Body metaphors

I recently read Donella Meadows' The Global Citizen, and felt freshly inspired about the wonders of systems theory. She had a marvelous gift for encapsulating complex ideas in readable essays formed around real-world examples, from policies to sheep farming. It reinforced the sense that although the world is not simple, it is comprehensible, and the roadblocks we suffer can be opened up by just a small shift in perspective.

A recent conversation with a friend centered on the use of body metaphors to reconceptualize economics. I found myself thinking of Meadows' beautifully interconnected worldview, and we mused on how to communicate the image of a biological economy. It's not a unique image-- others have seen it-- but we felt moved by its significance.

Of course, there is a broader perspective. Just today, I ran across this passage in Stephen Batchelor's Living with the Devil--

"In 494 BCE ... the consul Menenius Agrippa successfully put down a slave revolt in Rome. Agrippa persuaded the slaves that just as it would be unreasonable for the limbs of a body to rebel against the belly that sustains them, so it was unreasonable for workers to rebel against the Senate. Convinced, the slaves left their entrenched positions on the Aventine Hill and returned to the city to serve their masters. The same argument has also been used to justify the Indian caste system, in which each caste is seen as a different body part of the great primordial Man (Purusha): "His mouth became the Brahmin; his arms were made into the Warrior; his thighs the People, and from his feet the Servants were born." By sacrificing narrow self-interest and acting according to one's nature, each person thereby plays an essential role in sustaining the greater life of the whole.

When Shantideva uses this same organicist metaphor to illustrate how all beings are empathically interconnected, and Pascal and Eckhart, following Paul, draw on it to affirm how all members of the church are one in the body of Christ, they ignore its potential for justifying tyrrany. The story of Agrippa shows how the mere recognition of the organic interconnectedness of society is not in itself sufficient to generate compassion for others. Nor does the Indian belief that all people are one as members of a single body imply that they are entitled to the same rights or freedoms. [...]

Insight into the interconnectedness of life with only reinforce feelings of universal love and respect if we are already committed to the principles of equality, liberty, compassion, and nonviolence.... The image of life as a single organism in which we are all connected to each other is an insufficient basis for morality and ethics." (pp. 170-173)

His answer for what is a sufficient basis for morality is interesting too -- it's the realization of our own fragile vulnerability and the recognition that everyone else feels this at their core, too. Forget the organism -- we can connect on the level of being frightened little cells. And in fact, until we do this, we will not be able to create a well-functioning organism, an idea Batchelor develops throughout the course of the book.

Batchelor would agree with this comment from my friend (thanks J): "It's like a contrapositive -- knowing we're interconected doesn't bring peace, but forgetting that we are surely brings misery."