Evolution, Devolution and Chaos

    Deep down, evolution and devolution are wave/particle dance, the rhythmic process of creation unfolding—sometimes pretty and sometimes…not so pretty—but always awesome. Evolution and Devolution are ancient, really ancient dance partners. They've been dancing for thousands, millions, even many billions of years. Shall we call them Evo and Devo? [But don't tell them I called them ancient; they've gotten sensitive in their later years. OK!?] They are really important because they are responsible for all vital sustainability, including the maintenance of ecology.
    Evo is the stronger partner who takes two steps forward; Devo is the weaker partner who falls back one step. [To let you in on a little secret: Evo and Devo are Faith/Reason personifications of nature's strategies for syntropy against entropy, the evolutionary struggle of sustainability against chaos.] In humankind, Evo has taken a quantum-leap beyond the tension modes of particle physics to the intentional mode of symbiosis. It's hard for Devo to keep pace with her! But their development of intentional symbiosis has made it possible for their dance to advance in remarkable ways if only Devo could overcome his clumsy drag. Evo has had to create strategies just to overcome his backwardness. She has even had to come up with multiple ways (redundancy) of arriving at the same outcome.
    Science informs us that at the subatomic level our bodies are way, way more space than substance. A problem for Devo, I think. At deep subatomic levels, substances move in and out of wave/particle relationships. Devo seems to prefer being wave, smiley, and Evo favors being particle—substance. It figures. But their dance of vital sustainability is also the mechanism by which cosmic energy/matter continually renews and reiterates redundancy in the wave/particle maintenance of body molecules and by which humans come to self-justification.
    From the looks of things now, it seems that humanity is and has been in Devo's wave mode for a long time, taking two steps backward for every one step forward. This dance works to the advantage of chaos and against evolution. Devo's two steps back trips up Evo's substance choreography. The evolution of intentional symbiosis advances by the three-step dance of trustful communication, informed consciousness, and committed conscience; devolution counters with his three-step dance of distrust, dysfunction and frustration. Wave alone, without substance, isn't adequate to the tasks of evolution and symbiosis.
    The intelligence of self-reflectivity is enlarged in evolutionary potential by its capacity to anticipate outcomes and selectively (intentionally) choose beneficial outcomes. Evolving processes of living systems incorporate energetic redundancies (iterations) that secure the purposeful design-outcomes of repeatable intelligence. Advanced well beyond the merely physical tensions of energetic redundancies are self-reflective complexes by which intelligence continues to develop in more subtle and purposeful ways. Choosing has outcomes favoring either evolution or devolution; emotional/rational intelligence opts for the purposeful processes of choice that intend and act on the better interests of personal and social wellbeing. Failure to understand damaging options puts one at risk of inadvertently making choices favorable to devolution and chaos. When choices favoring devolution are politicized, all of human culture is set back, even catastrophically, as is evolution.
    Outcome-awareness is the means that can better choices, actions, and their outcomes. Fixation in status-quo knowledge gives false security even though there may be some escape and comfort in misguided faith/understanding. Advancing wellbeing can be achieved with due diligence in knowledge-updating even as back-peddling expectedly results from the neglect of intelligence-updating. Life is and is about ceaseless struggle against disintegration and chaos.
    As renewal and recovery from chaos at the subatomic level are incessant processes, so life at the conscious level is and must be incessant in contesting with entropic forces of chaos. When struggle ceases, evolution ceases; when struggle ceases, disintegration and devolution set in. As David C. Korten says, "Struggle is an incessant condition of living…God's own struggle manifest through us." ["The Great Turning", Part IV, pp 271-273] Evo and Devo have come to understandings of divine personality and Trinitarian processing (divine/human hypostsis), the understanding of divine/human likeness—divine in design (intelligence), and human (clumsy) in development. Sorry! But I have to be honest!
    Religion and civility are caught up in the evolve/devolve dance. The cultural animus between faith and reason, which has persisted for millennia even amongst monotheistic religions, interferes and interjects bloodshed and chaotic violence. [An aside: amongst other things, the Christian West's deeply cultured habit of "religious" violence factored in the Bush Administration's choosing to go to war with Iraq. Neglect of outcome anticipation, on the part of the Bush Administration to plan and foresee the war's consequences, has broad and lasting intercultural consequence.]
    Intentional purpose, whether at the inter-personal level or the inter-national, can accomplish personal/social harmony in the same manner as evolutionary harmony is accomplished, namely, by three-step processing: the exchange (communication) of understanding/difference; the enlargement of understanding (consciousness) by way of openness to differences and commonalities; and commitment to accommodate each other mutually (conscience) and mitigate differences. Globally, cultures suffer devolution and chaos from the wasting disease of rational intelligence (male arrogance) suppressing emotional (female) intelligence. The three-step pursuit of trust and the advancement of intelligence can calculate to avoid the destructive outcomes of devolution and advance the constructive outcomes of evolution.
    Trust, religion and civility advance on the mutuality of emotional/rational intelligence. The crises of our time are cumulative outcomes of failed mutuality. Personal religion and social civility together evolve or devolve on the choices we make personally and socially, on whether we opt for personal/communal resonance or dissonance. Unless and until public political consciousness understands and lives by the reciprocal necessity of faith/reason mutuality, self-wasting and chaos will perniciously visit upon us.
[Published concurrently at www.NCRcafe.org]