Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

“Evolutionary Paradigm” 108 and “Prigoginianism” 109 . Capra notes that this paradigm shifttranscends beyond the boundaries of the physical sciences: ‘today, twenty-five years afterKuhn’s analysis, we recognize the paradigm shift in physics is an integral part of a muchlarger cultural transformation’ 110 . Watson asserts that we are now in an era of ‘universalDarwinism’ 111 , an important statement in light of the fact that Boyd already in his firstpresentation of A Discourse states that:In addressing any questions about conflict, survival, and conquest one is naturally led to theTheory of Evolution by Natural Selection […] 112One of the key figures in this process and one whose work Boyd had read, IlyaPrigogine contends that there is a ‘radical change in our vision of nature towards themultiple, the temporal and the complex’ 113 , and ‘this development clearly reflects both theinternal logic of science and the cultural and social context of our time’ 114 . AlreadyHeisenberg recognized the shift from the parts to the whole as a central aspect of theconceptual revolution occurring in the 1920s 115 . At the same time in biology organismicbiologists took up the problem of biological form and explored the concept of organization.This involved a shift away from function to organization and implicitly also frommechanistic to systemic thinking. Organization was determined by configuration,relationships which formed patterns as a configuration of ordered relationships. What theseearly systems thinkers recognized very clearly is the existence of different levels ofcomplexity with different kinds laws operating at each level. The term “organizedcomplexity” was introduced as the subject of study. At each level of complexity the observedphenomena exhibit properties that do not exist at the lower level. The new science ofecology in the 1930s added to the movement. Ecologists study “communities” of organisms,or super-organisms, which for all intent and purposes act as an entity. Ecology alsointroduced the concept of “network” to describe the fact that organisms and communities oforganisms are integral wholes whose essential properties arise from the interaction andinterdependence of their parts.A similar shift was occurring in psychology towards Gestalt Psychology (Gestalt isthe German word for organic whole). The word “system” was coined to denote both livingorganisms and social systems and from that moment on a system had come to mean anintegrated whole whose essential properties arise from the relationships between its parts,and systems thinking the understanding of a phenomenon within the context of a largerwhole 116 . According to systems view, the essential properties of an organism, or livingsystem, are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from theinteractions and relationships among the parts. Systemic properties are properties of apatterns. These properties are destroyed when the system is dissected, either physically ortheoretically, into isolated elements.108 Prigogine and Stengers, p. xxix.109 Uri Merry, Coping With Uncertainty, Insights from the New Sciences of Chaos, Self-Organization, andComplexity (Praeger, Westport, Connecticut, 1995), p.100.110 Capra (1996), p.5.111 Watson, p.757.112 Boyd, Patterns of Conflict, p.11.113 Prigogine and Stengers, p.xxvii.114 Ibid, p.309.115 Capra (1996), p.31. A similar discussion can be read in Piaget’s Structuralism.116 Capra (1996), pp.29-35.101