Sustainability Principles Online Dialogue

The essence of the challenge, I think, is “creation of the fundamentally new.” This is the definition of “transformation” within “archetypal epistemology,” as explained by Manfred Halpern (now deceased, former Professor of Near East Studies, Princeton University).

The difficulty is creation of a vessel of “truth” that serves more as “emanation” and thus falsifies the claims by the error of reification. This produces incoherence when that vessel breaks.

Establishing “sustainability” as some verity, as if there were a set of laws to discover, hence a path of purity to follow once those laws are discovered – a new dispensation, as it were – is to construct a theology of sustainability, instead of the visionary goal that it should be. As a visionary goal, sustainability merely postulates the human desire to continue species, communal, and cultural existence within the universe – and employs the distinctly human attributes of creative intelligence and anticipatory design science in its pursuit and, thereby, ongoing attainment. Sustainability, in other words, is an invention.

This may be hard to grasp in our world afflicted by the illusion of progress, but the claim of discovery in Nature of something that guarantees a forward momentum to gain in either material or spiritual ascent must be carefully examined – Darwin’s phrase, indeed, was “the Descent of Man...,” though he postulated “from some Lower Form....” Yet, his “evolution” was less “progressive” than accidental. Teilhard de Chardin postulates a more explicit Telos (or Omega Point) in his evolutionary “complexification,” but has physical existence end by transcendence as spiritual existence.

The formal discipline of achieving progress by means of applying our intelligence is telesis. The advantage to this approach is that it makes explicit the need to invent social as well as material technologies. By the former, I include language, values, attitudes, and culture itself, as well as the institutions of society, including science, laws, economies, academic disciplines, organizations, governments, etc.

This is not to deny the possibility of objective truth, but challenges the primacy of objective truth. While some scientistically-minded may take issue with that, we should consider the deep structural implications of the alternative view: if truth is only objective and, thus, exists wholly independent of our thought, desire, and opinion, then nothing we think matters. We are mere accidental tourists with the vanity to think that the emergent awareness permitted by our accidental existence in the quantum inertia of m-brane billiards of reality has any effect. Strict materialists, as do many theologians of the predestinarian sort, reject this.

What I propose as a fundamental proposition is that consciousness is indeed a force in, and fundamental property of, Nature. I do not propose this as any sort of theological assertion; nor, conversely, do I deny anyone’s particular beliefs as such. Rather, in the Buddhist spirit, I suggest that debates about the existence of God are at best a distraction; whereas, the relevant discussion at hand is how to attain sustainability as best we can comprehend it. But, for purposes of reference, I recommend James N. Gardner’s book Biocosm – The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life is the Architect of the Universe (Inner Ocean, 2003) for a fuller discussion of what I intend by consciousness as a force of Nature. The immediate point is that it does not require theological interpretation to operate as a fundamental property, and has as its empirical evidence all of our known experience (which is not to dismiss anyone’s grander speculations about whence evolution trends...). That we choose thought and action as humans is simply a variant of the property of intelligence operating in the Cosmos as a whole to produce its intelligible character: its intelligible character is a natural consequence of the fundamental property of intelligence, which parallels energy.

Going further, where energy has its law of entropy, consciousness has its law of syntropy (understood as described in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntropy). More succinctly, mind is a product of evolution because intelligence is a fundamental property of existence, hence the Cosmos. There are simpler and more complex manifestations of intelligence, but more important is the question of its purpose. I suggest that its purpose is sustainability, not as a law, but as a pursuit. The universe is ever subject to the well-substantiated reality of entropy, and thus order is ever breaking down. Thus, to achieve sustainability in a universe ruled by entropy requires an organizing process (i.e., the harnessing of energy as “work” for a purpose). There is no right path so much as myriad paths to pursue, as each path degrades from the inevitable thermodynamic decay. But, to paraphrase Carlos Casteneda (Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge): all paths lead nowhere, so choose a path with heart.

While it is the case that entropy tends toward collapse, physicists have also shown that ultimate collapse into Black Holes creates its own form of entropic decay in the evaporation of the Black Hole. This occurs because “information” is not destroyed so much as randomized when energy is crunched into the Black Hole. But, since energy retains its curious quantum properties of indeterminacy, at the boundary of the Black Hole, the question of whether it is “within” or “without” results in a gradual “leakage” until it evaporates. Consequently, energy neither being created nor destroyed means also that the information is neither created nor destroyed. But, the property of intelligence implies that these thermodynamic properties can be organized, hence directed “forward” toward a purpose.

Now, there is a more subtle philosophical debate on the subject of the distinction between teleology and teleonomy when it comes to the question of purpose. I side with the non-theological teleonomic proposition because it comports with practical experience: our thought affects our action; intelligence effects purposive change. This does not require predestination for that change, nor certainty of outcome. It only requires recognition that action can be organized in the flow of energy into and through a system to effect a goal or purpose of that system.

That said, the challenge we still face is how to effect the goal or purpose of sustainability. I suggest it does not matter with what hypotheses one starts on this journey, but only that one continue the journey as an ongoing learning experiment, to get collectively and longitudinally better at it. This would accumulate greater “wealth” as defined by Buckminster Fuller, embodied within our various technologies as successful culture.

The point is not whether business, industry, government, private persons, or other entities create this wealth, but only that its use succeed at strategies for sustainability. Indeed, success at sustainability is what makes it wealth, and a lack of success is a waste of that wealth. Where our experiments fail, we must – hopefully -- learn from them and change. But, one lesson seems fairly robust: imposing dogma is not the path to truth, enlightenment, nor liberation. Indeed, in human experience, truth is dynamic in that its apperception is a direct consequence of experience from engaging directly with the world – a “liberating praxis” (to use Paulo Friere’s term), or “reflection and action on the world in order to transform it.” What may well explain why “happiness” is spiritual in nature is that our greatest happiness seems to derive from a recognition of having attained some measure of transcendent sustainability, where all else in our material existence is ephemeral, evanescent, and ever subject to entropic decay. The “spirit” of a sustainable system survives even as all its energy flows away. That is the real power of myth.