occurring between biological agents striving for survival and prosperity on the one ... that can only be seen reflected in the actions and reactions of agents and ... development of a general dynamic theory â the âdynamic-strategyâ theory â to.
ARK OF THE SUN The improbable voyage of life by
Graeme Donald Snooks
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Overview
A New Vision of Life and Human Society
The strategic logos is an entropy-defying, shock-deflecting life system
Ark of the Sun is a book about the dynamic life-system that has enabled the emergence and exponential development of life forms, including humanity, in a hostile universe. I discovered this life-system, called the “strategic logos”, towards the end of my fifty-year exploration of the dynamics of life and human society. It is a hidden system consisting of interacting forces occurring between biological agents striving for survival and prosperity on the one hand and societal structures generated to facilitate this, on the other. The strategic logos is vital to the success of life and human society because it is an entropy-defying, shock-deflecting system. As a hidden system that can only be seen reflected in the actions and reactions of agents and organisations, it can be compared with the cosmos, which is a scientifically-recognised system of hidden physical forces.
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Ark of the Sun shows how the strategic logos was discovered, how it operates, what it tells us about the entire past of life on Earth as well as the present, and what glimpses it provides of the immediate and distant future. To do this, it discusses: •
the role of the logos in the cosmos;
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the discovery of the logos during the final step in an inductive sequence that began with a comprehensive examination of the emergence of life and human society on Earth, followed by the isolation of the main patterns of the past, and then by the development of a general dynamic theory – the “dynamic-strategy” theory – to explain these patterns;
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how the strategic logos emerged from an examination of the operation of the dynamic-strategy theory;
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how the laws governing life and human history were also derived from the dynamicstrategy theory;
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the nature of the interaction between the mind and the metropolis as key actors in the logos;
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how religion and, more recently, scientism emerged in response to the logos;
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and finally, how the dynamic-strategy model can be used not only to explain the modern world, both developed and underdeveloped, but also to predict how it will respond to climate change and where it will be proceeding in the future.
It should be realised from the outset that Ark of the Sun is the overview of an original research program that challenges all earlier theories of societal change––including those by orthodox economists, institutionalists, Marx and Marxists, Darwin and neo-Darwinists, Freud and Freudians, evolutionary psychologists, self-organisation theorists, and complexity theorists. The dynamic-strategy theory is a demand-side theory, consisting of a core
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mechanism involving a demand-supply interaction. A successful society generates a “strategic demand” for a comprehensive range of supply variables, including productive resources, institutions, organisations, and ideas of all types (technical, intellectual, cultural). In this model demand creates its own supply. In contrast, all earlier theories are supply-side theories, where developments emerge spontaneously from internal characteristics, such as genetics and “culture”. In these models, supply creates its own demand (“build runways and the planes will come”!). As such, these theories fail the test of reality. Further, these supply-side theories are unintentionally racist, because they argue that the differences in performance between societies are due to cultural differences; and cultural differences, in a model without dynamic demand at its core, can be caused only by differences between peoples (i.e. race). Only a dynamic theory based on dynamic demand, like the dynamic-strategy theory, is free from racist interpretation. The dynamic-strategy theory is also a theory that extends across traditional disciplinary boundaries, embracing the fields (if not the partial supply-side theories) of economics, history, politics, sociology, psychology, philosophy, biology, and social physics. The dynamics of life and human society cannot be compartmentalised in a set of discrete academic boxes. The remainder of this section provides a brief overview of the arguments presented in the following thirteen chapters. •
Chapter 1: “Improbable Voyage” outlines how life emerged on Earth and has been sustained in a cosmos extremely hostile to biological forms. This has always been a mystery to scientists who rely on the laws of physics, or who employ the flawed Darwinian theory of natural selection. The key discovery here is the strategic logos, complete with its own laws of dynamics that are discussed in chapter 6. It is the logos
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that enabled life and human society to negotiate a series of biological and technological paradigm shifts, which have transformed primitive life forms inhabiting the oceans of the world into sophisticated self-aware beings responsible for constructing advanced forms of civilization. •
Chapter 2: “Unfinished Odyssey” provides an outline of the evidence concerning the emergence of life over the past 4,000 million years (myrs) and of human society over the past 2 myrs. It shows that life forms from the most simple to the most complex are driven by an unceasing urge to survive and prosper, which I call “strategic desire”, and that they attempt to achieve this unrelenting objective by the adoption of a given set of “dynamic strategies”. In this way, life forms became more numerous and complex; they generated a number of biological and technological revolutions; and they transformed the logos into a complex system of life where the agents and social structures are visible, but the interacting forces between them are obscured from view (just like the invisible forces operating on physical bodies in physics). The end result was an acceleration in the pace of history, both in life and human society.
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Chapter 3: “Patterns of the Past” outlines the main structural changes that have occurred in both life and human society since their beginnings. These quantitative “timescapes”, which must be explained by any credible dynamic theory, map the great biological and technological paradigm shifts together with the great waves of change within each paradigm. It is through the internal energy generated by these great waves that each paradigm is exploited and, finally, exhausted, making way for the next paradigm shift. The acceleration of these structural changes traces out an exponential curve that can be measured by what I call the “logological constant”, with a
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coefficient of transformation of 3.0. The logological constant is to the biological world, what the cosmological constant is to the physical world. •
Chapter 4: “Engine of Life” outlines the general dynamic theory I have developed to explain the patterns of the past. This model is realist (based as it is on detailed empirical work), self-starting, self-sustaining, and has at its core a dynamic demandsupply response mechanism. Accordingly, it is able to do what no other model in the social, biological, and physical sciences can do––explain and predict the complex process of biological and technological transformation at both the micro and macro levels. Only a demand-side dynamic model is capable of this feat. And the dynamicstrategy theory is unique in a world of flawed supply-side models. This is why my dynamic-strategy theory displaces those of the great Georgian and Victorian thinkers such as Adam Smith, Marx, Darwin and Freud, together with modern theorists in the fields of neoclassical economics, institutionalism, evolutionary psychology, social physics, and complexity.
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Chapter 5: “Strategic Logos––the Ark of the Sun” presents my discovery of the hidden vehicle of life and human society. It shows exactly how the strategic logos enabled life to emerge on Earth and to develop exponentially into large numbers of complex forms in a universe unfriendly to life. Because the logos consists of a set of invisible social forces (conceptually similar to the invisible forces driving the cosmos, or the electrical impulses in the human brain that give rise to the invisible selfconscious mind), its discovery had to wait until a viable realist general dynamic theory had been constructed––a general theory that exposes the nature and mode of interaction of these invisible forces. As will be demonstrated, the logos is the shaper of life and human society.
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Chapter 6: “Laws of the Logos” provides a comprehensive set of general laws that can explain the origins and dynamics of the real social world. This is the first time a comprehensive set of dynamic laws has been identified for either the social sciences or the life sciences. While the social sciences possess a long-standing collection of ad hoc static microeconomic laws, there are few in macroeconomics, none in history, and those in the life sciences are deeply flawed. Without exception, these disciplines have been unable to develop a realist general dynamic theory which, I show, is a prerequisite for developing dynamic laws.
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Chapter 7: “Citadel of the Logos––the Ephemeral Civilization” argues that institutions provide the vehicle, not the engine of material progress as institutionalists both old and new believe. To demonstrate this argument, a new strategic model of institutional and cultural change is developed. This strategic model demonstrates that institutions owe their origin, development, and inevitable demise to changes in strategic demand emanating from the logos, rather than evolving according to Darwinian supply-side forces. Only a demand-side model, which shows how agents respond to the requirements of society, can overcome the fundamental flaws inherent in the conventional institutional and evolutionary models, which incorrectly treat inherent characteristics of individuals and groups as proactive rather than passive. The temporary entity known as society––the “ephemeral civilization”––is the citadel of the logos. They rise and fall together.
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Chapter 8: “Ideology of the Logos––from Religion to Scientism” presents the entirely new idea that the world’s great myths and religions are the outcome of mankind’s attempt to understand and manipulate the hidden forces of the strategic logos. Societies have always considered it essential to understand these hidden forces in order to survive and prosper. Strategic survival is a difficult art, as demonstrated by
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the widespread ruined remains of former species, societies and civilizations. Because mankind has never felt confident about mastering the art of survival and prosperity, we have reached out in a mystical way to “strategic guardians”, or gods, to guide us. This chapter shows that the changing nature of myths and religions has been a response to the great technological paradigm shifts over the past 2 myrs, while the demise of religion (“the death of God”) in advanced societies and the adoption of scientism as the core “strategic ideology” is a response to the Industrial Revolution. •
Chapter 9: “Consciousness of the Logos––the Selfcreating Mind”, analyses the remarkable strategic instrument––the self-conscious mind––employed by our species to supervise the strategic pursuit. This chapter focuses on the emergence and role of “strategic awareness” (a generalised version of self-consciousness) in both mankind and the great metropolises of society. A central metaphor in this analysis of the mind is the metropolis, which functions in an analogous way to the human brain. As will be shown, the concept of the “metropolis of the mind” is more than metaphor: it is a fundamental characteristic of the strategic logos at both the micro and macro levels. The selfcreating mind, which is an entirely new theoretical construct based on a systematic study of the empirical evidence, challenges all existing supply-side theories (such as those of Freud or currently fashionable evolutionary psychology).
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Chapter 10: “Restoring Damaged Consciousness––A Strategic Psychiatry” is concerned with the difficult problem of restoring strategic awareness in the logos by employing a new “strategic psychiatry”. Essentially the argument is that psychological illness emerges in individuals who suffer malfunctions in those psychic mechanisms that enable them to participate in the strategic pursuit. Mental disorders, just like dysfunctional processes in the metropolis, are an outcome of the dynamics of life. They are, in effect, “strategic disorders”, which can be alleviated through a
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reversal of the process of “strategic malfunction”, and the reabsorption of affected individuals and societies back into the strategic pursuit. The core issue is “strategic failure” versus “strategic success”. •
Chapter 11: “Understanding the Modern Logos––Societal Dynamics” attempts to restate the general dynamic-strategy theory developed in earlier chapters into a more specific model (highlighting, for example, the “growth-inflation curve”, the strategy function, dynamic cost-benefit analysis, etc.) for analysing the modern world. It is argued that owing to the limitations of orthodox economic theory (which is only able to handle small, short-run and static issues), it is essential to develop a realist dynamic model. This new dynamic model is critical to the analysis and resolution of fundamentally important economic issues of both a short-run (inflation, financial crises, and periodic economic downturns) and a long-run (economic development, climate mitigation, and technological transformation) nature.
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Chapter 12: “The Logos at Large––Global Strategic Transition” employs the general dynamic-strategy theory developed in earlier chapters to analyse how lesserdeveloped countries are being steadily drawn into the global strategic core through the mechanism I call “global strategic transition” (GST). It is a theoretical account of the logos at large in the world. A key feature of this chapter is the “strategy function”––a new concept in economics––that displaces the more narrowly conceived (or more correctly, misconceived) production function, and provides a more general and realistic approach to underdevelopment. It views society as a flexible organic entity rather than a constrained factory writ large. Needless to say, this new model provides new policy principles concerning economic development.
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Chapter 13: “Choice of Futures for the Logos” focuses on the critical issue facing human society in the twenty-first century: the controversial matter of climate change.
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For the sake of argument, I do not challenge the claim by most scientists that climate change is real or man-made, even though there are still some important unresolved issues. As I argue, the real problem is not whether climate change is real and manmade, but how the potential problem should be resolved. By taking this position and employing the general dynamic-strategy theory, it becomes clear that there are two alternative futures facing humanity. The first is the future that would be generated by the strategic logos left free to ensure the survival and prosperity of life as it has always done. And the second is the future that is being inadvertently proposed by the “mitigation engineers”, who insist the world adopts a radical and comprehensive climate-mitigation program that will badly distort, even derail, the strategic logos. The first option, according to the dynamic-strategy theory, will lead to a new technological paradigm shift––the Solar Revolution––emerging in the middle decades of the twenty-first century. This technological paradigm shift will massively transform human society by a relative order of magnitude similar to that of the Industrial Revolution within the space of little more than a generation. The rapidity of this transformation is the outcome of history speeding up. The second option will lead to long-run economic stagnation, massive mitigation costs, the emergence of global military conflict, and possibly the collapse of our entire civilization. Clearly, the first option wins hands down in any rational debate. The trick, however, will be to negotiate increasing climate-related problems without resorting to the global command economy required by the level of intervention being advocated by powerful international lobby groups and organizations. As always in human history, we need to follow the requirements of the strategic logos, not the commands of the radical interventionists, who are the new antistrategists.
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Epilogue: finally, the future of the strategic logos is discussed more generally in terms of the struggle between “strategists” and “antistrategists”: between the forces of life and anti-life.
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