Yuri
Tarnopolsky
ESSAYS Essay 54. Growth and Anti-growth Use Firefox browser or see essays-complete.pdf |
![]() ![]() Essay
54.
Growth and Anti-growth ![]()
1.
STARTING FROM AFAR: Montaigne, de Tocqueville
My primary subject
is the large-scale novelty of the contemporary world
and the fate of freedom in it, as seen by a newcomer
transferred here from the extreme non-freedom of the
totalitarian Soviet society. I wanted to borrow from
Montaigne not his comprehensive openness regarding all
aspects of his personal life, but his absolute freedom
of reflection, including digressions, ramblings, and
countless quotations. Very early in my
childhood, The
Mysterious Island by Jules Verne (Essay
50) was my first and most powerful intellectual
stimulus. Some incomprehensible pages of the book
described chemical processes: making iron, soap,
sulfuric and nitric acids, and nitroglycerin. I became
a chemist. Much later, Montaigne became my first
teacher of freedom by affirming individuality as its
very beginning. For the rest of my life I have
been a too much of individualist for my own good.
Montaigne’s Essays was one of the
three most formative books of my youth, two other
being Dhammapada and Henry Longfellow’s The
Song of Hiawatha in a great Russian translation by
Ivan Bunin.
One introduced me into blind principles and the other
into true poetry. Hiawatha
expanded my understanding of poetry beyond rhymed
lines. Chemistry,
at an even later stage of my life, opened to me a
window through which the world as a whole could be
seen and partially understood in terms of atomism and
structural transformation. Poetry, science, unbound
reflection, and blind moral principles, all
coming from my early impressions, are the performing
quartet of the collection at spirospero. Alexis de
Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America: Men who live in democratic communities not only seldom indulge in meditation, but they naturally entertain very little esteem for it. A democratic state of society and democratic institutions plunge the greater part of men in constant active life; and the habits of mind which are suited to an active life, are not always suited to a contemplative one. (Volume 2, Chapter X) For eight last years
of my life in Communist Russia I had no access to
professional life or any employment and my activity
for long periods of time was spent in defiant
inactivity. I had come to
America with a deeply ingrained habit of reflection.
Thinking was my hobby. I was happy to reach the point
when it finally became affordable as my major
activity, peacefully competing with going to the
beach, tending to tomatoes, and fixing the porch.
Luckily, by that time Internet was ready to accept
anything bottled into a file and tossed into its muddy
e-waters. I need this introduction to explain
the origin, style, and direction of my casual Essays
and somewhat more focused and substantial pieces in complexity
because I am approaching very serious and intricate
things in which the border between complexity and
simplicity, as in all serious matters, disappears. This
has always been my main intent and enjoyment, but by
counting on minds both active and contemplative I most
likely sentence my bottles to perpetual virginity.
Indeed, exploiting the incomparable eloquence of
Alexis de Tocqueville,
One way to find the
calm is just to launch one’s mind into the whirlwind
instead of focusing on the single point, only that
single point should not be money. Amongst a multitude of men you will find a selfish, mercantile, and trading taste for the discoveries of the mind, which must not be confounded with that disinterested passion which is kindled in the heart of the few. A desire to utilize knowledge is one thing; the pure desire to know is another ( Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 2, Chapter X).
The powerful
currents of American life, so contrasting with the
pictures of deceitfully drowsy and prostrate suburbs,
impress me much more than Niagara Falls. But what is
that heady current and what is its course? It is
growth, the universal property of life and all
evolving complex systems (X-systems) growing on life.
The subject of this Essay is growth from the point of
view of a chemist, and if there is growth, anti-growth
must be nearby and, probably, growing, too.
2.
COMPOSITION IN SAND AND GRAVEL: making fool of
myself
Faith and reason do not mix. Neither do poetry and science. I still do not know what is immiscible with the Web except warm human touch. Reflection, however, like a glue (or money in economics), embeds poetry, science, and belief into a kind of composite material, in which components do not mix, but just tightly stick to each other, like cement, sand, and gravel in concrete, bones, vessels, muscles, and nerves in an organism, and, I guess, supply, demand, and price in economy.
While reading
(superficially) Michel Foucault very late in my life,
I felt baffled by a new and unfamiliar—except for a
few previous encounters—kind of literature, rarely
readable, but portentous (in both meanings of the
word). I would put it into a broad category of search
for the shifting borders between the four
domains: poetry, science, reflection (or
philosophy, if reflection is too obscure), and blind
moral principles. I was also surprised to find that
all subjects of Foucault's investigation could be seen
as economics: of sex, madness, medicine,
knowledge, power, state, and ideology. Philosophy used
to be about the sublime, economics is about the
gritty. With Foucault and Heidegger, philosophy falls
face into dust. Economics, which I
instinctively distrust for setting diverging goals, is
the largest white spot on my own mental map. But if
everything is economics (in the lives of most Human
Americans, I believe, it is) how can I understand the
world around me without economics? Some
encouragement (bold font is mine) comes from Erwin
Schrodinger: We feel clearly that we
are only now beginning to acquire reliable material
for welding together the sum total of all that is
known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has
become next to impossible for a single mind fully to
command more than a small specialized portion of it. I
can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our
true who I am be lost forever) that some of us should
venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and
theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete
knowledge of some of them—and at the risk of
making fools of ourselves ( Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life ). I have no
problem with taking this risk, but the above quotation
points also to a different matter. Erwin
Schrodinger was not interested in grand theories of
everything. He looked at the phenomenon of life from a
narrow, purely physical point of view, but addressing
the widest audience. He was even criticized for his
vulgarization of an important physical concept of
entropy, to which he resorted in order to avoid
technicalities. As result, he was the first to answer,
as early as in 1944, some most general questions about
life in a manner that helped James Watson and Francis
Crick to search for more intimate molecular details of
life. In my opinion, Erwin Schrodinger also formulated
the most general principles of all Evolving Complex
Systems (exystems). I do not
believe in grand theories of everything and for a very
simple reason: everything evolves and our knowledge of
everything perpetually lacks something we have
not even a hint what it could be. A theory of
everything is a contradiction in terms. While physical
world changes negligibly, if at all, during the human
presence on earth, human history is a record of new
and unanticipated events. What we can do is to explore
borders between the certain and the possible, as well
as the expected and the astonishing. We cannot
predict the future, but where does the future start?
We cannot know the unknown, but where does the known
end? Unlike physics,
chemistry views the world as transformations of atomic
objects selectively connected with bonds. This is
certainly a very narrow slit to look at the world. But
what we can see through it cannot be seen from other
observation points. Regarded in this abstract way,
chemistry is just a field of unusual mathematics, and
Ulf Grenander created this field (Pattern Theory)
single-handedly. I was powerfully influenced by
Pattern Theory, but I will remain here as just a
chemist, which is my nature. I will not speak about
chemical formulas, however, except for a single
trivial incidence. Chemistry is
deeply pictorial because it is about the imagination
space. Most of what we see with chemical eyes
can be presented in silent pictures
consisting of points and lines. How can we describe
them in human voice? We are constrained by
logic, but the choice of words is ours: we compose.
This is why, thinking as a chemist, I do not want to
limit myself to any verbal or visual palette. I am
willing to make fool of myself. I
will come back to anti-growth, but for growth we need
to rub shoulders with economics, the most unorthodox,
but least inviting subject for me after orthodox
religious faith.
PART 2 ECONOMICS , the new
science of everything 3.
EVERYTHING
IS ECONOMICS: from economics to
economics of economics
Google, August 7,
2007 : about 156,000,000
for economics. For comparison, about 104,000,000
for chemistry, about 117,000,000 for
biology, about 110,000,000 for humans,
but about 238,000,000 for politics and
about 296,000,000 for medicine. The
man-made things, however, beat them all: about 755,000,000 for technology.
They have really grown up. See Essay 53, A Supper
with Birds and Planes. Economy is the main
source of power and growth is an absolute obsession of
global economy and everybody under its erratic skies.
Greed is now
called "individual maximization." Stock market is
above all betting on growth (decline, too, as
pre-growth).
Academic productivity is a growing volume of
grants and publications. Wealth is growth. Success is
growth. Sex is growth. Collecting is growth. Sports is
growth. Agriculture is growth. Tomatoes are growth.
Career is growth. It is only in body weight and
waistline that anti-growth begins to compete with
growth, but the robust economy of weight loss is about
growth, too. In the eyes of
physics the visible world is doomed to entropic decay,
but life is about growing, blooming, and multiplying.
Division is bitter, but multiplication is sweet. In the last century,
quite surreptitiously, economics had turned into the
main interscience (but not yet science) of humanity,
spanning from mathematics to biosciences and from
thermodynamics to philosophy, with cognitive sciences
in the folds. As physical sciences are united by the
concept of energy, economics is united by the concept
of money—same money that
divides the people who own it. For a compressed
illustration of the ubiquity of economics, see APPENDIX
1. I confess, I was not prepared to find almost
1200 recognized subdivisions of economics (alas,
no Buddhist economics there). In short,
whatever you touch,
If you prick us, do we
not bleed? Yes, all 1168 listed
topics of economics (in fact, there are more than
that), big and small—even the poet, his winged
Rocinante, and each published line—bleed with money,
one way or the other. For example, Northwest
Florida Review pays $5 per poem, while Hayden’s
Ferry Review pays up to $100, and Boulevard
pays $250 or more. The Meridian pays $15 per
page, and The Georgia Review pays $3 per line.
Northwoods
Journal charges a $1 reading
fee for each poem. If they publish your work, they’ll
pay you $0.10 per line. (Source).
In my eyes nothing is
as postmodern today as economics because it is about
performance and performance is about growth. I begin
to believe that the entire postmodernity in humanities
and art, increasingly in sciences, and definitely in
technology, is simply the complete absorption of human
creativity of all kinds into the economy. I do not
mean it to sound derogative. To scold evolution is to
emulate King Xerxes who ordered to whip the sea for
scattering his bridge made of boats. Life is business.
Business is the through-the-looking-glass
wonderland,
in which you have to run in order to stay in place and
run twice as fast to get anywhere. The "heady current"
rolls all things in its course. Postmodernity does not
question ends: it watches the performance of means. The
Golden Standard of performance (source: Wikipedia): In 1998, Deepak Chopra was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in physics for "his
unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic
happiness." The business of
economics has its own economy. And, of course, here is
economics of
economics: July 23,
2007: Google: Results 1 - 10
of about 664 for "economics of economics" [June
12,
2009: about 907 for "economics of economics"]. Quoting
the insightful Tom Coupe: "Economics of Economics
is studying the behavior of economists and the
characteristics of the economics profession. Maybe
this is less wackonomics than the others as it's
mainly of interest to economists. At the other side,
some people clearly do not like it" ( The Economics of
Economics ). There
are more "wackonomics" at Tom Coupe's site:
Meanwhile,
the topic economics of terrorism is already a fully shaped
domain: July 23,
2007: Results 1 - 10 of about 11,300
for "economics
of terrorism."
[June 12, 2009: about
43,800 for "economics of terrorism"] {April,
2016: about 151,000 results (0.34 seconds) }. As an example of
what can be found in the intellectual marketplace
about growth, I would refer to the series of works by
Oded Galor and co-workers (available online), bringing together
biological and social evolutions in a non-trivial way.
Unified evolutionary
growth theory (the first one) that captures the
co-evolution of: - Homo Sapience - Economies in the long transition
from an epoch of Malthusian stagnation to sustained
growth. The theory suggests
that: - The epoch of
stagnation that has characterized most of human
history led to a process of natural selection that
transformed the characteristics of the human
population and made them more complementary to the
growth process Fundamental
Premise : During the Malthusian
Epoch, the composition of characteristics of the human
species that are highly relevant for the understanding
of the origin of economic growth has not been
stationary. Hereditary human traits, physical or
mental, that raised earning capacity, generated an
evolutionary advantage Source: Oded Galor and Omer Moav Natural Selection
and The Origin of Economic Growth (2002) Draw your
conclusions, Piraha Indians of Amazon. If everything is
economics, then economics must be complexity in flesh.
It is a stock of an incredible variety of
publications, bold and bright, as well as dull and
drab, see Appendix 1. As I suspect, the
postmodern market economy of intellectual production
started with postmodern philosophy, of
which David
Lewis and his plurality of worlds is a relatively
recent example.
The major drive came
from the honest intent to understand complex systems.
The work of Peter Turchin and his father Valentin Turchin, the founder
of Principia
Cybernetica Web , numerous
incursions of theoretical physicists into the tides of
market economy, artificial life, the Santa Fe Institute, the creepy
promissory notes and the actual ruthless progress of
cognitive sciences, and grand theories coming from
everywhere are some of many indicators of the
insatiable voracity for understanding complex systems
in which human molecules display their chemistry.
There must be some reason for that apart of the
natural curiosity and quest for understanding. If
kingdoms were never meant for sale, managerial skills
are, and we can manage anything but complexity. The religious faith
in mathematical equations and the escape from the
tyranny of facts are emblematic of postmodern industry
of knowledge. There is, however, a definite center in
the global subconsciousness, activated by the lessons
of all the hot and cold wars of the last century, plus
the new World War with the invisible phantoms of
terror. We have conquered space and time. Future is
the next frontier and growth is the only way to invade
and conquer the future, to flood it with your presence
and to build a castle on the top of a mountain. We do
not want to build on sand. We need some certainty. We
would like to slow down the future to be able to
respond to it, as in times of good old European wars
written into history by a quill. My own view of the
world, with hard graphic skeletons on the move instead
of equations, comes from the same historical
experience, in which I was late only for WWI. The fate of North
America and Europe has never been less certain for
those who have long historical memory. The united
states of United Europe are fragmented, and so are the
united states of the United States. The not yet
certified Science of Novelty (neology? the term is
used in linguistic) which I am trying to peek into, is
a paradoxical challenge to the classical science about
the immutable laws of the world: I see it as a science
about the shifting axiomatic grounds, about the
rotating stage of the world theater, and about the
limits of projections. As I tried to show in The New and the
Different, the new is
rare and it is dispersed in the overwhelming different
, i.e., the recombinant variants of the old. The main
problem of neology is not just to discern the new,
which we can do well, but to estimate its kinetics:
how fast it is running toward us before it freezes and
petrifies into the old. Prediction without timing is
fortune-telling. NOTE. I am greatly
sympathetic of counterfactual thinking, which is now
slowly burrowing its way through humanities. Chemical
thinking is deeply counterfactual (allofactual
is a better term) and requires a constant
circumspection about what could possibly happen
otherwise (look for transition
state in
complexity). The novelty of the
physical universe crawls at a much slower pace than
the novelty of human history or the history of our
planet itself. Thus, life on the Earth is possible
only because the Sun evolves incomparably slower than
life. Who can seriously worry about the dimming Sun
today? Probably, only the poets. 4.
THE
WORLD IS ON FIRE and Britain is to blame As an example of the
contribution of poetry to the chemist's vision of the
world that I attempt to practice in my Essays, this is
how I see the Industrial Revolution.
I see the early
Industrial Revolution, therefore, as an ignition of
the process of reduction of iron oxide into metal,
made probable and sustainable by the proximity of both
in England. The fire evolved into the streams of
molten pig iron and steel that solidified in the form
of bridges, railways, locomotives,
Fire in this picture
is not just a metaphor but an ideogram: a
template for a pattern of a process represented across
many domains and levels of the world. Classical
German philosophy, aloof about coal and iron, was also a
fire, still preserved as embers. While the pattern
is very general, the template is a configuration taken
from just one domain, in this case, chemical one. The
chemical process of self-sustaining and accelerating
change goes until the fuel and the oxidant are
available and the temperature does not drop.
Instead of fuel and oxygen, any two components can
interact in a fire-like pattern. The modern economic
growth is a typical—and the brightest—example of fire
that involves more and more mineral fuel. The
natural limit on this process is one of very few
indisputable but not yet unambiguously tested
principles of economics. It has been examined,
however, in physiology and medicine: breathing is a
quiet and controlled chemical fire inside the
organism. Without oxygen the human sooner or later
dies, of which the torture by waterboarding
takes notice.
What leaves some hope to economics is that society
always adapts, but at what price remains unclear even
for economists. Obviously, the fire
has a chance to move into the stage of decline and
collapse, which could still be kept at low metabolism
for as long as its energy supply lasts. While energy
is always partially dissipated, wasted, and
irreversibly lost, matter is conservable and
recyclable, for which, alas, energy is needed again.
This simple comparison outlines the difference between
Bios (life of organisms) and Technos (life of things):
Technos can be recycled because its template
—blueprints and files—are also species of conservable
Technos. This difference today does not seem as
sharp as fifty years ago: the templates of
life can be digitized and stored as Technos, while the
files of digitized Technos can be killed—erased
without a trace—or mutilated, or, worse, stolen and
turned into cash. Fire is not
evolution. It is a chemical reaction that runs
irreversibly and ends. Fire always burns out. Same
happens to wars, revolutions, classical German
philosophy, and the upheavals like Communism and
Islamism. Evolution grows forests of plants,
animals, humans, and Things, and the lightning strikes
of history start forest fires. The global pattern
of fire reflects in much smaller local outbursts. Here
is another example from the insular Crucible of
Industrial Revolution. J.
K. Rowling writes her first Harry Potter,
which spreads over the world like fire. In this
pattern, the material object—book—that arose as a
mutation in the mind of the author, probably, just
from a cup of tea, interacts with the money of
consumers. The global fire was started by a spark,
probably, as accidental as the creative impulse, and
further self-sustained by the high temperature known
as hype. In
the book business demand and supply are oxygen and
fuel in the intake of the business machine. It is not
important which is what: both are just two interacting
components. We can imagine a planet with methane
atmosphere and some limited source of oxygen coming
from the ground. In this picture the economic
roles of fuel and oxidizer are reversed. When
the next volumes of paper fuel are thrown into the
fire, the enterprise rises the next step up in the
form of movies, trinkets, bookmarks, spoofs, and the
rest of paraphernalia. Both supply and demand are
limited, and so is the hype. Children
have less choice than the readers of Nora Roberts
because of the immense peer pressure. What happens as
result is the loss of variety: the children read
one huge volume after another on the same topic
instead of absorbing twenty slimmer books which could
open to them twenty new vistas. The
business model took over Harry Potter after the writer
had completed her first and most creative act,
having established a template on which the process of
growth progressed along a standard scenario,
completely independent from the content and measurable
as performance. There are two kinds
of growth. One is the relative and local growth that
redistributes resources, reshuffles ideas, rearranges
priorities, etc., within the available energy
consumption until its source lasts. The other is the
fire-like global growth, predatory, wasteful,
frenzied, and dehumanizing. It consumes resources
irreversibly, dissipates matter and energy, and
expires at the end, leaving ashes and turning to new
firewood. I use the word
"dehumanizing" without any scorn. It denotes the
inclusion of humans into the modern economic
metabolism which has brought a lot of stability,
comfort, and "economic happiness," that most people in
the West, including myself, enjoy and more have been
embracing in the East. Still, anything ending with a
question mark is legitimate within the framework of
neology: Mankind unsparingly uses every
individual as material to heat its great machines; but
what good are the machines when all individuals (that
is, mankind) serve only to keep them going? Machines
that are their own end—is that the umana commedia? (Friedrich
Nietzsche, Human,
all
too Human,
"bad-tempered"
thought No. 585,
1878) With China and
India burning in growth fever, with Russian czardom
gloating over the kneeling
for Russian gas Europe, I believe, we will know the
answer sooner than we would like. What is growth,
then? What is its origin? What is that clockwork
mechanism that spins the hands in one direction only?
What is its blessing? What is its curse? 5.
WHY
EVERYTHING GROWS and cannot stop
What is the
evolutionary necessity of growth in evolving complex
systems, such as life or economy? I mean both
the growth of an individual organism, for which there
are obvious limits, and the property of organisms to
multiply, i.e. population growth. The same question—why to grow—can be addressed to
empire, social movement, religion, business
enterprise, party, and
knowledge factory. Why does
everybody and everything want to grow and
what happens as result? Physics is largely
counterintuitive. We do not see gravitation and
electromagnetic field, neither do we deal with atoms
outside a lab. We do not measure physical properties
without instruments. It takes a powerful mental effort
to penetrate the surface of observable events. There
are, however, areas of science that seem to come from
common sense. Thus, probability theory, which can be
as complicated as anything in mathematics, came from
simple considerations based on everyday experience.
Chemistry looks arcane, but the chemical concepts of
random collision, favorable mutual orientation,
bonding, transition state, and breakup have parallels
in the peculiar human and animal behavior known
as courtship and love. Chemistry is in on the tip of
the tong in romance and politics driven by intuition.
From the chemical
angle, i.e., from the atomistic perception of systems
as stable units and bonds (or as configurations of
Pattern Theory), there is at least one major obvious
difference between big complex systems and small
simple ones: size. A small system can
undergo a limited number of changes, many of them
catastrophic. For example, the simplest system
of two connected atomic units, A—B, can change in only
one direction: A—B
A + B , which completely destroys its very identity. If the system is naturally in equilibrium between two parts, A—B
⇄ A + B , then an elimination
or destruction of one part destroys the system. It
took the early chemists an effort to understand that
if salt disappears in water, not an atom is lost. It is certainly
true in the world of atoms and molecules that if some
molecule once arose from the environment than it can
happen again. We are interested, however, in the
emergence of Evolving Complex Systems
(exystems). The spontaneous appearance of anything
complex from something simple would require a rare
coincidence of rare events. Similarly, regarding
X-systems of cognitive, social, and political nature,
the unique individuality of initiators, founders, and
circumstances, once lost, cannot be replaced or
recreated. Complexity is
improbable, unless we, complex creatures, create it
ourselves, and yet X-systems can be stable (i.e.,
probable) only if they are sufficiently complex or at
least large enough as populations. The solution of the
paradox lies in the distinction between local and
global. In a system A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B , a
transformation A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B —> A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B + A—B
or A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B —> A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B—A + B leaves most
of the system unchanged. The same applies to an
addition of an extra part by chance. If the major part
is capable of restoring the damage, or if the damaged
part is not essential, the dynamic non-equilibrium
system, like trees and animal bodies, becomes
exceptionally stable. The big size,
therefore, turns annihilation into damage.
Growth is self-insurance against accidental
loss. This sounds like economics (GEL
classificator G22,
Insurance; Insurance companies). In the
origin and perpetuation of life, growth is life
insurance. Figures 2 and 3
illustrate growth as a major property of X-systems.
![]() Figure 2. Size and damage
A. Lethality of
damage to small size; B. Survival of population;
C. Large size and damage repair.
A damage in a small
system (Figure 2A) can destroy the system if
the energy of the impact per unit of size is high
enough. In a population (2B), a knocked
out unit may not be fatal for the population. A large
system (2C) can preserve viability
because of the locality of the damage. The
heavily wounded in Iraq soldiers illustrate human
vitality, as well as the economics of presidency, in a
macabre way. In all X-systems,
the economic function of growth, from the
point of view of a chemist, is self-insurance
against disaster. A large complex
system can be destroyed if it is crippled with several
simultaneous hits. Coincidence of several rare events,
however, is very low. The laws of probability—the
simple property of our world, which is, probably, the
best argument against deity—is what made life on earth
possible. Amazingly,
physicists used the improbability of complex systems
as an argument against spontaneous emergence of life.
For a chemist, however, as for a builder, political
leader, and scientist, the gradual stepwise
buildup of complexity is their daily
bread.
![]() Figure 3.
Size, temperature, and vulnerability
A. Growth (broken line) increases the vulnerability to multiple defects at the same probability of damage; B. Increased probability of damage (i.e., high temperature) creates multiple damage beyond repair.
The size of the
individual system and the size of population seems
unconditionally beneficial only at the very state of
emergence when the medium from which life emerges
works as an inexhaustible resource. When the resource
becomes limited, anti-growth plays tug of war with
growth. Growth has some
unintended by Creator consequences for the evolution
of exystems, but that should be a separate subject. In
short, the excess of energy and matter over the
minimum necessary for subsistence, vaguely
similar to the famous Mehrwert , surplus value
of Karl Marx, creates a step—a green pasture—toward the next
level in a food chain. The simple reason is that
biochemical mechanisms of life are universal. The
variety emerges and evolution takes off full throttle:
the lion hunts antelopes, the government collects
taxes, the professor steers the postgraduates in
the direction of his career, the bookstore peddles
Harry Potter trinkets, and wealth creates
super-wealth. In human matters, as
in biochemical matters, the mechanisms of evolution
are universal because humans are universal enzymes
capable of assembling and taking apart anything, from
political system to article on economics, and from
nuclear weapons to reputation. The moment comes when
humans start manipulating living organisms, and,
finally, their own bodies and somebody else’s
minds. The next natural
question is how a non-equilibrium system can be
stable, if only temporarily, since any deviation from
equilibrium decreases stability. The answer is that
equilibrium is the most stable state only of a closed
system. The surface of planet Earth is an open system:
open to solar energy, energy of the planet’s
core, and the cold of the space. Why do we need
instability to ensure stability? Why do
exystems need to be far from equilibrium , i.e. to
continuously consume energy and disperse heat? The
answer was given by Erwin Schrodinger in 1944 in an
incomparably lucent form. The text of his
groundbreaking book What is Life is available on the Web. It was
the very beginning of the revolution in biology. I see
it as the firm and lasting foundation for the science
of exystems. Schrodinger warned
his audience that the subject matter of his public
lectures, which preceded the book, was
difficult. It still remains difficult and
incessantly stimulating. I do not need to repeat here
the discussion of the thermodynamic aspects of life in
a large popular literature, as well as in complexity. I am more
interested in non-biological exystems, among which the
ailing American Democracy is the closest to my heart
(are many readers today as excited by Alex de
Tocqueville as I was?). Time to move from
the sunshine exuberance of growth to the rainy days
of decline. 6. DIVISION
AGAINST MULTIPLICATION: federalism? feudalism? Next, what is the
consequence of growth? Growth is suicidal.
But take it easy, so is life. As Anton Chekhov said,
life is a deadly disease: the one who lives
inadvertently dies. As an economic and
political phenomenon, growth carries a kind of
autoimmune disease that kills it long before the total
global triumph. The same objection
of improbability that physicists have been setting
against the spontaneous origin of life applies to
the origin of species. If genome is very long, as it
is in most species, then Darwinian evolution may look
problematic. The probability of a significant viable
mutation, like the elephant's trunk, is very low (do
we, really? it is just a multiplication of a nose unit). To continue
generalization, radically new developments in history
(WWI, 9-11, military challenge to US, catastrophic
presidency) are highly improbable a priori
because our imagination is not only boundless but also
tuned up to optimism. It seems to me that
it is exactly the large size of genome, which makes
most local changes in it realistic, ensures evolution,
so that other subsystems of the organism stay
untouched and ready to accommodate the new change. For
example, the elephant’s trunk may be a result of a
mutation at a very early stage, so that muscles,
nerves, and vessels automatically follow the new shape
of the nose. By the same logic, only in reverse,
if the genome evolves as a set of nested compartments
organized like a tree of systematics, a viable
mutation should be close to previous mutations in the
same subsystem of the organism and have non-disruptive
character.
Biological life,
paradoxically, is much less mysterious than biological
death. It is hardly a surprise that history has the
same asymmetry. Any empire is inherently unstable and
is either in deep slumber or in turmoil. But why is
its growth lethal? In the same way
that growth makes any change more and more local, it
makes any authority less and less potent. When
empire—company, office,
clan—grows, the
leader faces more and more unpredictable events
and contradicting choices. The leader loses efficiency
and delegates increasing part of his duties. It does not look
like anything having to do with chemistry. But, as
I noted in Essay 53, Power: Hidden Stick,
Shared Carrot, there is an analogy between
concentration of social and financial power and
localization of energy in quantum physics, which plays
profound role in chemistry. See also Essay
37, On the Soul. Social structures
need leaders, but why? What is so different
about social chemistry, as compared with molecular
chemistry? While positive
chemical bonds are more stable than disconnected
atoms, social bonds can be either way: positive as
well as negative. Some, like the mother-child bond,
are very much like chemical bond, but some family and
work ties are negative in the sense that they need a
constant effort (supply of energy) to maintain, like
to keep the ball in the air. In politics, mutual
sympathies between nations are exception rather than
rule. The most notable example was the forceful
unifying of disparate nations and sects by Saddam
Hussein in Iraq. The mutual distrust and hate exploded
after the liberation. Rivalry is just another word for
competition not only in democracies, but also inside
all units of any society: family, institution, school,
armed forces, science, arts, and government.
There is an
important difference between negative and neutral
bonds. The latter require approximately equal energy
to lock or to break. For example, to close or open a
door requires about the same energy in the absence of
any other external influences. To keep the
metaphoric gates of secrecy, more material gates of
illegal immigration, or quite nightmarish gates of
terrorism closed requires a constant work. To
keep the society open requires a lot of work,
too. For that purpose the entire design of the
social and political machine was put on a blueprint in
the US Constitution. Freedom
can be exhausting. In short, the force of authority is needed to keep a social structure in shape. The problem with the growth of a social structure is that the sovereign power of the leader per unit of size decreases with the size. Any added deputy has a more concentrated power over a smaller unit, but at a price: his or her own power and freedom of choice is limited by the immediate superior. Figure 3 illustrates the expansion of an abstract "kingdom," the appearance of an intermediate executive body, a mesoderm (see also Essay 43 on mesoderm), and the transition to "federalism." ![]() Figure 4. Growth and
differentiation of management and function
I find federalism
a convenient shortcut for a class of complex systems
that are absent, as far as I know, in animal
populations. It is new and rare in history, and can,
probably, exist only at certain conditions. Still, it
is well worth generalization because "democracy" is
too political and multiform. Federalism, the division of
the system into semi-independent units, the abolition
of the czar, and the limits on personal power of
local leaders have been, probably (who can know for
sure?) the main reason for the long, rarely
fractured record of success of American society, the
success being measured by the general stability.
Social stability is
a curious phenomenon. My naive impression is that the
American stability is based on the overall acceptance
of the margin of instability in the form of poverty,
crime, fraud, deviance, and just simple stupidity. The
optimistic America, unlike the stern and pessimistic
authoritarian and idealistic societies, accepts the
imperfections and risks associated with life on the
move. It has the courage to face life. The
totalitarian society, in which I lived in Russia, was
based on expecting the worst from people and was
struggling in vain for perfection. Hypocrisy is
the natural outcome of the struggle in secular and
religious orthodoxies. ![]() Figure 5. Vulnerability
of the centralized system
Figure 5 symbolically
portrays the consequences of centralization of
management: the damaged core can be sensitive to small
damage with fatal consequences to the entire system. NOTE (2016). Russia was
in shambles after its revolutions of 1917 and 1989.
This is why Intuitively, federalism
and feudalism somehow fit the same very
abstract contractual pattern. This is a
haunting question, cautiously but persistently brought up in literature ( Google: Results 1 - 10
of about 74,700 for feudalism federalism August 11,2007 ) Both federalism and feudalism
are etymologically related to trust (fealty, fidelity,
and federal come from fidere, to trust ). The
lord trusts the vassal, the sub-units trust the federal
representative. The states get pork, the vassals get
fiefdoms. The lord has no separate army to have a hold
over the vassals. The transition from
feudalism to capitalist democracy, therefore, looks like
evolution of the energy resource from renewable (land)
to exhaustible (mineral fuel): from a society of humans
to a society of machine parts. Otherwise, the structure
of relations is similar. The power of a
feudal lord was measured in the currency of land. The
modern currency of power is money. I hope that I am
still within my limits of foolishness by saying that
the immense concentration of private wealth in modern
times, especially in conjunction with limited energy
resources, revives some patterns of feudalism. Whether
federalism, or feudalism, or another term from history
books, patterns are not anchored: they float through
time, place, and across interdisciplinary borders. NOTE
(2016). I am now in the world flooded with oil and
gas. The stock market is neurotic because it takes it
for the end of growth. Yet mineral fuel remains
limited for more reasons than ever. Even the
sunlight harvest is limited, but the non-mineral
energy—that of the sun, tides, and winds—is still
enormous. The consequences of changes in sources of
energy, including human labor, are still unexplored,
however. We are busy with traveling to Mars. If all that looks
outrageously simplistic, it should: the chemical
view of extra-molecular world does not solve any
problems. It only helps to see the bones through the
fat flesh of complexity. As far as growth of
complexity is concerned, it evolves in at least three
forms: ![]() Growth is trivial.
What is anti-growth, then? The trivial part of it is
known as decline. Is there anything less trivial? I
believe it is the will not to grow,
moreover, the will to have less. NOTE: Growth of
temperature, chaos, and uncertainty may not be
consciously pursued in business, but it is still
growth, set as a goal in insurrections and
revolutions. PART 3 LESS is the only solution, but what is the problem? 7. INTRODUCTION TO ANTI-GROWTH : Dhammapada, Verse 167
In an oblique way, this Essay is a repercussion of the impact of Dhammapada on my youth.
I now identify the
short ancient book’s invective against multiplication
with the call to limit growth. What can be a less
popular idea in America? This is why I keep it in the
folder of blind moral principles. All
religions are irrational and all ideologies are beyond
proof. All prophesies require long waiting until they
are useless, true or not. Reason and belief do not
mix, except in the belief in reason. My own copy of
Dhammapada was the highly professional Russian
translation directly from the language of Pali,
elegantly published in 1960. What impressed me
so much in my youth was the commandment rendered
as “do not
increase existence.” [не увеличивай существования]. I had left the
book in Russia, but when I returned to it in English
translations, I ran into a mystery. Chapter 13 of
Dhammapada starts with Verse 167: hinaj
dhammaj
na seveyya pamadena na sajvase
micchaditthij
na
seveyya na siya lokavaddhano
In various English
translations the fourth part of Verse 167 , na
siya lokavaddhano, has been translated
differently, but mostly converging on a single
meaning: (1) be not a
friend of the world, (2) do not be a
world-upholder, (3) linger not
long in worldly existence, (4) don’t busy
yourself with the world. There were
interpretations more in line with my personal
perception: (5) do not
cultivate the world, (6)
do
not
augment the world. The discrepancies
had been troubling me until I found a detailed
interpretation at the Digital Library
& Museum of Buddhist Studies of National Taiwan University Library,
where the verse was translated as:
Don't
practice inferior teachings; don't connect with
negligence. Don't
embrace wrong beliefs; don't be attached to the world. But the
linguistic commentaries in the same source seemed to
suggest another interpretation. The
key last word lokavaddhano
is
a composite of loka,
world, and vaddhano ,
derived from vaddhana
translated as indulgence, attachment. The
commentary, however, mentioned that its root was vaddh- ,
growth. The word vaddhano
was Nominative of singular, masculine noun.
Literally, as I see it, the grower of the world. I found also a more
direct translation at Concise
Pali-English Dictionary: vaddhana
:
[nt.] growth; increase; enlargement.
nt. : neuter gender. My initial
understanding since the age of 25 was do not
multiply existence, i.e., with hindsight, do not
grow complexity, do not grow attachments, do not
surround yourself with numerous objects of desire and
care, do not multiply material things. In short, minimize.
In modern lingo, it, probably, sounds like focus
and prioritize. When, at about that age,
I had read about Albert Einstein not wearing socks and
using the same soap for washing and shaving, I saw him
as a Buddhist simplifier. By no means I
consider myself a true Buddhist. Besides, “true” is
the most divisive word if applied to religion or
ideology. I am not attracted
to either mysticism or asceticism. I have a few
superstitions (the spiders bring good news and I never
kill them; one should never mix fresh milk and
cucumbers; do not gossip), but I do not believe in any
world but the one around me. And yet Buddhism has the
same spell on me as on many Western people. One of its
charms is some separation between the final goal and
the ways of achieving it. The rich assortment of ways
and means in Buddhism allows for unwrapping one item
without opening another. One can be happy just by
walking the pathways and coming home. The dogmatic
symmetry of the Buddhist teaching and the tight straps
of control over young prankish chaos never attracted
me, but they were a good preparation for mature age. To summarize,
Dhammapada imprinted me with a clear distinction
between necessity and excess in material world.
We are individual in our needs but faceless in our
temptations. The luxury and wealth of ideas is a quite
different matter. A very selectively
read Dhammapada is one of my sources of blind
moral principles (BMP) which have nothing to do
with reason and logic. They complement for me the more
pragmatic, explicit, and commanding Judeo-Christian
principles. The BMPs are axioms of human
existence and by choosing, inventing, or inheriting
different sets of axioms we sign up to a life of not
always realistic ideals. NOTE
(2016). To summarize my material life, I followed
Dhammapada—partly, by circumstances, partly by choice.
To endure order and to wreak havoc
are two ends of the scale of human behavior. What
makes life worth living is that we constantly bend and
violate our principles. No religion shuns this game, not
even fundamentalism, but the Evangelical Christians in
America seem to beat anybody else in lavishly dispensing
forgiveness to each other at the expense of
tolerance.
My meditation on
Verse 167 of Dhammapada should not be taken too
seriously. I am not an expert. Besides, following
blind moral principles, I do not need to care about
facts and truth. This is convenient but
certainly incompatible with science. There is,
however, a small (Google: about 25,200 for "buddhist economics", August 7, 2007; 42,100
in 2016)
but well-tended plot of Buddhist
economics, which I am not to
visit here. The vast Economics, however, cannot
be neglected in any way because it is has already
fused not only with the biology of the global
population of Homo sapiens, but also with its blind
moral principles. What Michel Foucault called
bio-politics is nothing but economics. NOTE: Taoism (Lao Tzu) is another source
of anti-growth ideas. There must be some reason for
the emergence of the detachment idea in Eastern
philosophy. 8.
IDEOLOGY
AND ENERGY : the sleepy hollows of life
![]() The anti-growth
spirit of Buddhism has not yet presented any real
competition to the ideology of growth.
Nevertheless, anti-growth happens all the time,
coming, of course, as growth. I believe there are
at least three ways of anti-growth caused by growth. 1. Consequence
of growth of one or more among competitors for a
limited resource. This is the most trivial
phenomenon of biological and social evolution. It is
often overlooked, however, that land is the most
ancient limited resource. Land is a natural, powered
by sunlight machine for growing food, building
materials, and animal power. There is the trivial
zero-sum growth, in which competitors push each other
away over a nearly constant resource, as the history
of European empires and real estate in Manhattan
exemplify. If history did not end long ago, it is
because the efficiency of the land use has been
growing (growth, again). I am interested, however, in
the Manhattan of the size of the Earth, flooded not
with dollars, but photons of the sunlight. The little
Manhattan can be built upwards and downwards, but its
supply of sunlight does not change, while demand for
energy increases. The Earth is no different, but has
neither bridges nor tunnels to the rest of the
universe, except the one-way bridge from the Sun. 2. Consequence
of errors and chaos in the systems of control and
management. The particular talent, mental
decline, or death of an authoritarian leader often
changes the fate of the entire system. So does the
elected leadership, for better or worse. In business
and government, the threat of collapse is countered
with more: more time,
more money, more troops, more information technology,
more subcontractors, etc., until the downturn comes. 3. Anti-growth
as an idea. I am morbidly
fascinated by ideas, the invisible and intangible
ghosts that rule our human world. The first two kinds
of anti-growth are known as the trivial decline, but
the world of ideas is so evolutionary new that we,
humans, have not yet quite adjusted to their
immaterial power. Take philosophy: after Aristotle it
is never about the world but about our ideas of it. We
know what to do with a dollar bill and a donut, but
what to do with ideas, except trying to sell them as
fast as possible? That growth of
economy means borrowing against the future has been
suspected or well understood for quite a time. There
is a significant volume of literature related to what
I would call economic anti-growth, more accurately,
the ideology advocating limits to growth . It all
started in 1972 with Limits to
Growth (abstract) published by The Club of Rome and updated after 30
years. The idea itself
goes back to Robert Thomas Malthus, who did not
anticipate, however, any economic competition between
babies and their toys. The anti-growth
ideas find their way up from the social
subconsciousness in various forms: from protection and
preservation of environment (also in the form of growth of nature
preserves) to discrediting the growth of bottled water
industry, which will certainly mean a growth of some
grotesque alternative. Here is something about beer: While
many deplore the drunken Brits wandering Prague,
criticism has begun to come from a new source:
environmental groups who are not amused by the carbon
emissions their short- and midrange flights leave in
the atmosphere. Last week some 2,000
anti-climate-change activists set up camp at London’s
Heathrow Airport, one of the world’s busiest hubs, to
protest the emissions spewed by such flights.
Environmentalists also protested the airport’s plan to
add a new runway. (Source: The
Prague
Post , August 22,
2007 ) There is, however, a
categorical NO to MORE and an equally categorical
WELCOME to LESS. As an example of the
modern form of the categorical anti-growth, I would
quote a publication of The Free Range Energy
Beyond Oil Project : Why
the Only Solution is “Less”
The
Laws of Thermodynamics cannot be changed – if we don't
have the energy we need we are unable to carry out the
work we want to. Consequently, as we face a peak in
global energy supply, there is only one realistic
option: We have to use “less” energy, and consume
“less” resources. By growth and
anti-growth I mean not just ideas, but ideologies,
the programs for action, competing for a nest in a growing
number of minds. The ideologies set the direction of
social change in the same way as energy landscape sets
the direction of change in physical and chemical
processes. The role of ideology
can be compared with the tilt of a tray with a ball on
it. By changing the tilt we make the ball roll in
certain direction. The tray of evolution, however, is
not flat. There are valleys and hollows in it where
the ball can come to a relative rest, provided we do
not shake it too much. The tray of life is coming
toward us like a long treadmill and we cannot see what
is there behind its point of return. Neither can we
stay in cozy hollows: we have to run from the point of
entry behind or we would fall off. Did Lewis Carroll
anticipate a conveyor belt in 1865? The visual metaphor
of landscape in evolution was suggested by Conrad
Waddington (1905-1975), Figure 6A. A
B
Figure 6. Stability landscapes
A. Epigenetic
landscape along C. H. Waddington. B.
Energy landscape
The illustration
(6A) from his book Organisers & Genes (1940) is explained as
follows: Waddington's
epigenetic
landscape is a metaphor for how gene regulation
determines development. One is asked to imagine a
number of marbles rolling down a hill towards a wall.
The marbles will compete for the grooves on the slope,
and come to rest at the lowest points. These points
represent the eventual cell fates, that is, tissue
types. Obviously, the same
can be said about memes of different ideologies. The
ideology landscape generates certain types of
behavior, which are stable in the corresponding
ideological environment. They could clash with
a different environment, as sometimes happens with
immigrants. I
use this digression to emphasize the
universality of stability as the abstract
counterpart of energy in physics (Figure 6B).
It is time to reveal
my personal tilt. I am
whole-heartedly, although only instinctively, for
limited growth, preservation of nature, and minimizing
waste. What thermodynamics tells me, however, is that
to counter the powerful natural will to grow, we need
to use more energy, consume more resources, and to
write more checks. The prospect of a war against
growth is ghastly because it is a war against our own
human nature. I also realize that the occasional
excess is the spice of life, while the regular excess
is just routine and needs more and more excess. If so, any proponent
of anti-growth cannot rely on rational arguments. We
simply do not know what is going to happen if we rein
in our inborn will to grow. Anti-growth can be just
another suicide cult or a pretext for violence. If we
cannot indefinitely grow energy production, then let evolution
(economics calls it market) take its course
and just hope that adaptation will prevail. Anyway,
dinosaurs had adapted as lizards). All the more, it is
absolutely hopeless to fight evolution. By definition,
evolution is what happens in the end. I suspect,
however, that the role of ideas in human evolution is
largely unclear. We can evaluate it post factum,
but not in situ nascendi , when we need
it most. I am for
conservation, prudence, frugality, against waste,
against aggressive litter of disposable gadgets and
toys, theft of time, dumbing down, and voluntary
slavery of being wired and always on call. Am I
a retrograde grouch? Quite possibly. Another
possibility is that I have a hypertrophied instinct of
freedom and feel aversion to the prospect of becoming
a part of a machine or a herd. But whatever
anybody is for, there is someone who is against it or
there is the only someone whose opinion matters. Growth is what most
people want, do, and celebrate. It is here.
Anti-growth is what some dissidents and apostates
want, do, and celebrate, probably, only because it is
not there. Anti-growth means to keep growth in check,
which may require as much energy as growth. A pure idea itself
is beyond quantification. On the contrary,
the meme of the idea is as much prone to growth
in a population of minds as crabgrass among lawn
grass. If not rational,
than what kind of argument can I present for
anti-growth? 9. WHY NOT TO
GROW ![]() probably, by non-acting (wu wei
in Taoism). How can we justify
anti-growth if, indeed, thermodynamics does not say
anything nice about the future of us, humans? I
do not have rational arguments for anti-growth. I do
not have even any personal interest in it. I confess
of having some strong atavistic instincts of growth. ![]() A
B
I want to stretch my
legs. I want privacy. The food and water are
limited. The fuel in the tanks is limited. What should
I do? I do not ask "What we should do?" because there
is no "we." When the fuel nears the end, who is
going to be jettisoned to keep the balloon in the air?
The scientist, who can divert energy from the
sunlight? The dictator, who could maintain
order? The free thinker? The unbeliever? The
Hummer monster? The computer, which does not take too
much energy and does not whine for water? Me, who
keeps to himself? I have to grow
myself into "we," grow that "we," and make sure
we do not believe anymore in growth. We
have to land, to find a place under the sun, and to
think what to do next, and, probably, how to escape
the Inquisition of Holy Growth, with the blueprints of
our minds stored in Google's web search records.
It is
remarkable that not only the arthritic Microsoft but
also the young Google, whom I noticed and embraced
right after his birth, are being discussed today in
connection with evil. I realize that my
antipathy to growth does not make any logical,
scientific, economic, or any other sense. Anti-growth,
or Tao—it is just a blind
moral principle, double-edged, like any blind moral
principle, even “do not kill” that can turn
suicidal. Waste of energy and matter,
disposal of able man-made things, waste of human time
and attention are in my overheated imagination the
next level below murder. Economics captivates and unnerves me. Is it just a modern religion with the only commandment: grow and multiply? Is it an ideology of extremes, polarities, and contrasts, the wind that fans up the new world fire in which oil, nature, vehicles, and lives are burning? Is Confucianism, with its commandment of the Middle Road, a kind of anti-economics? Didn't it bring to power Mao and his frenzy of destruction, as well as the post-Mao frenzy of construction? Economic growth was as much an obsession of Soviet Communism as it has been of capitalism. Disruption, the new buzzword of business, associates in my mind with the Soviet slogan of destruction of the old |