Emergence

The magic of things greater than their parts

This is the second of three introductory posts that establish the foundation of what I’m trying to do in this newsletter. See the first one here. 

The verb “emerge” fails to capture what happens in and between our bodies when we love — the kind of freshness and breaking out that ushers in new ways of living. That’s why I also use the term “unfolding,” borrowed from Andrew Culp’s Dark Deleuze. Nevertheless, the concept of emergence as understood by philosophers and scientists provides an essential framework for articulating not only how our world works but also how we might act to change it. 

Emergence is a concept originally developed by philosophers in the 19th century and later adopted by scientists of various fields. It is just now beginning to be used in movement spaces as a framework for liberation. Emergence describes how complex systems come into being from simpler substrates: life from non-life, the mind from the body, society from nature. Emergent qualities are properties of an entity that are not independently shared by its constituent parts. 

Thus the chemical components of life do not in themselves possess the qualities that living organisms do (self-directed movement, reproduction, metabolism, etc). From cells, to organelles, to organs, to organisms: at each level of complexity new qualities emerge that the simpler levels don’t express. Muscles, tendons, bones, and nerves make up the hand, but only the hand grasps. 

Similarly, cognitive science confirms that the mind is inherently embodied. Rather than a dualistic nature of mind and matter, matter gives rise to mind. But this does not mean thought is an illusion: the matter that makes up the mind is organized with unthinkable complexity, but even were we able to trace the exact neurological firing of a thought, that electrical and chemical trail still would not be the thought itself. The mental experience of subjectivity, then, is an emergent property of our physical bodies. Altogether real and meaningful — even more so, perhaps, than if we posited a separate mental realm outside or alongside the physical, because then we begin to suspect not our minds but our senses. 

Just as mind/body dualism has led to great suffering, so the separation of human society from nature has done incredible harm. Emergence clarifies that the two are inextricably linked. Our physical bodies descended from our primate ancestors through a long process of evolution, thus we retain important traits of theirs even as we express qualities they never did. In the same way, the societies we form are different, more complex, than other animal communities. 

We cannot pretend to be gods, aloof and set apart from the influence of our biological ancestry; neither should we pretend to be our primate ancestors, forgetting that we have qualities of empathy, reason, cooperation, decision- and tool-making that they could never dream of. 

Our society and culture, the institutions and infrastructure we build, are neither the inevitable result of genetics nor the machinations of superior beings. Our actions are largely influenced by our biology, and we are responsible for what we do. Both are true at once. 

The implications of embracing an emergentist framework are vast. In its broadest interpretation, emergence challenges the dominant Western philosophical and scientific tradition of reduction and determinism — the same framework that underlies our current techno-capitalist reality. It offers instead a holistic worldview based on spontaneity and complexity. 

Peter Marshall, in his 2000 volume Riding the Wind, summarizes this paradigm shift beautifully:

The old reductionist, mechanistic paradigm still prevails in the way we think and talk about everyday matters, partly because of the inescapable presence and profound influence machines and technology have in our lives. People still talk of the mind as a computer, the body as a machine, and farming as a chemical process. But many are beginning to wake up to a much more exciting and unpredictable world.

The new paradigm has been evolving since the nineteenth century, with process philosophers like Hegel and Whitehead and evolutionary theorists like Darwin. Science in the twentieth century has had an even greater influence, with relativity theory, quantum physics, systems thinking, biology, ecology and, more recently, chaos theory. The fresh model for the universe which is emerging is not the dead machine of the old physics, but the living organism of the new life sciences. —Marshall, 25-26 (emphasis mine)

While a discussion of epiphenomenalism is outside the scope of this essay, some philosophers have maintained that one implication of emergence is the reality of things as they seem to be: immaterial things like thoughts and emotions really do exist, even though they are comprised of simpler parts like neurons and chemicals. Reducing things to their constituents not only confounds our ability to make sense of them, but fails to account for the things themselves; it’s missing the whole picture. 

This further implies that living things really are alive. Without straying into vitalism, emergence means that the organic is truly unique; we cannot approach living beings like inorganic matter, because life has emergent properties that nonliving matter does not. 

Thus when the ancients personified the trees in a forest and imagined them speaking, it turns out trees actually do communicate via the mycelium network, as well as by releasing chemical signals through their leaves. These processes are not some dumb automatic unfolding, a mindless response to stimuli. Trees are alive in the same way we are. They know their kin; they tend to their dead. 

The reason we’re able to think otherwise, to miss or forget the fact that the very ground on which all our cities are built was originally teeming with life, is because we are disconnected from our bodies (the main topic of the next essay). 

Lastly, the complex composition of emergent properties means that you can’t approach them simply or singly — you must approach them holistically, from the right angle and at the right level. Emergent patterns in living things show us that, just as DNA strands are folded into three-dimensional shapes that help determine their activation, so are ecological systems composed of complex relationships between organisms and their environments that cannot be reduced to independent processes. There is no one-size-fits all solution to problems, no single-issue cause. 

When it comes to ecology all solutions are multivalent, all issues are intertwined. We have to address ecological issues on a systems level, not a chemical level, because chemistry is several layers down the ladder of emergence from an ecosystem. That was precisely the problem with the advent of modern conventional agriculture. 

Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom, but an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual. —Gandhi

If we had to summarize what’s wrong with our dominant modes of thinking, we could say that they suffer from problems of scale.

We see this in our response to the climate crisis, which suffers from technological and scientific problems of scale. Our current framework prioritizes single-issue, short-term, high-tech, large-scale solutions to climate problems, whereas it has been precisely this approach that led to the climate crisis in the first place. 

Western science and technology has also been used to justify centuries of colonial and imperial violence, particularly by de-legitimizing non-Western forms of knowledge. 

It is part of this world to think that more of what we’re doing now will save us. That the corporations and industries that wreck the planet will of their own volition solve their problems. That we need more and bigger and better. 

We can let go of this way of thinking. We can turn instead to holistic, long-term, degrowth, hyper-local solutions to both environmental and social problems. We can do this without condemning ourselves to lives that are nasty, brutish, or short. There is abundance. 

Cutting-edge science corroborates ancient and indigenous wisdom: when we act from a rested place, aligned with natural rhythms, we find that less is more. We find that we can trust life's spontaneity and creativity to make a way.

In one sense, our social crisis can be seen as a problem of scale in terms of agency, organization, and change. (In another it can also be seen as a problem of body-to-body intimacy, which will be the focus of my next essay.) 

By social crisis I mean both the increasing atomization of capitalist culture, the fraying of our social fabric and dissolution of communal, traditional social ties, and the problem of organizing for change – namely, how do we overcome our individual disempowerment and collective paralysis to effectively escape the powers of the present? And why haven’t we done so already? 

For one, it helps to remember that we actually are doing the work: with a thousand small victories in a thousand hidden places, people are changing the world, escaping systems, and getting free. Sometimes those small victories burst out into the big open, like the George Floyd protests, or the shift towards holistic land management, or the revolution in Rojava, or Stop Cop City. Other times they remain clandestine: a subtle sabotage, lovers meeting against the odds, your local upcyclist. 

But why is it that even when armed with real, effective solutions do we still seem unable to turn the techno-capital tide? Given our asymmetrical relationship to the powers that be (they have the wealth, we have the numbers), how can we organize in ways that build power and maintain autonomy? 

Emergent strategy can help us even the odds. Our social institutions aren’t written in stone. They emerge from our relations, forming a more complex level than individuals and groups. Our collective activity, when powerful enough, can leap across emergent levels like electrons jumping from inner to outer orbits, distorting time in our favor and magnifying effects out of proportion. 

It’s why the protests after George Floyd’s murder erupted into nation-wide revolt and why others didn’t. There’s a level-change, and it involves not only the build up of energy but also new kinds of organization and movement. 

When we see that authority is arbitrary, that it exercises power only indirectly, it becomes clear that we can't just attack one person at the top, nor can we simply replace them with different people. Neither, of course, can we excuse ourselves of the system individually. 

Instead we can organize collectively on asymmetrical lines: autonomous individuals forming groups who then coordinate on horizontal lines rather than within a vertical hierarchy. The compounding power of these networks is often invisible to those outside them until they burst into public view. Change happens slowly, and then all at once. 

The dominant script of history is colored by the habit of viewing things through the lens of those in charge; a perspective that systematically misses exactly the dynamic that bursts open on picket lines, barricades, and protests. —Nappalos

Our political crisis involves our ideals of freedom and suffers from temporal problems of scale. To resolve this we can accept a framework of collapse, anticipate the death of this world, pursue social over political revolution, and resist capital’s urge to metabolize our visions.

By political crisis I don’t mean our gridlocked elections. The circus of the electoral cycle is a monumental charade, a distraction from our real lives and a distortion of our real autonomy.

What I mean is that even thinking another world is extraordinarily difficult. Capital eats even our imagination. What begins as a movement for liberation becomes an excuse for tyranny. What starts out as a spontaneous coalition of like-minded individuals becomes a bureaucratic institution with a payroll. 

I believe part of the problem is that our visions of a better world are often truncated. It’s so hard to think outside the boxes into which our society is neatly packed. Of course there’s always leftovers, people and places and things that defy categorization into the boxes. Sometimes we are the ones left out. But when imagining a free world we often fall back into imagining a better world, which often comes to resemble the same world we have, extended into the near future. 

That’s why I think reform is not enough. We need revolutionary change if we want to live free on a healthy planet. Many folks despair of things ever really changing, which makes sense given that most of us have grown up suspicious of any grand narratives of the past, and skeptical about prospects for the future. It also makes sense given the power and wealth invested in maintaining the status quo. 

But imagining another way of living and really living differently are symbiotic: more of one leads to more of the other. The more we break away from the systems and carve our own path, the more we care for each other instead of relying on the state, the more we’re able to see the possibility of real alternatives. The horizon of our imagination can broaden with practice. 

The death of this world is a slow, subtle shift: a window cracks open on a windowless door to let the light in. We can’t yet scale the wall to reach it, but we know it’s there. 

The old claim of scientists to be objective observers is a myth… Jerky transitions take place from one form of energy to another through quantum leaps. Unpredictability thus lies at the heart of matter, spontaneity and creativity at the centre of nature. —Marshall

The word “revolution” carries a lot of weight. Many associate it with the communist revolutions of the 20th century, most of which began as anarchist uprisings that were usurped and betrayed by power-hungry groups.

In contrast to the myth of anarchists as doomers and bombers, we’ve always maintained not that nonviolence is always the right answer but that political revolution shouldn’t even be the goal. Instead we pursue a social revolution, which means our daily lives, our culture, our relationships with each other and the land — those are what transform, not merely the instruments of political control or economic production. 

This also means we don’t sacrifice our freedom or autonomy now for a time in the future “after” the revolution. The future doesn’t exist yet, but we’re alive now, and we want to live free. The kind of self-sacrifice for a “higher cause” or “greater good” that churches or political parties expect from us is just another part of this world. We reject it along with everything else. 

Once wrested from those ties to an abstract impersonal future, we become free to pursue what makes life worth living. We find that there are always already spaces of resistance springing out of the cracks. We find ways to disrupt and push back; we find we have everything we need; we find each other. 

Emergence grounds us in our bodies: all the lofty promises of liberation are nothing if they’re not embodied in the present reality. It’s not worth dying for a heaven we can only imagine. But the possibility of carving out space for a new world right in the middle of this one? That’s something I find worth living for. 

For those interested in the concept of emergence as it developed in philosophy and science, here is some further information:

• Peter A. Corning, “The Re-Emergene of Emergence: A Venerable Concept in Search of a Theory”

• Brain McLaughlin, “The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism” in Emergence or Reduction?: Prospects for Nonreductive Physicalism

• Humphreys, Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science

I’m also deeply indebted to Scott Nappalos’ excellent work Emergence and Anarchism: A Philosophy of Power, Action, and Liberation, which can be found here.

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