Resilience : Introduction: Things and processes

A systems view of biological health

Section 1: Introduction

4 : Things and processes

Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 : also see my full Copyright statement.

You will find a spattering of slightly unfamiliar use of English throughout. I have deliberately used terms (such as relationality, mutuality, meaning-making) that imply a mobile process rather than a fixed “thing”. [1]

Because the Living body-mind is not a thing – it is a continuous process from well before the moment of the first spark of cell division to well after the last breath leaves the mouth.

Organic life is a process that has an atomic continuity back to the very origins of the physical universe; and exists in a continuity of Life that goes back a few billion years - at least as far as the archaeo-bacterium that was the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) - if there really was such an organism.

Life exhibits a continuity in which, like a river, the overt appearance hardly varies, but everything continuously changes and adapts. It finds its optimum position in the Landscape it flows through; occupies a position between the soft moist darkness of the Earth and the brightness of the sky and Heavens, reflecting the light from an infinity of stars; and finds companionship in everything else living.

Western civilisations have been thing-oriented for several hundred years now, but increasingly so since the second half of the 20th century, as our ways of thinking have shifted so that we can make best use of the technology we are surrounded by. Technology can enhance human life, but can also be an end in itself - and can create a mindset which revolves around the technology instead of around life-processes. Language itself is a technology, and the technological-mindset is reflected in language, technological language becomes normalised, and then the non-living mindset also becomes normalised. This deep flaw in Western cultures has been seen by a few people on the inside [2], but particularly by indigenous peoples observing from outside [3].

Re-gaining a life-oriented (process-oriented instead of object-oriented) way of thinking and experiencing (despite the continued use of a thing-oriented language) requires attention to nuances. It is something of a bootstrapping process - beginning to experience the external living world more, beginning to experience the inner living world more, and so on, repeating, repeating. There is a gradual re-gaining of the capacity to experience the embodied self, the self as part of a greater whole, and the greater whole as also wishing to relate to and communicate with the self.

References & Notes

1) Particularly see the work of Iain McGilchrist - The Master and his Emissary (2009), Ways of Attending (2017) and The Matter with Things (2021). Also on YouTube

2) A few authors worth looking at who have been able to useful re-frame the usual ways of seeing:

an economics perspective by David Graeber (2013) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House Publishing ISBN-13: 978-1612191294, available inline as a PDF at https://github.com/advancedresearch/mix_economy/issues/19.
a historical perspective, looking at how civilisations become brittle by having excessively rigid (i.e. inorganic) interconnections by Josephine Quinn (2024) How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History. Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN-13: 978-1526605184
similar socio-historical analyses by Eric Cline and Paul Cooper, and
a book about the drift into technological thinking : Neil Postman (1993) Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage Books ISBN-13: 978-0679745402, reviewed here. I tend to think of this as the Everest effect - we use tech because we can, enjoying the positive gains without considering the (often lateral) consequent negative implications, considering whether the balance is a net gain, and being largely unable to walk backwards and de-technologise when net gain is found to be negative. There are very few examples of reversal - asbestos, heavy metals, thalidomide and tobacco, and all came about only with a huge effort, as techno-economic influences tend to outweigh individual personal/societal damage. Postman is one of a wide range of authors currently revisting and expanding Rachel Carson's “Silent Spring”
The 20th Century philosopher Simone Weil and her advocate Irish author and philosopher Iris Murdoch. Weil in particular pointed out that the idea of “rights” requires a supportive sociopolitical power structure, and so ultimately removes people from their own sense of personal agency. A more “natural” arrangement being a sense of moral responsibility based on humility. She highlighted the way that a loss of humility arising from a belief in God resulted in humans thinking that we are Gods - I would say particularly when creating and applying technology, but also in the wielding of economic power. And Weil saw true humanity as fundamentally requiring a conscious quality of good-willed attentive engagement such that we could both be truly alive and truly supportive of others.

3) For example, see the documentary Journey to the Heart of the World or the work of Darcia Narvaez, or “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2020), Penguin ISBN-13: 978-0141991955, or the linguitstics hypothesis of Benjamin Lee Whorf. .