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126 11. The Human Group – A Living System The following paper was never published. It was written for a talk in 1977, at a fairly early stage in my reflections on the ‘human group’. I was interested at this time in the societies of the social insects – termites , ants and honeybees. ‘There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond us all, beyond the heavens, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the Light that shines in our heart.’ (Chandogya Upanishad) THERE is a growing awareness among individuals at the present time of the need to live more in tune with nature, each other and our fellow creatures. That we will do this only by making being a priority and doing a by-product, albeit totally necessary, would seem to be an inescapable conclusion. To be is the primary task of a human being; any doing or function which deprives him of his consciousness as a being is destroying him as surely as slow starvation. Unconscious doing, or rather functioning to the detriment of being, has left the world in a state of rising anxiety over our dwindling resources: Is our planet running down? Are we going to choke ourselves to death? What about the oil, minerals, etc.? And suppose our sources of energy last, what about the mounting dangers of pollution , our dying lakes and rivers and our decimated fish stocks? With this the spectre of famine comes ever closer. Already, we are told, two-thirds of the world’s population is hungry, with the population explosion and more and more mouths to feed melting food supplies. All of this we hear ad nauseam but is the problem really one of insufficient natural resources? Is there really not enough food to go around? Does the problem actually lie in the environment which is being relentlessly polluted? In considering these questions, we always seem to turn our eyes outwards from ourselves but who is it that The Human Group – A Living System 127 makes the decisions about the use of natural resources and about the purposes for which they are used? Who decides to burn oil in automobiles rather than to make fertilizers? Who is it that pollutes the rivers, lakes and seas? Who is responsible for the beef mountain in Europe while children in Ethiopia grow thinner each day? The fact is that there are still ample natural resources in the world for all our needs; we could easily feed the present world’s population were we to use our technology and present understanding of food production for this purpose. Even if the world’s population reaches four thousand million before it stabilizes, as has been predicted, it should still be possible to feed this number if land and other resources were used intelligently. What is more, with the understanding gained in recent years of the balance of nature and the world’s ecology, it would be quite possible to do this without overusing fertilizers and insecticides and thus damaging the ecological balance. So, as always, the problem seems to come back full circle to ourselves , to the way we utilize our human energy. Whatever about the balance of energies in the cosmos as a whole it seems evident that, in our immediate physical environment on this planet, the laws of thermodynamics are relentlessly at work – the planet is running down, natural resources are being gobbled up at an accelerating rate and, with each reaction, entropy is increasing. Nevertheless, in the midst of this, biological life has appeared and has been growing continually, becoming ever more complex, alive and conscious and concentrating more energy into itself. In this there consists a strange contradiction to which Teilhard de Chardin referred again and again in the last years of his life. On the one hand, we have in physics a matter which slides irresistibly , following the line of least resistence, in the direction of the most probable form, of distribution, and on the other hand, we have in biology the same matter drifting (no less irresistibly but in this case in a sort of ‘greater effort for survival’) towards ever more improbable, because ever more complex, forms of arrangement. Thus we find, as he said, a fundamental contradiction between physical entropy and biological ‘orthogenesis’, with increasing complexity and concentration of energy in a living substance that has reached full flood with the emergence of human life, consciousness and the [18.223.106.100] Project MUSE...

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