The Ghost in the Machine (10 page)

 

 

Let us revert for a moment to our Home Office example, and let one 'box'
be the Department of Immigration. In order to operate as a self-reliant
unit, the department must be equipped with a set of instructions and
regulations enabling it to take routine contingencies in its stride,
without having to consult higher authority in each particular case. In
other words, what enables the department to function in this efficient
way, as an autonomous holon, is once more a set of fixed rules,
its
canon
. But here again there will be cases where the rules can
be interpreted in this way or that, and so leave room for more than
one decision. Whatever the nature of a hierarchic organisation, its
constituent holons are defined by
fixed rules
and
flexible
strategies
.

 

 

In the present example, too, it is obvious that the individual codes which
guide the conduct of the people who work in the department are not the
same as the rules which determine the actions of the department. Mr Smith
may be willing to grant a visa to an applicant on grounds of compassion,
but the regulations say differently. And we find a further parallel to
previous examples (
p. 43
).
When the rules allow more than one course of action, the matter must be
referred to the head of the department, who might find it advisable
to appeal for a decision to a higher level of the hierarchy. And
there again, strategic considerations of a higher order may arise --
such as the availability of housing, the colour problem, the labour
situation. There may even be conflict between Home Offce policy and the
Ministry of Economics. Once more we are moving in a regressing series
(although in this case, of course, it is not an infinite regress).

 

 

To repeat: it is essential for the stability and efficient functioning
of the body social that each of its sub-divisions should operate as an
autonomous, self-reliant unit which, though subject to control from above,
must have a degree of independence and take routine contingencies in its
stride, without asking higher authority for instructions. Otherwise the
communication channels would become overloaded, the whole system clogged
up, the higher echelons would be kept occupied with petty detail and
unable to concentrate on more important factors.

 

 

 

The Basic Polarity

 

 

However, the rules, or codes, which govern a social holon act not merely
as negative
constraints
imposed on its actions, but also as positive
precepts
, maxims of conduct or moral imperatives. As a consequence,
every holon will tend to persist in and assert its particular pattern of
activity. This
self-assertive tendency
is a fundamental and universal
characteristic of holons, which manifests itself on every level of the
social hierarchy (and, as we shall see, in every other type of hierarchy).

 

 

On the level of the individual, a certain amount of self-assertiveness
-- ambition, initiative, competition -- is indispensable in a dynamic
society. At the same time, of course, he is dependent on, and must be
integrated into, his tribe or social group. If he is a well-adjusted
person, the self-assertive tendency and its opposite, the
integrative
tendency
, are more or less equally balanced; he lives, so long as
things are normal, in a kind of dynamic equilibrium with his social
environment. Under conditions of stress, however, the equilibrium is
upset, leading to emotionally disordered behaviour.

 

 

No man is an island he is a holon. A Janus-faced entity who, looking
inward, sees himself as a self-contained unique whole, looking
outward as a dependent part. His
self-assertive
tendency is the
dynamic manifestation of his unique
, his autonomy
and independence as a holon. Its equally universal antagonist,
the
integrative tendency
, expresses his dependence on the
larger whole to which he belongs: his 'part-ness'. The polarity of
these two tendencies, or potentials, is one of the leitmotivs of the
present theory. Empirically, it can be traced in all phenomena of life;
theoretically, it is derived from the part-whole dichotomy inherent in the
concept of the multi-layered hierarchy; its philosophical implications
will be discussed in later chapters. For the time being let me repeat
that
the self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the
holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of
its partness
.*

* In The Act of Creation I talked of self-assertive and
'participatory' tendencies; but 'integrative' appears to be the
more appropriate term.

The manifestations of the two tendencies on different levels go by
different names, but they are expressions of the same polarity running
through the whole series. The self-assertive tendencies of the individual
are known as 'rugged individualism', competitiveness, etc.; when we
come to larger holons we speak of 'clannishhess', 'cliquishness',
'class-consciousness', 'esprit de corps', 'local patriotism',
'nationalism', etc. The integrative tendencies, on the other hand, are
manifested in 'co-operativeness', 'disciplined behaviour', 'loyalty',
'self-effacement', 'devotion to duty', 'internationalism', and so on.
Note, however, that most of the terms referring to higher levels of the
hierarchy are ambiguous. The loyalty of individuals towards their clan
reflects their integrative tendencies; but it enables the clan as a whole
to behave in an aggressive, self-assertive way. The obedience and devotion
to duty of the members of the Nazi S.S. Guard kept the gas chambers
going. 'Patriotism' is the virtue of subordinating private interests to
the higher interests of the nation; 'nationalism' is a synonym for the
militant expression of those higher interests. The infernal dialectic of
this process is reflected throughout human history. It is not accidental;
the disposition towards such disturbances is inherent in the part-whole
polarisation of social hierarchies. It may be the unconscious reason why
the Romans gave the god Janus such a prominent role in their Pantheon
as the keeper of doorways, facing both inward and outward, and why they
named the first month of the year after him. But it would be premature
to go into this subject now; it will be one of our main preoccupations
in
Part Three
of this volume.
For the time being we are only concerned with the normal, orderly
functioning of the hierarchy, where each holon operates in accordance
with its code of rules, without attempting to impose it on others,
nor to lose its individuality by excessive subordination. It is only
in times of stress that a holon may tend to get out of control, and
its normal self-assertiveness changes into aggressiveness -- whether
the holon is an individual, or a social class, or a whole nation. The
reverse process occurs when the dependence of a holon on its superior
controls is so strong that it loses its identity.
Readers versed in contemporary psychology will have gathered, even
from this incomplete preliminary outline, that in the theory proposed
here there is no place for such a thing as a destructive instinct; nor
does it admit the reification of the sexual instinct as the
only
integrative force in human or animal society. Freud's Eros and Thanatos
are relative late-comers on the stage of evolution: a host of creatures
that multiply by fission (or budding) are ignorant of both.* In our
view, Eros is an offspring of the integrative, destructive Thanatos of
the self-assertive tendency, and Janus the ultimate ancestor of both --
the symbol of the dichotomy between partness and wholeness, which is
imeparable from the open-ended hierarchies of life.

* For a discussion of Freudian metapsychology,
see Insight and Outlook, Chapters XV, XVI.

Summary
Organisms and societies are multi-levelled hierarchies of semiautonomous
sub-wholes branching into sub-wholes of a lower order, and so on. The
term 'holon' has been introduced to refer to these intermediary entities
which, relative to their subordinates in the hierarchy, function as
self-contained wholes; relative to their superordinates as dependent
parts. This dichotomy of 'wholeness' and 'partness', of autonomy and
dependence, is inherent in the concept of hierarchic order, and is called
here the 'Janus principle'. Its dynamic expression is the polarity of
the Self-Assertive and Integrative Tendencies.
Hierarchies are 'dissectible' into their constituent branches, on which
the holons form the 'nodes'. The number of levels which a hierarchy
comprises is called its 'depth', and the number of holons on any given
level its 'span'.
Holons are governed by fixed sets of rules and display more or less
flexible strategies. The rules of conduct of a social holon are not
reducible to the rules of conduct of its members.
The reader may find it helpful to consult from time to time Appendix I,
which summarises the general characteristics of hierarchic systems as
proposed in this and subsequent chapters.
IV
INDIVIDUALS AND DIVIDUALS

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you
looked at it the right way did not become still more complicated.
Poul Anderson

A Note about Diagrams
Before we turn from social organisation to biological organisms, I must
briefly remark on various types of hierarchies and their diagrammatic
representation.
There have been several attempts to classify hierarchies into categories,
none of them entirely successful, because unavoidably the categories
overlap. Thus one can broadly distinguish between 'structural'
hierarchies, which emphasise the spatial aspect (anatomy, topology)
of a system, and 'functional' hierarchies, which emphasise process in
time. Evidently, structure and function cannot be separated, and represent
complementary aspects of an indivisible spatio-temporal process; but it
is often convenient to focus attention on one or the other aspect. All
hierarchies have a 'part within part' character, but this is more easily
recognised in 'structural' than in 'functional' hierarchies -- such as the
skills of language and music which weave patterns within patterns in time.
In the type of administrative hierarchy we have just discussed, the
tree diagram symbolises both structure and function -- the branches are
lines of communication and control, the nodes or boxes each represent a
group of physically real people (the department head, his assistants and
secretaries). But if we chart in a similar way a military establishment,
the tree will only represent the functional aspect, because, strictly
speaking, the boxes on each level whether they are labelled 'battalion'
or 'company' -- will contain only officers or N.C.O.s; the place for the
other ranks which makes up the bulk of the battalion or company is in the
bottom row of the chart. For our purposes this does not really matter,
because what we are interested in is how the machinery is functioning,
and the tree shows exactly that -- it is the officers and N.C.O.s who
determine the operations of the holon as repositories of its fixed
rules and makers of strategy. But people who are inclined to think
in concrete images, rather than in abstract schemata, often find this
rather confusing. If, however, we wanted to emphasise the
structural
aspect of an army, we might draw a diagram, such
as Figure 4 below, which shows how platoons are 'encapsulated' into
companies, companies into battalions, etc. But such structural diagrams
are clumsy, and contain less information than the branching tree.

Some authors put
symbolic hierarchies
(language, music,
mathematics) into a separate category; but they might just as well be
classified as 'functional hierarchies', as they are produced by human
operations. A book consists of chapters, consisting of paragraphs,
consisting of sentences, etc.; and a symphony can similarly be dissected
into parts within parts. The hierarchic structure of the product reflects
the hierarchic nature of the skills and subskills which brought it
into being.
In a similar way, all
classificatory hierarchies
, unless they are purely
descriptive, reflect the processes by which they came into being. Thus
the species-genus-family-order-class-phylum classification of the animal
kingdom is intended to reflect relations in evolutionary descent -- here
the tree diagram represents the archetypal 'tree of life'. Similarly, the
hierarchically subdivided subject-index in library catalogues reflects
the hierarchic ordering of knowledge.
Lastly, phylogeny and ontogeny are
developmental hierarchies
in which
the tree branches out along the axis of time, the different levels
represent different stages of development, and the holons -- as we shall
see -- reflect intermediary structures at these stages.
It may be useful to repeat at this point that the search for properties
or laws which all these varied kinds of hierarchies have in common is
more than a play on superficial analogies. It could rather be called an
exercise in 'general systems theory' -- a relatively recent branch of
science, whose aim is to construct theoretical models and 'logically
homologous laws' (v. Bertalanffy) which are universally applicable to
inorganic, biological and social systems of any kind.
Inanimate Systems
As we move downward in the hierarchy which constitutes the living
organism, from organs to tissues, cells, organelles, macro- molecules,
and so on, we nowhere strike rock bottom, find nowhere those ultimate
constituents which the old mechanistic* approach to life led us to
expect.
The hierarchy is open-ended in the downward, as it is in
the upward direction.
The atom, itself, although its name is derived
from the Greek for 'indivisible' has turned out to be a very complex,
Janus-faced holon. Facing outward, it associates with other atoms as
if it were a single unitary whole; and the regularity of the atomic
weights of elements, closely approximating to integral numbers, seemed
to confirm the belief in that indivisibility. But since we have learned
to look inside it, we can observe the rule-governed interactions between
nucleus and outer electron-shells, and of a variety of particles within
the nucleus. The rules can be expressed in sets of mathematical equations
which define each particular type of atom as a holon. But here again, the
rules which govern the interactions of the sub-nuclear particles in the
hierarchy are not the same rules which govern the chemical interactions
between atoms as wholes. The subject is too technical to be pursued here;
the interested reader will find a good summary in H. Simon's paper,
which I have quoted before. [1]

* Throughout this book, the term 'mechanistic' is used in its
general sense, and not in the technical sense of an alternative
to 'vitalistic' theories in biology.

When we turn from the universe in miniature to the universe at large,
we again find hierarchic order. Moons go round planets, planets
round stars, stars round the centres of their galaxies, galaxies form
clusters. Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find
that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that
without such structuring of complex systems into subassemblies, there
could be no order and stability -- except the order of a dead universe
filled with a uniformly distributed gas. And even so, each discrete gas
molecule would be a microscopic hierarchy. If this sounds by now like
a tautology, all the better.*

* Often, however, we fail to recognise hierarchic structure,
for example in a crystal, because it has a very shallow hierarchy
consisting of only three levels (as far as our knowledge goes) --
molecules -- atoms -- sub-atomic particles; and also because the
molecular level has an enormous 'span' of near-identical holons.

It would, of course, be grossly anthropomorphic to speak of
'self-assertive' and 'integrative' tendencies in inanimate nature, or of
'flexible strategies'. It is nevertheless true that in all stable dynamic
systems, stability is maintained by the equilibration of opposite forces,
one of which may be centrifugal or separative or inertial, representing
the quasi-independent, holistic properties of the part, and the other
a centripetal or attractive or cohesive force which keeps the part
in its place in the larger whole, and holds it together. On different
levels of the inorganic and organic hierarchies, the polarisation of
'particularistic' and 'holistic' forces takes different forms, but it is
observable on every level. This is not the reflection of any metaphysical
dualism, but rather of Newton's Third Law of Motion ('to every action
there is an equal and opposite reaction') applied to hierarchic systems.
There is also a significant analogy in physics to the distinction between
fixed rules and flexible strategies. The geometrical structure of a crystal
is represented by fixed rules; but crystals growing in a saturated solution
will reach the same final shape by different pathways, i.e., although their
growth processes differ in detail; and even if artificially damaged in the
process, the growing crystal may correct the blemish. In this and many other
well-known phenomena we find the self-regulatory properties of biological
holons foreshadowed on an elementary level.