Pattern

Have a look at a leaf. It may be helpful and fun to get a real leaf and have a look at it rather than just considering a mental image. Examining the leaf, a pattern can be seen clearly. What is the leaf made of? One way of answering the question may be to draw a hierarchy, something like this:
Go and look at a 'real' one.

Though, in drawing up such a structure, we would miss some of the lateral connections. We'd miss, for example, the very real impact of human society on natural systems, as well as the lateral dependencies (the plant depends on other plant communities, on soil biota and so on), the possibility of levels of the hierarchy being skipped (as when an animal drinks molecules of water). Also, there are underlying patterns which inform all levels of natural systems, and which are only hinted at by the diagram. Plants grow according to a genetic pattern, organic molecules are highly organised structures.

Here (below) is a hint of an alternate kind of diagram - one which is not so hierarchical, though it does have several of the features of the other map. It tries to show that the leaf is embedded in a complex matrix of dependencies and connections, some of which may overlap. It must, of course, be emphasized, that all such maps must remain provisional - they simply can't represent the complexity of natural systems. The old saw that the map is not the territory applies especially to our complex relationship with the natural/social world.

	The pattern for a leaf is only a part of a pattern for a plant;
	The plant, in turn, is embedded in a living community consisting of air, water, soil, energy and the living beings which create and interact with these;
	All living systems grow and change according to patterns.
	These patterns are not static, but unfold over time.
	Although the patterns are fixed in some ways, (a seed will always, unless mutated, produce a plant - a bat will not grow from a rose tree) they are flexible in other ways (plants adapt themselves to their environment, grow upward and towards light, cling to cliffs or grow in cracks.)
	These patterns are goal-seeking, or stochastic systems.
	The pattern for the leaf is only a part of the pattern for a plant.
	The plant, in turn, is embedded in a living community, consisting of air, water, soil, energy and the living beings which create and interact with these things.
	All the patterns in interaction form a super-pattern - the living planetary eco-system
	This super-pattern or overall system is also stochastic - it seeks its own survival, (though not consciously - this is a bias of language - cf. G Bateson Mind and Nature) which it has successfully done by maintaining a continuity of living systems on Earth for billions of years.
	Human systems and behaviours impact on these patterns at all levels.

Now have a look at your hand. Like the leaf, it reveals a pattern. Your whole body is a complex pattern of integrated systems: skeletal, muscular, cardiovascular etc. It is integrated in the bio-physical reality of the environment through physical interaction. Like all animals, you must breathe, take in water, eat, excrete, and ultimately die and return your components in some form to the eco-system. It would be interesting to try to draw a map for the hand like the ones for the leaf. One type of map would look exactly like the one for the leaf. But we could choose to see other connections, linking the human part into a social system:

Global culture

national systems

social systems and institutions

classes etc.

extended families

nuclear families

individual body/mind

body/mind systems
(including your hand)

cells... etc.

This would be only one of countless ways of situating your hand in its interconnected reality. We could, for instance, have made a map placing it in its biological context or its economic one, as a limb that performs work.

As a human, your relations with other living entities - including the ones you eat - are mediated by a special set of patterns which we can call culture or social formations or society or whatever, depending on our own beliefs.

Via the media, television, exposure to commodities, advertising, employment, the world expresses itself through and as our being. Obviously, many other factors also come into play, and any vision of interconnectedness must take as many as possible into account. But the oversimplified notion that we are formed by social forces is a very useful one. Interconnectedness means that we recognise that our breath, our body, and even what we believe, come from elsewhere. Although our genetics may shape the vessel, society provides the content.

One of the most immediate ways that we connect to each other is through language and information.

	You talk to me, I talk to you.
	Your mother sang you songs when you were small.
	Your school friends told you jokes.
	You read a book,
	you look at television
	you attend a conference.
	You "visit" a web-site
	Our society washes through us in words and images. Language, these words.

Think of a wild or feral child, someone who grew up among animals. Recently a family in Brazil has been found, who brought their three girls up as pigs. The children could only grunt. They were suckled on a sow, they were fed bran. They had no language and no mind as we would understand it.

So, to a large extent, we are constituted - made up - by our language, education and all the various systems with which we come into contact: systems of meaning like commerce, politics, culture, as well as the natural physical systems on which we depend. But we are not just mindless cogs in the world's system-machine - we are constituted as individuals, we act and think as individuals but we connect to everything. We experience ourselves not as air and food but as people, as personalities. What makes me me? Is it my ideas, my thoughts, my beliefs? Maybe we like to think we are these things. This is the paradox of modern life: we are individuals but we connect to everything. We must finally feel, think, decide and act as individuals - we have no choice - but if we try to pin down the borders of this individuality they go blurry. To quote Phillip Dick:

"They are not your ideas, you didn't create them. You can't turn them on and off when you want to. They operate through you. They are conditions deposited by your environment. What you believe is a reflection of certain social forces and pressures."

I don't have any resolution to the problem of individuality in an interconnected world except to state it: How does a vision of the interdependence of things affect our concept of our selves? How can we act in an interwoven world? Many beliefs offer answers. Clearly, none is adequate to explain the mind-boggling complexity of the planet. There are so many constantly changing facts that the sheer bulk of numbers must overwhelm any theory. I do believe that by remaining aware of the connections between people, things and systems, our actions and decisions can be better informed and possibly more useful.

Like natural systems, the social structures in which we exist are also stochastic systems.

	Human social formations are goal-seeking - Sometimes explicit and implicit goals are in conflict with one another;
	Sometimes they seek explicit goals, as when a society consciously strives for the happiness or health of most of its people, or when it strives to overcome another society by violence;
	Sometimes they seek goals which are not expressed, but are implicit in the way that the system is organised - as when a system further enriches the wealthy at the expense of the poor, but without admitting or discussing it;
	Sometimes explicit (stated) and implicit (hidden) goals are in conflict with each other. Many oil or logging companies, for example, have vociferous "environmental" policies;
	Living systems, in perpetual feedback with one another have survived by constant change and adaptation for billions of years;
	But unlike living systems, human cultures don't have a long history, nor have any survived for very long in ecological or evolutionary terms.

In the short term, (ecologically speaking) agriculture/industry has been a very successful system. It has allowed the human population to expand from about four million to five billion in just ten thousand years. Since agriculture began, the pattern of human relations with the biosphere has been dominated by a need to extract more and more surplus to support an increasing population with increasingly complex demands. This need accelerated with the advent of modern industrial and capitalist systems.

At this point in history, especially since the collapse of the centrally planned states of Eastern Europe, the dominant system for extracting and distributing surplus from the natural environment is the system of business, called world capital. Over the last few hundred years, this system of human relations has come to be the main context in which we relate to our environment. Its function in mediating these relations is important to our understanding of interconnectedness. .

Some of the main patterns around which society organises itself are those of Race, Class, Gender, Age and Religion, and other markers of difference. Along with these belief systems of difference, goes a package of exploitation:

	the rich exploit the poor
	people are exploited (sometimes even murdered) because of religious difference
	caste and race serve as a basic pattern of exploitation
	men exploit women
	children and the old suffer from increasing exploitation as traditional family systems break down.

In these examples, natural "resources" - the bounty of the environment, both renewable and non-renewable - are always the most exploited. Non-human beings have no "rights" worth mentioning. The next-lowest position is always occupied by the most exploited and marginalised people. Thus women, in many areas of South Africa, are under a multiple burden: as primary care-givers they must provide food fuel and water for their families. confined to marginal overcrowded lands, they are forced to work harder for less return. They are the underdogs of black-white, male-female, North-South and almost every other human system of otherness.

South Africa has a unique history of exploitation and few people are as well-equipped as South Africans to see the interconnections set up by exploitation. What shocked the world and turned South Africa into a pariah state was that under Apartheid the patterns of exploitation were explicit and legislated.. With the dismantling of the old system, society still functions (not surprisingly) in the old patterns, so that class, race, gender and age exploitation are as rife as ever and all exploit the environment as much as possible.

World capitalism depends on these inequalities for the extraction of profit. A view of the interconnectedness of things demands that we take this into account. To some, the system is desirable - as a result of it they can own the commodities which the media have made them desire. Others, victims of the inequalities of distribution, are angry. they still want/need the products that the world of business offers. They desire, understandably, to live like their rulers. But there simply aren't enough resources for everybody to possess the goods which are flaunted by characters in American soap operas.

While there is enough for everyone (world-wide) to be fed and housed at modest levels, the global system finds equitable distribution too costly and inconvenient and seems unable or unwilling to make the needed adjustments. Beside personal greed, the profit motive and the imperative to military spending which underlie the present system ensure that this remains so. As long as decision-makers benefit from unequal distribution, some will have excess while others will go without. The way that out society is patterned makes sure that White middle-aged upper-middle-class males currently get the best slice of the cake. The cake, in the process, may be damaged and poisoned, others may not get enough, but that's the way it goes...

?	How does unequal access to culture (education etc.) work to the advantage of some people?
?	How are others disadvantaged?
?	How can a vision of interconnectedness empower people?
?	Do you think that people who are aware of their dependency on natural systems will treat them with greater respect?
?	If not, why not?

We can make effective interventions once we can lay bare the connections and see them. Once we become aware of how air, food and energy connect us to the world, we can begin to ask some serious questions about these connections. W can see how our social systems make us what we are, and, seeing this, we can work to change our world for the better.

	Natural systems seek the goal of survival
	Human systems are also goal-seeking
	These (human) goals are explicit as well as implicit
	Human systems are grounded in natural systems and dependent on them
	Sometimes the goals of human systems are in conflict with the goals (survival) of natural systems
	When these conflicts crystallize in/as the breakdown of the natural systems, (e.g.: the US 'Dust Bowl', the SA Bantustans) the human systems also break down.
	Human system - natural system relations take place mainly within the context of the system of business, through agriculture and industry
	The goal of the business system is the maximisation of the extraction of surplus (profit) from natural systems
	The indefinite maximisation of surplus extraction is not compatible with the goal-seeking of natural systems.