Please tell me whom to hate
Digital and print ink is being spilled in endless amounts to condemn or defend one side or the other. Atrocities are being committed. Horror floods the world again, biblically, from somewhere else now. Tell me who is the more evil party! I want to know whom to hate and whom to defend. I want to know which side is morally superior to the other. Tell me! Please lead me to the experts who are dispassionately and completely correct in what they say and I shall obey them, wholly give my thinking to them, allow my emotions to be cradled by them. Give me this guidance! I need someone to hate, otherwise I can’t handle the horror, the evil, the unimaginable suffering.
It is just too much. Too much all over again, while other horrors grind on ceaselessly as if their energy for more and more were inexhaustible.
It looks like we want it this way. Do we really want it this way?
“Structural coupling”, qu’est que c’est?
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
When all you have is a money system, everything looks like a commodity.
When all you have is an army, everything looks like a war.
As we shape the world around us, so our shaping shapes us.
I see us, all of us, joined as individuals in our oceanic togetherness, losing it. Some storm urges up from our totality, gathering us into its fury as we give ourselves to its might. This uprushing hatred is exactly what I write against, over and over, exactly what I try to soothe away, first in me, then in anyone else who will listen. To this end – to this means – I put forward the thinking of those who seem to have produced material we must take into account – and understand – if we don’t want to become massed, unthinking rage, over and over again, if we don’t want to be tied by puppet strings to dark forces that will destruction on everything.
But beneath the complexity of the material I reference is something terribly simple: “Love is the way.” Its simplicity now, as the hate mounts, could not seem more offensive, more insensitive. But this is because we, culturally, in the West and elsewhere, do not understand. We don’t seem to want to.
Love is what nourishes our tender ability as impressionable human beings to live together respectfully, peacefully, to take the time to heal the wounds that plant the seeds that become hate somewhere down the line. While we fail to respect love, we slowly lose ourselves to wounded fears, until the hate that grows from that soil harvests us all.
How to help each other want to learn to love, to become more loving, to commit as reverently as possible, forever, to becoming love? How!?
Carefully, humbly, patiently.
The material I reference is complex because it is needed support for a radically different ontology that has love at its heart, as its fundament, rather than as some chemically generated brain fart whose significance is about the same as any other chemically generated brain fart. It is the “rather than” that must be disassembled, that side of this choice current modernity reflexively believes is The Nature Of Reality: Everything is matter and energy. In this article we look at how the concept of “structural coupling” helps us see reality a little differently to the materialist reflex, and how it offers us conceptual tools with which to dispel certain misapprehensions.
Niklas Luhmann saw systems interactions as governed by structural coupling. Imagine a virus docking to a cell. If no mutually compatible interface is there, no coupling (interaction) can occur. In this event, the virus is irrelevant to that particular cell. With no appropriate cell receptor available anywhere, what is a virus? Effectively, it is non-existent: an imperceivable non-thing.
(When all you have is matter, love sinks into invisibility.)
Scaling quickly up from viruses to ideas as structuring systems, we can state that the way I interact with my environment – a complex system of complex systems – is significantly governed by the system of complex systems I am – including my idea of what reality is, what principles I cherish, what I think wealth, health, value, etc., are. The way I interact, the way I perceive, my behaviour, are all governed by how the dynamic arrangement (or patterning) I am is able to dock with its environment. And none of us creates a single one of our cherished governing ideas ex nihilo. The structuring ideas that determine what proportion of reality we can perceive are planted in us by circumstances more or less beyond our control.
Ideas are filters. Beliefs are filters. And, as it happens, most belief systems persist in us unexamined, taken for granted, silently structuring how we perceive, how we emote, what we desire.
Who’s in charge here? Tool, or tool maker? Idea, or idea crafter? Which fashions which?
Well, to make matters still more unanchored, still more vertiginous, still freer of free will, Luhmann’s model conceives of systems as co-emergent phenomena whose boundaries can be defined this way or that, depending on the context; systems are not distinct objects per se, but morphing patterns determined by ever-shifting contexts no one controls.
I don’t know where you end and I begin.
Today, I don’t know where I end and Google begins.
Systems structure perception, dynamically, shiftingly, but well enough to aid navigation and survival through the ‘world’ that ‘mind’ is part of, otherwise a system perishes by way of maladaption.
In Luhmann’s model, then, it’s as if there were no agency anywhere. It’s almost as if there were no such thing as experience, consciousness, free will.
I understand reality more or less as described above, and yet I am also a committed advocate of the sanctity of free will. There is agency, and it is, for me, fundamental.
Luhmann’s descriptive model gives us a tool with which we can pry open the still reigning Newtonian model of clearly defined physical objects, and begin to discern a reality of co-emerging and co-evolving patterns, organically interdependent in a dizzying variety of ways. Luhmann’s is a helpful architecture for seeing reality a little more accurately. It is one potential addition to what we are that can help us perceive a little bit more of All That Is.
And yet – to repeat – there is also agency. So, how do I justify perceiving agency right down there in the fundament of All That Is?
Consciousness all the way down
While it is true, in my view, that “World and mind arise together” (Varela) – which could be rephrased as: Object and subject arise together, or: Passive and active arise together –, their co-arising is at once spontaneous and an act of will; ‘world’ and ‘mind’ are part of an all-encompassing whole: All That Is. And All That Is is consciousness. All That Is = God. Much flows logically from this bold statement that later accommodates love and agency seamlessly, necessarily, within it.
Free will is, in my conception, a property, or perhaps necessary corollary of conscious experience via the inherent presence of preference. In other words, choice (= preference = an expression of free will) is inherent to consciousness precisely because consciousness can experience, and precisely because of that experiencing, prefer. Can there be preference in the absence of experience? Without experience, what we have is predictable reaction or response to stimuli. This has nothing to do with preference as I mean it here.
By way of example, we could identify fight-or-flight reflexes in biological entities as ‘preferences’, but I would distinguish between autonomic impulse – reflex –, and experience thereof, i.e., why we might prefer calm over life-or-death conflict. To root this preference in genes (chemicals) that mysteriously ‘want’ to ‘survive’ (aren’t genes – chemicals – in fact ‘dead’?) is to put the cart before the horse, in my view. (I am using the horse-cart idiom somewhat inappropriately; it implies a dualistic framing I reject.)
Stepping in a little deeper: Because materialism cannot account for experience – because it cannot account for consciousness –, it is sounder to assert reality itself is consciousness, within whose domain what we call matter and energy are experienced. It is for me self-evidently true that consciousness exists. Failure to account for it thus disqualifies whichever model or paradigm that so fails. Thus, for me, what we call the physical universe must proceed from, and remain of, consciousness, not vice versa.
Materialism – there is nothing but matter/energy – is logically bound to assert consciousness as an illusion of some kind; consciousness itself can be neither matter nor energy, thus cannot even exist, strictly speaking; on materialism’s tenets, all that exists must be made of matter/energy. Materialism must therefore conceive of consciousness as a noncontiguous something emerging mysteriously from sufficiently complex brains. This position is confounded, however, by the insurmountable challenge of explaining which biochemicals or constellations of neuronal activity could possibly effect, or be deceived into experiencing, this thing we experience as experience. (To put it redundantly. Using my cheeky free will.)
Another explanatory model is dualism: there exists both matter and consciousness. However, each differs fundamentally from the other, such that dualism cannot explain how they interact; no structural coupling is possible, neither domain can perceive the other’s existence. And on this simple problem, dualism falls.
Hence:
If neither Dualism nor Materialism, then There Is Only God (Everything Is Consciousness).
This is my base position. I do not set it out to persuade you to agree, but rather to disclose it as my ontological base, and in so doing demonstrate, however sketchily, it is at least as reasonable as any other.
Essentially then, what we are examining is the structural-coupling concept as it dovetails with the reality of agency, preference and free will, as I understand them. The hinge between the two is information as it pertains to meaning, where meaning can only exist in consciousness. ‘Dead’ chemicals can neither purposefully communicate nor understand another’s meaning, neither can complex arrangements of chemicals or neuronal nets. Meaning is fundamentally different to mechanical output-input-output exchanges.
Expressed boldly: Without consciousness, there can be neither information nor meaning. From this I can also assert that materialism – the absence of consciousness – cannot account for meaning and information.
Conveniently for my purposes here, Luhmann’s model uses communications (of meaningful information) as the medium that enables the continuation or coherence of complex (living) systems through time; structural coupling accommodates communication, both within and between systems, communication of necessarily meaningful information. On my reading of it then, his model thus permits, or perhaps requires, consciousness, albeit without meaning to. If you’ll pardon the crude pun.
(If my logical leaps seem a little threadbare here, that’s because I’m trying to keep this short. This is a fuller examination of these ideas in a previous article.)
This combination of structural coupling and Consciousness-As-Reality explains for me how we humans can produce intractable nightmares like Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine: addiction, cultural habituation, pride, arrogance, fanaticism; how can matter/energy produce such states of being? More hopefully perhaps, this combination also accounts for the impossible beauty of earth’s biosphere, the awe-inspiring poetry of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, and everything else besides.
But reality’s potential to creatively express free will through its seemingly infinite vehicles (humans, forests, cultures, multinational corporations, ant hills, climate, etc.) is tightly governed by structural coupling as its all-encompassing effects determine available decision space, where “decision space” represents the ‘amount’ of free will we can bring to bear at any given moment.
We can reformulate this idea as a question: What spectra of decisions are visible to us as we flow from constraining moment to constraining moment? Any answer is also a description of how much free will is available to us, indeed, how visible our free will is to us, from moment to moment. The broader the spectrum, the more choices we see. The more open our hearts, the broader the spectra we perceive.
Imagine actually being Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, confronted with an attack on the country and people he is obliged to defend, compromised as he is by his colourful history and the yet more colour history of Israeli politics as it fits into the dazzling complexity of modern geopolitics. Imagine learning of atrocities committed to your country and people by your most bitter enemy. Imagine what decision space is available to your free will as the evolving complexity of What You Are structurally couples with your specific environment in this specific historical moment.
At a guess, I’d say you’d face a very narrow decision space indeed.
Could love possibly be a factor in Netanyahu’s calculations? Forgiveness?
The more love he could allow to flow through his being, the broader his decision space, his courage, his compassion, his wisdom, would become. This horribly unlikely possibility is what I am slowly trying to tease into focus in this article.
Is it impossible to love our enemies? May we deduce the impossibility of this hope from the basics of structural coupling set out above?
With this lengthy groundwork now stored soundly in our minds, it’s time to switch gears.
Just stop dehumanisation!
Dr Saffiyah Ally and Rabbi Dovid Weiss in conversation
Does it anger you to see a rabbi and an Islamic woman engaged in a peaceful discussion about Zionism and Judaism? It warms my heart and gives me hope. Here is some of what Rabbi Weiss had to say to Dr Ally, in paraphrase.
Judaism is in essence about a covenant with God to uphold the Torah, solemnly undertaken 3,000 years ago. Part of this covenant is to be close to and subservient to God. Zionism, by contrast, began about 150 years ago and represents a “transformation from subservience to God, into nationalism”. Had the land chosen as Zionism’s nation state been uninhabited, “it would still be forbidden for the Jewish people to have this concept of sovereignty, of nationalism.” Around 2,000 years ago, the Jewish people were driven from their land for failing to maintain the high level of spirituality required of them by their covenant. A decree from God that the Jews not be a sovereign nation was a corrective measure, a “medicine from God to break our haughtiness”. Instead, the Jewish people were to live loyally in other nation states: diaspora as medicine. No attempt to end diaspora is permitted; its ending is in God’s hands alone. In their great suffering because of their exile, the Jews were welcomed by Islamic countries that gave them succour and safe havens to call home. There they flourished, even without enshrined human rights; there was no need for such rights. Jews and Muslims babysat each other’s children, were good neighbours to each other. They lived together in peace and mutual respect.
If his account is true – I have no reason to doubt it – then it is possible for all peoples to live together in mutual respect and peace. Note that love of God, who is love, lies at the heart of this state of affairs, not arrogance or haughtiness, but the love that breathes life into common decency. Common decency. That decency which is shared by all, which is thus part of our nature as human beings.
Where has it gone? What conceals common decency from us, makes it seem like a pipe dream, like the foolish fantasy of a teenage idealist?
You can find common decency in the most shattered of places. In the horrors that burst over Israel, born of the horrors suffered by the Palestinians in Gaza, there it can be found. Despite her anger and grief, despite all she suffered and saw, nothing was more important to this brave woman than to share her compassion for her fellow human beings still suffering as terrible, or more terrible a fate than hers.
Though it can be hidden, love cannot be extinguished. It is fundamental.
Must I say I do not tolerate terrorism? Surely it goes without saying. It seems to me the strangest of compulsory genuflections, a cynical and bitter form of virtue signalling I find very hard to swallow, though I understand well its fear-filled and rage-powered roots. Horror is extremely hard to bear. But it is so hard to bear precisely because down deep in each of us love moves us towards compassion. Sadly, without the cultural and ideological architecture to facilitate robust and clear structural coupling with this deep aspect of what we are, what existence is, we have developed a malformed relationship with its concealed presence. I hope the horrors of the world, which are so unbearable for so many, break our rigid resistance to the real presence of love within, and free it.
Part of this process must of course include understanding. I want to understand how Hamas came to want to perform these acts. I want to understand why the Israeli government is so certain collective punishment of potentially millions of fellow human beings is the wisest response. I know such decisions do not represent the deep heart of all Palestinians and Israelis, so I do not support any form of collective punishment or terror. I reject terrorism from any and all perpetrators thereof, while wanting to welcome back into healthy humanity, welcome back onto the path of love, those driven somehow to commit acts of violence and terror.
None of this means I advocate letting sick tigers roam free to cause whatever harm they are driven to cause, just because I want to understand. What I mean is: first protect people from the sick tigers, then, after calm is restored, understand and address how they became sick. The first part – reestablishing safety and security – is done with love in our hearts. The second part – understanding what went wrong – is done with love in our hearts. There are victims, there are perpetrators. But hate is not a response – understandable as it is – that can address why hate-filled events whelm us as often as they do. Hate only perpetuates the root problem: a malformed relationship with love.
Without the wisdom needed to respond appropriately, i.e. in a manner optimal for reestablishing health, safety, and calm, violence will lead to violence back and forth, seemingly endlessly, until we perish or can take no more.
Do we really want ever escalating spirals of violence? If not, why not?
Because love.
We do not repudiate violence because biology says so – i.e. because pain hurts and genes want to survive –, no. We repudiate violence because our preferences are in fact rooted far more deeply in that which has patterned biological evolution on earth: the consciousness that honours the sanctity of free will as it learns how to find its way back to love in the face of the most extraordinary and challenging of circumstances.
There is of course a hole in this description, this assertion. Why is there biological life on earth, why is there physical existence? We can only guess. I find the metaphor of an impossibly profound and vast journey of evolution – the evolution of God via human experience – very helpful in this regard. Not everyone will agree with me. But regardless of the impossibility of mere humans understanding everything down to the last detail, we will always face choices, we will always offer up alternative explanatory models and choose from among them.
For me, imagining this perennial process of wanting, of yearning to understand because we marvel at the complexities and wonders of existence… Imagining our striving as wholly predictable, as entirely robotic emissions and belches egested from meat-and-bone machines, in which every word and sentence written or uttered could not possibly occur in any other way, that any meanings we experience in uttering and hearing these attempts to understand are illusory, is as silly an undertaking as I can conceive. My experience of taking and making meaning flatly contradicts this idea. Experience cannot be an illusion; to assert otherwise is a clear contradiction in terms.
Without the wisdom needed to respond appropriately, we respond sub-optimally. What could be more obvious. Decisions made in anger deliver poor outcomes far more often than not. We are human; we become addicted to certain patterns, hate being one of them, anger another, aloof neutrality another. In the absence of cultural architecture supportive of and conducive to wisdom, to love, to common decency, this susceptibility to addiction compounds, becomes a positive feedback loop that runs for generations until all we know is a profound malformation of what we are, and call it normal.
This is where common decency lies hidden. This is the muck love is buried beneath. This is the world we have co-evolved that makes love look to us like My Little Pony, or pornography, or romance, or chemicals. This is our principle error. It is the fruit of arrogance, of haughtiness. Today, we see its consequences all around, and are horrified.
I pray there is hope in that horror.
Can politics cope?
“I want [my book] to explain how shameful politics has become.” – Rory Stewart
A majority of both Biden (70%) and Trump (68%) voters believed electing officials from the opposite party would result in lasting harm to the U.S.
Roughly half (52% Biden voters, 47% Trump voters) viewed those who supported the other party as threats to the American way of life.
About 40% of both groups (41% Biden voters, 38% Trump voters) at least somewhat believed that the other side had become so extreme that it is acceptable to use violence to prevent them from achieving their goals. – From a Washington Examiner report, 18 October 2023
In the interview I link to in the image caption above, Rory Stewart, former cabinet minister and former contender for leadership of the Conservative Party, describes the immoral, machine-like entities politicians are forced to become by how today’s politics structures their world. Above, I used Benjamin Netanyahu as a vehicle for highlighting the problem of a greatly attenuated decision space narrowing the scope of free will, but today almost any politician would serve just as well to highlight this phenomenon. I know it’s a cliché by now, but the mechanistic worldview, as structuring paradigm, has made machines of us all. At the vanguard of that centuries-long development are politicians, managers of a system that has them wholly in its grip.
Imagine someone susceptible to hypnosis hypnotised into believing he is a robot with no free will. Until the spell is broken, he would await instructions before doing anything. The ‘belief’ imposed upon him has him under its spell. His decision space has been reduced to a single ‘choice’: obey. Paradigms ‘hypnotise’ too. Cult leaders hypnotise. Advertising hypnotises. The design of shops and department stores hypnotises. The speed and depth at which hypnosis is achieved vary, but the general outcomes are similar. These observations are a graphic way of showing how something as ‘immaterial’ as an idea, or paradigm, can attenuate decision space, in other words, significantly impact how we structurally couple with our environment. Ideas are powerful enough to make free will disappear, and with it consciousness, and with the latter’s disappearance disappears love as it really is.
Stewart is at pains to describe the moral disintegration politicians must subject themselves to if they are to have a chance of a successful career. He states that politics cannot work any other way. I understand that life is harsh for former politicians; they aren’t much good for anything other than party politics, generally speaking; politics demands a highly specialised skillset. Their only utility outside political life is sitting idly on some corporate board lending that corporation a little extra gravitas imagined to give it a competitive advantage. And this attractive career twilight is possible only to the lucky few: the luminaries of politics in any given country.
Imagine the pressure. Imagine how easily party whips can maintain voting discipline, how obediently a political party will act as one entity, either vying for power or delivering on its manifesto, its members almost emptied of free will, of conscience, as they vie to remain visible and valuable to their party.
Stewart describes a reality of manifestos, of parties, competing for votes, not politicians. The manifesto thus has priority over an individual’s conscience or preferences. Previously, say in the 18th century, political parties were more amorphous, but the upshot was increased corruption, he argues, where votes were bought and sold in Parliament for every contentious element of every bill. This produced gridlock over and over again. Today, things are more disciplined, more efficient, more mechanical. There is less free will. You could almost say there is less ego. Politics would not work out without disciplined obedience, with conscience-based voting reserved for the watershed decisions.
In The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, an article I published here in April 2021, I asked:
Are we being directed towards direct democracy even though we’re not ready for it? Are our amazing communication technologies inexorably herding us towards a challenge most don’t want to face?
My sense then and now is that top-down governance cannot be nimble enough, nor knowledgeable enough, to have a chance of keeping pace with change; can have no chance, therefore, of governing wisely. There is a systemic need to keep pace with the economy, the World Out There that messes itself up faster than politics can identify the cause of the problem – if it is a problem –, a world that changes far faster than an executive can produce legislation to prevent the ‘negative’ outcomes they are duty-bound to prevent. What do political parties understand of ethics, of morality, of viruses, of modern warfare, modern medicine, of the lives of plumbers, school teachers and nurses, of derivatives, high finance, the money system, double-entry bookkeeping, artificial intelligence, and so on? How can a political party, or The Establishment, maintain a meaningful dialogue with The People? Surely the impossibility of this is why The Establishment prefers narrative control, perception management, and censorship. Surely this is why it prefers the power threat of “You’re either with us, or against us”.
Who among We, the People reads the terms and conditions we ‘agree to’ multiple times a week, a day? Who contests them before clicking to agree? Is a click as legally binding as a wet-ink signature? Who cares! Who has the power to do anything about it. We all have a life to live. And it is true that, materially, we in the West live in paradise. Delivered meals, movies on demand, holidays abroad, instant communications with anyone anywhere in the world, incredibly effective machine translations for having a chance of understanding different cultures… And the pace of change keeps on accelerating. Perhaps, a few short decades from now, Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity will be upon us. Despite the often low-quality of much of IT products and services, I sometimes find it easy to imagine Kurzweil’s Singularity happening.
So I believe I’m a little justified in hoping war is quickly becoming unmanageable, or impossibly costly on too many axes. What we can do to each other militarily is more horrific and devastating than it has ever been, even without The Nuclear Option. War’s ‘benefits’ look brutish compared to those of cooperation, dialogue, diplomacy. Is it morally defensible to go to war against a country whose morals and rituals offend us?
It’s not only politicians; I don’t think anyone can keep up. There are competing vested interests funding this, that and the other pet project, furthering some cherished cause, be it an Open Society or The Singularity or The Great Reset, programmable CBDCs, just stopping oil, saving the planet, the rain forests, polar bears, pandas … on and on and on. This is the frenzy, the mind-boggling complexity of human life today. Who can say how these intertwining and competing interests will play out? It would be foolishly dishonest of me to claim I know what the heck is going on.
And there, my friends, is the rub. Things are as they are, yoked to the countless historical momenta that carry us all forwards in the dizzying rush some call progress. From its frenzy, bitter enmities can suddenly erupt as war. Can we hold things together while clinging to power relations as they stand? The world has been teetering on the edge of WW3 for months. I side with humanity, which means for me that I side with multipolarity – if forced to choose between it and unipolarity.
I have come to deeply distrust ideology. I see history making top-down, top-heavy power structures both redundant and catastrophically incompetent. The power that falls to those few who now ‘run’ the world is too great to be distributed such that one culture, one paradigm, one ideology can harshly judge all those that diverge from it. “You’re either with us, or against us!”, said G W Bush a while back. Well, those against us don’t take kindly to being threatened like that. Today, The West wakes up to its increasingly palpable isolation as events spin out of its control, and its ‘enemies’ assert their wills.
Following on from my preference for multipolarity, I further prefer yet more multipolarity, and still more after that, where its localising vector leads to increasingly localised governance, perhaps down to city level. Those processes/structures/institutions that govern (or simply facilitate) interactions between cities should have as little power as possible, if any. Perhaps political power would, in a more nimble and organic system, be reduced to a very low level, simply because politics then ceases to be a domain that requires much power. It would have a fundamentally different role as a result of the vector I prefer.
To minimise the very real dangers posed by current anachronistic power structures as they are dragged by history, kicking and screaming, further and further into the background, to manage this volatile process as wisely as possible, one of the things I believe we need front and centre in our hearts and minds is renewed commitment to love, as it pertains to wisdom, total health and revering the sanctity of free will. Understanding that free will needs as broad a decision space as possible to be healthily creative, to nourish common decency, knowing that our decision space is severely restricted by fear, hate and ossified systems of governance, choosing to prefer an organically free world over a mechanically dystopian one brings with it a requirement to choose love.
To make that perhaps naïve-sounding sequence imaginable, I argue we need a supportive ontology, one similar to what I have outlined in this article. I hope I have made this seem reasonable.
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