What Comes After Money

by Daniel Pinchbeck

  Instead, our modernist belief in the power of reductionism to develop knowledge led us to think that the successive steps of the reductionist definition are a disclosure of the truth about being human. We consequently came to regard the material aspect of human beings as more real or more fundamental, and therefore more important and more valuable than other qualities. But the more we see ourselves as material constructs, the more we will begin to treat each other as if this is what we value most about each other.

  There are many signs that this has happened, and has become one of the distinguishing marks of modernity. We say that nothing other than materiality exists, and that this is self-evidently true. We deny nonmaterial aspects of ourselves, dissociating ourselves from our own nature. We no longer see uniquely human qualities because we do not take them seriously anymore. We do not treat them as real in themselves, or as representing primary value; we say that they only exist as a by-product of material processes. And as we become dead to various human qualities in ourselves, and in others, our society begins to be less and less accommodating to certain aspects of being human. This is the predicament described in The Trap.

  We are living in a predominantly modernist culture that admires material and mechanistic qualities more than human ones. It places great value on the qualities of machines—their speed, precision, and efficiency—and we often see these as better than human attributes. In many contexts we aspire to be as much like machines as possible, and sometimes we actually wish to be machines, devising robotic implants and dreaming that we will be able to upload our consciousness to silicon and defy death.

  The shift to this outlook has been gradual, and largely without our noticing we have ceased to appreciate fully what it is to be human. So much so that this assertion itself may seem questionable, in spite of our uneasy awareness that it does carry some kind of meaning that we cannot quite pin down. The changes, these reductions in the way we see ourselves, have crept up on us gradually. We did not see them coming and we do not notice how they alter the way we see the world and how we behave toward each other. But we do see that there are social problems we do not know how to fix, and perhaps we sense that the full depth of experiencing life has somehow been diminished.

  REDUCTIONISM AND THE PROBLEM OF THE WHOLE

  Reductionism has not only had an unintended social impact, but it also limits our ability to find solutions to the problem of technological impact on the natural environment. It also helped create this problem in the first place. The effectiveness of reductionism in generating practical knowledge enabled us to develop advanced technologies, which have been a major force behind the exponential growth of industrialization and the spread of modernity. We used our knowledge almost exclusively to create disrelated instances of applied technology, such as consumer products and infrastructure projects, which we put into the world without any special thought for their impact on the whole context, the larger natural and social environment.

  For most of the industrial period the larger environmental context was simply not an issue. When industrialization began, it was a small development in a vast world that was patterned in ways far beyond human influence or understanding. We simply took for granted the preexisting structures and processes that organized the world. Even as we poured technology into the world, we thought the pattern of the whole would simply take care of itself.

  This was true up to a point, while the scale of industrial activity compared to the rest of the world remained small, but from sometime in the 1970s onward the relentless growth of the industrial economy began to overtake the scale of the biosphere itself. After the 1970s, according to the World Wildlife Fund, we began to consume renewable natural resources faster than the global capacity to regenerate them. This vast scale of operation meant that the total collection of technologies that had been deployed began to disrupt the preexisting pattern of the whole.

  The problem with reductionism is that it generates knowledge about parts that is capable of disrupting the whole, but this knowledge does not work the other way round to help us to bring order to the whole. This is illustrated by the way the structure of a living organism does not arise from its separated parts being put together to form a whole, but from the emergence of its parts in the context of a whole that exists from the outset. Yet so far almost all scientific exploration has been biased toward the parts rather than the whole. This gives us detailed knowledge of the parts, but little insight into how we might fix the disruption that is caused by the bias in our focus. To address the “problem of the whole” we need to find a way of appreciating the value of wholes as wholes. Until we can rebalance the value we put on the whole versus the parts we will not be able to heal the pathology caused by the entire system of human socio-technical organization—the disruption of the whole.

  REDUCTIONISM AND SUSTAINABILITY

  These two problems, our picture of human beings as material constructs, and the pathology of the whole, come together as a problem of sustainability. Disruption to the pattern of the whole is a direct threat to the sustainability of present-day human society. This means reductionist thinking is a key underlying source of unsustainability in the world today.

  This link between reductionism and sustainability should not be surprising. There is a connection between our understanding of what it is to be human and our ability to sustain our lives. If there is a distortion in our picture of ourselves, our sense of our needs will also be distorted, and this will affect our ability to sustain ourselves. This happens through the way we make choices to meet our needs.

  One of the attributes of being human is our ability to choose. Most of us, most of the time, choose to sustain our lives, to keep them going. If our lives are in danger, we will do our best to save ourselves. On a day-to-day basis we choose to sustain ourselves by making sure our needs are met.

  Our ability to do this of course depends on our being able to accurately identify and value our various needs. Because in the modernist worldview we consider the material or physical level of description to be the most real, we value our needs at this level more highly than our needs at other levels. Since we naturally make the most effort to meet the needs we value most, we then tend to neglect or ignore the remaining needs.

  If we consistently and systematically fail to meet our full range of needs as human beings we are indirectly threatening our ability to sustain ourselves. This unsustainability may not be obvious immediately, because it mostly involves our nonmaterial needs, whereas a lack of basic material needs causes obvious problems faster. Nevertheless our shift from a holistic appreciation of human needs to a reduced appreciation is an underlying cause of the wider problem of systemic unsustainability.

  AN ANTIDOTE TO REDUCTIONISM

  Is there an antidote to our bias toward valuing the parts more highly than the whole? How can we restore our sense of the qualities of the whole, and bring ourselves back to a fuller appreciation of what it is to be human? Is there an alternative to reductionist thinking that would achieve this?

  Suppose we throw the sequence of reduction into reverse. Instead of working down the sequence of levels of description and ending up with material parts as the answer to our questions about the whole, we could work our way upward toward the whole, integrating into our understanding of the whole the properties we find at each level, and crucially, giving equal value to each of the levels.

  To demonstrate this approach we could take the human being as the paradigm, not least because it has more levels of qualitative reduction than any other whole system we know. We would first set out and then describe each of the levels of reduction. We would then see various human qualities revealed at each level. Our aim would be to achieve the sustainability of the whole, and to heal the pathology of the whole, and we have seen how that depends on valuing all our needs equally. We would therefore look for the needs we have at each level when our reality or our identity is considered at that level. This procedure would result in several groups of needs that are
qualitatively distinct. We would then bring these sets of needs together into an integrated whole picture, giving equal value to each set.

  This process would put all the steps of the reduction back together and build back up to a much more fully described sense of what it means to be human. The result would be a holistic sense of being human, with a balanced sense of all the needs we as humans value being able to meet. This integrated picture would provide a holistic sense of human value.

  HUMAN NEEDS AND THE LEVELS OF REDUCTION

  Here is how this process would look in practice. We start by setting out the steps of the reductionist description of a human being:

  (Level 0) The starting point: we experience ourselves as human beings.

  We ask: what is a human being?

  (Level -1) We answer by saying: human beings are advanced animals.

  We ask next: what are animals?

  (Level -2) We answer by saying: animals are systems of life processes.

  We ask next: what are life processes?

  (Level -3) We answer by saying: they are dynamic systems of atoms and molecules.

  This gives us four levels of description, starting at the top level with the whole human being, and ending at the bottom level with material components.

  Next, we build back up from the lowest level, observing the human qualities and needs that exist at each level in turn.

  At the third most reduced level (-3 above), we see the human being as an assembly of atoms. At this level our corresponding needs are the ones met by assemblies of atoms and material constructs. These include basic material requirements such as tools, clothes, and infrastructure for functions such as transport and shelter. At this level of human identity the highest meaning of things arises from their relation to our physical needs.

  At the second most reduced level (-2 above), we see the human being as a set of systems of life processes. At this level our corresponding needs are ones the ones met by systems of life processes. These include a viable biosphere to provide ongoing life support, and food composed of complex organic compounds. At this level of human identity the highest meaning of things arises from their relation to our biological needs.

  At the first most reduced level (-1 above), we see the human as being essentially an advanced animal. At this level our corresponding needs are the ones that we have in common only with animals. These include social contact, social organization, social reciprocity, membership of family groups, and emotional relationships. At this level of human identity the highest meaning of things arises from their relation to our social needs.

  At the nonreduced or whole level (0 above), we see the human being as uniquely itself, unlike anything else we can compare it with. At this level our corresponding needs are the ones met at this level, and unique to humans. Our uniquely human qualities and attributes include reflexive awareness, abstract knowledge, and the potential for impartial judgment. Our needs include education and justice, intellectual development, and aesthetic satisfaction. At this level of human identity the highest meaning of things arises from their relation to our uniquely human needs, what might be called our “cultural” or “civilizational” needs.

  We can go further and add one level beyond or “above” our experience as human beings. We could call this level (+1). This level relates to a question about our ultimate identity, about the meaning of being human. We are not able to answer this question definitively, since we cannot fathom the source of our own identity. But perhaps the best answer available to us is that we appear to be creative beings who develop an innate and open-ended individual potentiality and who therefore need to be free or unconstrained in this by other human beings. Our needs at this level are therefore for freedom of self-realization and self-actualization, in free response to the mystery of creation. At this level we might say, although it is hard to pin down an exact definition of the word, that the highest meaning of everything in human experience arises from its relation to our “spiritual” needs.

  This (+1) is not a level of reduction, since it cannot be found when reducing the system we are dealing with to a description of its parts. Science will therefore be unable to find it using reductionism as the research mode. Rather than being a reduction, it is at a level of integration higher than the whole we are examining, which is why it is referred to as “plus 1.” However paradoxical this may be, it is important to include it because it acknowledges something further about human beings. We are not only aware of ourselves as wholes with unique attributes, but we are also (at least from time to time) aware that there is something about us that goes beyond our everyday experience of life. At the very least we are reminded of this because we are repeatedly haunted by questions about our own identity. This (+1) level provides a way to accommodate the idea of the “spiritual” and allow for religious needs, without attempting to precisely define it. However, should we ever want to designate more complex structure in reality above the human (0) level, the “plus” notation can accommodate it by means of levels (+2), (+3) etc.

  The listing of needs at each level given here is intended to be indicative or illustrative, not exhaustive. Further exploration and questioning will no doubt clarify the general or common human needs at each level, and in addition there will be many specific needs existing in particular situations, locations, and times.

  REINTEGRATING A HOLISTIC VALUATION OF HUMAN NEEDS

  If we now take all these groups of needs and bring them together, we can approximate a holistic picture of human needs.2 Putting together just the needs listed above, the picture looks like this: As human beings our needs include material requirements such as tools, clothes, and infrastructure for functions such as transport and shelter; a viable biosphere to provide ongoing life support, and food composed of complex organic compounds; social contact, social organization, social reciprocity, membership of family groups, and emotional relationships; education and justice, intellectual development, and aesthetic satisfaction; and freedom of self-realization and self-actualization, in free response to the mystery of creation.

  In bringing together this holistic picture we are no longer trying to define or value these needs in terms of each other. In particular we are not trying to explain the higher ones in terms of the lower ones. The aim is not to explain, but to harmonize functioning wholes, which requires appreciation of the qualities of the functioning whole and the needs related to them. This means developing the ability to perceive and value all the attributes. The quality of being fully human will only be possible if all the qualities of being human are recognized, and the needs related to them are valued equally and fully met.

  We now have the necessary starting point for achieving whole system sustainability, a procedure for identifying and valuing our full range of needs as human beings. The next step is to consider how we might make use of this to meet those needs in the practical context of the world, bearing in mind that the existing pattern of the whole is increasingly disrupted, as described earlier. A more precise definition of the disruption would be that the world as a whole is no longer able to self-regulate in a manner that will meet human needs indefinitely. We are overshooting planetary limits, and the risk for us is that if we push the overshoot too far, the biospheric system may crash or instead self-regulate by sweeping us out of the picture—this is the “revenge of Gaia” scenario.3 What we are looking for therefore is a process that enables human beings to relate to the whole system of the world in such a way that it can self-regulate and indefinitely meet (or allow us to provide for) human needs as it does so.

  TOWARD A COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN PROCESS FOR SUSTAINABILITY

  As individual human beings, we look to our surroundings to meet many of our needs. Our need for clean air is met by the functioning of the biosphere, while our need for human contact is met through our association with other human beings. At an earlier stage of human history our needs were directly met through the natural functioning of the larger ecosystem in which we live, just as with animals
living in their natural habitat. As human societies developed, we created increasingly specialized economic and technological systems for meeting our needs—and the needs of some at the expense of others—and these operated inside and depended on the global set of natural ecosystems.

  These human-technology-based subsystems, which could be classed as ecostructures along with beavers’ dams and spiders’ webs,4 were developed without special thought about the functioning of the natural global ecosystem, because, as already discussed, in the early stages of industrial growth this kind of thinking simply wasn’t necessary. At our current stage, however, industry has grown to span the planet, and involves physical flows of material that are as large as the flows of material within the natural global ecosystem. It is now essential that we do address the impact we have on the whole context within which we operate—the planetary biogeochemical system, or more simply the natural global ecosystem.

  The “pathology of the whole” is a disturbance of the entire biosphere, as well being the social issue described in The Trap. Life of some kind will no doubt survive the present period despite our environmental depredations, but we as a species are far more fragile than life in general. Our practical concern as human beings is that the planet remains habitable for us, and for the highly developed ecosystems that support us, and that something close to our current civilization can continue. It is certainly not in our interest for the planetary eco-climatic conditions to break down. If Gaia “strikes back” by moving beyond the range we can tolerate, we will be in serious trouble.

  In principle it should be possible to maintain human civilization, for several reasons. One is that we can now make adequate material provision for everyone because our technological capability allows us to overcome the material scarcity that existed before. Basic resources are still unequally accessible only because social belief and politics are lagging behind our actual capability. The social and psychological work of overcoming our outdated and now dangerous belief in fundamental scarcity is one of the most important tasks of the present century. The brunt of this task is now to master collectively the emotions of fear and greed that are fed by the belief in scarcity and that drive much dysfunctional political and corporate decision-making.