12. Integrative Meaning and our necessary denial of it

While humans couldn’t explain our upset competitive, aggressive and selfish condition there were a number of very important truths we had no choice but to evade and even deny. The quotes from Berdyaev and Kierkegaard at the beginning of this book made it very clear how necessary it has been to deny the truth of the issue of the human condition itself. Another truth, and by far the most important and greatest of all truths that we upset humans have had to practice denying, is that the meaning or purpose or theme of existence is to develop the order or integration of matter.

(Note, the following is a summary of Part 1 of The Human Condition Documentary Proposal where the issue of integrative meaning is addressed at some length.)

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, like gravity, is one of the physical laws of existence. This law states that over time all forms of energy, and matter is a form of energy, tend to move towards ending up as heat energy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics can also be stated in terms of the concept of entropy, which is the degree of randomness of a system at the atomic, ionic, or molecular level. Stated in terms of the concept of entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the entropy of a system increases with time.

Importantly, this natural direction of energy transfer is reversible but to reverse it does require the use of energy. Therefore energy must be available from outside a system if the system is not to eventually wind down to heat energy, to maximum randomness or entropy. Earth is not a closed system because it has an outside inflow of energy from the sun and since Earth is not a closed system an opposite direction to this breakdown towards heat energy has been possible. On Earth, instead of matter breaking down there has been a steady building up of matter into ever larger and more stable arrangements of matter. Incidentally the universe may not be a closed system either—thus the possibilities of maximum entropy, the possible so-called ‘heat death of the universe’, is not yet determined.

This reverse direction where instead of breaking down matter builds up and becomes more ordered and complex is now recognised in physics as the ‘Second Path of the Second Law of Thermodynamics’ or ‘Negative Entropy’. Negative entropy causes, or allows, or has led to, matter self-organising into larger and more stable wholes. It has led matter to integrate, develop order. Thus this negative entropy path has resulted in atoms arranging themselves, or coming together, or integrating, to form molecules. Molecules have then in turn integrated to form compounds and compounds have then integrated to form single-celled organisms and single-celled organisms have then integrated to form multicellular Page 42 of
PDF Version organisms. The next larger whole to form is integrations of multicellular organisms, which societies of multicellular organisms represent the beginnings of.

The following chart depicts this hierarchy of order:

This negative entropy direction of change that is occurring on Earth means that the overall activity or theme or, from a conscious observer’s point of view, purpose or meaning of existence is the development of the order or integration of matter.

The scientist-philosopher Arthur Koestler acknowledged integrative meaning in his 1978 book Janus: A Summing Up. In the chapter titled ‘Strategies and Purpose in Evolution’ he wrote: ‘One of the basic doctrines of the nineteenth-century mechanistic world-view was Clausius’ famous “Second Law of Thermodynamics”. It asserted that the universe was running down towards its final dissolution because its energy is being steadily, inexorably dissipated into the random motion of molecules, until it ends up as a single, amorphous bubble of gas with a uniform temperature just above absolute zero: cosmos dissolving into chaos. Only fairly recently did science begin to recover from the hypnotic effect of this gloomy vision, by realizing that the Second Law applies only in the special case of so-called “closed systems” (such as a gas enclosed in a perfectly insulated container), whereas all living organisms are “open systems” which maintain their complex structure and function by continuously drawing materials and energy from their environment [222 of 354] …It was in fact a physicist, not a biologist, the Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger, who put an end to the tyranny of the Second Law with his celebrated dictum: “What an organism feeds on is negative entropy” [p.223] …Schrödinger’s revolutionary concept of negentropy, published in 1944 [p.224] …is a somewhat perverse way of referring to the power of living organisms to “build up” instead of running down, to create complex structures out of simpler elements, integrated patterns out of shapelessness, order out of disorder. The same irrepressible building-up tendency is manifested in the progress of evolution, the emergence of Page 43 of
PDF Version new levels of complexity in the organismic hierarchy and new methods of functional coordination [p.223] …The origin of the concept dates back to Aristotle’s entelechy, the vital principle or function which turns mere substance into a living organism and at the same time strives towards perfection [p.224]’.

Koestler talked of ‘the active striving of living matter towards [order] [p.223]’, of ‘a drive towards synthesis, towards growth, towards wholeness [p.224]’. He said ‘the integrative tendency has the dual function of coordinating the constituent parts of a system in its existing state, and of generating new levels of organization in evolving hierarchies [p.225]’.

Significantly, in terms of behaviour, Koestler said ‘the integrative tendency’ requires ‘coordination’. It requires the parts of the new whole to cooperate, behave selflessly, place the maintenance of the whole above the maintenance of themselves. Put simply, selfishness is divisive or disintegrative while selflessness is integrative. A leaf falling from a tree in autumn does so in order for the tree to survive through winter and carry on. It has put the maintenance of the whole, namely the tree, above the maintenance of itself. The effective functioning of our body depends on the cooperation of all its parts, on every part doing what is best for the whole body. Our skin for example is constantly growing and dying to protect our body. Cancer cells destroy the body precisely because they violate this principle and follow their own independent agenda. Selflessness is actually the theme of existence because it is the glue that holds wholes together, and, as will be emphasised shortly, it is the real meaning of the word ‘love’.

The concept of ‘holism’ is an acknowledgment of integrative meaning. The ‘alternative’ culture has embraced the word on the superficial basis that it refers to the interconnectedness of all matter; however the true, deeper, core meaning of holism is ‘the tendency in nature to form wholes’ (Concise Oxford Dict. 5th edn, 1964). The concept was first introduced by the South African statesman, philosopher and scientist Jan Smuts in his 1926 book Holism and Evolution. Smuts conceived ‘holism’ as ‘the ultimate organising, regulative activity in the universe that accounts for all the structural groupings and syntheses in it, from the atom, and the physico-chemical structures, through the cell and organisms, through Mind in animals, to Personality in Man’ (p.341 of 380).

‘Teleology’, ‘the belief that purpose and design are a part of nature’ (Macquarie Dict. 3rd edn, 1998), is, like holism, another term that has been used to describe the integrative, cooperative, selfless purpose or meaning or theme or design in the universe.

‘Holism’ and ‘teleology’ acknowledge the cooperative, integrative purpose or meaning of life and in fact of all existence. Indeed, could it not be that this cooperative, integrative meaning of existence is what we have termed ‘God’ in the metaphysical, religious domain, such as in monotheistic Christian mythology? ‘God’ could be seen as the metaphysical term that has been used for integration, for Negative Entropy’s development of order of matter. Templeton Prize-winning Australian physicist Paul Davies thought so when he said, ‘these laws of physics are the correct place to look for God or meaning or purpose’ (‘God Only Knows’, Compass, ABC-TV, 23 Mar. 1997), and ‘humans came about as a result of the underlying laws of physics’ (Paul Davies—More Big Questions: Are We Alone in the Universe? SBS-TV, 1999). A decade earlier, physicist Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University—a position once held by Isaac Newton—said, ‘I would use the term God as the embodiment of the laws of physics’ (Master of the Universe, BBC, 1989).

In an article titled The Time of His Life (Sydney Morning Herald, 28 Apr. 2002), Gregory Benford, a professor of physics at the University of California, chronicled a meeting he held with Hawking, in which Hawking elaborated on this observation about God being the laws of physics. Benford reported that in the course of discussion he had commented that ‘there is amazing structure we can see from inside [the universe]’, to which Hawking agreed, saying, ‘the overwhelming impression is of order. The more we discover about the universe, the more Page 44 of
PDF Version we find that it is governed by rational laws. If one liked, one could say that this order was the work of God. Einstein thought so…We could call order by the name of God’.

‘God’ then can be seen as the personification of the Negative Entropy-driven integrative, cooperative, loving, selfless ideals, purpose and meaning of life. Indeed the old Christian word for love is ‘caritas’, meaning charity or giving or selflessness (see Col. 3:14, 1 Cor. 13:1—13, 10:24 & John 15:13), therefore it is true that ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8,16), or selflessness—in fact not just selflessness but unconditional selflessness, the capacity to, if required, make a full commitment to the maintenance of the larger whole. Christ articulated the unconditionally selfless significance of the word ‘love’ when he said ‘Greater love has no-one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13). Of the biblical references to love given above, Colossians 3:14 perfectly summarises the integrative significance of love: ‘And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.’

Most significantly, since the competitive, aggressive and selfish divisive behaviour of upset humans is the polar opposite of cooperative, loving and selfless integrative behaviour, this description of integrative meaning reveals what an extremely condemning and thus confronting concept it has been for us upset humans; indeed so confronting it must be met with determined psychological resistance. Integrative meaning confronts us squarely with the question of our current upset, divisive, apparently non-ideal, human-condition-afflicted reality. On the face of it integrative meaning implies that we humans are out-of-step with creation—at odds with God no less—seemingly bad, unworthy, guilty, sinful, even evil beings. It is no wonder we have been, as we say, a ‘God-fearing’ and not God-confronting species.

The reality is there has been no more condemning truth for upset humans than integrative meaning. In fact it is only now that we can explain the riddle of the human condition that it has become safe to admit the truth of integrative meaning. Integrative meaning no longer condemns us because we can explain that we had to suffer becoming divisively behaved in order to find understanding, ultimately self-understanding, understanding of why we became upset, and through finding that guilt-lifting, dignifying, ameliorating, liberating knowledge become psychologically secure and thus free of upset and thus integratively behaved conscious managers of our lives and world.

Until we humans could explain the riddle of why we had to be divisive in order to become integrative we couldn’t do anything about the horror of appearing to be ‘unGodly’—except find a way to deny the problem of our apparent imperfection. For this denial to be achieved it was obviously vital that that inescapable, first-principle-based, scientific admission of the unbearably depressing truth of integrative meaning was avoided. Even though the truth of integrative meaning is extremely obvious, with evidence of the hierarchy of the order of matter everywhere we look, it was of critical importance for humanity that science find a way to deny such a truth. The easy way to achieve this was to simply assert that there was no meaning or purpose or theme in existence and instead claim that while change was occurring it was a random, purposeless, directionless, meaningless, blind process. Also, to cope with the imbued recognition of integrative ideality and meaning in the religious concept of ‘God’, science simply left the concept of ‘God’ undefined, maintaining it was a strictly abstract, metaphysical concept unrelated to the scientific domain—a deity seated on a throne somewhere high above the clouds in a remote blue heaven who we can worship as someone superior to us but avoid any direct comparisons with ourselves.

In his 1987 book The Cosmic Blueprint, Paul Davies wrote: ‘We seem to be on the verge of discovering not only wholly new laws of nature, but ways of thinking about nature that depart radically from traditional science…Way back in the primeval phase of the universe, gravity triggered Page 45 of
PDF Version a cascade of self-organizing processes—organization begets organization—that led, step by step, to the conscious individuals who now contemplate the history of the cosmos and wonder what it all means…There exists alongside the entropy arrow another arrow of time [the negative entropy arrow], equally fundamental and no less subtle in nature…I refer to the fact that the universe is progressing—through the steady growth of structure, organization and complexity—to ever more developed and elaborate states of matter and energy. This unidirectional advance we might call the optimistic arrow, as opposed to the pessimistic arrow of the second law…There has been a tendency for scientists to simply deny the existence of the optimistic arrow. One wonders why’ (chpts 10, 9 and 2 respectively). The reason ‘why’ ‘the optimistic arrow’ of integrative meaning was denied was because it was far too dangerous to acknowledge without first finding the biological reason for our divisive, apparently non-integrative, ‘unGodly’ condition.

In approximately 360BC the Greek philosopher Plato wrote what many consider to be his greatest work, The Republic. Central to this work is the allegory of a cave in which humans are imprisoned, chained together and able only to envisage the outside world via shadows cast on the back wall of the cave. The shadows are thrown by the light of a fire that, situated in the entrance to the cave, effectively prevents any escape from the dark existence. Plato wrote that ‘the light of the brightly burning fire in the [cave] prison corresponds to the power of the sun [p.282 of 405]’, and explained that the sun represents the ‘universal first principle [p.277]’ and the ‘absolute form of Good [p.282]’ and that ‘if he [a prisoner in the cave] were made to look directly at the light of the fire, it would hurt his eyes and he would turn back [p.280]’ (quotes from H.D.P. Lee’s 1955 translation of The Republic). We can now understand that Plato’s ‘universal first principle’ and ‘absolute form of Good’ is integrative meaning, the truth that so condemns humans that we have had to live in denial of it—metaphorically speaking, in a dark cave, hidden from the scrutiny of its scorching glare.

Fire appears in many mythologies as a metaphor for the integrative ideals of life, the condemning implications of which prevented our ‘escape’ from our restricted, chained-up, alienated condition. In the Zoroastrian religion ‘Fire is the representative of God …His physical manifestation…Fire is bright, always points upward, is always pure’ (Eastern Definitions, Edward Rice, 1978, p.138 of 433). In Christian mythology the story of Genesis features ‘a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life’ (Gen. 3:24). In an acknowledgment of how suicidally confronting and depressing the truth of integrative meaning can be for humans, the Bible also records the Israelites as saying, ‘Let us not hear the voice of the Lord our God nor see this great fire any more, or we will die’ (Deut. 18:16). In another biblical account, Job pleaded for relief from confrontation with the issue of the human condition when he lamented, ‘Why then did you [God] bring me out of the womb?…Turn away from me so I can have a moment’s joy before I go to the place of no return, to the land of gloom and deep shadow, to the land of deepest night’ (Job 10:18, 20—22). Job’s ‘land of gloom and deep shadow…land of deepest night’, the state of deepest and darkest depression that resulted from trying to confront the issue of the human condition, equates perfectly with life in Plato’s cave. Humans could only avoid the terrible depression by turning from the ‘sun’/‘fire’, by living psychologically in denial of the truth of integrative meaning and all the truths that related to it. Christ understood the problem of the exposing ‘light’ of truth—which he, in his necessarily sheltered-from-exposure-to-the-human-condition-childhood, fully-loved-and-nurtured, innocent, denial-and-therefore-alienation-free, sound state, also represented—when he said, ‘the light shines in the darkness but…everyone who does evil [becomes upset] hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed’ (John 1:5, 3:20).

Thus, while integrative meaning is one of the most obvious, profound and thus important of all truths it is clearly also the truth that has appeared to most condemn humans, and which humans have therefore most feared and found most difficult to Page 46 of
PDF Version confront and accept. As will become increasingly evident as this book develops, we humans have sensibly avoided the subjective dimension to life, the issue of ‘self’. Instead of hopelessly and dangerously trying to confront the issue of our non-ideal, corrupted human condition we have sensibly either practiced denial of integrative meaning, and even of God, and thus the issue of self-corruption, or indirectly acknowledged our self-corruption by acknowledging the existence of God and embracing some expression of faith that a greater dignifying understanding of our divisive condition does exist and would one day be found. To cope with our less-than-ideal human condition there has only ever been either denial or faith. Understanding just how insecure we humans have been in the presence of the integrative ideals or God allows us to understand the origins of the religious impulse. This subject of the origin of religion will be looked at in some detail later in this book.

In physicist Paul Davies’ 1995 acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize (at approximately US$1.5 million, a financially rich award that is given for the bold objective of ‘increasing man’s understanding of God’ [The Templeton Prize, Vol.3, 1988—1992, p.108 of 153]), he made this comment about the demystification of the religious concept of God: ‘Yet among the general population there is a widespread belief that science and theology are forever at loggerheads, that every scientific discovery pushes God further and further out of the picture. It is clear that many religious people still cling to an image of a God-of-the-gaps, a cosmic magician invoked to explain all those mysteries about nature that currently have the scientists stumped. It is a dangerous position, for as science advances, so the God-of-the-gaps retreats, perhaps to be pushed off the edge of space and time altogether, and into redundancy.’ In truth, until understanding of the human condition was found the really ‘dangerous position’ was to demystify God and eliminate the ability for people to ‘cling to an image of a God-of-the-gaps’. The truth is understanding that God is integrative meaning is not something that has ‘stumped’ scientists, rather it is something that all humans intuitively know but have almost universally had to conscientiously practice denying.

Able to appreciate how important our denial of integrative meaning has been we can understand why it has been so important for science to avoid demystifying the concept of God. The final episode of Evolution (a TV series co-produced by WGBH/NOVA Science Unit and Clear Blue Sky Productions in 2001) examined the controversy in American schools and universities over the teaching of Charles Darwin’s concept of ‘natural selection’ as a Godless, meaningless, blind process. The episode’s title, ‘What about God?’, asked why God is excluded from science’s interpretation of existence. The answer is that direct acknowledgment of integrative meaning was excluded for humans’ own sake, for it saved us from suicidal depression. Ensuring the concept of God remained abstract and undefined in scientific terms saved us from direct confrontation with the truth of integrative meaning, a confrontation we could not survive until understanding of the human condition was found.

We can also understand now that what supporters of ‘creationism’ and ‘intelligent design’ were attempting to do was introduce the concept of God into science, but in a way that didn’t involve having to admit to integrative meaning and by so doing have to confront the suicidally depressing issue of the human condition. They were trying to counter the extreme dishonesty of integrative meaning/ God-denying science with their own form of dishonesty which thought of God in a fundamentalist, literal way as an actual being ‘designing’ life on Earth, or ‘creating’ the world in six days.

Both positions were extremely dishonest, as they had to be because without understanding of the human condition it was too psychologically dangerous to confront the truth of integrative meaning. The difference was that one wanted to pretend to be rational and either deny any semblance of integrative meaning by denying the existence of the Page 47 of
PDF Version concept of God or acknowledge the concept of God but claim it has nothing to do with science, while the other chose to admit to a semblance of integrative meaning in the form of a God who is literally a special person or being or deity who lives in a remote blue heaven surrounded by people with wings, with the downside being that such a stance necessarily meant abandoning all attempts at being rational. Again, the role of religions and the reason they became more and more simplistic/ literalist/ fundamentalist will be explained more fully later when the ever increasing levels of alienation in society is explained.

We can see that the real issue about God is the issue of integrative meaning and its human-condition-confronting implications. In recent years science has become evasively focused away from this real issue of integrative meaning onto the irrelevant issue of whether God has been destroyed by science’s ability to explain the origins of the universe. The focus has been on whether physicists’ discoveries about the Big Bang origin of the universe, the extinction of time before the Big Bang and, more recently, the possibility of multiple universes have each undermined the concept of God. In other words, can we now understand the origins of the universe without invoking the involvement of a divine agent, someone ‘twiddling the dials’? This debate has stalled however because the more physicists discover, the more they realise there is to discover. They are unable to give a logical and rational explanation for everything, such as how did the laws that govern the universe come into being in the first place. As emphasised, this debate has failed to acknowledge the involvement of the issue of the human condition—the existence within our species of a collective, shared-by-all psychosis that is resisting recognition of the existence of meaning and purpose in our existing world and the demystification of the concept of God that that makes possible.