In a fascinating lecture delivered for the Santa Fe Institute, biologist Richard Lewontin challenged the idea that evolution constituted the progress of increasing complexity over time by taking a piece of paper and crumpling it up in his hand. Presenting the ball of paper to the audience, Lewontin noted, “it will take more bits of information, I daresay, to describe that object. Is there anybody here who wants to say that, in any interesting sense, this is more complex?”
The point: just because something is more complex, does not mean it is better, or that it has “progressed” in any meaningful sense. Nothing, it seems, is more complex than chaos.
But what about complexity in human relations? The first serious attempt to understand the nature of complexity among human beings, Aristotle’s Politics, is without a doubt his most controversial work. Aristotle is responsible for several gross errors which have misled societies for millennia, most famously his physics: it took civilization many centuries to get over his belief that the earth was the center of the cosmos, and it wasn’t until Newton that we could dispose of his theory of motion, his belief that everything tends toward a natural state of rest.
But his flawed science is forgivable as a product of his time. Unfortunately, Aristotle is also famous for giving intellectual legitimacy to several tragically bad ideas concerning human society: slavery, patriarchy, and the just rule of elites over the masses. Aristotle is so uncompromising, and so brutally certain on these subjects that the reader can’t help but laugh in incredulity. Whereas he at least treats the subject of slavery with some care, recognizing that at least in some cases, it is unjust, he is preternaturally misogynistic. It doesn’t even occur to him that he should have to demonstrate the inferiority of women in relation to men-he takes it as self-evident.
And yet, reading Politics, one recognizes again and again that there is something for everybody in Aristotle. His theories of patriarchy and “natural” slavery are alive and well among conservatives, who won’t advocate slavery, but happily embrace the idea that some are born to lead, others to follow. To use our modern terminology, Aristotle simply says the quiet part out loud.
But there’s also much else in Politics which is instructive. Aristotle’s naturalism, and his almost infinite curiosity and fascination with everything in nature, is evident and crucial to understanding his political thought. Brian Morris contextualizes Aristotle’s approach in his work Anthropology and Dialectical Naturalism nicely:
Aristotle, in fact, describes himself as a physikos-“one who understands nature.” Armand Leroi suggests there is a sense in which Aristotle’s philosophy is biology, in that his ontology and epistemology were devised in order to understand the natural realm-specifically that of animal life. Aristotle was essentially a philosopher of living nature.
In that vein, the Politics serves as both a brilliant work of naturalistic thinking, and a crucial example of its pitfalls (really a pitfall of any epistemology), the ease with which invocations of nature can be used to justify reactionary ideas which, in retrospect, don’t appear natural at all.
Understanding Aristotle is crucial for naturalist thinkers, however, because Aristotle defines his philosophy in direct contradiction to the spiritual idealism of Plato. He is skeptical of a spirit world or the existence of ideals, but rather believes that we understand nature by studying it as it actually exists-in this way he presents a firm foundation for the Enlightenment’s incorporation of empiricism with abstract reason, and more particularly, dialectical reason. Aristotle defends his views of good or bad city-states on the basis of whether they are natural or not-do they cohere with human nature? Are they self-sufficient, or do they fall apart under their own terms? He deconstructs the constitutions of various city-states by looking for their internal contradictions, and through an analysis of these contradictions, speculates as to how a more perfect alternative could be reached.
The Politics is, then, a study of the organization of human groups. Aristotle begins with couples, then with households (composed of the relationships between the patriarch and his various subjects-his wife, his slaves, and his children), then with villages, and then with city-states.
Political Aggregates vs. Political Systems
Right away, Aristotle’s view is interesting to us in that he doesn’t view societies as mere aggregates of autonomous individuals (a much-maligned aspect of liberal political theory), but rather as a complex system, made up of different parts with different functions, but defined not merely by their substance (individual human beings). Aristotle is known for his famous theory of hylomorphism, the unity of matter (hulê) and form (morphê). It is in this way he explains the existence of different entities in nature-we do not exclusively find mere aggregates of atoms, as in the theory advanced by Aristotle’s Epicurean contemporaries, who believed that “atomic swerves” would occur, leading atoms to clump together and form recognizable material entities, glorified atomic snowballs. Rather, we find entities (in the form of inanimate objects such as crystals, as well as plants, animals, and, as later theorists would argue, thoughts and concepts) which have structure, an internal logic which differentiates them from other entities, and which sustains their existence. A diamond and a lump of graphite have exactly the same material constituent-both are pure carbon-but the structure of the carbon molecules yields an extraordinary difference in appearance and form. Likewise, living things are all composed of mostly the same stuff-carbon, but also some hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen-but those four elements, organized differently, can give rise to beings as disparate as cephalopods, to cucumbers, to Elvis. It was this quasi-magical power of form which early materialists neglected, and which has prompted supernatural explanations for thousands of years-consider the fact that it is a peculiar organization of C, N, O, and H which gives rise to the consciousness that is reading this essay. For many, that simply can’t be explained within the bounds of the natural sciences.
A theory of this sort-of the differing relations between matter and form-has been adapted and reinvented multiple times since Aristotle, forming a key insight of every naturalistic philosophy. In Anthropology of Dialectical Naturalism, Brian Morris outlines the distinction between mere matter and form in the systemist theory of Argentinian-Canadian philosopher Mario Bunge:
…Bunge made a distinction between two ways in which material things may conjoin to form a unity or a whole. This can occur either by association, juxtaposition, or accretion, so as to form aggregates; or by composition, or binding relations (organization), so as to form systems. Some examples of aggregates include the accretion of dust particles, sand dunes, garbage heaps, clouds in the sky, a swarm of locusts, or a loose crowd of people. Aggregates are characterized by a modular structure, or even a complete lack of structure, as well as a low degree of cohesion. Systems, in contrast, are not just a random collection of parts, but have an integral structure constituted of strong, usually enduring bonds (relations). Systems are, therefore, more stable, more cohesive, and more enduring than mere aggregates. Typically, systems as complex wholes possess properties that their component parts lack. It is these global properties that are said to be emergent (Bunge 2003: 10-12)
Think again of a crumpled up ball of paper-it is a unity in that it is one discrete thing, sure, but is it a system? Does it have form? If one leaves a crumpled piece of paper alone, it tends to relax, to somewhat flatten back out. It doesn’t hold itself together well, and to the extent it does, only does so incidentally. Compare this to a paper airplane-something which isn’t merely folded in a way which requires more bits of information to explain, but which has a self-sufficient complexity, one which is complex in such a way as to hold itself together, but also to perform a certain function well. Likewise, a crumpled piece of paper is not readily reproducible-every piece of paper you crumple up will be totally different from the last in its internal structure, the same way every pile of garbage is unlike every other pile. They are simply aggregates, without rhyme or reason, whereas a paper airplane has a specific set of steps which lead to the outcome. One can certainly make a paper airplane as complex as one likes-but it isn’t mere complexity, but coherent complexity which differentiates it-complexity in accord with a function or set of functions. Such is the difference between Pollock and Picasso-one aggregated paint on a canvas such that the outcome was complex, the other organized it, and the honest viewer can readily recognize which is more striking. It’s the difference between a zoo and an ecosystem, between a pile of lumber and a building, between graphite and a diamond, and between a crowd and a community. It is the natural tendency for ordered complexity to achieve fitness over chaotic complexity in living systems which interests naturalist political thought. It is specifically the ability of complex natural systems to find sustainable and mutually beneficial relations for many disparate elements, with many built-in redundancies and opportunities for change and improvement, which naturalist political thought seeks to emulate.
Unity vs. Unity in Diversity
Aristotle recognizes this nature of complex interrelationships when he criticizes Plato’s idea of abolishing families, with the intention of making everyone feel that they are a “unity”. With everyone “related” to everybody else by the knowledge that someone in their community is a blood relative, but without certainty as to who, every middle-aged man and woman, not knowing which children are their blood relatives, will think of every child as “their” child, and every child likewise every adult as “their” parent. It is this concept of holding someone to be simultaneously “mine” and “not mine” which Aristotle skewers in Book II of Politics:
Yet is this way of calling the same thing “mine” as practiced by two or ten thousand people really better than the way they in fact use “mine” in city-states? For the same person is called “my son” by one person, “my brother” by another, “my cousin” by a third, or something else in virtue of some other connection of kinship or marriage, one’s own marriage, in the first instance, or that of one’s relatives. Still others call him “my fellow clansman” or “my fellow tribesman.” For it is better to have a cousin of one’s own than a son in the way Socrates describes.
It isn’t enough to simply have a relationship with someone, generic and undifferentiated; the relationship ought to be of some specific nature. The point is that there must be vast webs of those relationships, maintained in their specificity and preserved through a sense that each member of a city “has” every other member in some way-I have a friend, I have my friend’s cousin, I have my friend’s cousin’s grandmother, I have my friend’s cousin’s grandmother’s friend, and so on.
These networks of relationships, absurd in their extension and depth, come to life for me when I simply ask my grandmother to tell me about Brooklyn in the 30s, when she was a young girl in an Irish catholic neighborhood. This is one of my favorite parts of talking to any person in their eighties or nineties-just asking them about their old neighborhood. What will typically follow is a dizzying list of names, families, friends of family friends, and so on, lists which grow shorter when you ask people in their 40s and 50s, and are likely almost nonexistent when you ask people in their 20s and 30s.
That list of names and avenues of relation is what constitutes membership in a community-complex, ornate, but nonetheless structured of clear and coherent relationships. It isn’t fixed by power or bureaucratic dictate, but rather constitutes an organic sort of foundation for the human identity, a clear and abundant answer to the question “who are you?” which has long been a sustaining source of clarity and meaning for generations of people.
It must be acknowledged, Aristotle does this in a way which is fatally filtered through his cultural heritage (speaking only of “sons,” “brothers,” “clansmen,” etc.), and it has been a tendency of reactionary thought ever since to naturalize hierarchies along biological lines. But hierarchies are a human invention-it is true that animals may organize along lines of strength, for instance, but human hierarchies visibly differ. Often, the master is weaker than the servant, quite often less intelligent, almost always less capable, and yet he nonetheless domineers over his “natural” superior.
The logic of natural superiority as a just basis for hierarchy was justifiable to Aristotle in antiquity, but his belief that Greek men were the natural masters of all other human cultures is one no one even bothers to reject in its self-evident absurdity now, reading his works in an era where Greece is a marginalized also-ran on the international stage. In the modern world, the logic of natural superiority is untenable, at least for its proponents to state out loud. Instead, by fixing hierarchies to political structures and the formation of bureaucracies, hierarchies become tools for domination and exploitation independent of the personal attributes of members of the ruling class. This is the remarkable characteristic of the modern state, and for that matter the modern corporation-unlike Aristotle’s polis, a modern state or multinational is made up not of people, but of paperwork. Without people, it is revealed in its true form-as merely a legal entity, a set of offices and relations which need not, and ideally probably ought not, be constituted by actual human beings. Indeed, this is why people form LLCs-to form a legal entity to take on debt and other responsibilities, instead of the humans who actually operate said entity. It is thus, ironically, a hierarchy without leaders-“leadership” consisting only of the necessary charisma to talk oneself into a predefined position within the bureaucracy, but not requiring the natural capacity to actually lead, something which only incidentally appears in some leaders of bureaucratic entities, but is notably absent in most.
It is a failing of the left to ignore the truth that in real, human communities, leaders do emerge in many circumstances, and are ignored at the peril of the community as a whole-but also a failing of states and statist political thought to not acknowledge that effective hierarchies are fluid, dependent on the needs of the moment and the actual qualities of the people who make up the community. This is the role of hierarchy acknowledged by classical anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in God and the State (a work I feel my readers probably expect me to quote in almost every essay at this point):
I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason. I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole. Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labor. I receive and I give-such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.
Thus we have a system which is not truly hierarchical, but rather mutualistic, in which positions of power are occupied at the behest of the community, and those powers revoked and transferred according to popular will. This is theoretically the goal of a liberal democracy! But we don’t see it in practice, both because voters are quite consciously manipulated for the private interests of parties rather than educated for the benefit of the whole, and because the larger class divisions (both between the rich and the poor, but most importantly between the poor and middle class) upon which liberal democracies are structured carry inherent antagonisms which would never allow for a citizenry to actually vote in its own best interests.
But the place of this essay isn’t to trash liberal democracy-we are well past that. It is to point readers to the natural continuity of individuals and political communities, to a recognition of the difference between the intricately woven system of relations which make up a true political community, and the aggregate of disjointed monads which make up a mere constituency. Building a new politics thus requires building a new culture, one in which we see our fates as genuinely bound up in one another’s by virtue of its structure-not in the vague sense of caring “for the community” as we are reminded by the mission statements of so many non-profits and NGOs, but rather for those individuals with whom we are linked by mutualistic relations in a community. The political system is a dynamic outgrowth of the human system, and for this reason there is no one political system to advance-each is an emergent property of the state of a given community in a given time, on the interaction between its parts and the natural ecology it inhabits. It is through the cultivation of dynamic and resilient systems, which by their nature will be given towards ordered rather than chaotic complexity, that political communities can achieve stability and, hopefully, more humane and fulfilling ways of life.