I’ve been spending the weekend at a conference on spontaneous orders, also known as complex adaptive, emergent, or self-organizing systems.  In the human world what those terms, and some equivalent ones, point to is how certain kinds of order can arise even though no one is in charge, and as a result the chances for anyone picked at random from within that order to successfully achieve his or her plans is enhanced.  There are many such processes, from language and markets to science and the internet. Their equivalent is found in the nonhuman world as well, as with ecosystems.  Maybe also with the Sacred.

I am in South Carolina at a conference on spontaneous orders.  Today, as I was making notes during our discussions, I was struck with a possible connection between people’s rapidly increasing interest in emergent processes, and the rise of Pagan religion.  I am NOT saying that either causes the other, but I think they are unusually compatible,  both psychologically and culturally.

From the rise of agriculture to recent times human relations in our various civilizations have been very hierarchical, usually with a king or emperor on top.  I think not coincidentally, there has tended to be a top, or single, deity referred to as a King, less often, Queen.  These hierarchies were long taken for granted.

The past two hundred years has seen a huge decline in the power of hierarchies, though they are still powerful and I think to some degree will always be.  Gradually we shifted to ways of living where complex orders could arise among people who were more or less equals.  Agency exists throughout our society, and not just in leaders, upper classes, and rulers. Science, markets, and democracies all rest on this value of equality in one way or another.

Though none of these institutions meet this value perfectly, all are justified in its terms. All scientists’ work is supposed to be judged by the same criteria, from grad student to Nobel Laureate.  The poorest person and Bill Gates alike are supposed to have the same property rights, even though one has vastly more property than the other.  All citizens have equal political rights, be they a working single mom or legislator.

Hierarchies are always trying to arise – like our current corporate oligarchs – but they are on the defensive morally, and often have to hide their power rather than boast of it, as the old aristocracy did.  There is always the possibility they could lose their perks, as they should.  Hierarchy is no longer unquestioned.

In natural science the rising interest in emergent order is in keeping with these trends. The ‘building blocks’ of our world are not really blocks, and they are creative. In chemistry Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel by showing how important these processes were in his field.  Simple reductionism was undermined.  New possibilities emerge at every level of existence. Rather than life arising either because of some divine clockmaker, as with traditional Western religion, or through a process of mechanical chance repeated over millenia, as with secular mechanism, evidence is accumulating that even the most basic atoms have unexpected properties that can emerge when they combine with other atoms.  The universe is creative all the way down.

This third possibility is distinct from either Genesis or Dawkins.  It is not much addressed by advocates of either despite abundant evidence such processes happen.

Increasingly we are told our world consists of networks, nodes, processes, and continual transformation.

We are learning to think in new ways, freed from so much hierarchical conditioning, and as we do, our world looks different.

I wonder whether this very deep cultural shift has led to a gradual abandonment of the ideal of one God as absolute King, perhaps with a heavenly throne and angelic retainers, to monism (there is a single Source from which all arises, and in which everything manifests It to some degree), various forms of divine immanence (the sacred is in the world, in all things), and polytheism.  

What these three concepts have in common is that no single source of divine order is ‘in charge.’  The sacred is distributed everywhere.  This is a spiritual perspective far more in keeping with modern values than one of divine eternal hierarchies.  It is also not threatened by the discoveries of modern science.  There is no need for a God of ever narrower gaps, for there are no gaps.