Two different concepts of ‘balance’ in
ethics and social organisation
August 27, 2008
Our concept of ‘balance’ plays a foundational role in our individual and collective social behaviour, and there is not one but two ways that we may understand ‘the achieving and sustaining of balance’. Difference in giving precedence to one over the other, as we seek to bring about or restore ‘balance’, is a primary source of conflict in our social dynamic.
The two balance-seeking approaches can be distinguished through the examples of;
- a sailboat in a storm, that derives power and steerage from the fluid-dynamical space it in which it is included, and,
- a powerboat in fluid-dynamical conditions that its ‘onboard’ power and steerage are [apparently] capable of ‘neutralizing’ so that its prescriptive movements dominate.
In the former ‘inclusional-balance-seeking’ case of the sailboater, the fluid dynamic the sailboater is included in is a ceaselessly unfolding innovative dynamical continuum. The particulars of the unfolding situation the sailboater finds himself are innately unpredictable and beyond his control, and the sailboater, in seeking to stay in balance with the fluid dynamic (i.e. ‘stay afloat’), extracts his motive power and his steerage from the fluid-dynamic he is included in, in a continuously ‘attuning’ fashion. This ‘inclusional’ type of balance-seeking is based on direct engagement with the fluid-dynamical space one is included in, that one cannot ‘let go of’ (drop out of attuning with) and still stay afloat. Thus, in this mode of balance-seeking, it is not possible to put into precedence, the driving of one’s behaviour in the service of achieving ‘one’s own’ ‘purpose-determined’ destination.
In the latter, ‘purposeful-balance-seeking’ case of the power-boater, in the conceptualizing-theatre of our mind’s-eye, the overwhelming presence of nature’s fluid dynamic we are included in, that we derive our power and steerage from, recedes from its dominant influencing position and shrinks into the background (it is ‘neutralized’), leaving on front and centre stage, ‘us’, the purposeful player/s as if the power and steerage available to us now derives from ‘our own onboard resources’. In this schema, we see our dynamical selves as ‘local, independently-existing systems with locally originating [purpose-driven] behaviours that we are fully and solely responsible for.’
The sailboating metaphor for balance-seeking is the more comprehensive of the two since the power-boating metaphor can be ‘included in it’ (e.g. the sailboater can also direct his vessel with oars or other onboard devices and his ‘purposeful’ behaviour will rise to APPARENT dominance as the force of the fluid-dynamic he is included in subsides). On the other hand, the power-boating metaphor captures only that part of the dynamic involving the movement of the purposeful entity when the dynamic of the space it is in has ‘died’ down and can be approximated at ‘dead’ (i.e. non participating ‘Euclidian’ space). Thus, the power-boating metaphor embodies purely onboard point-sourced and purpose oriented motion and is made possible by an implicit neutralizing of the fluid-dynamics of space (removing them from their natural and innate position of dominance).
Our habit of ‘neutralizing’ of the dynamics of space and ‘going with’ a power-boating metaphor is something that scientists such as Newton (who popularized this reduced way of rendering dynamics) recognized and made note of, but nevertheless proceeded with because of the greater ease of use of the prescriptive representations of dynamics when the dynamical participation of space was notionally neutralized. Meanwhile, in nature, everything is included in a continual process of spatial gathering and re-gathering; e.g. when a human ‘dies’, it does not ‘die’ from the point of view of living nature since everything included in the human is being re-gathered into new dynamical forms and processes without ‘skipping a beat’ (from an ecosystems point of view, the human organism was never a local, independently-moving power-boat in the first place; e.g. its digestive tract deriving life-sustaining power from the common living space it is included in with the help of hundreds of smaller dynamical forms [bacteria]). In any case, Newton commented on ‘his omission’ in formulating his theories of dynamics purely in ‘power-boating’ terms which neglected to address the participation of space, in the Author’s Preface to ‘The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’;
"I wish we could derive the rest of the phaenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from physical principles; for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they all may depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled towards each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other; which forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of nature in vain; but I hope the principles laid down will afford some light either to this or some truer method of philosophy."
The continuous all-inclusive re-gathering of matter and
energy that characterizes the common living space we are all included in
(otherwise known as ‘nature’) evidently has its own built-in ‘balance-seeking’
tendency. For example, in push-and-pull
cycles of continuing renewal, wave crests fall into wave troughs and rise up
again, mountains slump down into valleys and rise up again, and continents
slide down into the earth’s interior and re-emerge in continuing
balance-seeking cycles of renewal. And
as meteorologists observe, hurricanes exist for no other reason but to
transport thermal energy from thermal energy rich equa
Meanwhile, while it is more accurate to think of the dynamics of things in terms of the sailboating metaphor where the continuing dynamics of space is where all motion originates, it is more easy and convenient to use the reduced power-boating metaphor in which we ‘divide out’ the movement of particular forms and ‘neutralize’ the dynamics of the space they are included in, so that we can capture dynamics, such as our own human social dynamics, in purely prescriptive terms.
Given that we have two ways of understanding the dynamics of ‘balance’, how then shall we go about ‘seeking balance in our social dynamics’? Should we regard ourselves as ‘sailboaters’ and put the ‘inclusional balance-seeking’ approach in precedence or should we regard ourselves as ‘power-boaters’ and put the ‘purposeful-balance-seeking’ approach in precedence?
This turns out to be an important alternative foundation that
we build in to our cultural concept of ethics and our approach to social
dynamics management (how to organise ourselves). Our ‘western’ ‘popular choice’ of
power-boating is sown deeply into our his
For example, Aristotle, in his "The Doctrine of the Mean", Nichomachean Ethics II., 6-7”, associates "virtue" with ‘hitting the mark’ (implying purposeful behaviour) and ‘evil’ with ‘missing the mark’ (also implying purposeful behaviour);
"Virtue, then, is a kind of
moderation inasmuch as it aims at the mean or moderate amount. ... Again, there
are many ways of going wrong (for evil is infinite in nature, to use a
Pythagorean figure, while good is finite), but only one way of going right; so
that the one is easy and the other hard--easy to miss the mark and hard to hit
it. On this account also, then, excess and deficiency are characteristic of
vice, hitting the mean is characteristic of virtue: "Goodness is simple,
evil takes any shape.""
Once our heads get inside of this Aristotelian philosophical conjecture, we are in a purpose-driven prescriptive realm where the overwhelming role of the fluid-dynamics of the natural living space we are included in, has been ‘neutralized’.
In other words, ‘space’ has been taken out of the conceptualizing theatre, leaving only purposeful beings (powerboaters) ‘doing their own thing’ on front and centre stage. This view of ‘what things do’ as if the space they were in was a fixed, absolute (dead, non-participating) space does not mean that they are no longer included in the ceaselessly unfolding innovation of nature, it is simply a ‘reduced view’ for ease and convenience.
In this reduced ‘power-boating’ view, ‘balance’ is now implied to be something ‘we make happen’, as in the aphorism ‘an eye for an eye’, which holds us each fully responsible for ‘our own behaviours’. This is the familiar ‘zero sum’ mathematical archetype that has been shown to be ‘too simple’ by systems scientists. The thermostat control system has been given as an example wherein we have equipment to raise and/or lower room temperature and we specify ‘the mark that we want to hit’ that ‘calibrates’ the system’s balance-seeking purpose. This control system is characterized by a negative feedback loop which continually drives its onboard equipment so as to hit the desired mark, measures the gap between the desired mark and the mark actually hit, re-adjusting the onboard equipment correspondingly so as to ‘home in on’ the desired mark and thus eliminate the unwanted evils, ‘excess’ and ‘deficiency’.
Of course, if we include space in our conceptualizing, we may have the situation where there are two people in a house with one thermostat where one is on the sunny side of the house experiencing excess and the other is on the shady side experiencing deficiency, and both seek to take control of the system and drive it in opposite directions at once. Once ‘space’ is again recognized as playing the dominant role, we can see that ‘Mach’s Principle’ holds and that ‘our behaviour is conditioned by the dynamics of the common space we are included in at the same time as our behaviours are conditioning those dynamics’. The common dynamical space we are included in is the universal mediator of dynamical behaviour. If we huddle together, this warms up the common space which, at the same time, warms us up, and if we disperse and move apart, this cools down the common space which, at the same time, cools us down.
The balance-seeking ‘ethics’ of ‘what purposeful people do’ is an innately deficient ethics in that it does not comprehend the dominant role of the common dynamical living space that we are included in.
The ‘successful’ manager who ‘makes his numbers’ according to corporate plan and purpose, may leave the workforce, the environment and host community in a shambles in the process, simply by failing to acknowledge and attune to the fact that the purposeful behaviours he is orchestrating are, at the same time, conditioning the dynamics of the common space he, the employees, the host community, our fellow flora, fauna, air, earth and water, are all included in, and vice versa. This is a pitfall of a purely prescriptive view of dynamics and balance.
As mathematicians such as Henri Poincaré have pointed out, in order to conceptualize dynamical behaviour in terms of ‘local results’ (as is the case with the purposeful individual that seeks to ‘hit the mark’ in a balanced fashion, avoiding the evils of excess and deficiency), we must assume that the present state of the world (i.e. the ‘results’ that are caused by the purposeful individual) depends only on the immediate past.
As Poincaré says in "Science and Hypothesis" in the chapter "Hypotheses in Physics", subsection "Origin of Mathematical Physics";
"We recognise at the outset
that the efforts of scientists have always tended to resolve the complex
phenomenon given directly by our experience into a large number of elementary
phenomena.
And to do this in three different ways : first, with respect to time. Instead of taking into
account the progressive development of a phenomenon as a whole, we simply seek
to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We assert that the
present state of the world depends only on the immediate past, without being
directly influenced, so to speak, by the memory of a more distant past. Thanks
to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of
phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down “its differential
equation”; for the laws of Kepler, we substitute the
laws of
We can reconcile this with the balance-seeking ethic of ‘an eye for an eye’. In Kepler’s ‘Harmonies of the World’ (1619), he makes the point that the sustaining of ‘spatial harmony’ prevails over the harmonies implicit in the particular behaviours of the planets. Thus, the planets taken in pairs must ‘give way for one another’ in order for the harmony of space to be sustained (see footnote 1.).
This is the equivalent of Mach’s Principle, that the behaviours of those included in a common dynamical space conditions the dynamics of that common space at the same time as their behaviours are being conditioned by it (by the dynamics of the common space they are included in).
If two people, both of whom embrace the Aristotelian ‘excess-and-deficiency avoiding’ balance-seeking ethic and the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ enforcement tactic, confront each other over a currently perceived behavioural ‘excess’ or ‘deficiency’, the fact is that these current excesses or deficiencies may have long roots (as in family or tribal feuds or the latent effects of climatic variation). Thus, we fall into the trap discussed by Poincaré in regard to the hidden assumptions in our rational thinking; i.e. in our tendency;
“to resolve the complex phenomenon given
directly by our experience into a large number of elementary phenomena” wherein
“We assert that the present state of the world depends only on the immediate
past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the memory of a more
distant past.”
Thus it is over-simplistic to conceive of a current ‘excess’ or ‘deficiency’ as being causally determined by a local purposeful being who is holding ‘the smoking gun’. If we then play the ‘zero sum’ balance-seeking game and apply ‘an eye for an eye’, we simply set ourselves up for the ‘next round’ of excess and retribution.
Kepler’s ‘harmonies of the world’ understanding, which puts spatial harmony in precedence over two-body harmony (zero-sum balance) can be seen in the ethic of Nelson Mandela, who suspended his ‘an eye for an eye’ cycle of retribution by forgiving those who sought to have him hanged as a ‘terrorist’ (including UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). That is;
“The truth of the ancient Bantu adage umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (we
are people through other people) often came to his mind. And he [Nelson
Mandela] saw, perhaps clearer than most of his contemporaries, the
inevitability of "mutual interdependence" in the human condition, that "the common ground is greater and more
enduring than the differences that divide."
“A central concept in this Xhosa-speaking
culture, as in Bantu tradition in general, is Ubuntu, fraternity. This implies compassion
and open-mindedness and is opposed to individualism and egotism. Nelson Mandela
learned how the belligerent and ruthless foreign occupants had destroyed the
ancient peace and harmony that reigned among the different Xhosa tribes in the
past. The effect was his persistent longing for the reestablishment of precolonial concord, the renaissance of the golden age of
Nelson Mandela’s balance-seeking approach oriented to sustaining harmony in the ‘common ground’ or ‘common living space’ that we share inclusion in. The ‘sailboating’ rather than ‘powerboating’ metaphor is implicit in his approach. Also implicit is the rejection of the over-simplistic worldview that reduces human behaviour to that of local purposeful beings whose current/local excesses and deficiencies are attributed fully and solely to them, as if the present state of the world was hatched out of the immediate past through their local causal agency.
In summary, we have available to us, two different ‘balance-seeking concepts’, one which gives to the dynamics of our common living space the over-riding influence/role in the sense of Mach’s Principle wherein our individual behaviours cannot be understood in a stand-alone sense, but must be understood in the larger sense that they are conditioning the dynamics of our common living space. If we wish to sustain harmony in the dynamics of our common living space, our community and our environment, then a balance-seeking approach which conceptually ‘divides out’ into separate (more easily mentally managed) events, the causal actions of notional local, independent purposeful agents, coupled with a zero-sum oriented ‘an eye for an eye’ balance enforcement tactic, is not going to work.
It will not work because;
1. It does not orient to the sustaining of harmony in our common living space, yet excesses and deficiencies in our common living space dynamic injures many of our fellows that share inclusion in this space, and in so doing, the dynamics of space condition the behaviours of those who are included. The balance-enforcing military plane that inflicts ‘collateral damage’ on the innocents for whom the military mission is purportedly in the service of helping, is a ‘spatial dynamic’ that is at the same time conditioning the behaviours of those included in that common space (e.g. more recruits for the Taliban).
2. It seeks to explain social behaviour in terms of the current causal actions of local, independent purposeful beings who are fully and solely responsible for their own behaviours, and the evil ‘excesses’ and ‘deficiencies’ that depart from the goodness of moderation, therein. Since the dynamics of a common living space, which evolve continually over the long term and inductively actualize and shape (‘condition’) the behaviours of the individuals included in the common living space are not comprehended, the balance-seeking approach (management approach) based solely on the local, current actions of notional purposeful beings (power-boaters) cannot possibly work. Every corrective action applied to individuals judged and convicted of behavioural excesses or deficiencies involves a conditioning of the dynamics of the common living space that goes unaccounted for and unmanaged. The result is thus a ‘sustained incoherence’ by orienting the balance-seeking approach to the ‘wrong realm’, to the notional realm of an empty euclidian space inhabited by local, independently-existing purposeful agents (powerboaters) whose onboard equipment is seen to be responsible for the current state of the social dynamic by virtue of their actions on the immediately preceding moment that are imputed to be fully and solely responsible for causing the present state of affairs.
Many people have written about ‘The
Challenge of Governance in an Interdependent World’ and it remains the theme of
aboriginal governance traditions, as cited by aboriginal writers such as
Professor of Indigenous Governance (
In these themes, our mutual interdependence is acknowledged and this interdependence is understood to come through the dynamical mediating role of the common living space we are all included in. It makes sense, therefore, to direct our balance-seeking efforts to the dynamics of our shared living space. By keeping our behaviours attuned to sustaining balance and harmony in the space we are included in, and relegating individual purpose to a secondary support role.
‘Keeping everything in balance’ in an innately interdependent world is, in
one sense, automatically taken care of by Mother Nature. But in a world of human social dynamics which
we choose to ‘deliberately manage’, we become the architects of our own
organising principles, which are prone to falling ‘out of joint’ with those of
nature. In spite of our experience
informing us that we live within a common (interdependent) living space, for
ease and convenience, western political leaders replaced the ‘sailboating’ metaphor for community to its reduced
‘power-boating’ counterpart by instituting the notion of ‘sovereignty’. As Peter D’Errico (Law professor emeritus at
the
“The concept of sovereignty was a
response to civil war in the Christian world at the close of the Middle Ages.
It spawned an era of centralizing, terri
As we are witnessing in modern times, ‘purposeful balance-seeking’, when practiced by a muliplicity of sovereign states that regard themselves, in power-boating style, as ‘local, independently-existing organisms with locally originating purpose and behaviour’, is a recipe for dissonance and conflict in our interdependent natural world where the power and steerage of individual organisms/nation-states can only derive from the dynamics of the common space in which we all share inclusion.
There is no ‘reality’ grounded in natural experience that supports the ‘existence’ of a sovereign nation-state. The animals, plants, earth, air and water do not acknowledge the imaginary-boundary-line borders of the sovereign nation. D’Errico cites Lombardi in pointing out that the existence of a ‘sovereign state’ comes purely from ‘common will’ or ‘spiritual force’ of a group of people who seek to control a territory and who will agree, in order to do so, to bear arms and give their lives if necessary, in order to keep the purely abstract notion of the sovereign state’s existence, ‘credible’ to those who reside ‘within it’ and ‘outsiders’ that may ‘covet it’.
State sovereignty "is a 'religion' and a faith." The skillfully drawn borders that cartographers have provided for us are ... spiritual and philosophical abstractions representative of a form of quasi-belief. They are ... not detached maps of reality as proponents would have us believe. These geographies reflect an ardent desire to make (or impose) sovereignty a physical reality as natural as the mountains, rivers and lakes....”- Mark Owen Lombardi
D’Errico cites Joseph Camilleri in describing the
potential for a new era of social organization that may better deal with the
challenges of governance in an interdependent world (in effect, a res
The
resistance to the present political and economic organization of society,
expressed by the peace/antinuclear, ecological, communalist, consumer, feminist,
gay liberation, human potential/self-awareness and other movements, cannot be
overestimated. They represent a multidimensional response to the
"colonization of the life-world." Their praxis may not yet pose a
decisive challenge to the status quo, but it has already generated ... a
readiness to resist existing institutions and their life-eroding consequences.
The point about these antisystemic movements is that
they ... are reaffirming the priority of ... popular sovereignty over state
sovereignty. For them the state retains a positive function only to the extent
that it can be used as a vehicle for the realization of popular sovereignty.
... Whether or not, and in what way, the state can be effectively integrated
into the praxis of critical movements remains,
however, a largely unanswered question.”
It is no accident that Nelson Mandela
(and Taiaiake Alfred and other aboriginal writers on
governance) speak of a return to pre-colonial practice that preceded the
instituting of ‘sovereignty’ into the foundations of global social
organisation. That is, ‘colonialism’
embodies a shift in precedence from sailboating to powerboating that is accompanied by the ‘neutralization’ of
space ( It is this ‘neutralization’ of space that
synthetically removes the natural ‘interdependency’ in our common dynamical
living space. The ‘sovereign nation’,
based on nothing other than local ‘common conviction’, re-renders space and its
dynamical forms that are innately inseparable and mutually interdependent in
nature, in terms of local independent purposeful agents. This is the ‘large scale’ granularized version of the attempt to manage the world
dynamic by parts (in this case, hundreds of ‘sovereign nation states’ seen as
‘local purposeful agents’); “... the
efforts of scientists [rational mindsets] have always tended to resolve the
complex phenomenon given directly by our experience into a large number of
elementary phenomena.”
There is thus, in colonialism, a refocusing of balance-seeking away from the dynamics of the common living space, towards the Aristotelian balance-seeking ethics that associate with individual (power-boating) behaviour that, to be good, must avoid the ‘evils’ of excess and deficiency. But like the one-thermostat house, the world experience is that one individual nation’s pursuit of ‘goodness’ and ‘hitting the mark’ conditions the dynamics of the common living space so that excesses or deficiencies are unintentionally imposed on others whose behaviours are at the same time being correspondingly conditioned by their unique situational inclusion within the common dynamical space. As a result, everyone would like to take control of the thermostat setting and adjust it so that, in their view, it is at the optimum ‘goodness’ level to avoid the ‘evils’ of excess and deficiency. The Nichomachean ethics of Aristotle, based on purposeful-balance-seeking, are thus inadequate for playing a foundational role in social organisation/governance in an interdependent world.
There is no solution to this problem other than recognition of the dangerous over-simplicity of the notion of local, independently-existing purposeful agents whose causal behaviours are responsible for the current state of world, by means of their operations on the immediately preceding state of affairs. Management of the social dynamic that orients to regulating these notional purposeful agents, at the level of the individual human and/or the sovereign nation-state, while ignoring the over-riding mediating role of our common dynamical living space, is a recipe for continuing conflict and dysfunction.
The ‘purposeful balance-seeking’ concept will collapse with the recognition,
as in Ubuntu
and as in Kepler’s ‘Harmonies of the World’, that the universe we live in (that we are
included in) is an ‘inclusional volume of
harmony-seeking unification-in-progress’.
What we have to contend with is that the space-neutralizing worldview
has become deeply entrenched because it is ‘easier for us to grasp’ and because
our educational system perpetuates, as Kepler
observed, the tendency of our sciences for “choosing
not that which is most true but that which is most easy.”
* * *
Ted Lumley, White Rock, August 27, 2008
* * *
Footnote 1.
“Nun aber tragen zur Vervollkommnung
der Welt mehr die Gesamtharmonien aller Planeten bei als die einzelnen Harmonien bei je
zwei und die Paare von Harmonien bei je
zwei benachbarten Planeten. Denn die Harmonie ist
gewissermaßen ein Band der Vereinigung. Es liegt aber eine
weitergehende Vereinigung vor, wenn alle
Planeten miteinander eine Harmonie bilden,
als wenn
immer je zwei für sich
in doppelter Weise harmonieren. Im Widerstreit dieser Harmonien mußte daher von den beiden Harmoniereihen, die die Planetenpaare miteinander bilden, die eine oder andere
nachgeben, damit die Gesamtharmonien aller bestehen konnte.” - Johannes Kepler,
Harmonies of the World.
“Now, the 'harmony-of-the-whole of all the
planets contributes more to the perfection of the world than the single
harmonies by twos and the pairs of harmonies by the twos of neighbouring
planets. For harmony is, so to speak, a volume of unification. A deeper unity
yet is presented, when all the planets form a harmony with each another, as
when just two at a time harmonize in a bivalent manner. In the interference of
these harmonies deriving from the dual harmonic line-ups, which the pairs of
planets form with each another, the one or the other must give way (yield), so
that the harmony-of-the- whole can prevail.”