follow the laws.
But we have freedom and that is what makes the horror of violence between humans so much more reproachable. The concept of free will probably is the basis of all religion. The control of our behaviour gets no example from the rest of nature, so we must develop customs that harness the better of our behavioural patterns. The most important behavioural pattern is that of mutual co-operation. It is a feature of all life, whether vegetative or animal. Yet it doesn't appear to exist in the world of substance. This world follows a law of forces and force fields. The greater force always prevails. The only way to avoid a force is to be outside its range of action. Nothing is greater than the colour force of quarks but it is constrained to act only at the infinitesimal range of the quark to quark bond. Were this force possible to unleash into the general world, it would destroy all. Nature is telling us that force must be constrained - an unconstrained force will only cause destruction. We have already experienced the liberation of the nuclear strong force and are in no doubt that it is incredibly destructive. The electromagnetic force can also be destructive but only at a much lower level. Humans have harnessed the power of this force for much good, making the affluence of the modern world possible. Nature is telling us that properly harnessing its forces can lead to much good for humanity. The jury may be out for whether it is good for all of life. The smallest of all the forces, by an incredible scale, is the force of gravitation. It is this tiny force that keeps us locked into our small local patch of spacetime. Gravity ordains that our environment is restricted to the thin spherical film, within which, on the scale of the solar system, we are less than ants to a soaring hawk, but on the scale of the galaxy or the cosmos we are beyond the infinitesimal. Gravity tells us that ultimately our actions can only affect ourselves and that because our thin film of existence is so small our actions will ultimately rebound on ourselves.
So what moral code is nature seemingly telling us? It is saying that the greater force always wins and therefore must be constrained lest all be destroyed. At a personal level, this gives rise to the necessity for law where the rights of the individual are not based on physical strength but on justice. The problem is that there is no justice within nature - it is totally blind in its actions. Nature only tells us that the strongest of forces must be contained in the smallest of boxes. We must only legitimate strong force for the narrowest of reasons.
At the social and political level, the strong force is constrained by the narrowness of the film of our existence. Unleashing very strong force, for instance nuclear force, will inevitably rebound as the impact will affect the entire environment eventually. This is the only constraint on nuclear arms at the moment. The fear is that the constraint is there only to the rational mind. The irrational mind may be the downfall of humanity in the end. These are the very people who believe in Armageddon.
The strong force does not enter our sensible daily life. It is the electromagnetic and gravitational forces that are our constant environment. Internally the electromagnetic force drives the bonds between the trillions of molecules in our bodies. Externally the gravitational force applies pressure to all our exteriors and keeps us firmly grounded on the earth's surface. The role of the electromagnetic force in the bonding of atoms tells us that our basic existence is centred around sharing. The formation of bonds, by the sharing of electrons, is an essential part of the fabric of substance. This concept of sharing becomes a basic part of our being and must manifest itself at the level of the conscious, to lay the foundations of primitive justice. We are in essence only a collection of substances, joined together to form organisms, whose totality forms our bodies.
But we must be more than mere substances. What distinguishes humans and other living things from innate objects? In metals the individual atoms are closely packed and their proximity allows the free sharing of valence electrons. This binds the atoms together in crystal lattices that are very stable in their form. In biology the molecules are bound together but are stable not just in form but more so in process. This functional stability underpins all life. The kidneys must perform the task of kidneys and do so day in day out. If the process is upset or becomes unstable then the impact is felt by other organs and illness sets in. Looking for analogies with justice or human behaviour in general, this seems to imply that we should organise ourselves in terms of function and try to generate stability within that function. At the level of the animal this is exactly what nature ordains. Rabbits burrow and eat leaves. They have set programs of activity. There is great predictability in the behaviour of rabbits or similar animals. Human behaviour does not have that predictability because humans have intelligence that allows for freedom of action within the constraints of the environment. It is the struggle with the environment to extract food and a living that forces on humans the need for functional stability. The farmer must plant in spring or there will be no food in the winter. It is from the demands of the natural environment that the functional development of humanity has arisen, leading from hunter gatherers, farmers and craftsmen to modern scientists, technologists and engineers. The organisations of these functions follows many political and social models but all focus on maintaining stability. Uncertainty leads to revolution, wars and famine. To protect the stability, systems of governance, organisation of society, and political and economic orders are established. We have come so far in our modern world that the basic origin of the need for functional stability at the level of the organ is long forgotten. We are losing out by not recognising the intrinsic nature of our need for functional stability. It is because of this that one can say that the normal functions of parenthood should be nurtured and promoted within each society. Family stability underpins all of society. It is the organ, whereas society is the body. If families are dysfunctional than it is no wonder that society feels the effects in increased crime, delinquency, addictions. The systems that support the family and society in general must also have functional stability. Incremental change rather than revolution is best for society. If you get it wrong the impact is small and can be corrected. If the result is good then the pace can be increased marginally to effect marginal continuous improvement.
I am not a conservative in espousing functional stability. Rather I am recognising that all evolution takes place by increments. There are no revolutionary changes. Such changes disappear very quickly from the tree of life. Change is absolutely necessary but must come by degrees that allow the organism to adapt and survive. Evolution, by definition, is change but not change that will lead to the destruction of the life form that is meant to evolve.
But what of the gravitational force? What parallels are there for it in terms of guidance of human actions. Unlike the other forces, the range of gravitation is infinite. It acts on all the universe. The gravitational effect, of remote galaxies billions of light years away, may be infinitesimally small but it acts on each and every one of us. It teaches us that there is a unity to all existence and that unity is the manifold of spacetime. The manifold is a complete unity being infinite in extent but without boundaries. One could for example think of it as a giant balloon. The far off galaxy is like an indentation in the elastic surface. The indentation affects the inner pressure of the balloon that affects every part of the surface over time, as the pressure ripples across spacetime. It is gravity that tells us that all things are connected. Our actions always impact on the whole universe. Obviously the major impact will be on our immediate locale and that is where we experience the effects. But the unseen effects should not go unnoticed. Taking this more holistic view is what the parallel with gravity leads us to adopt. This holistic stance would not allow global warming to occur and that it is, is evidence that we still have not adopted holism into our systems of living.
But what does holism mean in a particular system? The concept is so different from the usual Cartesian approach of dissection and analysis. We still labour in the Cartesian paradigm. We want to take apart to understand, rather than try and see the whole and understand. Thi
s is the necessary fall out from an education system that teaches people to specialise, to adopt blinkers and use the microscope. The understanding that the complexity of life cannot be understood by system analysis may well be one of the greatest realisations of modern humanity. The vain attempts to build models to short circuit this inherent complexity has yielded results, mostly collateral gains, but has signally failed to reach an understanding of reality. The laws of reality, if they are available to our understanding at all, are holistic in nature. There are no islands of existence - all is linked in a complex web of space and time. We can discover laws that apply locally but we must not assume that these same laws are universal. Our extrapolations from the local can only be that - extrapolations. Hume's scepticism is valid in this respect - what we know to apply locally gives us no reason to assume it applies globally or rather cosmically.
So nature is telling us to constrain strong forces, to seek out process stability and to act holistically. Yet human nature seems to do