Peace: A Familar Model - III

The last blog raised several issues that are very relevant to our mission of eliminating standing armies and the distrust that feeds them from the human experience. The first is the fact that the human race, as is true of every species, is not a loose collection or amalgamation of organisms but is itself and organism.

I was able to find one article on the internet in which the author boldly tries to argue the very opposite. The argument he tries to make here is very strange but I also find it to be interesting in the context of this discussion.

“Sometimes, I speak of a species as one organism. But it is not. A species is a collection of organisms that evolved according to Darwin's Five Laws.
Nonetheless, sometimes the `one organism' metaphor is useful. Just as an organism needs to eat and reproduce, so does a species.
Sadly, the metaphor may also be misleading. A friend of mine recently employed the metaphor to argue against human wars: just as one leg in a human should not fight the other, so one country should not fight another. According to the metaphor, humanity as a species was like a single organism.

I am no authority on the theory of evolution but I do not think that Darwin’s theory posits the evolution of individual organisms but, rather, of populations of organisms. In the final paragraph the author appears to be unaware of the contextual nature of war.

But there are other thinkers who have seen the organismic nature of the species. This is seen in Schaffle’s image of society as a living organism as well as his notion of collective conscience as a composite. Émile Durkheim, the sociologist, also accepted Schaffle’s image of society and was of the view that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and morality must be analyzed as a property of the collective (society) rather than a characteristic of the individual. Hobbes (he of the social contract) also insisted that human behavior could be explained by looking at the "particles" that form the human body. (Click here and here for more on Émile Durkheim’s ideas on this topic.

As we go through the coming postings it will become obvious that the reason why we have not been able to attain sustainable peace, i.e. a condition of peace that does not need to be maintained by the threat of violence or mutually assured destruction, is directly related to the fact that we have a faulty view of the nature or a species. This is because in our search for sustainable peace we are not concerned with how the species functions but with why it does not function as it should. The thinkers we mentioned above were more concerned with exploring the operations of society than in bring healing to a sick species. A machine (which is what a collection of parts is) and an organism may not differ in terms of how they accomplish their purpose but they certainly differ in terms of how they may be repaired.

When a machine malfunctions it is enough to find the part that has malfunctioned and replace it. When an organism malfunctions parts cannot be so easily replaced. A machine does not care where a replacement part comes from, as long as it is compatible. An organism does not accept parts that are not original. This is why after successful organ transplant surgery the patient must continue on a regimen of anti-rejection drugs. An efficient machine can be built by bringing together the best parts available. But a collection of perfect body parts does not mean one has a healthy body. As long as we can we will treat the body to bring healing to one organ because the organ exists first as a part of the body.

Another thing that has hampered us in our peace seeking efforts is the fact that human organizations, arguably our greatest inventions, are machines. Organizational theory is an extension of or builds on General Systems Theory, which recognizes that the universe is a system whose components are also systems. But our interest in organizational theory has obscured the distinction between natural systems, of which the human race is one, and human made or synthetic systems that we have crafted inspired by what we have learned from observing natural systems.

Other issues raised by the last blog include, whether DNA really affects choice based cultural behavior, what is the equivalent in the species of the immune system in each organism, whether the mutations caused by cell division have an equivalent in the species, and the possibility that the type of “gene therapy” I have recommended is appropriate to bring lasting peace to humanity.