High Tea at the Not-So-OK Corral LO25753

From: AM de Lange (amdelange@gold.up.ac.za)
Date: 12/06/00


Dear Complexifiers,

Rol Fessenden <Rol@FESSENDEN.NET> writes:

>Depending on feedback, we may wish to take this
>discussion private. Until I hear howls of outrage,
>though, I will continue in public on the grounds that
>others are probably finding something of interest in
>this exhcange.

Greetings Rol,

As for myself, when such outrage flickers up, I would rather prefer stop
discussing it, exert patience and wait sometime until the issue begs to be
discussed once again in some other context. The reason is that I want to
honour as far as possible what I call the Law of Requiste Complexity --
LRC. (It is not R Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, but can rather be seen
as a generalisation of it, eventhough I have discovered the LRC in a
manner different to the generalisation of Ashby's law).

>I have lots of "mechanical" questions to ask before
>I can understand what you have said.

Fire them and let us pursue the answers with patience.

>You describe a long history of ethnic violence,
>and you feel that understanding the history is
>important. At least 2,500 years of conflict I think
>you said. What is the significance of this in entropy
>production or in social terms?

Forgive the shouting below

The "zones" of PRESENT "entropy production" in any complex system depends
on the PRESENT organisation of that system (in a very curious manner which
I will not now say more because it will confuse the answer). Our main
difficulty is to get an authentic PICTURE of the PRESENT organisation. One
way is to ANALYSE the PRESENT organisation. This, I fear, will always be
incomplete because we have worked with only one of the COMPLEMENTARY dual
"becoming-being". The other way complementary to this analysis is to get
an authentic MOVIE involving the PAST and then freeze it when we reach the
PRESENT into a PICTURE. Hence we have to SYNTHESISE the PAST (evolution
of) organisation, trying to link to all historical data (far too often
clouded by the Mental Model of the historian) available. I have found that
it is too difficult to discern the organisation of some zones unless I go
far back into time.

>Why did the Afrikaaners choose distinction
>rather than holism as their mechanism of survival?

This is a profoundly important question. It involves a complex web of
events over a long period of time involving many key personalties and
almost all walks of Afrikaner culture. The most profound event is that the
Afrikaners in the two Boer republics arose like the proverbial Phoenix
from the ashes -- literaly ashes because the British burnt every thing on
the Boer farms to ashes while putting the women and children in
concentration camps where some 26 000 of them died.

Many reasons are offered for this Phoenix event and many arguments have
ensued which reason is true. I myself think of a number of reasons being
true and one of them as the "sheave bundeling" all the other together. It
was the emergence of Afrikaans (which had to survive for over 200 years as
a spoken language) as a written langauge. One man played almost single
handed the role here, unlike in most other languages, Eugene Marais. I
have to stress the emergence of Afrikaans into script because within one
generation it led to the Bible translated into Afrikaans, some seven years
after Jan Smuts' "Holism and Evolution" was published.

I will now focus on two key figures among many important figures to lift
out the main entropy producing pattern.

As I have written earlier, Jan Smuts (being secretary of state before the
British Boer War) fought in it and helped ending it as general with
superior distinction. His efforts afterwards in awakening the ashes leaves
no doubt to his patriotism and unconditional love for his own people. He
was already thinking holistically and firmly believed that Afriaans
speaking whites and English speaking whites should become one European
community, respecting each other's language (almost like the EU in
principle today). But most Afrikaans speaking people had too bitter
feelings because of the total destruction which the British Empire leveled
at them. Thus they began to view Smuts with suspicion and so that he had
to do his political work in the political party to which the great of
English speaking people belong. Here his contributions were so profound
that it helped many English people to stop "looking down upon" the
Afrikaners.

The Afrikaners was in religion predominantly Protestants and particularly
(an this is vitally important) Calvinistic orientated. Thus they used the
Bible as their main source of information how to organise "all walks"
(typically Calvinistic) of their life. Furthermore, they interpreted the
Bible literally (again typically Calvinistic) unless common sense told
them to seek for a symbolic explanantion. As for the information on
Creation documented in Genesis 1 and 2, they believed this information to
be a factual rather than a metaphorical account of Creation in general and
the creation of humankind in particlar. God created the man called Adam in
one day on the sixth day of the "Week of Creation".

You can now imagined what happened. When "Holism and Evulotion" got
published, it was immediately judged by most Afrikaners to be the work of
Smuts collaborating with the Devil. What Smuts wrote, was diametrically
opposed to what the reformer Calvin had written some 300 years earlier.
Calvin is right so Smuts had to be wrong. God created man so that the
whole cannot drive Creation, even with man in it. Furthermore, of all
reformers, Calvin was foremost in defending the right of the Protestants
to split away from the Roman Catholic church. The word Catholic
(wholeness) meant nothing to Calvinists -- they had the right to religious
apartheid, to be apart from the disctatorship of Rome. If religious
apartheid is a right, why should political and economical apartheid not be
rights too?

What is also very important, is to bear in mind that in the early
twentieth century "comprehensive" science finally gave way to
"disciplinary" science. The Afrikaner phoenix even reached science. Within
two generations they delivered their own "disciplinary" scientists (in
sufficient ratio to their overall population) who could compete with the
rest of the world. All these sceintists worked in disciplines of which the
one discipline was apart of the other. Yes, "apartheid in science" was at
the order of the day. So when Smuts began to question and lament the
fragmentation of academy, they thought that his collaboration with the
devil brought him close to even insanity.

If apartheid (framentarism) is a right in religion, science, economy and
politics, then this wholeness which Smuts dreamt about was a mirage
actually construed by the devil. In 1948 Afrikaners believed that they
have finnaly shattered this dream of Smuts (the prime minister) when they
defeated his political party in the general elections with their ideology
of apartheid. Some Afrikaners warned them they were going to far, but they
answered deftly with the glabal political situation of those days. The USA
and the USSR were then clearly the only two world powers left. The USSR
stood for communism in the context of collectivism, something which they
thought had connections with holsim. The USA was increasingly walking the
road of Segregationism (a US kind of paratheid). How could Afrikaners be
wrong when their friend the USA is right and their enemy the USSR is
wrong?

His defeat in 1948 was the biggest blow ever to Smuts spanning a history
of some eigthy years. He was awarded almost thirty honorary doctorates
from outstanding universities all over the world for his work on holism.
Yet his own people rejected him in very clear terms. For a couple of
months he was almost paralysed in body and mind. But so great was the
mentality of Smuts that the Phoenix within him arose once again. Once he
helped the Phoenix of his people to arise again. Now he had to focus on
the Phoenix within himself.

At an age when he ought to have sit in the sun and enjoy the last days
preparing for his Maker, he flung himself into studies which will ashame
the most diligent young student. He began to study books on an incredible
diversity of topics. He bagn to study the NT in Greek to search for the
clue there. He now knew that wholeness was not alone in directing
evolution. One or more other "---nesses" are also essential. But what are
they. He even studied the scanty literature on creativity in those days,
hoping to find the clue there. Alas, three years was not enough to find
the answer. He died with a compassion, which cannot be descibed, for the
coming future of his fellow Afrikaners. Long before Maturana came up with
autopoiesis and Progogine with irreversible self-organisation, he had the
prophetic vision that the Afrikaners will only bcome sane by healing
themselves form their insinity called apartheid -- and the price which
they will have to pay is to burn self the Phoenix which they were so proud
of. Almost 40 years later the Nobel Prize for peace, awarded to De Klerk
(Afrikaner) and Mandella (Xhosa), sealed this vision as indeed prophetic.

The Bible says that a prophet must be stoned when his vision finally
becomes evident as an illusion. But what should one do when the vision
refers to a time long after the death of the prophet? In such a case the
prophet is usually "stoned" (metaphorically speaking) during life by those
who judge his vision to be insane or from the devil. So when that vision
becmes true, it seems to me that we should stop stoning the prophet and
rather try to use his vision as a guide for authentic learning.

The funny thing today is that when the far majority of Afrikaners insist
that they do no want anything to do with apartheid again most other people
suspect that they are the most clever bunch of liers upon this globe!

>Yes, please intensive/extensive.

This is such a complex topic that we will have to reserve it for some
other day.

> Your equation [y(1) - y(2)] x (del x) (did I get that right?)
> is about an entropic force (y1-y2) multiplied by a labor
> factor(?). Is this a partial differential equation? Why is
> labor an impact? What are the units?

The answere to this question depends very much on the
intensive-extensive complementarity so that we will first have to deal
with the former.

> That's probably enough for now. Let's see if we should go
> off-line for this.

Rol, I have spent much time on painting a rich picture why the Afrikaners
threw wholeness into the wind in organising their country. I did it to
stress that religion is part of complexity, whether we like it or not.
John Cavin and Jan Smuts some three hundred years later formed the two
dialextical poles in the religious dimension of complexity from which
apartheid immerged destructively. Afrikaners judged Smuts left, right and
centre as someone who despised religion. However, when I began to study
his private letters, I was ashamed how much I had been fooled by these
judgements. He was not only a devout Christain, but one of rare persons
(other than ministers schooled in theology) who studied the NT frequently
in its original text!

After Einstein studied "Holism and Evolution" soon upon its publication,
he wrote that two mental constructs will direct human thinking in the next
millenium, his own mental construct of relativity and Smuts' of holism. In
the work of Smuts he saw a clear blueprint of much of his own life, work
and personality. Do an experiment self. Read Smuts' "Holism and Evolution"
in one session and then in the next session one of the many biographies on
Einstein. Einstein kept on using the word "unified", but his thinking on
"unified" was as holistic as that of Smuts.

Best wishes

At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za>
Snailmail: A M de Lange
Gold Fields Computer Centre
Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria
Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa

-- 

"AM de Lange" <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za>

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