Attuning to Natural Energy Flows vs. Abstract Economic Rationality

Essay: Inclusionality and sustainability – attuning with the currency of natural energy flow and how this contrasts with abstract economic rationality. By Alan D.M. Rayner

Paper available via the author at a.d.m.rayner@bath.ac.uk

Abstract

"This paper explores how the way organisms relate energetically to changing circumstances in their natural neighbourhood differs in some fundamental respects from human behaviour induced by economic incentives and controls. It explains how the fundamental principles of much current economic and management practice arise from the partial representation of reality by abstract mathematical and scientific logic and self-definition. This partiality singles human identity out from the wider context of natural identity, resulting in an inversion of priorities from seeking sustainable, co-creative evolutionary relationship to striving for supremacy. By revealing the omission in the foundations of abstract logic, this paper shows how a more natural, ‘inclusional’ form of reasoning, based on energy flow, could transform and restore our human sense of place as inhabitants, not ‘exhabitants’, of the world. Such a logical and psychological transformation is necessary for developing systems of economic and social governance that encourage rather than impede sustainable human-environmental relationships. The underlying principles of these systems align with those of traditional gift flow and the dynamics of heterogeneous natural ecosystems. Here, energy is relayed continuously and reciprocally between sites of supply and sites of receipt, hence sustaining diverse, complementary functionality and avoiding cancerous monopolization. According to these principles, notions of exclusive ownership and competition or co-operation amongst independent individuals or groups are logically and ecologically unsustainable as well as a source of profound human conflict. "

Excerpts

Energy currents vs. monetary currency

"The idea of packaging energy within and outside completely discrete units – i.e. as atomic particles in material bodies and photons in electromagnetic radiation – clearly relates to the notion of a quantifiable currency that can be exchanged between independent individuals or groups in human organizations. Monetary units might thereby be thought of as equivalent to energy units, a measure of effort made in the discovery and gathering of natural products or in the value added through their transformation into desirable commodities. If so, then some correspondence could be expected between the sustainability of natural ergonomics and human economics.

Despite this superficial similarity, there are two main physical reasons why, in reality, energy and money amount to very different kinds of currency: the variable fluidity of natural system boundaries and the continuity of space as a limitless omnipresence. The latter cannot physically be abstracted from the former and treated as a completely quantifiable commodity that can be cut up uniformly, along with ‘time’, into discrete sub-units.

There is also a deep psychological reason, associated with the human fear and perception of death and darkness as the end and enemy of life and light. This fear and perception may, above all, lead many of us mentally to try to seal our selves and others within unnaturally discrete boundary limits that feel secure, yet only set the scene for profound opposition and conflict. To soften its edges, there is a need not just to learn about nature from our own local perspective as distanced subjective observers, but more imaginatively and reflectively also about our selves from nature’s limitless perspective in which we are included as inhabitants (Rayner, 2010a). We may then be better prepared to cope with Hamlet’s ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ than by attempting to ‘take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing (think we can) end them’."

Energy as the necessary basis if any economy

"It is therefore clear that availability of energy is the principal influence that governs the growth, organization and function of living systems. Any activity or pattern of development in which energy loss through permeable boundaries persistently exceeds energy acquisition will result in unsustainable deficit. For any living system to sustain itself, its primary need is therefore to be able to attune its activities and development to correspond with energy availability and hence with the local conditions of its habitat. This availability varies, both in amount and rate of supply due to seasonal and climatic fluctuations, and where and in what form it is located. It also changes due to the growth, death and decomposition of the systems themselves, which respectively deplete and replenish supplies as they come under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence.

...

the inescapable truth is that the ecological and evolutionary sustainability of natural life forms, from the cells and tissues in a human body to the trees in a forest depend upon close attunement with the diversity, complementary nature and changeability of all within their neighbourhood, to which they themselves contribute. When energy supplies become scarce, sustainable living systems pool and redistribute internal resources within integrated structures and survival capsules – they do not compete to proliferate faster on the dwindling supplies than their neighbours. When supplies are abundant they proliferate and differentiate.

...

Sustainability, not supremacy, is therefore the key to evolutionary and ecological continuity. Natural energy flow is variably fluid, circulatory and redistributive from higher concentration (relative ‘abundance’) to lower concentration (relative ‘scarcity’), as illustrated, for example by atmospheric and ocean currents. The primary need for all life forms is not to seek competitive advantage through the unilateral accumulation of energy ‘wealth’ at the expense of their neighbourhood, but to sustain themselves and their offspring as variable channels for natural energy flow. They are more like members of a relay team – continually receiving, temporarily retaining and eventually passing on what sustains life – than a set of autonomous individuals striving to be first past the post. To succeed in this they have to be open to the energetic influence of their neighbourhood at the same time as sustaining the distinctiveness – but not discreteness – of their inner worlds from their outer worlds through their dynamic boundaries. Any growth that overwhelms what it depends upon isn’t sustainable in the long run, no matter how profitable an enterprise it might seem to be in the short term. Any loss of distinctiveness removes the capacity to relate in versatile and complementary ways to changeable circumstances. Real natural community life, as an expression of heterogeneous energy flow, isn’t intolerant of variety – it can’t sustain a monoculture of too many the same if its inflows and outflows are to remain balanced. By the same token, ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ simply represent ‘receptive’ and ‘responsive’ influences affecting the direction of flow within a circulation between receivers and donors, not the subtraction or addition of ‘one’ from or to ‘an other’.

...

Any ecological or evolutionary model that treats an individual or group as a discrete, autonomous object or subject with the set objective of promulgating and preserving its self at all costs as sole survivor of a war of attrition is therefore partial and unsustainable in a changeable world of natural energy flow. Yet just such partial treatment underpins the Darwinian concept of ‘natural selection’ as ‘the survival of the fittest’ or ‘preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’ (Darwin, 1859). It also underpins the notion of economic incentive that drives human social governance to abstraction, an over-definitive representation of reality, at the expense of our evolutionary and environmental sustainability."

Gift Flows and their restrictions

"There is clear anthropological evidence that prior to barter and financial transaction, human social organization was and in some indigenous communities still is primarily orchestrated according to principles of ‘gift flow’. These correspond closely with the circulatory and redistributive supply, receipt and temporary retention of natural energy flow (e.g. Hyde, 2006; Taylor, 2005). Even in modern cultures, intangible qualities of love and artistic creativity are a shared source of profound human pleasure and caring that defy – and are defiled by – any attempt to commoditize or quantify them.

At the heart of traditional gift flow is trust in the principle that what is freely given is equally freely returned in the long run, such that whoever gives away most also receives most, and vice versa. This harmonizing principle is broken as soon as anyone accepts without giving or vice versa. Such restrictive practices give rise to a breakdown of trust that gives rise to further restrictive practices, setting the scene for a vicious cycle of competition, conflict and increasingly rigorous legislation to define trading practice and monetary transactions. By the same token, such restrictive economic rationality is associated with the localization (‘privatization’/’nationalization’) of self and/or group identity and individual or public ‘rights’ of property ownership. Sometimes systems of gift flow may operate within family/social groupings alongside rigidly structured trading or economic practice between groups. This implies a hard boundary limit between the two and a resulting ‘double standard’ of the kind identified by Hyde (2006) as ‘the double law of Moses’, which permits repayment of a loan to be demanded from an ‘other’, but not from a ‘brother’. This duality corresponds with the neo-Darwinian notions of ‘reciprocal altruism’, ‘kin-selection’ and ‘inclusive fitness’ but leaves moot the question of where and whether kinship begins and ends and how it arises, both genetically and contextually (Rayner, 1997).

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No sooner is an absolute two-way or one-way discontinuity set up between individual or group-interest and other-interest, than the harmonizing flow that balances giving and receiving within a community is liable to be blocked or subverted. This leads to fragmentation and corruption into hierarchical power relationships in which the few may live at the expense of the many or vice versa. These problems are exacerbated by prescriptive consumption and enclosure in anticipation of scarcity or abundance instead of in direct attunement with actual availability."