Dialectics and Evolution
A kind of dialogue
Dialectics emerged as a kind of dialogue among philosophers seeking to understand reality.
Over time the dialogue among people aspect dropped away but it remained as an abstract way of looking at reality.
Marx and Engels adapted Hegel's version of dialectic into Dialectical Materialism which was concerned with the fluid nature of social evolution. I remember that as "Everything contains the seeds of its own destruction."
Free markets often show this mechanism at work. Let's consider farming - say pig farming. If pigs are scarce then the price for them goes up and pig farming becomes very profitable. The profitability induces many other farmers to raise pigs which leads to a market glut a plummeting profitability. Which leads to a scarcity of pigs. Then the process repeats. This is very common.
It happens in nature too with the classic predator/prey oscillation. When there are few foxes the rabbits multiply. The bounty of rabbits creates a paradise for foxes who then multiply in turn. This of course is hard on the rabbits whose population declines which is hard on the foxes in turn. The cycle repeats.
Similar things happen in culture. A culture that trusts others not to steal learns to leave doors unlocked. This of course makes a paradise for thieves which of course leads to everyone locking their doors. I actually saw that at work.
When I was a kid nobody locked their doors until I found a kid snooping around in the kitchen. Soon all the doors were locked, an inconvenience. Now I live in a building with very tight security into the lobby and even so all of us keep our doors locked all the time too.
I wonder how long before theft becomes so rare that nobody worries about it and people stop using their locks.
The boom/bust nature of the dialectic puts it at odds with Kant's categorical imperative of "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
One might say that one of the great forces in society is the tension between dialectics and the categorical imperative.
Deer are an ecological problem in many places. They have few predators and the population grows to the point where they eat up all the food and then starve. This of course damages the environment of many other species.
The boom/bust cycle of dialectics fits very well with the requirements of darwinian natural selection which requires a cycle of replication with variation with a selection pressure. A system approaches a boom or bust state many times (replication) and each time it does it's in not exactly as it was before (variation). The selection pressure may be provided by the categorical imperative which might act to counter the boom/bust cycle and approach a stable steady state.
The tension between dialectics and the categorical imperative produces a cycle. Sometimes the boom/bust nature of the dialectic is modified by the categorical imperative and sometimes not. But recent events may increase humanity's respect for the categorical imperative .
What do you think?
I open the floor.
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.