SERMON: “Greater Than the Sum of the Parts”

I used three, maybe four, amazing books to get perspective on my subject this morning. One is The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World that Works for All (Cranston, RI: The Writer’s Collective, 2003) by Tom Atlee, a community-organizer slash activist visionary who, thank God, still lives with one foot in the seventies and the other a fulfilled and hopeful fifty years from now in the world we want. His was the story about the fertilizer factory. The second book, the source of the first reading, is Harold J. Morowitz’s The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex (Oxford university Press, 2002) which is a tour of the evolving universe written by a biologist philosopher wondering about the relationship between the phenomenon of “emergence” and our ideas about a transcendent and immanent God, a God of the sum and a God greater than the sum. Morowitz is a fan of Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and paleontologist who also wrote a book that risked marking him as a “bad scientist” just because he wondered about God as much as he did about human artifacts. That book is called The Phenomenon of Man. The third book Max Ochs told me about, swooningly, in the Narthex last Sunday: The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001) by Louis Menand. I just had to look at it for this sermon, so he gave it to me for my birthday, and by golly, I read a big ol’ hunk of it. It is wonderful—a history of American thinkers and their thoughts about who we are and how we know. How do we know? We know by talking to one another, thinking together, by tweaking ideas and passing them forward. Knowledge is social. This is my sermon’s refrain.

So I read all these books, practicing this new job of using my brain (such as it is) for a living, and I start wondering about the relationship between these two elephants I know. One of them is the elephant that the group of blind men are trying to describe to one another. You know this story. One grabs the tail and says “Oh, I see, an elephant is a lot like a rope.” And another one has hold of an ear and says, “Oh no, you are wrong, my friend, an elephant is very like a banana leaf.” And a third happens to touch and explore one of the elephant’s legs and this man says “You are both wrong, actually; an elephant is clearly more like a tree trunk than a banana leaf or a rope.” And so on. This story demonstrates an insight developed in feminist thought called “standpoint theory” and a bit of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as well: what we see and come to know is shaped by what we bring to the investigation, the standpoint from which we view it. Just in the act of observing something, we affect it and thereby change it. Multiple perspectives are required to even approximate a tentative “truth” about this thing we can’t really see (because we are blind men), the whole. Knowledge is social.

The other elephant—they could be brothers for all I know—I read somewhere was invented by psychologists trying to explain the strange behavior of alcoholic families. This is the “elephant in the living room” elephant. You know this story too: there is something very large squeezed into this small living space and all the interactions of all the people in the room are affected by this huge creature about which everyone is afraid to speak. It seems true that to speak of it will precipitate some condition which is much, much worse than the current condition of crowding. Better to just let this very large mammal hang out in this small living room, squashing people on the couch, knocking pictures off the wall, drawing blood with his tusks, than to question his presence in this setting. Lack of knowledge is also social.

These elephants exist for us primarily as symbols. They don’t eat or poop or move around or give us any information about themselves directly. We don’t offer them a life of their own. They are unfamiliar objects of inquiry which we can’t really see very clearly and are a little afraid to find out more about, because then, perhaps, we would have to do something. The elephants are a metaphor about our own sense of personal fragmentation in a fragmented world and our anxiety around exploring the contested or unknown, even the unknown with potential for improving life. And both stories are also about our inability or reluctance to use the information we have—not to deny what we see or to argue with one another about what we will admit to seeing—but to deepen our inquiry, to move past our fears, to hear one another and build on each other’s theories and observations, to search for truth together.

We use the symbol of “the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part” in a little bit the same way, I think. The web is an idea that both intrigues and scares us because it represents something that is bigger than we are and not in our control that we do not fully understand. Knowledge about the interdependent web is social. We need one another in order to acquire the knowledge which will save us. The web and both elephants are wholes “greater than the sum of their parts.” In their stories they are metaphors which describe the human struggle to discern and appreciate the whole picture of the dynamic of life which both reflects and deepens us. That the whole might be greater than the sum of its parts is a sweet promise to me. My greatest hope for the world lies in that promise. Whether I call that whole “God” or not, I know that my purpose in life is to contribute my perspective on the meaning and nature of that whole so that maybe we can together move the whole toward dynamic that promotes optimal survival.

Under the influence of my three books (or four, if you count Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, from which the reflection at the top of your order of service is quoted) I have been thinking about three ways to see “the whole greater than the sum of its parts.” One way to think about the whole is to look at what science knows about it, which is a lot actually. At the growing edge of science, as you all know, natural law comes into fascinating dialogue with religion. Morowitz’s book takes us through the story of the evolutionary process with particular attention to the evolutionary leaps in which a novel property emerges from the increasingly complex patterns of life and matter. Anti- or a-theological scientists see the phenomenon of emergence as triggered by what they call “frozen accidents” (Morowitz, p.65). Morowitz makes room for the possibility that emergence operates in nature in much the same way Tom Atlee the fertilizer factory guy sees it working in groups as a pretty mysterious product of complexity.

Morowitz tries to give us the perspective on time and the universe his dialogue-partner Teilhard de Chardin pleads for in his Forward to The Phenomenon of Man [please excuse the non-inclusive language of the author’s time]:

When studied narrowly in himself by anthropologists or jurists man is a tiny, even a shrinking, creature. His overpronounced individuality conceals from our eyes the whole to which he belongs; as we look at him our minds incline to break nature up into pieces and to forget both its deep interrelations and its measureless horizons: we incline to all that is bad in anthropocentrism…. I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes, and realizes that a universal will to live converges…in him. In such a vision man is seen not as a static centre of the world—as he for long believed himself to be—but as the axis and leading shoot of evolution, which is something much finer (Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, NY: Harper and Row, 1959, p. 33-34).

“The universe is 100 million times the age of the longest-lived individual,” Morowitz reminds us, “one million times the age of civilization, and 250,000 times the age of Homo sapiens (Morowitz, p. 53).” And things are way more complex than they were just post-Big Bang. The more complex things are, the more frequently novel emergences occur. The rate of emergences has increased exponentially lately, “lately” as in the last 70 million years since the emergence of the primates. We’ve seen the following subsequent novelties emerge: the great apes, homonids, tools, man, language, agriculture, technology & urbanization, writing, the alphabet. That’s all in a blink of an eye in comparison to the 12 billion year history of the universe. Morowitz is interested in the phenomenon of the emergence of mind. In his closing chapters he finally permits himself a little theological speculation and he writes:

“Divine transcendence arose from immanence [= natural law] and emergence [evolutionary novelty] and co-evolved with Homo sapiens [humans]…. We Homo sapiens are the mode of action of divine transcendence…. Transcendence…means that, with the evolution of the human mind, we can generate new emergences that were not part of the presapient world of immanences and emergences (Morowitz, 195).”

We are God acting in evolution to create a more perfect world, Morowitz suggests. We are co-weaving the tapestry. The shuttle passes back and forth between us and this source of emergent novelty. Together we develop the pattern, telling the story in evolving colors and shapes. It strikes me that it is less important whether we name this “whole” God than that we offer ourselves the opportunity to interact with it, and in so doing seize on the possibility of becoming active co-creators our collective future. To interact we must gain knowledge; to gain knowledge we must talk among ourselves. The ideas of individuals are partial and restrictive. Knowledge is social.

Another way to view the whole is through the little windows that open up from time to time in our everyday lives. In these brief moments of exposure we glimpse a bigger pattern, the point at which our own weaving fits into the whole story. Carl Jung noticed that often our stories about these experiences are curiously similar. He theorized that they emerge from the collective experience of human beings, what he called the “collective unconscious.” Folk tales and literature and music and the other arts are full of these stories, and most of us carry around some of our own as well, if only in our dreams. In the past, “window” moments were sometimes called “miracles,” moments when the laws of nature seem to be suspended, and “God” breaks through.

Many of my own moments of deep insight have come along in nursing experiences. I am looking at a woman sleeping in a hospital bed and suddenly for a moment we are one and extremely precious and powerful and small and very large. The moment is full of paradox and gravity. Our “window” moments are often very personal, mystical and profoundly moving. They can be scary too, because often the edges of who we are get uncertain as we merge with an exponentially greater whole. Human egos really hate that feeling! For these reasons and others it is hard to talk about our personal insights into the nature of the whole. Hence, as I have mentioned in previous sermons, our difficulty talking about theology. But to piece together a story of a “whole greater than the sum of the parts” we’ve got to keep lining our windows up and peering through them together on the chance that one day a coherent vista will show up in the frame. Knowledge is social.

A third way of viewing the whole is to look at what Teilhard de Chardin the Jesuit paleontologist calls the “noosphere.” The noosphere, a coinage derived from the Greek word for mind, is analogous to the geosphere and the biosphere. The noosphere is that territory in which the minds of humans achieve a hyperpersonal organization in which individuality is transcended in a conscious integration of the self with the All. Whooo! That sounds very Star Trek, doesn’t it? Well, to bring it all right back down to the ground, Morowitz speculates that Teilhard’s idea of the noosphere has found a manifestation in the World Wide Web. And to further ground the concept, Tom Atlee is talking about an effect of the noosphere in the story of the fertilizer factory. He calls it “co-intelligence,” and he thinks it is an underappreciated principle of democracy. Atlee’s favorite definition of co-intelligence is “the ability to generate or evoke creative responses and initiatives that integrate the diverse gifts of all for the benefit of all (Atlee, p.3).” He finds this principle working in all kinds of groups doing all kinds of work in the world. Co-intelligence has “emergent” properties. Novel ideas and behaviors can emerge from co-intelligent processes that less complex systems could not produce. Just as in Morowitz’s wise universe. A wisdom of the whole has a greater chance of emerging from the complexity of numerous minds in direct communication with one another. Because the efficacy of communication is key, Atlee writes about ways we can enhance our ability to carry on meaningful conversations and engage in co-creative projects. His book, The Tao of Democracy, would make a great focus for small group discussion here at the church.

There you have it: three ways we have access to degrees of comprehension about “the whole which is greater than the sum of its parts.” One, science. Two, the windows opened to us in moments of personal insight. Three, that amazing thing that happens when groups of people act in ways that are more intelligent than the sum of the individual smarts. And each way of glimpsing a concept of the whole turns on Louis Menand’s point in The Metaphysical Club, what brilliant thinkers in nineteenth century America learned from talking to one another through the generations, that knowledge is social. We have to talk to one another in order to be as wise as we can be. Wisdom enough to guide this earth ship through crises on her voyage takes all of us thinking and sharing our thoughts.

So, the next time you come upon an elephant and a group of blind men (which happens more often than you might think), strike up a conversation and see what novelty emerges. And don’t forget to solicit the elephant’s view. This is how we become wise and that is what church is all about. AMEN.

Margaret H. Allen

Sunday, July 27, 2003

READING #1

[From Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 18-20]

Classical science then moves by consensus through a series of abstractions such as material objects→ molecules→ atoms→ electrons→ probability distribution functions, and even more abstract notions. This pathway is known as reductionism and theory formation…. Science in this view consists of those theories that have not been falsified. It is constantly subject to change….

The reductionist description will generally postulate entries called agents, often a large number of such agents, usually interacting by nonlinear rules. The reactions cannot be described by simple relations such as A is directly proportional to B. In the precomputer age, the approach to prediction was to formulate complex problems in terms of equations, usually a number of second-order nonlinear differential equations, and then stare at the insoluble series of relations, searching for linear approximations. The equations represent the rules for the interaction of agents. Using computers, one is able to move directly to numerical solutions. But a new general feature is that the solution space becomes huge and highly multi-dimensional, and the problems become combinatorically explosive. The next and critical step in the computational approach to such problems has been to select solutions or families of solutions by fitness rules or other selection criteria often defined by introducing pruning algorithms. Theories of this kind are successful if the selected set of solutions or the solutions generated under the constraint of rules and pruning lead to behaviors with some kind of agreement or resonance with the world of observation. Such outputs are called emergent properties of the system. The agreement between computation and observation by these approaches is not necessarily numerical and exact, as it is in classical science, but it does lend insight into the problems being studied. Indeed, the notion of metaphor sometimes replaced agreement, an idea that worries some scientists, but may allow us to move ahead.

In the domain of emergence, the assumption is made that both actual systems as well as models operate by selection from the immense space and variability of the world of the possible, and in carrying out this selection, new and unanticipated properties emerge. This type of outcome is similar in some ways to the biologists’ view of evolution, in which novelty occurs by mutation, translocation, selection, and differential survival. New structures, new species, and new ecosystems thus emerge. The evolving taxa and systems are not predicable in any exact sense. Thus, emergence has a certain familiar feel to biologists.

Emergences thus occur both in model systems and in real world situations. If the models are well chosen, the two kinds of emergences map onto each other. They resonate with each other. In both cases, emergence leads to novelties: the whole is somehow different from the sum of the parts…. A different way of doing science appears before us, and we are going to have to develop a philosophical framework for this new sense of reality. This is not to be construed as a barrier to moving ahead; in classical physics we used what was essentially the Popperian approach to scientific epistemology long before it had been made explicit. Emergence does not mean randomness; it is an orderly unfolding of the world, but an unfolding rich in novelty. We know the challenge, if not the solution [emphasis added].

READING #2

[From Tom Atlee, The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All (Cranston, RI: The Writer’s Collective, 2003), pp.ii-v.]

I remember the day I had my first inklings that intelligence might be more than how smart each of us is individually. It was in early June 1986, three months into the Great Peace March. We had embarked from Los Angeles in March 1986 as a dramatic mobile public relations event with a cast of 1,200 marchers and staff. Two weeks later our parent organization, ProPeace, went bankrupt, abandoning us in the Mohave Desert. 800 marchers went home. 400 of us stayed. Somehow, we managed to reorganize ourselves and walk across the country, united only by our compelling vision of global nuclear disarmament and our determination to reach our country’s capital.

Our leadership could not have been more tenuous, conflicted and diffuse. Our governing councils had virtually no power to enforce their decisions. By all traditional logic, the whole operation should have just fallen apart and blown away. There was no way it should have been able to work or survive. But it did. And in the process, it became an extraordinary crucible for personal and collective learning and transformation….

After three months on the road, our mobile community had become deeply divided. Some marchers were adamant that we should all march together to make a good impression and attract positive publicity. Others wanted to walk at their own pace, strung out along the road, attuned to the beauty of nature and stopping to chat with farmers and school children. Advocates of each approach saw the other approach as a threat to the march’s peacemaking mission. The situation started to get nasty. People threatened to leave the march unless they got their way. Then a simple miracle occurred.

Somewhere in Colorado, a heavy late-afternoon storm drenched us as we tried to pitch our multi-colored tents in a soggy field near a fertilizer factory. The storm became a deluge. Hundreds of us retreated into the smelly, cavernous confines of the factory. As we stood there dripping and jostling, joking and complaining about our lives, we noticed a couple of marchers setting up a microphone and portable speakers. When the makeshift sound system was ready, they suggested we use this time to speak from our hearts about the issue that divided us. So we did that.

Taking two minutes each, we shared passion and perspective with one another for more than two hours—weeping, cajoling, steaming and sweating in the muggy fetid air. Quite unexpectedly, as we talked and listened with great intensity, the answer to our problem began to emerge. We knew we had fully heard one another when the answer became as obvious as the rain on the sheet-metal roof.

All of us realized what we would do for the next few months: we would walk together through the cities (where there were rushing crowds, traffic, and media) and strung out in the countryside (where farmers and children had time to talk and nature had time to be beautiful). It was so simple, and it handled all our concerns. On cue, the storm subsided. We dispersed into the glistening dusk, a healed community ready to continue on our path together. As I headed across the flooded campsite to my tent, my mind was racing. I realized that something amazing had just happened, something so subtle I had almost missed it: in spite of our talking, we had not made a decision. We had just stopped talking when we knew.

I had never before been in a meeting like the one that generated this alignment. Nobody had been in charge. It was as if we had become a single sentient being, “The March,” and our diverse thoughts and feelings had become the thoughts and feelings of this single but ambivalent March-mind wrestling with its problems. Increasingly, as the meeting unfolded, I had heard other marchers voice the thoughts in my head and the feelings in my heart. I had begun to sense us all sailing on a river of meaning that we had called up from our collective depths. It carried us to exactly the place we needed to go.

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