5 Fabric of
Society
The brain may
devise laws for the blood;
but a hot temper leaps over a cold decree…
William
Shakespeare
The
Merchant of Venice
People, as
practicing vertebrates, are in and of the world. Within the purely physical
world, all interactions are grounded in the basic laws of nature. No matter how
ethereal is our perspective when we start, we ultimately play by the rules of
our physical ecosystem. Here, interactions are physical in the purest sense;
they’re face-to-face, claw-to-claw, mano-a-mano. This is a place where
being knee deep in alligators has a very real and pragmatic connotation;
particularly, if you’re a wildebeest crossing a river made shallow by the dry
season and yet containing the entire crocodile population, all competing for
food. Wildebeest is particularly tasty this time of year!
From the
physical ecosystem come the metaphors for our being and behavior. “We fight for the things we believe in!” “We
thirst for knowledge.” “We struggle to lose weight.” “We can’t
quite grasp the solution to Fermat’s
Last Theorem.” In the fullness of time, evolutionary processes have provided a
path away from the pure, objective nature of the physical ecosystem.
Collectively, and in collectives, we sort of left, but we carried our metaphors
with us. We say “sort of” because it should be clear by now that we really can’t
completely divorce ourselves from the physical ecosystem. However, with the
emergence of living organisms a variety of levels of cognitive capability were
brought into play. A more subjective interaction process was the result. Thus,
while the lion usually has the prowess to catch and eat the antelope, if it is
somewhat sated from a prior feast and not driven by pending hunger, it might
choose not to engage in the hunt. “The lion sleeps tonight!” and we extend our
metaphorical concepts into the realm of allegory.
So evolution,
through the mechanisms that it saw prevail, availed to the human species an
ostensibly better opportunity. When we, as a species, became physiologically
capable of it, we found that we could create an artificial environment that
mitigated many of the threats posed to us by the physical world. These
artificial environments we term social
ecosystems. When we enter this more subjective world, interactions can take
on more extended and complex forms; perhaps profound, perhaps whimsical. As
Willy Wonka tells us, “We are the music makers; we are the dreamers of dreams.”
Individual
organisms have distinct and complex physiologies that govern their capabilities
within the realms in which they exist. As we noted in the previous chapter,
there are parallels to these capabilities found in the architecture of computer
systems. As we explore extending these parallels to encompass human social structures,
of course, we must consider multi-entity constructs. This is what gives meaning
to the concept of social. For humans, this facility is