages stricken by some disaster). Such stimuli may set people interacting in ways which carry on in further development, overbalancing past the point where the original problem has been met and disposed of. This is how Toynbee sees civilization igniting, either among primitive settlements where nothing much was going on previously, or among the demoralized and anomic fragments of cultures which previously had been flourishing civilizations before their decay.

“Civilization begins best as a cosmos of small, separate units such as city-states, which are close enough to communicate but not so close as to be able to rule each other or seriously restrict each other’s actions. Among all these independent settlements emerge creative minorities – usually in response to some challenge. Such creative minorities, sometimes a single, charismatic individual, have often had to withdraw from their unit, or even from the larger culture-cosmos, before returning to spark changes (withdrawal-and-return; lowering of group homeostatic resistances at transition).

The creative responses and changes, once seen in one or a few units, are then imitated in the rest of the culture-cosmos. Mistaken responses can usually be observed and avoided by the rest of the culture-cosmos. Thus, we have civilization ignited or propelled by Challenge; in Response a Creative Minority spark changes while the rest of the culture undergoes Mimesis.

Creative Minorities, in Toynbee’s model, tend over time to become merely Dominant Minorities, While the culture-cosmos is yet subdivided into separate independent settlements, though, this Dominant Minority cannot exercise its by-now-sterile control over enough of the civilization to prevent the upwelling of other, new Creative Minorities elsewhere in the culture. These then meet the newest set of problems, rise to leadership as civilization mimics them through another cycle of success, and in turn themselves become dominant while other new leadership begins to emerge outside the limits of control.

As success cycles after success, the civilization diversifies and grows. Living standards and cultural “surplus” rise, and the society “etherializes” by becoming involved less with dire animal necessities than with more refined cultural issues. Outsiders are attracted in to imitate and finally join the rising culture’s way of life. Though new territories as well as new resources are enterprised, growth is more by radiation of influence than by overt conquest.

But by these very successes, the once-scattered settlements grow. They come into conflicting overlap of interest at the very time as they develop means to subject one another to political and military control. Besides generating more problems, this diversion of efforts toward controls (or defense against such controls) slows the rate at which the rest of civilization’s problems are solved, creating a stumblesome backlog. This backlog worsens as these factors emerge:

Solutions become more imposed (and therefore resisted) than imitated, with greater separation (and thus room for error) between problem, decision, action, and those affected by that action.
Controls exercised by Dominant Minorities leave less and less room for the emergence of fresh creators.
The culture becomes more uniformly homogenous, so that there is less of a varied background from which new solutions may spring.
The most urgent or fundamental problems of the entire culture become displaced in people’s attentions by such problems as attend upon the efforts of each unit to subjugate, or to avoid subjugation by, other units.

In such a manner the civilization then enters a Time of Troubles, of division and endemic strife, growing “sidewise” and unevenly and by force amidst inter-unit wars of increasing severity and brutality.

Those units not conquered or wiped out become desensitized, rigid and brittle from the hardships and incessant crises. Populations are put to flight or enslaved; as slaves or refugees they thenceforth become a further unsettling element in the situation. Professional warriors come to outweigh and outnumber the traditional citizen-armies.

Against such strains men and resources are ordered into larger organizations so that greater strength can be marshalled at critical points more quickly, and to ensure that the no-longer-mimetic solutions to situations are carried out as directed. Between this and such factors as sheer destruction, the growth which results from occasional successes, and the seeming need for still greater size as even the largest units still seem inadequate for their tasks; remaining diversities get ground out and the peoples of the whole culture get lumped Into fewer and more homogenous groupings.

Strife rises to a crushing climax until one unit, at great cost to itself and to others, overwhelms its internal and external opposition and extends uniform political control over the entire civilization. With its resources united, the civilization enters its “great” period – but enters it already dying, from self-inflicted wounds incurred during the Time of Troubles.

The remains of civilization, turned to the recourse and domination of a Universal State, are now too uniform and too controlled to allow fresh creative minorities to successfully emerge. Creativity must remain either repressed or warped into strange channels, until controls have at some future date broken down so thoroughly that the entire society is naught but ashes and rubble.

After Toynbee’s Universal State is firmly established, the ruling group begins to become more and more expensive. This phenomenon leads the empire into its “Yang-Yin” phase of successive routs and rallies. (Actually, establishing the Universal State itself represents a rally from the rout of Civilization during its long Time of Troubles). The Yang-Yin cycle runs something like this:

The growing expensiveness of the ruling group places too much burden on the outlying population. Taxes and other drains become so severe that, in some instances, producers stop producing. Ultimately, much of the demoralized population either stands by at, or participates in, the destruction of the Empire. As this point approaches a strange reverse English becomes more apparent: where in times of the civilization’s growth the lower classes had mimicked the tastes and styles and arts of the then-creative upper classes, now the sterile rulers ape the brutalized and dispossessed proletariats.

After the empire is destroyed, ensuing hardships and confusion make the old Universal State so attractive in retrospect that some heroic group emerges to restore it. Then that stern-virtued set of rescuers in turn begins more and more to resemble its high-living predecessors, and to lose control of the expenses of administering the Empire at intermediate and lower levels. Once again the burden becomes too harsh and bitter, another “Yin” collapse ensues, and so on. In each swing of the cycle the reasserted controls of the Empire become more rigid and absolutist than in the previous swing, whose easier controls were apparently tried and found wanting.

In the early stages of this Yang-Yin meat grinder, the Universal State in its rally stages enjoys extraordinary territorial growth, Imposing a high order of civilization on wide-flung new lands. Later, the Empire’s bounds become static. Later, they disintegrate and retreat in great, irregular spasms. Still, some of the most outlying areas of the Empire remain loyal to it, even past the point where the Empire itself has passed away.

Once the Empire has a static frontier with a lesser people, the balance of advantage falls (for obvious reasons) more and more co that lesser people – even to barbarians. If the Empire has no barbarians around to start with, it nevertheless manages to create its own, who will be in at the kill. Despite vast swaths of barbarian destruction invading across the Empire, the scene is not so much one of barbarian conquest but one where barbarians are sucked in to run amok over the still-quivering corpse of a society which has committed suicide. Until the absolute end, though, the old Empire still has enormous resources and occasionally may pull itself together long enough to deliver powerfully devastating blows against its tormentors.

The Yang-Yin rout-rally sequence ends with final destruction, or with an alien civilization drawn in to impose a new way of life, or when an alien, extremist; other-worldly religion sweeps all before it, from the Empire’s standpoint robbing people of their good sense at a time when it was needed most. Not a very pretty picture, the last lights of civilization dying amidst the ashes, shattered and superstitious survivors coming under the domination of religious mania and a mystic Church hating the very world whose affairs it is now responsible for by default. And everywhere the arts, the old arts, the sublime arts and skills which once lifted men above themselves, dwindling down toward a tired, dreary and dingy extinction.

But that same Church, acquiring what it will, stores and generates within itself the beginnings of the next civilizations. To Toynbee, the end product of civilization is grinding human misery; the end-product of churches and higher religions is spiritual development and the foundations of ascent. Toynbee sees the higher religions as perhaps a more interesting entity for study than are civilizations.

History rides on wagon wheels, in one of Toynbee’s famous metaphors. Civilizations act as the wagon wheels, rising and falling in their cycle but moving history forward – the motion of history being that of developing spiritual insights ground out of human material misfortune.

Before concluding with some rather fragile propositions on which Mr. Toynbee ends his main Study, it is necessary to quote another of his famous analogies. On pp. 49-50 of the first volume of D.C. Somervell’s abridgement of Toynbee’s Study, we read:

Primitive societies…may be likened to people lying torpid upon a ledge on a mountainside, with a precipice below and a precipice above; civilizations may be likened to companions of those sleepers who have just risen to their feet and have started to climb up the face of the cliff above… (historical observers’) field of vision is limited to the ledge and to the lower slopes of the upper precipice and (they) have come upon the scene at the minute when the different members of the party happen to be in these respective postures and positions… Since the next ledge is out of sight, we do not know how high or how arduous the next pitch may be. We only know that it is impossible to halt and rest before the next ledge, wherever that may lie, is reached…We can observe that, for every single one now strenuously climbing, twice that number (in extinct civilizations) have fallen back on the ledge, defeated.
— Toynbee, The Study of History, abridged by D.C. Somervell, Vol. 1, pp. 49-50

On page 562 of the XIIth volume of the Study, Reconsiderations, Toynbee says:

(We may liken) the situation of mankind in the present age to a climber’s pitch. Below us lies the ledge that our pre-human ancestors reached in the act of becoming human. In the Age of Civilization mankind has been making a number of attempts to scale the cliff-face that towers up from the ledge reached by Primitive Man. The next ledge above, unlike the ledge immediately below, is invisible to climbers who are striving to reach it…All that they know is that they are compelled to risk their necks in the hope of gaining this next ledge and in the faith that the endeavor is worthwhile.
— Toynbee, The Study of History, abridged by D.C. Somervell, Vol. 12, p. 562

These two analogies, of the ledge climber’s pitch and of civilizations as history’s wagon wheels distilling spiritual insights out of the ground-over human aspiration which rides those wheels up and down, should prove rather suggestive from the standpoint of systems and, indeed, in a longer paper each point cited of Toynbee’s model can be readily treated as cases in the theory of systems. All these analogies appear to do for Mr. Toynbee, though, is to let him posit “the next ledge up” as that of a spiritual world synthesis which will move Man beyond the Age of Civilizations and into a higher communion without being troubled by the processes of civilization any longer. He sees Western Man as soon being forced into a spiritual revolution through sheer despair, with such revolution bringing about the seemingly-impossible, peace-rooted world order.

In Toynbee’s description, the mistake of all previous Universal States was the destructive use of force in establishing such empires. This brutalizing use of force irrevocably wounded each civilization so deeply that the harshly-won unity at length failed, failed again, and finally collapsed. Toynbee’s promised land of a world-embracing, Western Universal State, supposedly would escape this fate because:

In a thermonuclear age, establishing the Universal State by force is no more feasible than continuing the present impasse of our Time of Troubles would be. The only choice left is to establish world order by spiritual revolution and spiritual synthesis which render all the old political divisions and calculations as pointless and disregardable as late Roman material advantages were to chillastic Christianity – although we may very well destroy ourselves first.⁵³ An empire founded by such spiritual means, Toynbee believes (or, perhaps, merely hopes), would tend to last.
While ruling groups in either case would tend to get expensive, Toynbee feels that modern economies are far too productive for this to become a very serious burden; if this were so, then the new world order would not be taxed into a destructive Yang-Yin oscillation.

<< Back to Contents

Toynbee’s Model, Critiqued and Revised, Shows Other Possibilities

It may prove feasible to treat Toynbee’s Model separately from his conclusions, particularly since quite a range of alternative conclusions may be derived from the very same Model. In particular, elements of his Model may be used to generate some very interesting propositions, which may have some immediate practical use for our society, preventative and curative. One need only review some of the relations of group size to conditions for progress, and some of the dynamics of social change, to catch a glimpse of some intriguing Leads for further study – even without the aid of insights from other Models and other sciences which throw the whole scene into some fresh Perspectives (of which Mr. Toynbee, by his own personal admission to the writers, is unaware).

Is Toynbee’s Model actually relevant to modern history, or is our society too different from those of the past to be subject to the same cyclic forces? If the west had followed the same path as its predecessors, and strictly so, by now we would be in the last throes of the dissolution of its Universal State. Why aren’t we? Let’s look at Toynbee’s reasoning on this.

Toynbee sees the same forces moving the West – but with one historic difference: the expansion of the hinterlands of Western society has been too rapid for either the breakdown of the West’s master-institution-of-the-times to crash the entire society, or for any unit to succeed in extending its unifying by stultifying mastery over the entire world of the West.

In Toynbee’s view, the West’s hinterlands spread so rapidly that each time the principal features of Western Civilization collapsed, other important sectors had already sprung up to seize the torch with their successes then imitated by the rest and their hinterlands in turn flourishing while these features collapsed in their turn.

Thus, by the time Western Civilization’s rustic kingdoms had disintegrated, the 14th Century city-states became our master-institution. These in turn were collapsing in internecine warfare before the end of the 15th Century, but with “nation-states conjured out of the old-fashioned feudal kingdoms by an infusion of city-state efficiency and vitality” (p. 520, Reconsiderations) , progress continued.

According to Toynbee’s “normal timing of civilization life-cycles, peace would be brought to a broken-down city-state cosmos by imposing political unity on it about the time of Napoleon — but Napoleon was crushed by the hinterland resources of the British and Russian Empires, so that the would-be world conqueror merely reabsorbed the debris of the medieval Western city-state cosmos into the modern Western world. Likewise, if the breakdown of the West’s other master-institution, i.e., the Reformation break-up of Western Christendom, is the West’s breakdown point, the Universal State should have been established by Germany in one or the other of the World Wars – but this was frustrated by hinterlands such as America, Russia, and a flourishing British Empire. If the actual outbreak of the Wars of Religion is the West’s breakdown point, then our Universal State should be appearing on the scene in our time. (It might also be interesting to watch for developments in the Spanish-speaking world in the 1980’s to the end of the century, perhaps associated with German Influences). And we now seem to have about run out of hinterlands – pending some colossal breakthrough in space development, of course.

While it would be decidedly unscientific to assume that the same Patterned forces which moved apparently all our sister civilizations are present and active in our own; It would be at least as unscientific (and perhaps more dangerous) to simply assume that they are not.

And for the time being, all of mankind’s eggs are in the West’s basket.

Note that both Toynbee’s reason for previous escapes of the west from disaster – the proliferation of hinterlands – and his reason for the tax-ruined Yang-Yin oscillations of a dying Universal State, are structural. The problem of civilizational decline he describes corresponds closely to the metazoan/systems-structural problem we have cited.

<< Back to Contents

Structural Issues

Toynbee’s non-structural solutions do not seem workable; his proposed peacefully-founded Universal State, founded upon a post-nuclear-age recoil and spiritual revolution, is still a universal state, structurally prone to hypertrophy of specialized intra-dependent arrangements vulnerable in the same ways a metazoan’s structure is vulnerable to stress and aging. Modern productive economies, moreover, not only are unlikely to surmount all the infinitely-expandable human wants of ruling groups, but are inexpressibly complex and sensitively vulnerable to breakdown. Rather than averting a Yang-Yin meatgrinder, modern productive economies under Toynbee’s idealized Universal State are likelier to add to the difficulties whenever difficulties start.

More structural approaches would seem to offer more promise. From the standpoint of Toynbee’s own model, our recourse would be to proliferate new hinterlands, to minimize the culture-break when existing arrangements fail. There are many ways to do this, both on-planet and off-planet; some of our young appear, without notable success thus far, to have been attempting to sow the land within existing societies with social groups pursuing social alternatives. In the long run, off-planet hinterlands may well be preferable since, with current technologies, off-planet settlement appears less difficult in many respects than settlement of the Americas did to 15th and 16th Century Europeans – and since, with some of those same technologies, a collapse of Western Civilization could endanger everything still living on the planet.

From the standpoint of “reduction,” one of our list of all general strategies for combating entropy as mentioned above, we see other reasons to proliferate hinterlands – the new settlements will have simpler organization (less vulnerable to entropy increase), will seek self-sufficiency with great vigor, and may well relieve the parent civilization of more stresses than they create.

“Reduction” and “negative feedback” together would argue for bridging of the gap between perceived problem, decision, action, and people affected by that action. Toynbee perceived that when civilization is healthiest, solutions to felt problems can be tried by almost anyone from almost anywhere in that society; the failing solutions are avoided and the successful solutions imitated by other members of that society. In declining civilizations, decisions requiring standardized behavior by all members of the society are imposed from the top down, whether they work or not.

<< Back to Contents

Laissez-faire and Other Ways to Climb Down

One guiding principle affecting the designs wrought by systems engineers is that a control mechanism should consume a bare minimum of the energies of the system it is controlling. It is precisely this principle whose violation, committed with such shocking gusto by advanced civilizations including our own, in Toynbee’s Model taxed such societies into Yang-Yin oscillation and decline. Antithesis to this violation is the laissez-faire system of Adam Smith: each participant is guided by his own selfish interests to serve others’ wants – since such service is what pays him. Smith’s free market was a gigantic, sophisticated computer reflecting changing problems and opportunities in changing prices which always was to bid people and scarce productive resources from less productive uses toward more productive uses. Essentially, this computer was to run itself without much further control exerted or needed.

Unfortunately, laissez-faire economists did not know of, or account for, an important output from the system; (external dis-economies, cost externalities, such as pollution whose costs fall mainly on other people and don’t enter into the profit-loss figures of the doer); an important input into the system; (external economies, benefit externalities such as basic, as contrasted to applied, research: so much of the benefit may go to others that the doer, feeling all the costs, may not feel it worth his while to perform it); and an important feedback 100p (advertising). Instead of rigging incentives to correct for these extra inputs and outputs, governments in our society, as in our predecessors’ opted instead to try to provide and/or regulate immense externality-ridden sectors of public economy – and this is basis for much, perhaps most, of our organizational hyper-trophy, Should we switch to incentives in place of more direct controls» we could reduce much hypertrophy and return some distance toward the conditions Toynbee described as characteristic of civilizations at their most viable, With our control mechanisms consuming less of the energy resources of the system they govern, our civilization would look sounder from the standpoint of systems-design.

<< Back to Contents

Partial Bibliography

Ayer, A.J. Logical Positivism. New York: The Free Press, 1959.

Bernstein, Basil. “Social Class and Linguistic Development: A Theory of Social Learning.” Halsey, A.H., Floud, J. and Anderson, C.A. Education, Economy and Society. New York: The Free Press, 1961.

Boulding, Kenneth. The Organizational Revolution. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953.

Brinton, Crane. The Anatomy of Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1938.

Bruner, Jerome S. The Process of Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.

Chambers, Mortimer. The Fall of Rome: Can It Be Explained? New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963.

Crile, George Jr. A Naturalistic View of Man. New York: World Publishing Company, 1969.

Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. New York: Washington Square Press, 1962.

Hagan, Everett E. On the Theory of Social Change. Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1962.

Hardin, Garrett. Nature and Man’s Fate. New York: Mentor, 1961.

Hebb, Donald O. The Organization of Behavior. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1949.

Kuhn, Alfred. The Study of Society: A Unified Approach. Homewood, Illinois: Irwin-Dorsey, 1964.

LeBarre, Weston. The Human Animal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.

McCluhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet, 1966.

Meskill, John (ed.). The Pattern of Chinese History – Cycles, Development or Stagnation? Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath & Co., 1965.

Rashevsky, Nicholas. Looking at History Through Mathematics. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968.

Seyle, Hans. The Stress of Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956.

Sorokin, Pitirim. The Crisis of Our Age. New York: Everyman, 1941.

Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History, Vo1. I-X abridged by D.C. Somervell, and Vols. XI-XII, New York: Oxford University Press, 1947, 1957.

Waggar, W. Warren. The City of Man. Baltimore, Pelican, 1967.

Wenger, Win. On Raising Human Intelligence. Federalsburg, Maryland: MCM Press, 1971.

Wenger, Win. How to Increase Your Intelligence. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, Inc., 1974; Dell, 1975.

Wenger, Win. “A Systems Approach to Human Longevity.” Paper presented to the Third Mensa College of Maryland Symposium on the Integration of Knowledge. Federalsburg, Maryland: MCM Press, 1972.

White, Leslie A. The Evolution of Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959.

Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. New York: Avon Discus reprint, 1969.

<< Back to Contents

Discussion Points: A Catalog of the Universe

All events are interactions.
All interactions are systems.
There are only these types of system—
1. ”Open-loop” (one-way cause-and-effect: Very rare)
2. “Closed-loop” (effect feeds back to affect its cause)
  1. “Positive feedback” (effects snowball, add to the disequilibrating event which set them in motion; this type of system is rare because positive feedback explodes the situations in which it occurs and so doesn’t usually remain around very long)
  2. (General) “Negative Feedback” (self-equilibrating system; disturbances tend to be damped out. Common, because such systems tend to last)
  3. (Cybernetic) “Homeostatic Systems” (goal-homing, negative feedbacks equilibrate around some specific level or target or goal. Common because such stable systems tend to last.)
3. Complex systems – comprised of more than one sub-system, perhaps of several types of system. Systems analysis within a hierarchy of systems… an event may be a member of more than one system at the same time even on the same level of the “hierarchy.” Almost all discernible events are, to various degrees, complex systems. Almost all cyclic repetitions are matters of phasing and mis-phasing in negative feedback systems.

IF ONE CAN IDENTIFY THE TYPE(S) OF SYSTEM TO WHICH AN EVENT BELONGS, REGARDLESS OF FIELD OF STUDY, HE MAY USEFULLY DESCRIBE, ACCOUNT FOR, ANALYZE, AND EVEN PREDICT THE OUTCOME OF THAT EVENT!

A message is an improbably ordered modulation of some medium. All patterns, structure, configuration, constitute messages, which we can “read” if we have the prior information with which to decode those messages. All perception is recognition of previously-stored concepts. Levels, stages, hierarchies of code and message. All patterns, structure, configuration, etc., share all the characteristics common to all messages – i.e., they are governed by the same “natural laws” which govern all messages. All patterns, structure, configuration, etc., by considerations discussed below, are messages about the selection processes which brought them into being.
All energy tends to randomize in distribution and become unavailable for work (2nd Thermodynamic Law). All concentrations of energy tend to “run downhill.” All matter, all structure, all pattern, all messages, all systems, all configurations are forms of energy and thus tend to become randomized (to increase in entropy, rot, die, become scrambled or garbled or “noisy,” be destroyed, rubbled, scattered, ruined, etc.).

There are only these ways to resist entropy-increase (listed in increasing order of effectiveness):

Running
Rigidity
Redundancy
Reduction
Redirection
Negative feedback – dynamic stability
Selection process – “reverse entropy” – entropy-increase itself is a selection process selecting in favor of superior resistance to entropy-increase – all ordered “low-entropy” states – i.e., all systems, messages, etc., were arrived at by selection processes…

<< Back to Contents

In Memoriam: Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Arnold Joseph Toynbee, metahistorian, and more a citizen of classical Hellas than of 20th Century Great Britain. That one of this century’s few greatest intellects should now be extinguished is a saddening thing, especially to those of us who knew him while he was still in his vigor. What a masterwork that man was!

When finally I got to discuss things with him, circa 1960-61, he still had so much more sheer presence than anyone I had ever met that to enter the same room with him was like a body blow, however exhilarating. Only two years later I saw him on television and the effect was another kind of blow–all that presence was gone. Age had moved in and begun to snuff out one of this century’s best and brightest lamps.

Like everyone else who had studied Toynbee, I poked a few holes in his momentous work and theory of history (A Study of History, Oxford University Press, 13 volumes and various abridgements). Some of us, though, learned the essential lessons:

That the affairs of Mankind, if one studies enough of them, are classifiable in ways useful to probabilistic predictions of current ongoing situations. And,

That the only thing inevitable about history is that it will repeat itself unless you introduce new factors, such as the still all-too-novel factor of learning from the lessons of the past.

Neither the Determinists such as Marx and Spengler, who believed in the historical inevitabilities of some particular process they thought to have identified, nor the popular chronological narrators of history uttering popular-level significances of events too narrow to really matter or to yield much perspective, nor that great majority of historians who believe their profession should be merely the collection of “facts” without causal relation to one-another–none of those three prevailing viewpoints in the discipline could have taught us those essential lessons.

That the lessons did not get across to very many as yet, is demonstrated by the shabby editorial salute to Toynbee’s passing rendered by a major metropolitan daily in this area. In this instance, the weeds on Stravinsky’s grave grew early. Yet compared to the three dominant philosophies of history, Toynbee’s kind of approach was the only one that made much sense–to this writer, at any rate. And now he is dead.

Or perhaps not entirely dead. Metaphysics aside, there are a few men among us standing on his shoulders with their own further-evolved theories of history and large-scale human process–notably Matthew Melko and Carroll Quigley. A Study of History is still endlessly rich with untapped insights. A hundred years from now a more enlightened generation of scholars will pour through Toynbee’s works and say repeatedly to one another with delight and astonishment: “Of course! Why, of course!”

<< Back to Contents

Endnotes

Toynbee, Arnold J., A Study of History, Vols. I-XII. Oxford University Press.
↩︎
“Civilization,” in Toynbee’s sense, is that society in which the following characteristics appear:

a) Inside, it is sufficiently intra-active that many of the historic events and processes occuring in any part of it can be described adequately only by reference to other parts of it. For example, the Industrial Revolution can not be studied adequately through the history of only one nation-state.

b) Events occuring within it do not, for some time, have much bearing or effect on peoples living outside it. And conversely.

c) Technical and cultural sophistication to a significantly higher degree than that found in “primitive” societies.

kEach of these may be argued in terms of degree; these categorical boundaries are “soft”; there is no hard, specific point where a particular civilization leaves off and some other entity begins. The category and concept nevertheless appear useful in many respects.

Toynbee identifies 28 known civilizations, nearly all of which went seemingly through similar processes of emergence and decay, culminating in an agonizingly prolonged suicide.
↩︎
Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. New York: Avon Discus reprint, 1969. By this proposition Wiener extends to all forms of energy — structure, order, information etc. — the effects of the Second Thermodynamic Law.
↩︎
Rashevsky, Nicholas. Looking At History Through Mathematics.
Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968.
↩︎
Wenger, Win. On Raising Human Intelligence. Federalsburg, Maryland: MCM Press, 1971.
↩︎
Wenger, Win. How to Increase Your Intelligence. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, Inc. 1975. New York: Dell Books, 1976.
↩︎
Wenger, Win. “A Systems Approach to Human Longevity.” Paper presented to the Third Mensa College of Maryland Symposium on the Integration of Knowledge. Federalsburg, Maryland: MCM Press, 1972.
↩︎
Toynbee, Op. Cit., Vol XII.
↩︎
Standard definition. See extensive developments upon this definition by Kuhn, Alfred. The Study of Society: A Unified Approach. Homewood, Illinois: Irwin-Dorsey, 1963.
↩︎
Hagan, Everette. On the Theory of Social Change, Appendix B.
Homewood, Illinois: Irwin-Dorsey, 1962.
↩︎
Kuhn, Op. Cit.
↩︎
Ayer, A.J. Logical Positivism. New York: The Free Press, 1959.
↩︎
Wiener, Norbert. Op. Cit.
↩︎
It may be argued that cyberneticists and information scientists are not empirical enough; that all they want to do is sit in armchairs and apply definitions. Nevertheless it seems to the writers that such definitions as are encountered in these sciences should lend themselves well to “plodding empiricism.” For example, when information scientists define the most general characteristics of a communication system, then state that to the extent that any given situation possesses these characteristics it constitutes a communication system, it seems clear that:

a) tangible, inexpensive, concrete communication systems abound to empirically work with, even to destroy in the task of analyzing, to work out in logical detail all the general features which are common to all communication systems – a model, if you will.

b) All the things which one may do to or with a communication system generally, represent testable predictions about any situation which has been identified as having the characteristics of a communication system.
Kuhn makes excellent description, op. git., of such uses of models, conceptual as well as mechanical, mathematical, etc., in the stages of building a science or even a single concept.
↩︎
For description of the historical development of these sciences, see Guilbaud, G.T. What Is Cybernetics? New York: Evergreen Grove Press, 1960.
↩︎
Kuhn, Op. Cit.
↩︎
But is commended to the reader, not only for the many insights Kuhn generates from this synthesis, but for exemplifying many of the finest interdisciplinary Integrations of knowledge yet attained.
↩︎
Wiener, Op. Cit.
↩︎
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
New York: Signet, 1966.
↩︎
See neurological descriptions of this problem in Hebb, Donald 0.
The Organization of Behavior. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1949.
↩︎
See, for example, Bruner, Jerome, The Process of Education. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1960.
↩︎
Barre, Weston. The Human Animal, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
↩︎
Wiener, Op. Cit.
↩︎
Note for the second edition: Since the first edition of this monograph was prepared, various descriptions of “negentropy” — negative entropy — have become popular in some quarters, though still seeming to miss the simple basic of selection.
↩︎
Wiener. Op. Cit.
↩︎
by definition. See also Kuhnk, Op. Cit.
↩︎
Kuhn, Op. Cit.
↩︎
by definition. See also Kuhn, Op. Cit.
↩︎
Williams, Roger J. Biochemical Individuality. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1956.
↩︎
-Crile, George Jr. A Naturalistic View of Man. New York: World Publishing Company, 1969.
↩︎
Hardin, Garrett, Nature and Man’s Fate. New York: Mentor, 1961.
↩︎
White, Leslie A., The Evolution of Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill,
↩︎
Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Reprint of 1859 edition, New York: Philosophical Library, 1951.
↩︎
Detailed in LeBarre, Weston. The Human Animal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.
↩︎
This “Inevitability” is supported by the fact of our sharing planet Earth with two other intelligent species: cetaceans and dolphins.
↩︎
Le Barre, Op. Cit: (Since the first edition of this monograph, it has developed that some dinosaurs also developed warm-bloodedness en route to evolving into birds).
↩︎
LeBarre, Op. Cit.
↩︎
Bernstein, Basil. “Social Class and Linguistic Development: A Theory of Social Learning.” Halsey, A.N., Floud, Jean and Anderson, C.A. (eds.). Education, Economy and Society. New York: The Free Press, 1961.
↩︎
LeBarre, Op. Cit.
↩︎
To the point even of heterostasis, of homing on exterior goals at some considerations removed from the immediate homeostatic needs of the system, as the system becomes more complex and sophisticated and treats with larger and longer-range aspects of its environment.
↩︎
See examples and discussions of “Withdrawal-and-Return” in Toynbee, Op. Cit.
↩︎
Seyle, Hans. The Stress of Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956.
↩︎
Klosovskii, B.N. The Development of the Brain, and its Disturbance by Harmful Factors. Elmsford, New York: Pergmon, 1963.
↩︎
Krech, David. “Reports of Sections and Societies, General Sessions of the AAAS: Behavior, Brain and Blochemistry,” Science, CLI, 1966.
↩︎
Heron, Woodborn T., “The Pathology of Boredom,” Scientific American, CXCVI, 1957.
↩︎
1Wenger, 1972, Op. Cit.
↩︎
Gibbon, Op. Cit.
↩︎
The following paragraphs are adapted from Wenget, Win. “On the Pathology of Civilizations.” Mensa Research, Vol. 1, #7, June 1971.
↩︎
Although if the problem appears sufficiently pressing and all-engulfing, bargaining requirements appear kept to a minimum. If the problem is less urgent, member components of the society may each solve It on their own, on copy each other’s successful solutions.
↩︎
See also Kenneth Boulding’s “Brontosaurus Principle,” in which any organization tends automatically to grow and add to itself, until it uses up its best, most accessible outside resources and/or reaches a size inappropriate to its form of organization, and so faces increasingly unfavorable internal and external environments. (The Organizational Revolution. New York: Harper & Bros., 1953).
↩︎
Chambers, Mortimer. The Fall of Rome: Can It Be Explained? New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963.
↩︎
See footnote given at the beginning of this monograph for definition of Toynbee’s usage of the term “civilization.”
↩︎
Some writers now believe that such an all-encompassing world order now exists covertly, not on a spiritual but an economic basis.
↩︎

<< Back to Contents

<< Books Online Index

Civilizations and Other Living Systems

Table of Contents

Title Details

Summary

Author’s Preface to the Second Edition

1992 Foreword

The Organic Analogy in Human Society: A Re-Examination

A Brief Look at the Nature of Systems

Seven Types of System, Seven Methods to Resist Entropy

Selection Reduces Entropy

Human Societies as Systems

Stressed Systems

Healthier States and Possible Solutions

Why Does Society Go to Hypertrophy

Breaking Down

Toynbee’s Model in a Capsule

Toynbee’s Model, Critiqued and Revised, Shows Other Possibilities

Structural Issues

Laissez-faire and Other Ways to Climb Down

Partial Bibliography

Discussion Points: A Catalog of the Universe

In Memoriam: Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Endnotes