ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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In contrast, it is organically rational to elaborate upon this evolutionary
trend—to organically ‘complicate’, rather than simplify, social and ecological
reality by creating institutions that allow people to be freer, more joyous, and
creative.
ORCjANic ObjEdiviTy: A CrouncI TIhat Moves
Yet here we witness a new approach to questions of objectivity. The objective
dimension within social ecology’s ethics, far from being rooted in deterministic
universal ‘natural facts’, is rooted in the idea of general, nascent, and organic
potentiality . Here, the understanding of ‘objectivity’ represents a recognition of
an identifiable, stable, yet dynamic trend toward the potential for increasing
complexity and freedom in natural history. The ‘ground’ for this ‘organic
objectivity’ is paradoxically ‘unstable’—it is, as social ecologist Amy Harmon
says, a “ground that moves.”16 Rather than be anchored in static biological
facts, it is anchored in the ‘flexible’ field of potentiality that afiows for ever
greater degrees of stability and order to emerge within the process of natural
evolution.
Again, such socio- and eco-erotic principles of mutualism, differentiation,
and development are not reductive, essential, or deterministic ‘natural facts’.
Instead, they are complex and rational organizing tendencies that give shape,
symmetry, and directionaHty to the process of natural evolution that are
open-ended, diverse, and multi-directional, rather than determined or unilinear.
As a non-deterministic perspective, social ecology does not view this
trend toward increasing mutuafism, differentiation, and development, as the
‘dominant’ trend in natural or social history; nor does it propose that this trend
wifi necessarily triumph over the iirational anti-social tendency toward social
hierarchy, homogenization, and simplification. For the fact that particular
societies today are characterized by irrational and tenacious forms of hierarchy
that reduce social complexity and interdependence and that global capitaHsm is
currently ‘undoing’ the process of natural evolution by simplifying the
environment, is
testament to the unactualized potential
of societies to
participate creatively and rationally in elaborating the evolutionary process.
The trend toward a social desire based on ecological principles of
mutuafism, differentiation, and development, while not the most pervasive
trend, is ‘objectively’ the most promising and rational trend, both ethically and
politically. For, when societies elaborate upon such a trend, they open the way
for greater evolutionary choice and social freedom. It is on this basis that we
may ground an ethics of social desire on something more stable than relative
or arbitrary ‘personal opinion’. The decision to actualize our social desire for
mutualism, differentiation, and self-organized development, represents an