PART 1, INTRODUCTORY, repetitive, and skippable
 

1.  STARTING FROM AFAR:  Montaigne, de Tocqueville

I intended my first Essays in 2001 as a distant echo of Michel Montaigne’s Essays (1580). My own essays (i.e., attempts) were supposed to reverberate in the freshly internetted halls of the New World, the term which in times of my youth was still synonymous with America. The halls are so big, however, that the e-sound could travel to and from the walls for decades before coming back to me. Meanwhile, I keep sending signals. 

My primary subject is the large scale novelty of the contemporary world and the fate of freedom in it as seen by a newcomer transferred here from the extreme non-freedom of a totalitarian society. I wanted to borrow from Montaigne not his comprehensive openness regarding all aspects of his personal life, but his absolute freedom of reflection.

Rather early in my childhood, The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne was my first and most powerful intellectual stimulus. Some incomprehensible pages of the book described chemical processes: making iron, soap, sulfuric and nitric acids, and nitroglycerin. Much later, Montaigne became my first teacher of freedom by affirming individuality as its very beginning.  Montaigne’s Essays was one of the three most formative books of my youth, two other being Dhammapada and Henry Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha in a great Russian translation by Ivan Bunin.

Hiawatha expanded my understanding of poetry beyond rhymed lines. Chemistry, at an even later stage of my life, opened to me a window through which the world as a whole could be seen and partially understood in terms of atomism and structural transformation. Poetry, science, unbound reflection, and blind moral principles, all coming from my early impressions, are the performing quartet of the collection at spirospero.  

Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America:

Men who live in democratic communities not only seldom indulge in meditation, but they naturally entertain very little esteem for it. A democratic state of society and democratic institutions plunge the greater part of men in constant active life; and the habits of mind which are suited to an active life, are not always suited to a contemplative one. (Volume 2, Chapter X)

For eight last years of my life in Communist Russia I had no access to professional life or any employment and my activity for long periods of time consisted in defiant inactivity.

I had come to America with a deeply ingrained habit of reflection which attracted me more than anything else. I was happy to reach the point when “meditation” finally became affordable as  my major activity, peacefully competing with going to the beach, tending to tomatoes, and fixing the porch. Luckily, by that time Internet was ready to accept anything bottled into a file and tossed into its muddy e-waters. 

I need this introduction to explain the origin, style, and direction of my casual Essays and somewhat more focused and substantial pieces in complexity because I am approaching very serious and intricate things in which the border between complexity and simplicity, as in all serious matters, disappears. This has always been my main intent and enjoyment, but by counting on minds both active and contemplative I most likely sentence my bottles to perpetual virginity. Indeed, exploiting the incomparable eloquence of  Alexis de Tocqueville,

Everyone  [in America] is actively in motion: some in quest of power, others of gain. In the midst of this universal tumult—this incessant conflict of jarring interests—this continual stride of men after fortune—where is that calm to be found which is necessary for the deeper combinations of the intellect? How can the mind dwell upon any single point, when everything whirls around it, and man himself is swept and beaten onwards by the heady current which rolls all things in its course?  (Alexis de Tocqueville,Democracy in America, Volume 2, Chapter X)

One way to find the calm is just to launch one’s mind into the whirlwind instead of focusing on the single point, only that single point should not be money.

Amongst a multitude of men you will find a selfish, mercantile, and trading taste for the discoveries of the mind, which must not be confounded with that disinterested passion which is kindled in the heart of the few. A desire to utilize knowledge is one thing; the pure desire to know is another ( Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 2, Chapter X).

The powerful current of American life, so contrasting with the pictures of deceitfully drowsy and prostrate suburbs, impresses me much more than Niagara Falls. But what is that heady current and what is its course?  It is growth, the universal property of life and all evolving complex systems (X-systems) growing on life. The subject of this Essay is growth from the point of view of a chemist, and if there is growth, anti-growth must be nearby and, probably, growing, too.

2. COMPOSITION IN SAND AND GRAVEL: making fool of myself

Faith and reason do not mix. Neither do poetry and science. I still do not know what is immiscible with the Web. Reflection, however, like a glue (or money in economics), embeds poetry, science, and belief into a kind of composite material, in which components do not mix, but just tightly stick to each other, like cement, sand, and gravel in concrete, bones, vessels, muscles, and nerves in an organism, and, I guess, supply, demand, and price in economy.

While reading (superficially) Michel Foucault very late in my life, I felt baffled by a new and unfamiliar—except for a few previous encounters—kind of literature, rarely readable, but portentous (in both meanings of the word). I would put it into a broad category of search for the shifting borders between the four domains: poetry, science, reflection  (or philosophy, if reflection is too obscure), and blind moral principles. I was also surprised to find that all subjects of Foucault's investigation could be seen as economics: of sex, madness, medicine, knowledge, power, state, and ideology. Philosophy used to be about the sublime, economics is about the gritty. With Foucault and Heidegger philosophy falls face into dust.

Economics, which I instinctively distrust, is the largest white spot on my own mental map. But if everything is economics (in the lives of most Human-Americans, I believe, it is) how can I understand the world around me without economics?  Some encouragement (bold font is mine) comes from Erwin Schrodinger:

We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it. I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true who I am be lost forever) that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them—and at the risk of making fools of ourselves ( Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life ).

I have no problem with taking this risk, but the above quotation points also to a different matter.

Erwin Schrodinger was not interested in grand theories of everything. He looked at the phenomenon of life from a narrow, purely physical point of view, but addressing the widest audience. He was even criticized for his vulgarization of an important physical concept of entropy, to which he resorted in order to avoid technicalities. As result, he was the first to answer, as early as in 1944, some most general questions about life in a manner that helped James Watson and Francis Crick to search for more intimate molecular details of life. In my opinion, Erwin Schrodinger also formulated the most general principles of all Evolving Complex Systems (X-systems). 

I do not believe in grand theories of everything and for a very simple reason: everything evolves and our knowledge of everything perpetually lacks something we  have even no hint what it could be. A theory of everything is a contradiction in terms. While physical world changes negligibly, if at all, during the human presence on earth, human history is a record of new and unanticipated events. What we can do is to explore borders between the certain and the possible, as well as the  expected and the astonishing. We cannot predict the future, but where does the future start? We cannot know the unknown, but where does the known end?

Unlike physics, chemistry views the world as transformations of atomic objects selectively connected with bonds. This is certainly a very narrow slit to look at the world. But what we can see through it cannot be seen from other observation points. Regarded in this abstract way, chemistry is just a field of unusual mathematics, and Ulf Grenander created this field (Pattern Theory) single-handedly. I was powerfully influenced by Pattern Theory, but I will remain here  just a chemist, which is my nature. I will not speak about chemical formulas, however, except for a single trivial incidence.

Chemistry is very pictorial. Most of what we see with chemical eyes can be presented in silent pictures consisting of points and lines. How can we describe them in human voice?  We are constrained by logic, but the choice of words is ours: we compose. This is why, thinking as a chemist, I do not want to limit myself to any verbal or visual palette. I am willing to make fool of myself.
 

I will come back to anti-growth, but for growth we need to rub shoulders with economics, the most unorthodox, but most uninviting subject for me after orthodox religious faith.

PART 2  ECONOMICS , the new science of everything

Regarding the subject of growth, outside natural sciences we have only one source: economics. But what is economics? How vast is economics?
Google, August 7, 2007 : about 156,000,000 for economics. For comparison, about 104,000,000 for chemistry, about 117,000,000 for biology, about 110,000,000 for humans, but about 238,000,000 for politics and about 296,000,000 for medicine. The man-made things, however, beat them all: about 755,000,000 for technology. They have really grown up. See Essay 53, A Supper with Birds and Planes.

Economy is the main source of power and growth is an absolute obsession of global economy and everybody under its erratic skies. Greed is now called "individual maximization." Stock market is above all betting on growth (decline, too, as pre-growth). Academic productivity is  a growing volume of grants and publications. Wealth is growth. Success is growth. Sex is growth. Collecting is growth. Sports is growth. Agriculture is growth. Tomatoes are growth. Career is growth. It is only in body weight and waistline that anti-growth begins to compete with growth, but the robust economy of weight loss is about growth, too.

In the eyes of physics the visible world is doomed to entropic decay, but life is about growing, blooming, and multiplying. Division is bitter, but multiplication is sweet.

In the last century, quite surreptitiously, economics has turned into the main interscience (but not yet science) of humanity, spanning from mathematics to biosciences and from thermodynamics to philosophy, with cognitive sciences in the folds. As physical sciences are united by the concept of energy, economics is united by the concept of money—same money that divides the people who own it. For a compressed illustration of the ubiquity of economics, see APPENDIX 1. I confess, I was not prepared to find almost 1200 recognized subdivisions of economics (alas, no Buddhist economics there). In short, whatever you touch,

                                            If you prick us, do we not bleed?

Yes, all 1168 listed topics of economics (in fact, there are more than that), big and small, even the poet, his Pegasus, and each published line bleed with money, one way or the other.

For example, Northwest Florida Review pays $5 per poem, while Hayden’s Ferry Review pays up to $100, and Boulevard pays $250 or more. The Meridian pays $15 per page, and The Georgia Review pays $3 per line.

Northwoods Journal charges a $1 reading fee for each poem. If they publish your work, they’ll pay you $0.10 per line.
 Source: http://www.suite101.com/lesson.cfm/19698/3150/5

In my eyes nothing is as postmodern today as economics because it is about performance and performance is about growth. I begin to believe that the entire postmodernity in humanities and art, increasingly in sciences, and definitely in technology is simply the complete absorption of human creativity of all kinds by the economy. I do not mean it to sound derogative. To scold evolution is to emulate King Xerxes who ordered to whip the sea for scattering his bridge made of boats.

Life is business. Business is the through-the-looking-glass wonderland, in which you have to run in order to stay in place and run twice as fast to get anywhere. The "heady current" rolls all things in its course. Postmodernity does not question ends: it watches the performance of means.

The business of economics has its own economy. And, of course, here is economics of economics:

            July 23, 2007:  Results 1 - 10 of about 11,300 for "economics of terrorism"

 
As an example of what can be found in the intellectual marketplace about growth, I would refer, with respectful disbelief, to the series of works by Oded Galor and co-workers (available online), bringing together biological and social evolutions in a non-trivial way.

Unified evolutionary growth theory (the first one) that captures the co-evolution of:

- Homo Sapience

- Economies

in the long transition from an epoch of Malthusian stagnation to sustained growth.

The theory suggests that:

- The epoch of stagnation that has characterized most of human history led to a process of natural selection that transformed the characteristics of the human population and made them more complementary to the growth process

Fundamental Premise :

During the Malthusian Epoch, the composition of characteristics of the human species that are highly relevant for the understanding of the origin of economic growth has not been stationary. Hereditary human traits, physical or mental, that raised earning capacity, generated an evolutionary advantage

             Source: Oded Galor and Omer Moav  Natural Selection and The Origin of Economic Growth    (2002)

 
Draw your conclusions, Piraha Indians of Amazon.

If everything is economics, then economics must be complexity in flesh. It is a stock of an incredible variety of publications, bold and bright, as well as dull and drab, see Appendix 1.

As I suspect, the postmodern market economy of intellectual production started  with postmodern philosophy, of which David Lewis and his plurality of worlds is a relatively recent example.

But the major drive came from the honest intent to understand complex systems. The work of Peter Turchin and his father Valentin Turchin, the founder of  Principia Cybernetica Web , numerous incursions of theoretical physicists into the tides of market economy, artificial life, the Santa Fe Institute, the creepy promissory notes and the actual ruthless progress of cognitive sciences, and grand theories coming from everywhere are some of many indicators of the insatiable voracity for understanding complex systems in which human molecules display their chemistry. There must be some reason for that apart of the natural curiosity and quest for understanding. If kingdoms were never meant for sale, managerial skills are, and we can manage anything but complexity.

The religious faith in mathematical equations and the escape from the tyranny of facts are emblematic of postmodern industry of knowledge. There is, however, a definite center in the global subconsciousness, activated by the lessons of all the hot and cold wars of the last century, plus the new World War with the invisible phantoms of terror. We have conquered space and time. Future is the next frontier and growth is the only way to invade and conquer the future, to flood it with your presence and to build a castle on the top of a mountain. We do not want to build on sand. We need some certainty. We would like to slow down the future to be able to respond to it, as in times of good old European wars written into history by a quill.

My own view of the world, with its attention to the hard graphic skeletons on the move, instead of equations, comes from the same historical experience, in which I was late only for WWI. 

The fate of North America and Europe has never been less certain for those who have long historical memory. Europe is fragmented, and so are the united states of the United States. The not yet certified Science of Novelty (neology? the term is posted on the Web, but not yet occupied) which I am trying to peek into, is a paradoxical challenge to the classical science about the immutable laws of the world: I see it as a science about the shifting axiomatic grounds, about the rotating stage of the world theater, and about the limits of projections. As I tried to show in The New and the Different, the new is rare and it is dispersed in the overwhelming different , i.e., the recombinant variants of the old. The main problem of neology is not just to discern the new, which we can do well, but to estimate its kinetics: how fast it is running toward us before it freezes and petrifies into the old. Prediction without timing is fortune telling.

NOTE. I am greatly sympathetic of counterfactual thinking, which is now slowly smoldering its way through humanities. Chemical thinking is deeply counterfactual (allofactual is a better term) and requires a constant circumspection about what could possibly happen otherwise.  Look for transition state in complexity. The novelty of the physical universe crawls at a much slower pace than the novelty of human history or the history of our planet itself. Thus, life on the Earth is possible only because the Sun evolves incomparably slower than life. Who can seriously worry about the dimming Sun today? Probably, only the poets.

4. THE WORLD IS ON FIRE and Britain is to blame

As an example of the contribution of poetry to the chemist's vision of the world that I attempt to practice in my Essays, this is how I see the Industrial Revolution.
 

Let us look at the map of coal and iron ore resources of United Kingdom, Figure 1. They either overlap or are extremely close. As a chemist I see them mixed up in a crucible on a lab bench and expect iron ore, Fe₂O₃  , to react with carbon, C, resulting in iron, Fe, and  carbon dioxide CO₂ , because it is thermodynamically possible. All we need to start the reaction is to heat the mixture up.
 

 I see the early Industrial Revolution, therefore, as an ignition of the process of reduction of iron oxide into metal, made probable and sustainable by the proximity of both in England. The fire evolved into the streams of molten pig iron and steel that solidified in the form of bridges, railways, locomotives, and various steam engines. The streams of money from all new useful things also greatly elevated the status and fecundity of scientist and engineer, so that even more useful things could be produced. That was one of many derivative fires.

The steam engine evolved further through the internal combustion engine. It was a secondary fire, ignited from the first, in which mineral oil began to burn at ever increasing speed. The industrial use of electricity evolved into IT: information technology. The weak electromagnetic tremor in IT devices keeps tweaking the global nervous system with its creative and destructive impulses.

Fire in this picture is not just a metaphor but an ideogram: a template for a pattern of a process represented across many domains and levels of the world. Classical German philosophy, aloof about coal and iron, was also a fire, still preserved as embers. While the pattern is very general, the template is a configuration taken from just one domain, in this case, chemical one. The chemical process of self-sustaining and accelerating change goes until the fuel and the oxidant are available and the temperature does not drop.  Instead of fuel and oxygen, any two components can interact in a fire-like pattern.

The modern economic growth is a typical—and the brightest—example of fire that involves more and more mineral fuel.  The natural limit on this process is one of very few indisputable but not yet unambiguously tested principles of economics. It has been tested, however, in physiology and medicine: breathing is a quiet and controlled chemical fire inside the organism, and without oxygen the human sooner or later dies, of which the torture by waterboarding takes notice. What leaves some hope to economics is that society always adapts, but at what price remains unclear even for economists.

Obviously, the fire has a chance to turn into the stage of decline and collapse, which could still be kept at low metabolism for as long as its energy supply lasts. While energy is always partially dissipated, wasted, and irreversibly lost, matter is conservable and recyclable, for which, alas, energy is needed again. This simple comparison outlines the difference between Bios (life of organisms) and Technos (life of things): Technos can be recycled because its template —blueprints and files—are also species of conservable Technos.  This difference today does not seem as sharp as  fifty years ago:  the templates of life can be digitized and stored as Technos, too.

J.K. Rowlands writes her first Harry Potter, which spreads over the world like fire. In this pattern, the material object—book—that arose as a mutation in the mind of the author, probably, just from a cup of tea, interacts with the money of consumers. The global fire was started by a spark, probably, as accidental as the creative impulse, and further self-sustained by the high temperature known as hype.  

In the book business demand and supply are oxygen and fuel in the intake of the business machine. It is not important which is what: both are just two interacting components. We can imagine a planet with methane atmosphere and some limited source of oxygen coming from the ground. In this picture the economic roles of fuel and oxidizer are reversed.

When the next volumes of paper fuel are thrown into the fire, the enterprise rises the next step up in the form of movies, trinkets, bookmarks, spoofs, and the rest of paraphernalia. Both supply and demand are limited, and so is the hype.  

The business model took over Harry Potter after the writer had completed her first and most creative act, having established a template on which the process of growth progressed along a standard scenario, completely independent from the content and measurable as performance.

There are two kinds of growth. One is the relative and local growth that redistributes resources, reshuffles ideas, rearranges priorities, etc., within the available energy consumption until its source lasts. The other is the fire-like global growth, predatory, wasteful, frenzied, and dehumanizing. It consumes resources irreversibly, dissipates matter and energy, and expires at the end, switching from ashes to new firewood.

I use the word "dehumanizing" without any scorn. It denotes the inclusion of humans into the modern economic metabolism which has brought a lot of stability, comfort, and "economic happiness," that most people in the West, including myself, enjoy and more have been embracing in the East. Still, anything ending with a question mark is legitimate within the framework of neology:

Mankind unsparingly uses every individual as material to heat its great machines; but what good are the machines when all individuals (that is, mankind) serve only to keep them going? Machines that are their own end—is that the umana commedia? (Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, all too Human,  "bad-tempered" thought No. 585, 1878)

With China and India burning in growth fever, with thuggish Russia gloating over Europe kneeling for Russian gas, I believe, we will know the answer sooner than we would like.

What is growth, then? What is its origin? What is that clockwork mechanism that spins the hands in one direction only? What is its blessing? What is its curse?

What is the evolutionary necessity of growth in evolving complex systems, such as life or economy?  I mean both the growth of an individual organism, for which there are obvious limits, and the property of organisms to multiply, i.e. population growth. The same question—why to grow—can be addressed to empire, social movement, religion, business enterprise, party, and knowledge factory.

Physics is largely counterintuitive. We do not see gravitation and electromagnetic field, neither do we deal with atoms outside a lab. We do not measure physical properties without instruments. It takes a powerful mental effort to penetrate the surface of observable events. There are, however, areas of science that seem to come from common sense. Thus, probability theory, which can be as complicated as anything in mathematics, came from simple considerations based on everyday experience. Chemistry looks arcane, but the chemical concepts of random collision, favorable mutual orientation, bonding, transition state, and breakup have parallels in the peculiar human behavior known as courtship and love. Chemistry is in on the tip of the tong in romance and politics.

From the chemical angle, i.e., from the atomistic perception of systems as stable units and bonds (or as configurations of Pattern Theory), there is at least one major difference between big complex systems and small simple ones: size.  

A small system can undergo a limited number of changes, many of them catastrophic.  For example, the simplest system of two connected atomic units, A—B, can change in only one direction:

which completely destroys its very identity. If the system is naturally in equilibrium between two parts, 

It is certainly true in the world of atoms and molecules that if some molecule once arose from the environment than it can happen again. We are interested, however, in the emergence of Evolving Complex Systems (X-systems). The spontaneous appearance of anything complex from something simple would require a rare coincidence of rare events. Similarly, regarding X-systems of cognitive, social, and political nature, the unique individuality of initiators, founders, and circumstances, once lost, cannot be replaced or recreated.

Complexity is improbable, unless we, complex creatures, create it ourselves, and yet X-systems can be stable (i.e., probable) only if they are sufficiently complex or at least large enough as populations. The solution of the paradox lies in the distinction between local and global.

In a system

A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B  ,

a transformation

A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B  —> A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B + A—B    

or

A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B  —> A—B—A—B—A—B—A—B—A  + B    

leaves most of the system unchanged. The same applies to an addition of an extra part by chance. If the major part is capable of restoring the damage, or if the damaged part is not essential, the dynamic non-equilibrium system, like trees and animal bodies, becomes exceptionally stable.

The big size, therefore, turns annihilation into damage.  Growth is self-insurance against accidental loss.  This sounds like economics (GEL classificator G22, Insurance; Insurance companies).  In the origin and perpetuation of life, growth is life insurance.

Figures 2 and 3 illustrate growth as a major property of X-systems.

A damage in a small system (Figure 2A) can destroy the system if the energy of the impact per unit of size is high enough.  In a population (2B), a knocked out unit may not be lethal for the population. A large system  (2C) can preserve  viability because of the locality of the damage. The heavily wounded in Iraq soldiers illustrate human vitality, as well as the economics of presidency, in a macabre way.

In all X-systems, the economic function of growth, from the point of view of a chemist, is self-insurance against disaster. 

A large complex system can be destroyed if it is crippled with several simultaneous hits. Coincidence of several rare events, however, is very low. The laws of probability—the simple property of our world, which is, probably, the best argument against deity—is what made life on earth possible.

Amazingly, physicists used the improbability of complex systems as an argument against spontaneous emergence of life. For a chemist, however, as for a builder, political leader, and scientist, the gradual stepwise buildup of complexity is their daily bread. 

Figures 3A and 3B show that if the probability of the damaging factor, i.e., generalized temperature, increases, a growth of the system is equivalent to an increase in temperature (intensity of chaos). A combined multiple damage, however, can be beyond repair. Again, look at the Republican Party and the President's crumbling internal circle. Under right circumstances the same could apply to the Democrats, who should not be too gleeful. 

Figure 3.  Size, temperature, and vulnerability

A.  Growth  (broken line) increases  the vulnerability to multiple defects at the same probability of damage;
B.  Increased probability of damage (i.e., high temperature) creates multiple damage beyond repair.  

In human matters, as in biochemical matters, the mechanisms of evolution are universal because humans are universal enzymes capable of assembling and taking apart anything, from political system to article on economics, and from nuclear weapons to reputation. The moment comes when humans start manipilating living organisms, and, finally, their own bodies and minds. 

The next natural question is how a non-equilibrium system can be stable if any deviation from equilibrium means decreased stability: equilibrium is the most stable state of the system.

Why do we need instability to ensure stability? Why do X-systems need to be far from equilibrium , i.e. to continuously consume energy and eject heat? The answer was given by Erwin Schrodinger in 1944 in an incomparably lucent  form. The text of his famous groundbreaking book What is Life is available on the Web. It was the very beginning of the revolution in biology. I see it as the firm and lasting foundation for the science of X-systems.

Schrodinger warned his audience that the subject matter of his public lectures, which preceded the book, was difficult.  It still remains difficult and incessantly stimulating. I do not need to repeat here the discussion of the thermodynamic aspects of life in a large popular literature, as well as in complexity. I am more interested in non-biological X-systems, among which the ailing American Democracy is the closest to my heart (are many readers today as excited by Alex de Tocqueville as I am?).

Time to move from the sunshine exuberance of growth to the rainy days of  decline.

Next, what is the consequence of growth?

I wonder if the very special role of size and number in evolution has been noticed. The same objection of improbability that physicists have been setting against the spontaneous origin of life  applies to the origin of species. If genome is very long, as it is in most species, then Darwinian evolution may look problematic. The probability of a significant viable mutation, like the elephant's trunk, is very low. To continue generalization, radically new developments in history (WWI, 9-11, military challenge to US, catastrophic presidency) are highly improbable a priori  because our imagination is not only boundless but also tuned to optimism.

It seems to me that it is exactly the large size of genome, which makes most realistic changes in it local, ensures evolution, so that  other subsystems of the organism stay untouched and ready to accommodate the new change. For example, the trunk may be a result of a change in, say, muscles, while the nerves and vessels automatically follow the new shape of the nose.  By the same logic, only in reverse, if the genome evolves as a set of nested compartments organized like a tree of systematics, a viable mutation should be close to previous mutations in the same subsystem of the organism and have non-disruptive character.

I am not familiar with literature on the subject, so that  the above is nothing but my uneducated guess. My purpose is to illustrate the generality and the commonsensical nature of chemical view of the world.

  In an oblique way, this Essay is a repercussion of the impact of Dhammapada on my youth.

I now identify the short ancient book’s invective against multiplication with the call to limit growth. What can be a less popular idea in America? This is why I store it in the folder of blind moral principles. All religions are irrational and all ideologies are beyond proof. So are all prophesies. Reason and belief do not mix, except in the belief in reason. 

My own copy of Dhammapada was the highly professional Russian translation directly from Pali, elegantly published in 1960.  What impressed me so much in my youth was the commandment rendered as  “do not increase existence.”  [не увеличивай существования]. I had left the book in Russia, but when I returned to it in English translations, I ran into a mystery.

Chapter 13 of Dhammapada starts with Verse 167:

hinaj dhammaj na seveyya    pamadena na sajvase

micchaditthij na seveyya    na siya lokavaddhano

In various English translations the fourth part of  Verse 167 , na siya lokavaddhano, has been translated differently, but mostly converging on a single meaning:

be not a friend of the world,

do not be a world-upholder,

linger not long in worldly existence,

don’t busy yourself with the world.  

There were interpretations more in line with my personal perception:

do not cultivate the world,

do not augment the world.

The discrepancies troubled me until I found a detailed interpretation at the Digital Library & Museum of Buddhist Studies of National Taiwan University Library, where the verse was translated as:

Don't practice inferior teachings; don't connect with negligence.
Don't embrace wrong beliefs; don't be attached to the world.

But the linguistic commentaries in the same source seemed to suggest another interpretation.

The key last word  lokavaddhano  is a composite of loka, world, and vaddhano , derived from vaddhana  translated as indulgence, attachment.  The commentary, however, mentioned that its root was vaddh- , growth.  The word vaddhano  was Nominative of singular, masculine noun.  Literally, as I see it, the grower of the world.

I found also a more direct translation at Concise Pali-English Dictionary:  

vaddhana : [nt.] growth; increase; enlargement.

       nt. :  neuter gender.

My initial understanding since the age of  25 was do not multiply existence, i.e., with hindsight, do not grow complexity, do not grow attachments, do not surround yourself with numerous objects of desire and care, do not multiply material things. In short, minimize. In modern lingo, it, probably, sounds like focus and prioritize.  When, at about that age, I had read about Albert Einstein not wearing socks and using the same soap for washing and shaving, I saw him as a Buddhist simplifier.

By no means I consider myself a true Buddhist. Besides, “true” is the most divisive word if applied to religion or ideology.

I am not attracted to either mysticism or ascetism. I have a few superstitions (the spiders bring good news and I never kill them; one should never mix fresh milk and cucumbers; I dislike gossip), but I do not believe in any world but the one around. And yet Buddhism has the same spell on me as on many Western people. One of its charms is some separation between the final goal and the ways of achieving it. The rich assortment of ways and means in Buddhism allows for unwrapping one item without opening another. One can be happy just by walking the pathways and coming home. The dogmatic symmetry of the Buddhist teaching and the tight straps of control over young prankish chaos never attracted me, but they were a good preparation for mature age.

To summarize, Dhammapada imprinted me with a clear distinction between necessity and excess in material world. We are individual in our needs but faceless in our temptations. The luxury and wealth of ideas is a quite different matter.

A very selectively read Dhammapada is one of my sources of blind moral principles (BMP) which have nothing to do with reason and logic. They complement for me the more pragmatic, explicit, and commanding Judeo-Christian principles. The BMPs  are axioms of human existence and by choosing, inventing, or inheriting different sets of axioms we sign up to a life of not always realistic ideals.  

To endure order and to wreak havoc are two ends of the scale of human behavior.  What makes life worth living is that we constantly bend and violate our principles. No religion shuns this game, not even fundamentalism, but the Evangelical Christians in America seem to beat anybody else in lavishly dispensing forgiveness to each other at the expense of tolerance. 

My meditation on Verse 167 of Dhammapada should not be taken seriously. I am not an expert. Besides, following blind moral principles, I do not need to care about facts and truth.  This is certainly incompatible with science. There is, however, a small (Google: about 25,200 for "buddhist economics", August 7, 2007) but well-tended plot of Buddhist economics, which I am not to visit here. The vast  Economics, however, cannot be neglected in any way because it is has already fused not only with the biology of the global population of Homo sapiens, but also with its blind moral principles. What Michel Foucault called bio-politics is nothing but economics.

8.  IDEOLOGY AND ENERGY : the sleepy hollows of life

That growth of economy means borrowing against the future has been suspected or well understood for quite a time. There is a significant volume of literature related to what I would call economic anti-growth, more accurately, the ideology advocating limits to growth . It all started in 1972 with Limits to Growth (abstract) published by The Club of Rome and updated after 30 years. The idea itself goes back to Robert Thomas Malthus, who did not anticipate, however, any economic competition between babies and their toys.

Why the Only Solution is “Less”   The Laws of Thermodynamics cannot be changed – if we don't have the energy we need we are unable to carry out the work we want to. Consequently, as we face a peak in global energy supply, there is only one realistic option: We have to use “less” energy, and consume “less” resources.

By growth and anti-growth I mean not just ideas, but ideologies, the programs for action, competing for a nest in a growing number of minds. In this sense, DNA is also a program for action. The ideologies set the direction of social change in the same way as energy landscape sets the direction of change in physical and chemical processes.

The role of ideology can be compared with the tilt of a tray with a ball on it. By changing the tilt we make the ball roll in certain direction. The tray of evolution, however, is not flat. There are valleys and hollows in it where the ball can come to a relative rest, provided we do not shake it too much. The tray of life, however, is coming toward us like a long treadmill and we cannot see what is there behind its bend. Neither can we stay in cozy hollows: we have to run from the bend behind us where we would fall off. Did Lewis Carroll anticipate a conveyor belt in 1865?

A                                      B

Figure 6. Stability landscapes

A. Epigenetic landscape along  C.H. Waddington. B. Energy landscape

The illustration (6A) from  his book Organisers & Genes (1940)  is explained as follows:

Obviously, the same can be said about memes of different ideologies. The ideology landscape generates certain types of behavior, which are stable in the corresponding ideological environment. They could clash with a different environment, as sometimes happens with immigrants. I use this digression  to emphasize  the  universality of  stability  as the abstract counterpart  of energy in physics (Figure 6B).

It is time for me to reveal my personal tilt.

I am whole-heartedly, although only instinctively, for limited growth, preservation of nature, and minimizing waste. What thermodynamics tells me, however, is that to counter the powerful natural will to grow, we need to use more energy, consume more resources, and to write more checks. The prospect of a war against growth is ghastly because it is a war against our own human nature. I also realize that the occasional excess is the spice of life, while the regular excess is just routine and needs more and more excess.

If so, any proponent of anti-growth cannot rely on rational arguments. We simply do not know what is going to happen if we rein in our inborn will to grow. Anti-growth can be just another suicide cult or a pretext for violence. If we cannot indefinitely grow energy production, then let evolution (economics calls it market) take its course and just hope that adaptation will prevail (dinosaurs adapted, anyway, as lizards). All the more, it is absolutely hopeless to fight evolution. By definition, evolution is what happens after all. I suspect, however, that the role of ideas in human evolution is largely unclear. We can evaluate it post factum, but not in situ nascendi.

If not rational, than what kind of argument can I present for anti-growth?


9. WHY NOT TO GROW


I feel uncomfortable in the world of ideologies. Ideology is anti-freedom of thought more than anti-anything-else. While I cannot act by non-thinking, I can act by feeling, doubting, and, probably,

                                   A                                                               B

) that could be compared with a hot air balloon in the air, Figure 8, flying to an unknown destination. We all are in a closed cabin. We burn our fuel. I have to share space and breathe the same air with mostly indifferent, but also some highly unsympathetic and hostile people. Moreover, most of my companions are not even people. Some are animals and plants, others just man-made things that need energy, others are parts of human bodies, like heart pacer, stent, and electronic prosthesis.

I want to stretch my legs. I want privacy. The food  and water are limited. The fuel in the tanks is limited. What should I do? I do not ask "What we should do?" because there is no "we."  When the fuel nears the end, who is going to be jettisoned to keep the balloon in the air? The scientist, who can divert energy from the sunlight?  The dictator, who could maintain order?  The free thinker? The unbeliever? The Hummer monster? The computer, which does not take too much energy and does not whine for water? Me, who keeps to himself?

I have to grow myself into "we,"  grow that "we," and make sure we do not believe anymore in growth.  We have to land, to find a place under the sun, and to think what to do next, and, probably, how to escape the Inquisition of Holy Growth, with the blueprints of our minds stored in Google's personal web search records. 

It is remarkable that not only the arthritic Microsoft but also the young Google, whom I noticed and embraced right after his birth, are being discussed today in connection with evil.

I realize that my antipathy to growth does not make any logical, scientific, economic, or any other sense. Anti-growth, or Tao

APPENDIX 1

Social Science Research Network

SSRN Abstract Database by JEL Classification

The database consists of 1168 lines,  of which I list only 130, some human issues in red, to illustrate the variety of topics:

Examples of entries:

 
Why Kill Politicians? A Rational Choice Analysis of Political Assassinations
Bruno S. Frey

Why Kill Politicians? A Rational Choice Analysis of Political Assassinations

BRUNO S. FREY
University of Zurich - Institute for Empirical Research in Economics (IEW); CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research); Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

May 2007

Abstract:     
In the course of history a large number of politicians has been assassinated. A rational choice analysis is used to distinguish the expected marginal benefits of killing, and the marginal cost of attacking a politician. The comparative analysis of various equilibria helps us to gain insights into specific historical events.

The analysis suggests that - in addition to well-known security measures - an extension of democracy, a rule by a committee of several politicians, more decentralization via the division of power and federalism, and a strengthening of civil society significantly reduce politicians' probability of being attacked and killed.

Keywords: Rational choice, democracy, dictatorship, assassination, deterrence

JEL Classifications: D01, D70, K14, K42, Z10

I29 - Other

Mental Health and Higher Education: Mapping Field, Consciousness and Legitimation
Critical Social Policy, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 31-56, 2006
Sally Baker , Brian Brown and John Fazey
Bangor University , De Montfort University and Oxford Learning Institute
Date Posted: May 17, 2007
Last Revised: May 17, 2007
Accepted Paper Series
5 downloads

Sheepskin or Prozac: The Causal Effect of Education on Mental Health
IZA Discussion Paper No. 2231
Arnaud Chevalier and Leon Feinstein
University College Dublin (UCD) - Institute for the Study of Social Change and London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE)
Date Posted: August 10, 2006
Last Revised: August 10, 2006
Working Paper Series
41 downloads

APPENDIX 2

Dhammapada manuscript on palm leaves

source

APPENDIX 3

 EXAMPLES:  terror, politics, China,

We still do not know how exactly life emerged and whether there is a single way to life. Yet we can observe the emergence of X-systems out of very simple configurations in history of social, political, economic, and religious movements, of which Al-Qaeda and, more generally, Islamism, are the most recent phenomena.

3.1.  Suicidal terrorism is the most mysterious phenomenon from the economic point of view. How can anything grow if the ultimate result is self-destruction?  It can, if destruction is a business and production growth is rewarded in the economy of destruction. The reward, in deferred or whatever form, goes to the managers.  It al looks like a typical Marxist model of exploitation.

An easy answer is that death is rewarded with entrance into paradise, but this goes against deep instincts of life. There is a high transition barrier to death. It could be overcome at high temperature, regardless the religious promise. The source of heat may come from the same source as the instinct of self-preservation.

As all X-systems, Islamism (1) has a template to grow and restore lost parts in the form of doctrine and technical manuals and (2) consumes energy (money) and matter (humans, explosives, food, etc.). It essentially repeats the pattern of early Russian Communism, counting on human and monetary resources on global scale on the grounds of ideological solidarity. Fascism counted, for a start, only on its own resources and so did the contained Communism. Islamism, however, is the first totalitarian movement in possession, actual or potential, of enormous resources of all kinds, including not just mineral fuel, land, and human sacrifice, but also Western education and technology.

For a Westerner, probably, it is as hard to imagine the intimate mechanisms of life in closed Islamic societies as it was to understand life without private property in Communist Russia. I could easily recognize the familiar totalitarian spirit of fundamentalism in any religion, but until I had started reading post-9-11 books on the subject, I was, like everybody in the West, even the always sanguine Thomas L. Friedman, baffled by the scale and brutality of violence. The mass murder-suicide must require an extremely high generalized temperature (i.e., instability) to overcome the transition barrier. Although there could be exceptions, I believe that this temperature comes from a culture in which large number of idle young men are separated from young women, which must be a source of constant instinctive stress. Thinking about the anti-growth, I  feel a certain trepidation about the consequences of the separation of large number of young modern men from their gadgets. God forbid, anti-growth becomes an orthodoxy!

One of the latest episodes of history—the rise of Islamism—had its grand opening right before our eyes and is, unfortunately, a good example to test the chemist’s view of the world. The very first opinion this view offers is to stop the growth while the new X-system is small and unstable. But even more unfortunately, however, the American democracy, as well as the rest of the world,  is undergoing an evolutionary change, which is an even better and worthy test pad for the pattern ideas.

3.2. Political parties in America, it is my intuitive assessment, have been growing in power, i.e. the ability to sign big checks for a single goal.  The goals of both American political parties are sharply focused on single issues and names, which makes the use of money in electoral campaigns relatively effective, especially for swiftboating, for the winner, of course.  I do not have, however, any facts to substantiate this my rather venomous statement. But I can add even more venom: only the goals of mafia seem to be as narrowly focused as the goals of electoral campaigns.

My personal impression of American political evolution, which I have been observing for 20 years, is the increasing centralization of power. It begins with the centralization of power within political parties, of which there are only two—a very small system, vulnerable to chaos. I see it as sovietization—demanding the Surgeon General to mention President Bush at least three times for a page  as if He were Stalin or Almighty is the best illustration.

Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings. Source:  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/washington/11surgeon.html?pagewanted=print

The term sovietization (Results 11 - 20 of about 76,800 for sovietization, 7/19/2007 9:04 AM) is not my invention. It is  used in a variety of meanings. “Sovietization of America” (Results 1 - 10 of about 1,870 for "sovietization of america". 7/19/2007 8:59 AM) is seen by one correspondent as:

The Sovietization of America continues.
Ideological purity and Loyalty to the Party trumps all.
Posted by: Doyle on December 2, 2005 1:32 AM

 3.3. China is the most interesting historical laboratory of anti-growth.  

The interplay between growth and resources creates a particular history. Thus, America owes in part its history to immense land resources that seemed endless and China to its fertile but limited ones. America began with scarce European population and China has had large (but fluctuating) population throughout its history. China exports it enormous workforce without even moving people, and the United States imports brains from China together with their bodily encasings because America has been losing the ability to grow their own.

Alexis de Tocqueville left us the following image, which we should not judge for historical truthfulness:

The nation [China] was absorbed in productive industry: the greater part of its scientific processes had been preserved, but science itself no longer existed there. This served to explain the strangely motionless state in which they found the minds of this people. The Chinese, in following the track of their forefathers, had forgotten the reasons by which the latter had been guided. They still used the formula, without asking for its meaning: they retained the instrument, but they no longer possessed the art of altering or renewing it. The Chinese, then, had lost the power of change; for them to improve was impossible. (Democracy in America, Volume II, Chapter X)