Volume 3 of the Middle Way Philosophy Series: Now published

Systemic history is an approach to explaining the past, that tries to maximize our understanding of context. Unlike most history, it does not do this by just narrating a chain of causal relationships for a given group through time. Instead, it shows how simpler systems become more complex over time through the interaction of reinforcing and balancing feedback loops. Systemic history offers the best way of understanding the processes that shape the Middle Way, because the Middle Way involves improving responses to complexity, rather than falling back on shortcut simplifications (absolutizations).

This book examines the history of the Middle Way in four inter-related ways: as the biological development of organisms in relation to reinforcing or balancing feedback loops, as the psychological development of individual humans during a lifetime, as a succession of reinforcing and balancing feedback tendencies in human culture through history, and as a successive development of integrative practice. This shows how the Middle Way is a path distinctive to the human response to complexity, but nevertheless one rooted in the wider processes of all life. In the process it provides a detailed exploration of the relationship between the Middle Way and systems theory, biology, developmental psychology, and world history.

Chapter Summary

Introduction

1. Conflict and integration in organic systems

a. The emergence of self-organization

The emergence of self-organizing life is the first reinforcing feedback loop, marking the beginning of the succession of reinforcing and balancing feedback loops that are the focus of this book. These feedback loops give the basic prior conditions for absolutization and the Middle Way. Life seems to have emerged in continuity with non-organic matter, through the catalysed differentiation of electrical charges in molecules that results in a self-organized ‘inside’ becoming distinct from the ‘outside’.

b. Electrical responsiveness

The first balancing feedback loops in organisms were needed for them to adapt to new conditions. This was done through ion channels across their boundaries that later developed into senses. The organism also needed to be able to respond to new information through optionality in the form of meaning (a range of possible states) and provisional belief (states determining behaviour, but that could still be modified). We should not reduce this optionality dogmatically into either freewill or determinism, despite the vagueness and ambiguity of its origins.

c. Competition and predation

Competition and predation between organisms is in practice unavoidable, and is the source of systemic conflict. Systemic conflict needs to be distinguished from absolutized conflict, which rigidifies conflicting needs into maladaptive repression. Systemic conflict is compatible with homeostatic balance in an organism’s response to its environment (which is a kind of proto Middle Way), whereas absolutized conflict is not.

d. Sexual reproduction and adaptivity

Sexual reproduction offers a further method of balancing feedback for organisms that enables them to be adaptive, though at considerable short-term cost. To understand this adaptivity, however, we need to apply scepticism to recognize our full uncertainty about future states. Such a wider understanding of adaptivity also requires that we recognize both its extension beyond fulfilling the goals of survival and reproduction, and the role that this gives to individuals as well as species.

e. Multicellular organisms and homology

Multicellular organisms extend the demands of adaptivity to internal as well as external environments. They are made possible by homology, the reproduction of similar characteristics either within the organism or making new organisms. This is a form of reinforcing feedback loop. It enables specialization, reproduction, and bilaterianism, all of which can develop into maladaptive patterns, but which also provide the conditions for subsequent balancing feedback.

f. Nervous systems, senses, and action

The development of animal nervous systems, used in co-ordinated sensing and swift, targeted movement, provides a new form of balancing feedback at the multicellular level. Neural processes are also relatively autonomous from those of the rest of the body, separating judgement from the energy used in action, though not to the extent of ‘freewill’. However, this new adaptivity also allows new reinforcing feedback loops of predation and environmental modification.

g. Bilaterianism

Bilateral symmetry has developed in most animals more complex than jellyfish, and is useful for goal-directed movement. It has also allowed for redundancy that contributes to longer-term sustainability. Bilateral symmetry in the brain, along with cross-wiring to the rest of the body, seems to have first developed in early fish similar to lancelets that lay horizontally in the sea. This is hugely significant for later brain lateralization.

h. Bilateral asymmetry

Asymmetry between the two sides of the body of animals is most important in the lateralization of the brain, but many features of the body are also interdependent with brain lateralization. Brain lateralization is specialized and habitual, not essential, and has probably proved advantageous because we can’t focus on unique features and instrumental categorizations at the same time, although we need both functions. At group level it also enables rapid co-ordination.

i. Left hemisphere repression

Absolutization is the specifically human form of reinforcing feedback that develops due to left hemisphere repression of the right, via the corpus callosum. Human brains are more lateralized as a result of being bigger, leading to a greater possibility of reduplicated functions, and thus a greater practical need for suppression or repression of each hemisphere by the other. Language and cultural reinforcement building on group co-ordination, though, makes left hemisphere repression of the right dangerously powerful.

j. The biology of the Middle Way

Absolutization is due to conflicts between representations in the human left hemisphere pre-frontal cortex at different times when judgement is applied, but parallel capacities to reframe and contextualize these absolutizations have also developed in the right pre-frontal and parietal cortices. The Five Principles of the practice of the Middle Way can all be given neural explanations that unite these capacities of the right hemisphere with support from the left. This has the effect of re-uniting the energies experienced before the conflict emerged, though we also have more to integrate because of having gone through that process.

2. Stages of Psychological Development

a. Issues of psychological development

The approach in this book favours the psychological development theory of Robert Kegan, because this integrates various approaches, and identifies tipping points of judgement as the basis of stages. Although a particular culture has a crucial role in enabling individual development to reach a particular level, it becomes speculative to stage cultures as a whole. Stage theory is a helpful tool used provisionally, but we also need to avoid using it for any purposes of social power: this would absolutize what is only one aspect of our asymmetrical characters.

b . Birth and the incorporative stage

Following birth, we gradually differentiate the meaning of objects in our environment by interacting with them, in the process letting go of the undifferentiated meaning of the womb. We reach a tipping point of independence when meaning becomes predominantly differentiated. Negotiating that stressful transition from incorporative to impulsive stage requires secure attachment, which later provides a model for potential integration, and an implicit Middle Way balance to embrace our independence sustainably.

c. The impulsive stage

In the impulsive stage, the child has a viewpoint, but is subject to unintegrated desires (‘impulses’) and still lacks the ability to integrate these by recognizing alternative viewpoints, whether internally or externally. He/she remains dependent on the family, but begins to transition to the next stage in contact with the wider community, as the child begins to develop a coherent role in that community along with other consistent models of the world. Finding the Middle Way for transition means making use of rules and authorities that at this stage give context, though at later stages they might become absolutized.

d. The imperial stage

The imperial stage offers consistent beliefs about an immediate, concrete, assumed reality. Roles and rules are followed instrumentally, but without empathy towards others’ viewpoints. A significant minority of adults are stuck at this point. Transition to the interpersonal stage requires imperial motives to begin to resolve conflict with others in a way that is not just instrumental, but has genuine loyalty. A new capacity for balancing feedback is developed through relationship.

e. The interpersonal stage

The interpersonal stage involves thinking based on assumptions that are consistently in the service of the group, maintained through socio-political value foundations of authority, loyalty and purity. Wider values of justice, freedom, and care are interpreted in terms favourable to the group. Transition to the ideological stage requires consistently more universal expectations from an alternative group, such as at university, with the Middle Way needed to navigate it.

f. The ideological stage

The ideological stage reflects the adoption of universal models, though these can be used either to inspire or to exclude new examination. It allows individual self-sufficiency in relationships, principial ethics, progressive politics, and explicit metaphysical belief (both positive and negative). Sceptical argument, questioning of one’s persona, or existential dissatisfaction can all help trigger transition to the fifth stage. However, the institutional entrenchment of ideology is likely to make that transition partial in most cases.

g. The interindividual stage

Each of the stages contextualizes the previous ones and addresses new conditions, extending the reinforcing and balancing loops of previous phylogenetic development. To see how the interindividual stage contextualizes the others, an embodied perspective is needed, finding our ‘foundations’ literally in experience which contextualizes merely abstract beliefs. The cultural entrenchment of ideological foundations can make us either deny the possibility of interindividual judgement, or alternatively make us speculate on merely abstracted further ‘enlightened’ stages that offer no further context.

3. Provisionality and absolutization in human culture

a. Provisionality in the Old Stone Age

Early humans seem to have first developed repressive abilities with representational language. However, that absolutization was not necessarily culturally entrenched in paleolithic society, because such societies varied greatly, some being egalitarian and evidently using ideological level judgement. Nor, though, should we idealize these early societies by contrast with the later effects of agriculture and the state, since the capacity for absolutization was there throughout.

b. The two faces of farming

Contrary to the widespread narrative, there is now good evidence that farming did not begin in the intensive, highly instrumental forms that have created such increasingly damaging reinforcing feedback loops since the neolithic. Instead, there was probably a 3000 year period of provisional farming that was liminal, flexible, diverse, egalitarian, and relatively integrable with the ecosystem. Even more intensive river-valley farming and cities did not immediately produce absolutized social structures: these instead spread from marginal areas where exploitative groups had taken over.

c. Religious archetypes and their projection

Early human religion is often interpreted in terms of ‘beliefs’, fuelling reductivist or dogmatic interpretations of it, but this is not obvious from the evidence. Early religion is archetypal meaning, with probably a mixture of integrated and projected use of those archetypes. At some point in the paleolithic, many groups became more insular, leading to the interpersonal level judgements of ethnic religion. In the Axial Age, this expanded into ideological universality, giving new awareness, but also metaphysical expressions to projected religion. The interindividual judgement offered in the Buddha’s Middle Way is needed to go fully beyond this.

d. Desire, exploitation and liberation

Desire is part of the human condition, but can be absolutized positively into addiction and exploitation, or negatively into asceticism and ideologies of liberation. Cultural conflict between addicted and ascetic groups creates reactive counter-dependence. Addicted societies are shaped by exploitative inequality, but absolutized ideologies of liberation in reaction produce ineffective revolutions that neglect the incremental psychological conditions needed for equality. Nevertheless, both ancient and modern societies also show evidence that effective reduction of addictive inequality is possible.

e. Literacy and idolatry

The development of writing has facilitated both contextualized and abstracted representation, and the latter, due to re-thematization, seems to be understood in a way that can be easily absolutized. Both the power and the absolutizing danger of abstracted representation was reflected in the monotheistic prohibition of the idolatry of images, which was then not extended to the written word. Instead, iconoclasm has created new conflicts between interpersonal thinking, and ideological thinking dependent on literalized written propositions.

f. Sceptical argument and its appropriation

Sceptical argument implies even-handed and consistent questioning to help us recognize uncertainty and thus consider new possible beliefs. It seems to have originated in Indian Buddhism, from which it spread to Greece in the form of Pyrrhonism. However, even in these ancient sources scepticism is not consistently applied, and its subsequent history is one of constant defensive misinterpretation, through the techniques of appropriation and lumping.

g. Scientific method and scientism

Scientific method has developed from the early human practice of categorization and causal theory justified by experience. Through the ages this method has developed increasingly systematic observation and theorization, leading to a series of dramatic breakthroughs that have greatly helped humanity to address conditions. In modern times, however, over-specialization has made science subject to the same hijacking by reinforcing feedback as other cultural traditions, though somewhat less far advanced. This is shown in the slowdown and increasing distrust of science.

h. Technology: shaped things shape us

Technology has developed largely through a process of trial and error adjustment rather than of the application of formal scientific theory. Nevertheless, it can be hijacked by many reinforcing feedback processes: normalization, addiction, dependence on specialization and exploitation, and impact on the environment and on imagination. However, it is still possible to provisionally shape these things that have taken over and ended up shaping us, as in the use of renewable power technology.

i. Specialization and over-specialization

Specialization is most basically an adaptive biological process that unavoidably reduces options. However, it starts to create reinforcing feedback when we absolutize our specialized niche. The most basic human specialization is that of gender, which started provisionally but became absolutized in patriarchy. Class over-specialization has developed new forms under capitalism, creating the necessity for ‘recreation’, while professional over-specialization constricts thinking. Most balancing responses to this have been superficial in practice.

j. Administration and bureaucracy

There is historical evidence that, contrary to long-held assumptions, provisional administration is possible without the absolute imposition of top-down authority and rule-following rigidity. Some ancient models separated administration from sovereignty, as also proposed by anarchists – an approach that requires suitable psychological conditions. Modern bureaucracy, though, often follows is its own self-justifying left hemisphere ‘rationality’, whilst political reactions against it have failed to reframe, themselves relying on bureaucratic managerialism.

k. Relativism and breakdown

Relativism is a recently developed and sustained form of negative absolutization, that combines several dogmas, whilst confusing the particularity and incrementality that we need to recognize with equality of justification. Its most common naturalist and subjectivist forms began in the 18th and 19th centuries, but have become much more widespread in response to globalization. The naturalistic version can produce narrow utilitarianism, but the subjectivist version is associated with the relativistic breakdown of practically vital consensus on issues such as climate change.

4. A history of integrative practices

a. Archetypal inspiration

Archetypal inspiration is probably the earliest and most important integrative practice, because it is needed to motivate other practices. Possible early signs of archetypal symbolism are the use of red ochre on cave walls, and compassionate cannibalism. It then became associated with religious experience, which continued despite the increasing formalization, specialization and projection of religion through time. ‘Secular’ arts and concepts also provide archetypal inspiration in the modern period.

b. Ethical observance

Ethical observance may be rooted in kinship feelings, but it is childhood discipline that helps to create basic reflection prior to behaviour. Interpersonal and ideological stages then shape and universalize our moral motives, with the Buddha and Jesus both offering further stretches into more provisional practice. Socio-political values, psychological awareness of inner conflict, and ‘culture wars’ all form further influencing conditions on our ethical practice, the overall benefit of which is to help address basic sources of conflict.

c. Prayer and meditation

Contemplative prayer involves openness to inspirational states, and is this probably as old as archetypal inspiration. Meditation systematizes working with mental states to produce more openness, particularly by stilling stress loops through body awareness. ‘Directive’ forms of meditation, like prayer, carry the danger of projection, so probably need grounding in ‘non-directive’ forms such a mindfulness. Attachment to jhana states can also create reinforcing feedback for modern practitioners. The Middle Way is both applied to, and evident through, meditation.

d. Bodywork

Although sport and dance can also have integrative value, the two main traditions of integrative bodywork are the Indian yoga tradition and the Chinese martial arts tradition. Yoga as understood in the West is largely a twentieth century synthesis, prone to metaphysical inflation of its origins, but this doesn’t affect its practical value. Martial arts develops a quite ancient aspect of Chinese fighting that seeks balancing feedback loops and the Middle Way in conflict.

e. The arts

All the major arts have very ancient origins, and offer different kinds of beauty that are all integrative developments of embodied experience: aesthetic, symbolic, archetypal or conceptual. The performing arts particularly added a socially integrative dimension. After the rigid interlude of the European medieval period, the Western arts were reborn with extraordinary integrative development from the Renaissance onwards. This continues, despite the dangers for the arts of propaganda, commercialization, over-specialization, over-conceptualization, and over-technologization.

f. Philosophical enquiry

‘Philosophy’ throughout its history has included both metaphysical claims that induce reinforcing feedback, and critical enquiry that supports balancing feedback. Socrates and the Buddha helped to establish the dialogical technique of the latter. Ancient scepticism and its later revival helped to stimulate systematic critical enquiry. Christian dogma and modern analytic philosophy have each greatly constricted philosophical enquiry at times, but Hume, phenomenology, pragmatism and philosophical education have all contributed much to keeping it alive.

g. Education

Education is an integrative practice where it supports the development of meaning (including understanding) and justified belief, but merely creates reinforcing loops when trying to inculcate ‘knowledge’. It needs to increase in formality to help people negotiate successive psychological stages in widening social settings. Past approaches using rote memorization of texts or facts, or narrow training in skills, can be integrative only as a side-effect. Modern student-centered approaches improve on this, but are often in conflict with the assessment system.

h. Humour

Humour seems to have survived unaltered by human history, with unknown origins and a strong presence in ancient Greece and Rome. It works as an integrative practice by integrating meaning that is unsettled by ambiguity, but within a context of reassurance. This works as an account of integrative humour of different types and historical periods. The balancing feedback loops become reinforcing ones when humour is used without a reassuring context, to reinforce power relationships.

i. Reflection and autobiography

Systematic reflection, whether or not written down in a journal, can be an integrative practice that widens our access to meaning and consideration of beliefs. In relation to one’s life it is autobiography, a form of writing that can provide archetypal inspiration, or also reinforce dogmas. Journals and autobiographies go back to ancient times, with both ancient and modern examples showing their contrasting integrative or disintegrative effects.

j. Travel and foreign languages

Travel and foreign language learning both go back to paleolithic times, and provide stimulus that is of huge value for the integration of meaning, providing resources for provisionality. The tradition of pilgrimage can also be of value by re-embodying the Middle Way, focusing on the process of travelling. Studies of bilingualism and translingualism show the value of learning foreign languages in increasing the flexibility of our use of models. These practices support globalization, but this is a process producing balancing as well as reinforcing loops, sometimes worth the trade-offs.

k. Recreation and green environments

‘Recreation’ is compensatory activity that has been made necessary by the over-specialization and alienation of work since the industrial revolution. In its context it is integrative and necessary, but also mild, temporary and supportive of continuing reinforcing feedback of exploitation in the wider economic conditions. The constricting effects of artificial urban environments have also created a similar compensatory need for immersion in green environments, that can also be intensified into sublime experience. This is not ‘nature’, which is often projected, but it is contextually valuable.

l. Democracy

Democracy as an integrative practice is a form of decision-making that allows greater provisionality through the limitation of authority. This limitation of authority goes back to ancient, even paleolithic, times, but became increasingly effective with the gradual development of representative parliamentary democracy. It remains dependent on other features that developed from the enlightenment – citizenship education, freedom of information, rule of law, and trust within an executive elite. This makes it dependent on other integrative practices, and vulnerable to authoritarian attack, appropriation, or corruption.

m. Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy is rooted in early guiding encounters between suffering people and those perceived as wiser, for healing or integration. As a modern practice it began with Freud’s insights, though these were accompanied by causal speculations, and was developed as integrative practice particularly by Jung and Rogers. Although working within a number of tensions and prone to theoretical dogmas, it continues to offer valuable integrative practice.

n. Critical thinking

Critical thinking is based on the wider application of certain philosophical and scientific skills to all judgement in every area of life, and began to be recognized as a separate practice during the twentieth century, mainly in an educational context. However, it still suffers from poor definition, particularly the perception that it is most centrally dependent on reasoning, when the range of skills it encompasses are much more those of contextualization. Putting it in the context of integrative practice could do much to clarify it.

Conclusion