Krasylov, 1997. Метаэкология-27. Развитие

CONCLUSION. Metabomass. Metamorphmass.

V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. M.: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 pp. Part 27.

Development.

Development. It is not enough to state development in a spiral. It is necessary to explain, without resorting to overly abstract schemes, why the evolutionary sequence has this particular form. The mechanism of removing the climax phase of biological communities and bringing relatively primitive pioneer species to the forefront was discussed above. Similar processes accompany economic crises, which primarily destroy highly specialized industries. Parallels are also possible with the evolution of metaecological systems, in which crisis phenomena are accompanied by the removal of a layer of high culture (Cretan due to the military defeat of the Trojans, Babylonian, partially destroyed by the Persians, Hellenistic under the blows of barbarians, and, recently, Russian, destroyed by social cataclysms), which exposes more stable layers of grassroots culture. According to the laws of thermodynamics, the work of a system is equal to the loss of free energy, directly related to internal energy – the sum of the energies of all structural elements. The specific manifestations of these regularities are very diverse. Biological species specialize and lose evolutionary plasticity. Spiritual life develops from the omnipotence of the magical will of the individual to dependence on impersonal will, fate, and then – to voluntary spiritual enslavement. Rituals obscure faith, canonized beauty loses its appeal, morality, enshrined in law and protected by law enforcement agencies, leaves the sphere of ethics, because moral action is possible only in a situation of free choice. Marital love gives way to marital duties. In personal life, the romantic period is limited to early youth, giving way to the conservative, the threshold of death. Far-reaching processes of this kind require an external impetus to overcome them. In nature, these are most often cosmic and geological influences that disrupt the ecological climax; in metaecology, they are invasions of primitive warring metaphysics, brought on the point of a spear (thus, the Aryan invasion exploded the ossified Semitic theocracy, the Mahabharata gave birth to Buddhism, the Trojan War – Homeric ethics, the Peloponnesian War – Platonism, Judaism – Christianity). In all these cases, destructive impulses go from inert matter to living matter (cosmic and geological influences causing biosphere crises, see Chapter 5) and from material to spiritual (wars, economic catastrophes causing a metaecosystem crisis), creative ones – in the opposite direction. Destruction as a way to clear the path for the new is necessary only in the early stages of evolution due to the rigidity of the structure of forming systems. A more flexible structure of evolutionarily advanced systems allows for crisis-free development. Thus, at the dawn of civilization, the paradox of high productivity of spiritual life arose with a small metabiomass of living culture, which was subject to rapid petrification in the form of taboos, rituals, traditions, standards, and paradigms. These sacred cows produced so much dung that only a reversed flow, like in the Augean stables, could wash it away. Since then, the idea of the need to reject the old to make way for the new has taken root. But this is not the only and not the main path of development. It is more rational, as the experience of biological evolution shows, to constantly increase the metabiomass, drawing all accumulated diversity of ideas into circulation, protecting them from both ideological selection and ossification in mass culture. The scheme of development at the cost of destruction is mandatory only for systems in which the inert component dominates and disappears with an increase in the proportion of living matter. No one can forever establish the ratio of these components – what is primary and what is secondary – as it changes in the process of development. Man emerged from the animal world when the spiritual principle prevailed over the material. This was the case throughout ancient history, and only the last period, the darkest, was marked by reversed proportions. It is precisely for this period that violence as an impetus for development is characteristic. But the chain of cause and effect – from natural resources to the economy, to social relations, to spiritual life – is already unfolding before our eyes in the reverse direction. The general regularity of system evolution is the transition of conflict relations to cooperation. The interaction of nucleotide and protein particles probably began as parasitism. Over time, the former turned into a programming device that reproduces its protein environment – the organism. This is a model of optimal relations with the environment that humanity must adopt. Homeostatic mechanisms that ensure stability eventually appear in a system. Life on Earth has overcome a series of crises, during which hundreds of thousands of species have become extinct. According to the logic of development, this expensive process should eventually transition to more rational forms. The emergence of reason in the course of evolution, capable of storing and processing information about the state of the entire biosphere, had the same systemic goal as genetic coding in individual development: ensuring stable reproduction. We are experiencing an early stage of the formation of a biosphere ethic, which clarifies the meaning of self-restraints preached by all religions. But humanity still has to realize its historical mission as the guardian of the biosphere, just as an individual has the mission of developing an ecosystem according to the following (and probably many, not accounted for here) positions. Vitalization. The paleontological record has preserved numerous layers of fossilized ecosystems. From past civilizations, stone ruins have remained. But, having become facts of spiritual culture, all these accumulations of stones were drawn into the development of thought, received a second life. Therefore, resurrection from the dead is possible. We have already become convinced that the history of life is not a meaningless "leapfrog" of species. For hundreds of millions of years, living space has expanded and become more densely populated with diverse species. Primitive organisms produced a huge number of practically identical copies. Mass mortality was (and remains in lower forms) a necessary mechanism for population regulation. With low biomass, the first ecosystems generated impressive volumes of mortmass. Subsequent steps changed these proportions, increasing the efficiency of resource utilization, the energy contribution to offspring, and the protection of each individual life. Gene recombination during sexual reproduction compensated for defects inherited from one of the parents. Society took care of the weak and the sick. Metaphysics provided refuge for the rejected. As a result, ternary systems paid a smaller tribute to death, the ratio of dead and living in them shifted in favor of the latter. In light of this, the evolution of organisms and human existence gains meaning. This is a measure that allows us to evaluate alternative life models. Here I want to remind you of the existence of a fairly wide range of life models that have entered the system of Western culture as its supporting elements. This is the solar model of rise – fall – purification – rebirth, the oldest and therefore leaving a deep mark on consciousness; the Homeric model of testing fate; the Platonic model of serving the system as a cog; the romantic model of asserting individuality by destroying the system; the mixed Platonic-romantic model, which allows individual rebellion in early life provided that the social debt is paid later; its development into the Faustian model of a second life based on natural rhythms; the heroic model – a duel with the last enemy, death; the Stoic model – the path to death through simplification and suffering; the Epicurean model – ataraxia, avoidance of suffering; and, finally, Nirvana – exiting the game. Everyone can use these and other models to build their own. Transsystemicity. Any system limits the freedom of its components. A developed personality strives for systemic constraints and simultaneously finds the possibility of biological, social, and spiritual realization only in an adequately developed society; outside of it, like Robinson Crusoe, it is doomed to exhibit the most primitive and, in essence, impersonal qualities. Escape from the system is Nirvana, non-being, achievable only through the systematic destruction of all manifestations and traces of personal existence. The striving for freedom is paradoxical. One can convince oneself that true freedom lies in conscious limitation, but the feeling of freedom will not increase. Since a person cannot exist without entering into certain relationships with nature, the man-made world of things, family, professional environment, secular society, state, cultural environment, then, freeing himself from one system, he thereby plunges deeper into another. It is difficult to break free from their embrace. Even Jesus had to use a sword for this purpose. Inner freedom, as a rule, means the self-affirmation of one part of the personality at the expense of another. So what is the meaning of the eternal striving for freedom? It seems, only not to allow one of the systems, be it nature, society, or culture, to completely absorb a person, for one side of the personality to subordinate the other. The freedom realistically available to a person is transsystemic and consists in simultaneous belonging to different systems and not to any one of them separately. Horizontal. Schemes "god – human – nature", "religious – ethical – aesthetic", "noosphere – technosphere – biosphere", "spirit – consciousness – matter", as well as their opposites, reflect a hierarchical – vertical – orientation in human consciousness. The vertical is, in one way or another, transferred to relations between people, excluding true equality and indicating the path upwards as the meaning of life. This orientation could be transformed by replacing the vertical with a horizontal in the relations between spiritual, social, and natural systems (this idea is metaphorically expressed in the advent of the Son of Man, brotherly relations between God and people). The horizontal should also be maintained in relations between generations, traditionally looking at each other from top to bottom or bottom to top (we are concerned about the irresponsibility and pragmatism of the current youth, and they – about the backwardness and hypocrisy of the older generation). Those who sacrifice themselves for the future will not raise worthy successors. No one has the right to demand such a sacrifice, because generations are equal. Those who violate natural and cultural heritage are no less grossly violating this principle, as they are putting the next generation in worse conditions. These considerations allow us to consider the principle of the horizontal as an element of biosphere ethics. Uniqueness. In natural systems, each species occupies a specific ecological niche, differing in at least one parameter from the niches of other species. Aphorisically, one species – one niche. The more niches overlap, the sharper the competition, and species with completely identical niches cannot coexist. Therefore, niche non-correspondence is a principle of coexistence. All this also applies to the social system, whose primitive caste structure generates masses of indistinguishable people who act as certain multifaceted creatures. The theory that the disappearance of the caste system occurs as a result of the struggle of lower castes for equality belongs to the number of persistent historical errors. The destruction of the caste system while maintaining a large number of socially similar people, i.e., masses, only leads to a sharp intensification of competitive relations, a struggle of everyone against everyone, which ends with the formation of new castes. The path to equality through unification (to be like everyone is to be equal to everyone) turned out to be a dead end. It seems more promising to move in the opposite direction: towards equality through difference. The disappearance of castes can occur only as a result of the complication of the social structure, the emergence of a large number of new niches, and the reduction of their overlaps. More and more people can thereby manifest their natural peculiarities, genetic uniqueness at the social level. As a result, the mass disintegrates, striving for the limiting level of social individualization: one individual – one niche. In connection with a special socio-cultural niche, uniqueness arises, which excludes vertical relationships: it is impossible to be more or less unique. Since socially significant traits have a complex polygenic-genetic nature, the genetic uniqueness of each human being can in principle be realized at the socio-cultural level as the uniqueness of a human personality. Then archaic mechanisms of competition and natural selection will die out. As in natural systems, dominance will dissolve in diversity, vertical relationships between humans and God, humans and nature will transition to horizontal ones, and humans will strive to occupy a special place, not the highest. Rationalism. Spiritual development has gone through a series of stages, including the magical one, in which the world was imagined as a clash of wills, the fatalistic one, when systemic connections appeared under the guise of inevitable fate, and the theocratic one, which defined the goal of development as the dissolution of individual souls in the world soul. We still believe, at least five percent, that fate cannot be escaped and that the future is a certain depot into which our life train enters on pre-laid tracks. Primitive magic hides under the guise of the philosophy of free will, ancient fatalism asserts conscious necessity as the basis of ethics. But, retaining a multilayered structure, the soul evolves towards the rationalization of deeper, archaic layers. Since ancient times, the competence of reason in ethical matters has been subjected to not entirely unfounded doubt. If we talk about innate – instinctive – ethics, then attempts to transfer it to a conscious level could destroy it, which is what happened in practice. The dull Ajax is morally superior to the cunning Odysseus. Therefore, it was important that the categorical imperatives that replaced ethical instincts had an imperative character. In any case, it turned out to be more reliable to entrust ethical teaching to an illiterate fisherman than to an intellectual from the Pharisees. The appearance (in the Middle Ages) and circulation (to this day) of the literary thief-scientist shows how incompatible intellect and morality seemed. Science, trying to understand human nature with an imperfect tool, did not find a moral law in it. The reaction to this failure was the extensive moralizing literature of the second half of the 19th century. "Reason discovered the struggle for existence, but could not discover love, because it is unreasonable." However, attempts to remove ethics from the course of intellectual development, undertaken to protect the ideals of humanism, led to world moral catastrophes, which the twentieth century witnessed. We now know more about the laws of system development, in which ethical norms arise as a condition for productive interaction between elements. In the biosphere system, the human species occupies a special place due to the development of intellect, which opens up the possibility of moral choice. The latter implies an understanding of the goals derived from the analysis of evolutionary trends. Local teaching turned into a world ethical system thanks to a former Pharisee, not a fisherman. Primary ethical norms, either imposed by the creator or inherited from animals, lost the organic nature of innate instincts with the development of consciousness. They can regain it as an achievement of reason.

CONCLUSION. Metabomass. Metamass.

V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. M.: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 pp. Part 27.

Development.