Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Systems Theory and the Interdependent Web

Reverend Darcey Laine
January 15, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

When the Unitarian tradition and the Universalist tradition merged in 1961, we formulated a set of principles and purposes that we all could agree to. This was no easy task, because we have resisted having any kind of obligatory creed for centuries. But these good folks were able to articulate 6 principles that we all could pretty much get behind. For 20 years these principles provided a sense of common ground to our congregations. But then in 1983, a new principle was added by a vote at our general assembly which represents all the congregations in the country This new principle was: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

This principle is now part of who we are — part of what we teach our children. Some of you remember when our junior high class threw a ball of yarn back and forth across this room during a worship service a few years ago, creating a web across our congregation which moved as we moved, and was changed by all who touched it — kinesthetic metaphor for this principle.

But at the time the principle was suggested, it was something of a controversial and new thought. So what was going on in the late 70s and early eighties that would cause our movement to feel a new principle was required to give a complete sense of who we are as a religious people? Certainly the environmental movement had raised the awareness of people throughout the world to the impact of our lives on this biosphere, but if that was the only principle we meant to hold in common, we could have said “respect our environment and work to keep it healthy.”

But there was something about this interdependence that captured our collective imagination.

By the early twentieth century, Relativity, Quantum physics and other scientific advances had begun to show gaps in Newtonian Physics, in Classical science. AOne response to the new questions raised was General Systems Theory, whose father is held to be Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) a German born Biologist who emigrated to the United states in the early 20th century. One of the primary purposes of the systems movement articulated by Bertalanffy as the integration of the scientific disciplines, both natural and social. It has been called interdisciplinary, metadisiplinary and transdisciplinary. It grew out of a “scientific exploration for universal principles of wholeness” It was pursued as balance to the trend over recent centuries to specialize, to “know more and more about less and less.”

Systems have been defined in such a way that we can identify 4 properties of every system, whether biological or sociological.

First: every system is a whole, and this whole is more than the sum of its parts. You know you have a system when there are emergent properties. No single neuron is capable of complex thought, but the human brain, which is in large part comprised of those neurons, is capable of complex thought. Emergence refers to a property of the whole system which is not predicted at lower levels. Therefore, if we look only at the component parts of the system, we will be missing important information that can only be found by looking at the system as a whole.

The second property is homeostasis: the capacity to self sustain. A system is able to create a stable constant condition over time. This is what makes our congregation a system, while the group of people gathered at the BART station not a system. That group at the BART station does not self-sustain. All real systems are open systems. We get input and energy from external sources, and then return something back to the environment. If a system is closed, it will eventually suffocate and die. If a system is too open, it will dissipate into a larger or neighboring system. So a system has this tendency toward homeostasis, to maintain congruence while interacting.

A system is self-correcting and self-regulating so that it can return to its homeostatic state. This requires a feedback mechanism. Let’s return to the human body as our sample system. I receive the feedback that my hand is too close to the fire through pain. I self-correct by moving my hand away from the fire, and then the burned area begins the process of healing itself in order to return to my usual stable state. I also am left with a vivid memory that connects pain and fire, and hopefully I become more self-aware when I am around fire.

The third property is that every system evolves. This is the balancing tendency to homeostasis. Every system can adapt and complexify, to change how we respond as the world that meets us changes. This “exploratory self-reorganizing” can be very uncomfortable. In the psychological model developed by Dabrowski, this is called “positive disintegration. In theological language it is analogous to the “dark night of the soul” and is the interstitial period before truly creative moments.

The fourth principle is that every system is a Holon (a term coined by Arthur Kessler). Every system is not only a whole with subsystems, but is also a subsystem of larger systems. Each human person is nested in smaller and larger hierarchies, referred to as “nested hierarchies,” (call to mind those Russian nesting dolls.) We are part of a vast embedded ness. We can’t fall out of it. At each level emergent properties appear, because each layer defines a new system. Nesting holons: whole self, whole family, whole church community, whole bioregion, global community.

Since Bertalanffy first began to develop General Systems Theory almost a century ago, new generations of scientists and academics have taken this idea into their work, and so it developed and spread.

By the time I was a child growing up in the 70s, we were taught to think of the natural world in terms of ecosystems. We were encouraged to think in terms of the complex web of relationships between animals and plants in their natural community. By the early 80s this paradigm had popularly been applied to the social sciences as well. It is when my favorite books by the Religious Education Press and other religious publishing houses were producing books encouraging us to view our congregational life through a different lens. Family counseling began to spread, and popular psychology books talked in terms of family systems. While we were working on our 7th principle, Psychologist Harriet Lerner was writing The Dance of Anger which told us that a family unit is not a collection of individuals, but also a system. And the system has a tendency towards homeostasis as all systems do. Individual therapy focused on the member of the family having the most trouble. But often the person exhibiting systems is reflecting the troubles of the whole system. It was quite revolutionary at the time to think that little Bob’s falling grades might be caused by stress in his parent’s marriage, and that the best way to help Bob succeed in school might be for his parents to work through their conflicts. We also learned that if Mom starts changing the way she deals with her anger in a more healthy way, the system will push back, trying to return to homeostasis, but that the family system also has the capacity to change and grow based on the novelty introduced to the system.

By the time I got to seminary in the early 90s, all candidates for ministry were expected to be well versed in congregational systems theory. The principles are similar, but the congregation is a much more complex system than most modern families. The connection between Bob’s grades and his parent’s marital strife can be pretty easy to make. But a congregation is comprised of many different individuals over a period of decades or even centuries.

We pick up a habit that long outlives the particular individuals who first responded to their environment in a that particular way. These processes actually begin to define the system. I like the metaphor of the density waves that are amplifications of the pattern of vibration in the Big Bang: The way the universe came into being continues to shape it. In the same way, the forming moments of our congregation created ripples or “grooves” (if you will) that shape how our congregation behaves today even if we are not conscious of it.

When we try to change these patterns, the congregational system will Ðoften without conscious awareness- push back, trying to restore homeostasis. For example, I’ve heard that when your previous minister Ken Collier introduced Caring and Sharing, there was considerable resistance, but eventually it became part of the pattern of our system. Recently we tried to make changes to Caring and Sharing, and this caused a new reaction. We are attached to Caring and Sharing because it is part of our homeostatic state.

The complexity of our own body’s biological system calls our best scientists to ongoing investigation and questioning. Moving out a layer we find that our local ecosystem is just as complex. Our consciousness is even less able to fathom all the connections we have with our neighbors. I trim a bush in my back yard and completely re-form the world of a family of birds, some rodents, and the plants which formerly lived in the shade of this bush.

But I’m not a scientist, as many of you are. So I will speak to this model in the areas where I have some training and experience, and will trust you all to play out the model in your sphere of expertise over coffee or lunch today.

Naturally I am drawn to the Theological and cosmological implications. First I am compelled by the implication that our relationship with the other beings in our local ecosystem is not that of human actors on a stage, but the relationship of neighbors and relatives of every living being. We are like organs in the same body. In the same way that the brain cannot survive without the heart, in our local ecosystem I see no hierarchy of worth (from an ultimate rather than personal point of view). I see that we are also only partly conscious of our role in the local ecosystem; many relationships are still unseen, and may exist in a dynamic complexity that we will never fully comprehend. This changes my diagram of being from the classical pyramid with God on top and then humans right under the angels, to one where all beings function in unity, and any God we may conceive is just as radically embedded as we are.

Next, we are part of an open not a closed system. Systems theory says it may be more helpful to think of “interface” rather than boundaries. This means we need not only the beings which make up our own system, but we also need for nutrients, or energy or information to move between systems as well. What a wonderfully affirming truth for a community that holds “open minds” as one of our highest ideals.

The third implication I want to mention today, is that systems theory reminds me that I am part of something vast. I am part of something unfathomable as it recedes into larger and larger nesting holons, and recedes into smaller and smaller holons. And yet I am intimately related to it. It inspires awe and wonder, and hopefully respect for everything we are connected to that we cannot know.

Fourth, our concept of “holiness” or what is sacred is impacted by this systemic paradigm- the wholeness of everything is sacred. This idea born in the halls of science converges with our deepest religious understandings. It reminds us to respect the wholeness of the Self. In this paradigm mind and body do not compete, but are part of a system with emergent properties which could not emerge but that all the diverse elements are present. It reminds us to respect the wholeness of our church community: its complexity and unity. Our belief in a primary one-ness is embedded right in our name: Unitarian speaks to the one-ness of divinity, and Universalist speaks to this notion that we are all in one boat. There are not some created as sinners and other elect who are saved before they are even born. Perhaps our 21st century extrapolation of this 400 year old teaching is that we are in the same boat with not only all humans but with all the beings in our eco-system, and indeed with our whole biosphere.

Our UU Pagan movement understands itself to be held by the principle of the interdependent web, but that is only one kind of expression of the theological implications. The transcendentalists were a transformative part of our movement in the 19th century who believed that God was most easily found in nature. Emerson, in his treatise “Nature” affirms that all that we are and know as humans comes from the natural world. There are many theological and practical expressions of this principle. It belongs to all of us.

Though this paradigm has spread widely, the world still acts like we are a collection of individuals. [Which makes sense; systems resist change, work for homeostasis] We are in need of a “figure ground reversal” as Joanna calls it, to take the individual which has been in focus, and refocus our lens on the relationships between individuals which are equally real and equally crucial to help balance this fragmentation. The Unitarian Universalists are pioneers here as with so many other things. Remember we were the first denomination to ordain women, then the first to ordain openly gay and lesbian clergy, and we were the first to answer Calvinism with the idea that each and every soul has the same religious potential.

Well, that’s all fantastic brain food, but what are the practical implications? I think the most crucial are the environmental implications Kay spoke about in her reflection. Waking up to the realization that we are deeply interrelated to other organisms within a system that is nested in other systems, we also realize that we have the power to negatively impact not only our neighbors, but ourselves as we realize that we cannot extricate ourselves from the biosphere. Our job as a religious movement then is to deal honestly the thoughts and feeling we have when we hear about the negative effect we can have on the system. Then we can return to the thoughtful practice of creating a life that is more and more in line with our principles.

This is why the environmental arm of our movement was first named “The 7th principle project.” Because they understood themselves to be helping us all to live out our UU principles both as congregations and as individuals. It is through this affiliate of the UUA that our congregation is working to become a “Green Sanctuary” congregation. This year the 7th principle Project changed their name to “UU ministry for the Earth” to widen the circle of recognition about who they are and what they are trying to do. But that leaves it up to us to remember that this work is at the very core of who we are as a movement, as articulated in our 7th principle.

This is Ours as UUs — our covenant to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of which we are a part. It comes from both the lineage of science, and the lineage of earth-centered traditions. This principle is (now) part of who we are. It is part of our tradition and heritage. It reminds us of our inherent unity with everything. It reminds us to think in terms of our relationships instead of our separateness. I believe our culture is hungry for greater connection: and the truth our interconnectedness is really quite stunning. As my teacher Joanna Macy taught “We are part of a vast embedded ness. We can’t fall out of it.” May you feel held by this connection, remembering you are never alone.