By Sally Morem
Human society is the most astonishing and perplexing of all such self-organizing systems in its ability to transform the creative and mundane acts of thinking beings into systems that span the globe and stretch out into the universe, returning to where everything began.
How can we create undirected systems that exhibit independence while retaining our own separate lives? What is a society anyway? Anthropologists define it as any group of cooperating human beings who have developed patterns of long-term relationships and have maintained common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests. Contrary to assumptions made in traditional philosophy, society is not an artifact frozen in time. It is not a structure, it is not an order, nor is it merely a human contrivance alienated from nature. In fact, society can’t realistically be described as an object at all.
Thoughtful people in the natural and social sciences have shown us that the self-organizing principles inherent in physics and biology are at work in every part of human life, weaving together this huge, sprawling, chaotic, changing, growing, vibrant, information-laden process known as society into something akin to an organism.
The Evolving Society
Ervin Laszlo, in his book, “Evolution: The Grand Synthesis,” described how human societies change, persist, and transform themselves through the interplay of individual members and systems with the environment. We participate in the evolution of the universe itself.
How can unplanned order come to be in the human world? Laszlo explains by listing six evolutionary axioms for society:
1. Society persists, develops, or decays according to processes that take place on the societal level.
2. Society occupies a cluster of organizational levels, including the physical and biological. Its environment includes the biosphere and other societies.
3. Society is the result of human action and interaction, but not of conscious human design. People are incapable of planning and building an entire society or even any of its major subsystems—language, political systems, economic systems, or moral-cultural systems.
4. Society is not reducible to the sum of its members’ behaviors and attributes; it evolves its own functions and attributes at its own level of organization. It is self-organized. It is able to repair, replicate, and renew itself without outside guidance.
5. Society’s structural complexity is less than that of its individual members. The human brain is far more complex than all contemporary societies put together.
6. Society evolves through convergence to progressively higher organizational levels. Small societies interact more and more intensely until they become one much larger and more complex society. Tribes and villages become ethnic communities, which become colonies or provinces in empires. Nation-states form regional blocs, which then form a world society. Society grows as it masters the natural flow of matter and energy in the universe.
Over millennia, we have constructed vast civilizations filled with immense amounts of knowledge dealing with a wide range of subjects. We store this backlog of information in many forms—habits, skills, prices, books, songs. As our experience grows, we, largely unconsciously, winnow out inappropriate knowledge and retain what is most useful. This process of artificial selection can be compared with the way natural selection removes and retains information in the genetic code.
In “The Selfish Gene,” Richard Dawkins explores the similarities between biological and cultural evolution. One of the most striking examples of this can be seen in the construction of information networks by organisms and societies.
Dawkins noticed that beliefs, thoughts, ideas, phrases, fashions, technologies, and language tended to replicate themselves by cultural transfer from individual to individual in social groups. He decided that these units of culture must in some sense be similar to genes. They needed a new name, so he called them “memes,” deriving the word from “mimemes,” from the Greek for imitation.
“Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitative.”
“Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitative.”
Memes spread, mutate, die out, and are replaced by new, presumably more fit, memes. The most successful memes are the ones that are most easily retained, accurately copied, and propagated to the largest number of human brains.
Since we can only think about a few things at a time, a meme must, in a sense, compete with other memes for attention. Some memes reinforce memes. Other memes degrade them. Entire arrays of nested memes form scientific, religious, and political theories. For instance, church services and political conventions rely upon a conglomeration of cooperating memes to retain effectiveness.
Society isn’t just a collection of individual human beings; it’s a complex amalgam of systems. Societal processes orchestrate the growing and shipping of food and goods, the generation and allocation of energy, the setting of political decision-making processes into motion, the construction of intricate scientific theories out of thousands of ideas and observations, and the communication of all this and more through ever-changing networks of people. In short, society brings out the fullest expression of self-organization ever seen in nature.