| �A man coins not a new word without some peril; for if it happens to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is assured.� So wrote Ben Jonson, and so quoted Arthur Koestler on page 48 of his The Ghost in the Machine (1967). Koestler inserted the quotation to express the uneasiness he felt at suggesting a neologism. The very useful word he coined��holon��seems to have gone tragically underappreciated, while Koestler has, I suspect, not received much in the way of scorn for his impudence (at least in this respect). Jonson was wrong. A man coins not a new word without some peril, it�s true. But the nature of the peril is this: if it happens to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the coiner gets not even scorn. What is a holon? Coined from the Greek holos (whole) and the diminutive suffix -on (after the pattern of proton, electron, etc.), the term holon �may be applied to any stable biological or social sub-whole which displays rule-governed behavior.� Koestler writes: Parts and wholes in an absolute sense do not exist in the domain of life.... The organism is to be regarded as a multi-leveled hierarchy of semi-autonomous sub-wholes, branching into sub-wholes of a lower order, and so on. Sub-wholes on any level of the hierarchy are referred to as holons. Biological holons are self-regulating open systems which display both the autonomous properties of wholes and the dependent properties of parts. This dichotomy is present on every level of every type of hierarchic organization, and is referred to as the Janus Effect.... The concept of holon is intended to reconcile the atomistic and holistic approaches. (Appendix I.1; scrambled somewhat for conciseness.) The first third of Koestler�s book, the section titled �Order,� is dedicated to the concept of the holon, and his introduction to open hierarchic system theory. The versatility and universality of the holon concept should have guaranteed its entry into the language. Its prevalence in all ordered, i.e. hierarchic, systems, and particularly biological organisms, Koestler illustrates through the parable of the two watchmakers, Mekhos and Bios. Their watches are of equal quality and of equal complexity (a thousand pieces each) but their methods of production differ. Bios builds durable sub-units of ten pieces each, ten of which can be joined together to create a secure sub-assembly of one-hundred pieces�and ten sub-assemblies, of course, make one complete watch. Mekhos, on the other hand, adds one piece at a time, seriatim; as such, any interruption requires him to start afresh. Bios�s method is clearly superior not just because an interruption will only set him back, at most, nine steps (versus Mekhos�s possible 999), but because Bios�s watches will tend to be much sturdier than Mekhos�s. �It is easy to show mathematically that if a watch consists of a thousand bits, and if some disturbance occurs at an average of once in every hundred assembling operations�then Mekhos will take four thousand times longer to assemble a watch than Bios. Instead of a single day, it will take him eleven years.� Consequently, Bios�s business thrives, while Mekhos barely manages to scrape by. Biological systems (Bios), in other words, are not just vortices of chance patterns constrained by deterministic mechanical laws (Mekhos); they are hierarchic systems made up of Janus-faced, quasi-independent holons. In �Becoming,� the second part of the book, Koestler discusses evolution in holarchic terms, citing organelles (e.g. mitochondria) and homologous organs (e.g. the human arm and the bird�s wing) as examples of evolutionary holons�sub-units which appear, with striking similarity, across countless discrete species. Just as nearly every company has an IT department, every cell has chemical power plants which extract energy from food. And just as automobile designers do not overhaul but rather perform variations on basic components such as the engine, chassis, or suspension system, evolution progresses by making small changes to existing tried and true mechanisms�the arm of the human, the wing of the bird, the leg of the dog, and the flipper of the seal, however different in appearance or function, are all made of bones, muscles, and blood vessels. This tendency to recycle old parts has its risks as well as its obvious benefits, however. The legacy systems don�t always interact smoothly with the enhancements. This is essentially the thesis of the third part of the book, �Disorder�: that it is not unreasonable to assume that, considering the �explosive rate of the brain�s development, which so widely overshot its mark, something may have gone wrong ... More precisely, that the lines of communication between the very old and the brand-new structures were not developed sufficiently to guarantee their harmonious interplay, the hierarchic co-ordination of instinct and intelligence.� In short, Koestler blames the dominance of instinct over intellect�the latter�s subservience to the former as physiologically manifest in the neocortex�s subjection to the brain�s more reptilian limbic systems�for not only humanity�s spectacular social and moral cataclysms, but the halting, erratic progress of science as well. The �passionate neighing of affect-based beliefs� prevent us from listening to the voice of reason. This is why all moral exhortation, all efforts of persuasion by reasoned argument, are doomed to failure; they rely on the implicit assumption that homo sapiens, though occasionally blinded by emotion, is a basically rational animal, aware of the motives of his own actions and beliefs�an assumption which is untenable in the light of both historical and neurological evidence. All such appeals fall on barren ground; they could take root only if the ground were prepared by a spontaneous change in human mentality all over the world�the equivalent of a major biological mutation. The solution to our predicament is sketched out and advocated by Koestler in the final few pages of The Ghost in the Machine; it is, to put it succinctly, a pharmacological one. Readers will bristle at the contentious, and some might say contemptible, declaration that mankind�s only hope for long-term survival is through medication, but to me the answer seems logical enough. If we agree that something has gone awry in our phylogenetic development, and it seems an anodyne enough hypothesis, then nothing short of �tampering with human nature� can rectify the pathology of our species, which has been so garishly demonstrated in holocaust after holocaust. And as Koestler is himself quick to point out, we tamper with our nature every day, and have done so �ever since the first hunter wrapped his shivering frame into the hide of a dead animal.� It could be argued that part of our problem has been tampering: Pasteur et al. tampered on a microscopic level, and with colossal repercussions. No one would seriously propose a voluntary abjuration of antibiotics, however, in order to cull the herd a bit. We can only move forward. Let�s be explicit: we are considering an overpopulated, irrational, imbalanced species equipped with the ability to manufacture weapons of genosuicidal magnitude�an ability which will not evaporate: As the devices of atomic and biological warfare become more potent and simpler to produce, their spreading to young and immature, as well as old and over-ripe, nations is inevitable. An invention, once made, cannot be dis-invented; the bomb has come to stay. Mankind has to live with it forever: not merely through the next crisis and the next one, but forever; not through the next twenty or two hundred or two thousand years, but forever. It has become part of the human condition. �The Promethean myth,� Koestler goes on, �has acquired an ugly twist: the giant reaching out to steal the lightning from the gods is insane.� With this in mind, the advent of a suggestibility-curbing pill��an artificially simulated, adaptive mutation to bridge the rift between the phylogenetically old and new brain, between instinct and intellect, emotion and reason,� to �counteract misplaced devotion and that militant enthusiasm, both murderous and suicidal, which we see reflected in the pages of the daily newspaper��seems relatively benign. We cannot ask people to be more rational, more thoughtful, less susceptible to blind passion, bigotry, murderous devotion. I sympathize with Koestler�s proposal, but I am pessimistic as to its practicality. And I think he might have overlooked the possibility that suggestibility and subservience to the affect-based beliefs might be the very epoxies holding society together�for better or for worse. Consider Heinrich Eichmann who, as Koestler observes, �was not a monster or a sadist, but a conscientious bureaucrat, who considered it his duty to carry out his orders and believed in obedience as the supreme virtue; far from being a sadist, he felt physically sick on the only occasion when he watched the Zircon gas at work.� He was, in other words, the perfect cog, a smoothly functioning holon in something larger than himself. He was a good citizen in a bad society. Where exactly does his sin lie? Where his pathology? �War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars; and loyalty is a noble thing.� And Solzhenitsyn wrote: Ideology�that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others� eyes, so that he won�t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.... Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Perhaps here�s a way of daring to insist that evildoers do not exist: by declaring, instead, that only bureaucrats exist. We could move up the hierarchy and blame everything on its head (Hitler in this case) but frequently the hierarchy has no head�perhaps there is only an amorphous board of directors; perhaps the hierarchy is open-ended�and of course no hierarchy operates in a vacuum, and no hierarchy can function without its sub-holons. Eichmann, we feel compelled to say, was as culpable as anyone�i.e., fully, or not at all. In him, perhaps, we are given a glimpse of the true nature of contemporary �evil�: conscientious bureaucracy; obedience as the supreme virtue. The integrative tendency, the desire to transcend the self, the desire to belong, to fit in, to function as a part of some larger organization, to serve something larger than the petty ego�this is what stymies intellectual progress and permits wars and pogroms. Death camps cannot be implemented without a stable hierarchic society to carry out the plan; humans cannot exterminate one another on such a cosmic scale without first getting along. �The self-assertive behaviour of the group is based on the self-transcending behaviour of its members, which often entails sacrifice of personal interests and even of life in the interest of the group. To put it simply: the egotism of the group feeds on the altruism of its members.� This is the most important revelation in Koestler�s book: that the virtuous, self-denying, self-transcending, integrative urges are far more dangerous than the self-assertive ones. And this urge to integrate, to belong, to blindly submit to the rules of the social holon you belong to, is the warp and the woof of the fabric of society. It may well be instinctual�it may well be written in our genes�because it is implicit, inescapable, a necessity in any hierarchic system. The human individual is truly Janus-faced because his or her self-assertive and integrative inclinations are at odds, true, but also mutually dependent. To do what�s best for your group is in fact what�s best for you; self-surrender is self-preservation. If the body dies, so do all of its cells. What would we have had Eichmann do? We fancy that we can imagine a scenario in which his refusal to administrate the death camps (a pang of conscience prompted, in our thought experiment, by Koestler�s Pill, perhaps) might have made some difference. �He could have conscientiously objected,� we say from the smug safety of our armchair. And then what? He probably would have been exterminated, and someone with less compunctions, someone with a stronger desire to fit in, put in his place. Hegel has said that �What experience and history teach us is this�that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.� If this is true, it is probably unnecessary to pose this question: Have any of us learned anything from, for example, the Holocaust? How would we, as people or governments, prevent a repeat? We glibly take it for granted that nothing so horrific, and in so recent memory, can have failed to make us a little more jaded, a little less naïve, a little less susceptible to mass hysteria or national insanity�and we leave it at that. Here�s all we�ve really learned: Nazis�bad. Hitler�real bad. Case closed. But of course the next Nazis will not call themselves Nazis; the next Hitler won�t have the mustache. What we should have learned, perhaps, is that our suggestibility needs to be curbed; that each of us has an obligation to be extremely careful about which holons we allow ourselves to be subsumed by; that our integrative tendencies need to be reined and restrained. Before we resort to pharmacology, we should presumably attempt education. So maybe we should be indoctrinating our children with the belief that blindly accepting indoctrination can be disastrous. �Oh. You see the problem. Koestler�s Pill, or any equivalent thereof, might well dissolve society. If we were properly critical, properly rational, all the time, if we took nothing on faith, we would never learn. The paradox is that the march of science is founded on credulity. Specialization, which has become more or less prerequisite to progress in any field, is a hierarchic branching out and narrowing down of knowledge. If every generation of physicists had to rediscover the electron, no one would have ever got to the quark; if I paused to evaluate, to impugn, to prove every one of the �statements of fact� I�ve received from parents and professors, television and textbooks, over the course of my lifetime I would probably never have graduated from high school. In fact I am critical of very little. How could I afford to be? We stand like Newton on the shoulders of giants but only because we trust the giants enough to get up on their shoulders�when of course they could dash us to the earth if they so desired. Jacob Empson has written (in Sleep and Dreaming): Rather than modern Western beliefs being less mystic than those in antiquity, or in underdeveloped communities, they seem equally if not more so than some. It could be argued that the very incomprehensibility of the modern world has made us even more credulous. Many of the quite commonplace products of modern technology might as well be magic, for all that any normal person could be expected to understand how they work. The human race is an unfathomably complex network of overlapping open-ended hierarchies; it is a juggernaut trundling forth, with no one at the helm. And so too is each one of us. How can it be otherwise? This is one of the best books I've read in a while. Koestler's erudition, humanity, and prose are nonpareil. Read it and make up your own mind -- it's your moral imperative. |
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