There’s a tri-partite holism of material, informational and spiritual/dynamic dimensions coursing through everything. Since matter, energy and information always exist together in a holism, they can never be entirely separated. The dimensions are distinguishable but inseperable, although one or another might come to the fore at one time or another. The model is applied by identifying polarities and then what mediates between them. It offers an initial analytical tool applicable generally everywhere. It is speculative and intuitive because it works with fuzzy concepts that are hard to precisely identify or measure objectively. The Greeks recognized and applied this model to make sense of otherwise unintelligible phenomena. But it hasn’t proved useful in modern social and hard sciences. And yet this rudimentary parsing of reality makes intuitive common sense and contains a truth, and as such has a place in our understanding.
For example, all life on earth feels the downward pull of material gravity and the upward draw of sunlight energy, with the two forces mediated by the day-night rhythmic on-off sunlight, the rhythm being an informational constant. In special relativity, the the equation e=mC2, expresses the polarity of energy and mass as mediated by the informational constant, “C”, the speed of light. The material, dynamic and informational are a unity, and yet separately distinguishable. An electron is simultaneously a particle and an energy wave, depending on how you look at it.
Our bodies operate with chemical, electrical and rhythmic processes, in every cell. But the material-chemical based organs (e.g. stomach, intestine, liver, kidneys, pancreas, spleen) are mostly located in the abdomenal cavity. The electrically based nerve-sense system mostly in the head (brain and organs of sight, hearing, smell and taste). And mediating are the heart and lungs in the chest cavity operate rhythmically, pumping blood to connect the body internally and air to connect it with the outside surroundings. Being holistic, the parsing and categorization is always incomplete. Digestion, a chemical process, starts in the mouth and head, and the sense of touch in the skin covers the entire body.
Insects and fish generally display the same tri-partite organ and bone structure. Plant roots reach downward to draw up nutrients while leaves spread horizontally to gather sunlight and magically, using chlorophyl, turn water and CO2 into sugars and usable energy. Intermediating between roots and leaves, is the stem and branch system, structured rhythmically, and the hypocotl, where the vascular system of the root transitions to that of the stem, structurally its polar opposite.
Every biological subsystem, from cells to organs, and every social organization and society, processes matter, energy and information to varying degrees, and since all these systems and subsystems are holistic, the parts reflect the structure of the whole. In society the holistic triad manifests as economy, culture and governance. The economy provides material products and services, while culture (arts, science, religion) lifts us toward the spiritual. Government and laws mediate the two by defining the rights and regulations that structure the relationships between society’s individual parts.
Being a holistic system, businesses and the economy contend with governance and the spiritual matters when dealing with innovation, research, and employee motivation, for example, as does every individual deal with all three aspects of life throughout the day. Science, the arts and religion have their material, governance and political dimensions.
Government mediates between the polar forces of profit-seeking materialism, money and capital, insofar as they drive the economy and the forces of the human spirit, manifest in arts science and religion. Money flows toward profit, like water flows downward under gravity. The human spirit seeks self-expression and the heights of fame, glory and immortanlity Government, ideally, keeps profit seeking economic forces in their place and assures human spirit has room to flourish. Again, being holistic, the classification isn’t clear cut and every person in every endeavor deals with material, governance and inspirational/motivational issues.
Executive, legislative and judicial branches of government can be categorized this way. The executive branch physically carries out the business of government, while Congress legislates and defines government’s structure of laws, and the Judiciary, standing above the fray, decides what is allowable.
Production, consumption and trade fit the pattern. I suspect that monetary, fiscal and exchange rate policies, the three basic tools through which government controls the economy, can be made to fit the pattern. The analysis has practical applications, for example when news organizations devide stories into separate sections for business, arts/culture, and current affairs, mosty concerning governance.
Yet social science makes little or no use of this triadic distinction, but there remains an intuitive truth at its basis. By Occam’s raiser, why look for a more sophisticated analytical tool when the simpler one can be applied?
Living systems theory seeks the generalities common to all organic systems, from single cell organisms to social institutions and nations. Assumed here is that self-organized aggregations of individuals, i.e. an insect colony, a flock of birds or human society are themselves alive. Living systems theory has no trouble with and makes this assumption, recognizing such aggregations as coherent systems. The theory builds from the recognition that all such systems and subsystems — organs, organisms, companies, societies — can be analyzed in terms of how they process matter, energy, information or combinations thereof. But living system theory doesn’t address metamorphosis, a still largely mysterious process.
The matter-information-energy triad, in organic and physical structures, also has a sequential version, though not as widely evidenced nor embraced as the static cross-sectional model. Mammals and birds grow to full size in their immature stage, undergo an adolescent metamorphosis and restructuring to become reproductively mature, and in adult maturity live out their procreative potential, an essentially spiritual task. The pattern can be described as physical expansion, structural transformation and spiritual/dynamic actualization.
We see how caterpillars metamorhose into pupas and eventually emerge as butterflies. The caterpillar stage, oriented to materiality, focuses on foraging and physical growth, the pupa stage on dissolution and reconstitution of the caterpillar’s structure, and the butterfly takes to the air oriented to light, smell and mating, its spiritual purpose. We can draw a parallel with the physical phase changes from solid to liquid to gas.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from material survival to social standing to self-actualization fit the sequential pattern. Maslo’s hierarchy of sequential human needs fits this pattern, with material needs, food and shelter being the first to be satisfied, followed by social needs, belonging and status, and ultimately spiritual needs, actualization. A human pursues these needs sequentially as needed and as they mature.
And it arises in some models of organizational development, which identify a life cycle of entrepreneurial, scientific and human relations phases, the first being focused on material growth, the second on systematic restructuring, and the third concerned with boosting morale to enhance productivity. In the early pioneering phase an organization grows rapidly, in its middle scientific phase it consolidates, developing a more formal structure, and in a mature phase it maintains rather than grows its operations, but optimizes them and seeks stability. It’s this three-stage version that may be applicable to global human society’s situation right now.
Metamorphosis refers to the process in which an organism or any of its parts undergoes structural changes during its growth and development. It involves a discontinuous change and reorientation of the developmental path in often a radically opposite or orthogonal direction. For instance, when a plant blooms its development shifts from extending more branches and growing more leaves to catch the light, to inwardly transforming that growth with intensification and complexification into flowers, with petals and reproductive pistils and/or stamens. The leaf metamorphoses into a sepal, which performs a mere protective function as it surrounds the developing reproductive organs. The sepal metamorphoses into a flower petal, developing with color and light, almost spiritually. Plenty of counter examples and exceptions to this sequential material/structural/dynamic pattern can be found, with animals that are reproductively mature at birth, plants that flower before they grow leaves, or organisms that metamorphose differently. But because so many organisms follow this three-stage path, and because the evidence suggests society may be metamorphosing, the pattern just might be directing societal maturation and development.
According to the Societal Metamorphosis thesis, global human society is and will continue to be redirecting its developmental path away from ever increasing material expansion and toward reworking its interrelational and structural aspects, i.e. its institutions, social conventions, technologies and all that which connects people and their artificats with each other and with their surroundings. Living standards in modern middle-class life have achieved a certain level of physical comfort and sufficiency, but society is plagued by relational problems: income inequality, dysfunctional governance, loneliness and lack of connection, environmental unsustainability, and disruptive change from technological transformation.
We’ve made great strides in understanding the material world over the last few centuries, insofar as we can now identify and manipulate most everything down to sub-atomic particles. I dare say we’ve learned the bulk of what we’re ever to learn about materiality. But our societal structures, from governance institutions to communications technologies and conventions, are either in dynamic flux or in sore need of reconfiguration. Across the world we see various governance styles vying for supremacy — democratic, oligarchic, autocratic, religious, militaristic — with none the clear winner.
As we enter and pass through the information age, our developmental task will be to design and build best governance practices, communications conventions and technologies guiding not only how we relate and are connected with each other and our surroundings through government laws, cultural institutions and conventions, but also how we relate to our natural environment and to future generations insofar as we bequeath them a changed environment.
As a unified global system, humanity is seeking and will increasingly seek to progress in areas other than physical expansion as it proceeds through its Information Age Adolescence. Society’s still-dawning middle-stage development must and will continue to focus on replacing its existing relational structures with more mature structures, because that is where developmental opportunities lie. These relational structures need to be redesigned for both better efficiency and to new purpose, a purpose other than limitless material growth. The metamorphosis is pervasive and the evidence can be seen across widely various phenomena.