The Ecological Age

Richard Ostrofsky
(November, 2005)
To call our period “modern” or “post-modern,” says nothing at all. The
adjective “modern” is defined as “of the present or recent times,” so post-
modern means merely “just after the most recent times.” On that definition,
every epoch of history is both modern and post-modern. To know more
clearly who and what we are, it might help to have a clearer sense of when
we are; and this question of a suitable tag for our present epoch has bugged
me for quite a while now. Some years ago, I wrote a piece for OSCAR
called What Comes After Modern,1 suggesting the name “Diasporan Age”
which nicely captures the diffusion and scattering so characteristic of this
era; but today I think I can do better. I suspect that future historians will
distinguish between a Mechanical Age, that began to end in the 19th
century, and an Organic or Ecological Age that began to emerge in the late
20th.
What I would call the Mechanical Age is usually known as the Scientific,
the Industrial or the Modern, but none of these terms serve to draw the
contrast with what is happening now. A real change of world view is
occurring, but there is no sign that either science or industry are being
superseded although their character is changing. We could speak of an
Information Age – and do – except that the concept of information is too
abstract to capture many people’s imagination, while the glamor of
information technology is already waning. The real paradigm shift is from a
Newtonian, clock-work universe, designed and governed from the top
down, to a spontaneously evolving, holarchic, ecological universe self-
organizing from the bottom up.
We think of the Mechanical Age as having commenced intellectually
with the discoveries of Galileo and Newton. Similarly, we can see the first
glimmerings of a new Ecological Age in Adam Smith’s recognition of the
self-organizing properties of a market, in the concept of democracy
(sovereignty and mandate flowing upward from the people), and in

1 See previous article.

Darwin’s idea of natural selection as the driver of adaptive change in
biological organisms. But these early departures from the paradigm of
mechanism were only the beginning. We are coming to understand all the
fundamental processes of life as instances of organic self-organization: the
development of the fertilized egg into a foetus and finally into an adult
organism; the spontaneous adaptation of a brain to the world it has to cope
with; the self-motivated, self-integrating evolution of technology, language,
culture and society; the dynamic balance and self-consistency of the bio-
sphere as a whole. From sub-atomic particles to galaxies and, it may be, to
whole universes,2 the same principles of bottom-up self-organization can be
discerned at every level. Paley's notorious “watchmaker argument” falls
down. As it turns out, you don’t need an injection of intelligence from the
outside to build complexity in a system; order can arise and accumulate
spontaneously due, most fundamentally, to a single very simple tautology,
that “Longer lasting patterns last longer than patterns that last not so long,”
in Gregory Bateson’s words. Of this very general principle, Darwinian
natural selection is only an important special case. Self-organization in
general is something we are still just beginning to understand.
If by “God” we mean the “supreme context” of life and the universe,
following Gordon Allport's definition which puts this ancient, vexed
concept in exactly the right light, then the principle of self-organization has
explosive theological consequences. While it need not do away with our
ideas of spirituality, or even with organized religion per se, it revises their
traditional concepts almost completely. Its political consequences are still
more interesting, as we are led to understand government as an institution
that societies evolve spontaneously, in much the same way and for the same
reasons that some biological systems evolved brains. For systems-theoretic
reasons, the idea of a centrally planned society cannot be feasible; but the
idea that a society of post-modern complexity can do without significant
central coordination is equally silly. My belief is that we have no inkling yet
what kind of government our global, technological pan-human society
requires and will evolve for itself. The implications of self-organization for
political philosophy are left to the reader’s imagination and, as I hope, to
future writings.

2 See Lee Smolin’s book, The Life of the Cosmos.