Law of Techno-Humanitarian Balance
Discussion
James Tierney:
"An interesting variation on this theme of self-destruction has been suggested by Big Historian Akop Nazaretyan, who has proposed the ‘Law of TechnoHumanitarian Balance’. This proposition states that the higher the power of war production and technology, the more refined the behavior-regulation needs to be for self-preservation of society (Nazaretyan 2004: 160). Nazaretyan builds on the work of physicist/biologist Erwin Shrödinger, which shows:
- … anti-entropy work can be done only by means of ‘order consumption’ from outside – that is, at the cost of the increasing entropy of other systems. In instances of abundant environments, open non-equilibrium systems increase the volume of their anti-entropy work, and expand as much as they can. Sooner or later, this exhausts the available resources, and as a result, a specific crisis in system-environment relations follows … Crises of this type are called endo-exogenous in ecology. The system – an individual, a population, or a human society – runs against the unfavorable environmental transformations provoked by its own activity. Endo-exogenous crises, including all anthropogenic (technogenic) ones, play a special role in evolution. As previous anti-entropy mechanisms turn counterproductive – being fraught with catastrophic entropy growth – a bifurcation phase develops. If migration is impossible, there are only two further possibilities. Either the system turns back to equilibrium – that is degrades (which is named simple attractor in synergetics) – or diverges from that owing to the development of advanced anti-entropy mechanisms. The last possibility is usually caused by inner diversity and structural complexity, and a more dynamic world model with higher resolving power and sensible feedback" (Nazaretyan 2005: 75–76).
From this perspective, all social systems face the potential of devastating crises in their ‘system-environment relations’, from which no previous culture may have survived intact. It is precisely those societies that are most highly invested in the production of war technologies that are most vulnerable to demise. Nazaretyan does, however, offer the possibility that more refined behavior regulation might allow for even their self-preservation. It would seem that such refined behavior for self-preservation would require an understanding of the stakes involved by the participants, as well as a capacity for the system to reorient itself more sustainably. There may be some evidence that this is actually happening within human culture, and it may indeed be the role of Big History to encourage this selfawareness to take place. In this sense, our culture would then perhaps be at the leading edge of many such cultures that have evolved over the eons. We might then engage in the effort to enable complexity-building to proceed beyond the barriers that entropy places before it. This is a startling perspective, but not nearly as arrogant as the position that humans are the be-all and end-all of the Universe, or as pessimistic as the view that all human-like cultures inevitably destroy themselves."
(http://www.socionauki.ru/almanac/issues/evolution_2_en/full_text_tierney.pdf)
Source: Evolution: A Big History Perspective 2011, pp. 287–293