Dear Organlearners,
Jan Lelie <janlelie@wxs.nl> writes:
>> Who was the author of "Holism and Evolution"? Jan Smuts.
>> In 1948 he lost the general election in South Africa to a
>> party who formulated apartheid as their ideology and policy.
>> He was devastated.
>
>So: i guessed correctly: holism had to evolve from apartheid.
Greetings Jan,
No and Yes!
No. Jan Smuts wrote his book in 1913, rewrote it in 1925 and got it
published in 1926. Thus the date for the formal exposition of holism is
1926.
The word "apartheid" was not even created in those years. Most of the laws
(and they were not many) regulating races at that time were laws already
in effect since collonial times. Similar laws were also to be found in
other English, Dutch, German and French colonies. Since 1902 up to 1926
the Afrikaner people were also far too much involved in overcoming the
immense destructions caused by the British-Boer War (1899-1902). One of
their struggles was to regain their national identity which culminated in
1926 with their language recognised by the constitution as official
language together with English.
Then in 1933 another law was passed by genl Herzog (Smuts was in that
years leader of the opposition) to determine the regions which belonged to
black people just before the BB war commenced. The idea was not apartheid
as we know it, but to help the black people to empower themselves by
giving their land back to them. In 1936 Herzog and Smuts formed a
coalition and the United Party to save South Africa from the economic
depression as well as WWII looming in Europe. In 1939 the coalition broke
up when Smuts' motion that South Africa has to enter the war got the
majority of votes. Herzog opted for neutrality. The first sign of
apartheid lifted its head. A small group of people wanted to side with
Hitler, Germany and Nazism. Smuts had difficulty to keep them at bay
during WWII.
After WWII they began to freely organise for apartheid. Soon the name
apartheid began to appear formally. It took them a little over three years
to convince the majority of the electorate (white people as a legacy of
colonial rule) that apartheid was to be the solution of the country in all
its walks. By then Smuts' holism was already twenty years known. Step by
step, AS IF THEY CONSULTED HIS BOOK CLOSELY, they formulated the ideology
and polcicy of apartheid to be the very antithesis of holism.
But what actually happened is that his articulation of holsim and bringing
its principles into practice enabled them to articulate an ideology and
propose a policy which would otherwise not have been possible. Remember
that the racial laws in South Africa at that stage were much the same as
in other forme colonies of England, Holland, France, etc. The fact is that
in none of these former colonies apartheid manifested itself because in
none of these countries they had holism as their antithetical example to
work from.
Yes, holism was shaped by the culture in which Jan Smuts grew up and the
university which he attented. And in this culture racial, economical,
langauge and religious classes/divisions played an important role. One can
see an "apartheid" in this culture, but then only as
informal-innate-implicate-lawless. It is something which exists this very
day in almost every country of the world -- a society with many dimensions
and classes within each dimension. Perhaps the most important difference
between South Africa and the other countries is that the differences
between the classes here were much deeper and wider. In other words, much
the entropic forces here is much greater.
However, a most important point to remember about Smuts was that he was
the product of home schooling. He did not attend public schools (except
for the last couple of years). Thus he was more free of social engineering
through the school system than most other people. So when he arrived at
university, eventhough an extremely bright scholar, he was rather naive.
His studies here and later at Oxford where he distingusihed himself as an
exceptional scholar, soon healed him from this naivity.
Most important is what Smuts himself had to say on holism in his book. He
was acutely aware that other people will try to understand it as a
philosphy or a metaphysics whereas his first illumination and later
insights were scientific. Thus he took great pains to elaborate on the
scientific foundation of holism. As he suspected, most other thinkers did
what he feared despite his precautions. They failed to perceive the
scientific foundations of holism and made a philosphy or even allegories
out of it. Of the twenty seven honorary doctorate degrees bestowed on him
by universities all over the world, very few came from the faculties of
science. (Somebody else borrowed my documentation so that I cannot give
you an exact figure).
The one remarkable exception was the scientist Einstein who did not try to
see philosophy or metaphysics in it, but who took heed from the author and
tried to understand its scientific foundations. As I have said, this gave
Einstein insight in his own quest of Relativity and later on the Unified
Field Theory. Jan Smuts had a great influence to his thinking in his
papers and letters since 1930, although he seldom mentioned holism or
Smuts in them. Perhaps it was Smut's holism which gave him the final push
to take a standpoint against Max Born and other quantum physicists who
wanted to make probablity an integral part of the foundation fo physics.
In his reply to Born he writes these immortal words:
* You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete
* law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which
* I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture.
Where did this idea of "probablity" entered the thoughts of physicists?
When Boltzmann late in the previous century tried to give an
interpretation of "entropy" in terms of Newtonian mechanics! To arrive at
an interpretation, he had to import "probability" principles into the
framework of Newtonian Mechanics. So when Newtonian Mechanics shifted into
Quantum Mechanics, the importation of "probability" to get an interpration
after all, surfaced again.
>> Firstly, Newton's original discovery, ... , were made from the
>> paradigm of simplicity. Perhaps it is possible to make
>> discoveries of spiritual laws also from this paradigm, but I do
>> not believe so.
>
> I believe simplicity or complexity has nothing to do with
> paradigm shifts. This world has become a complex one from
> moment 0 (take or leave a few femtoseconds) - although the
> simplest possible - i assume that this is true - .
Perhaps you are right.
But I cannot help to notice that you look at reality from the assumption
that reality is complex. I know too many people who look at reality as
something which is simple and that the only complexity in it is because of
complications brought about by people who do not think simple enough about
it.
As for myself, I thought about the physical world as something simple,
even though its great diversity caught my attention since my days as a
kid. My training at university (1962-67) did nothing to question this
assumption. It was only the next year when my efforts to understand soils
made me realise that soils are complex and that the disciplines of
traditional phsyics and chemistry cannot handle this complexity. So I
shifted from the assumption that categories of life are simple to the
assumption that they are complex.
>snip, excuse me Ilse-Marie
I will tell her.
For other who are baffled why I told so much about Ilse-Marie -- it was to
illustrate with a case study what happens when a manager thinking in terms
of simplicity tries to control an organisation which has to deal with the
complexity of chemistry, pharmacy and personalities. It leads to a fiasco.
>I do not want to imply that i consider Einstein, Smuts or other
>people were no geniuses, they were. Even more so, they are
>my heros because they opposed their tribal leaders, shifted
>paradigms. This requires guts.
There was a time when I also lived from month to month by discovering hero
upon hero in the literature on every important walk of life. What I
admired in all of them was, as you put it, their guts. But after I have
discovered empirically that entropy production happens in the spiritual
world, I realised that free energy (that which is needed for producing
entropy) in the spiritual world is just as important as "entropy
production". These thinkers, our heroes, had reserves of spiritual free
energy which we assume we will never have. It is the same kind of thinking
as "These thinkers, our heroes, had bravery or creativity which we assume
we will never have."
Why do people make negative assumptions about themselves and why do they
persist in conforming to such assumptions? How much has it do with other
people thinking posively about themselves which often leads to great
successes? Why do these successes merely intensify the feeling of loss and
desolation among the negative thinkers rather than making them positive
too?
Best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>