Emergence
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 05:31PM You're going to hear that word more and more in the coming years. Trust me. It's going to become a catch all phrase that is going to be applied to everything from economics to politics to religion. I'd like to take a moment and talk about where it comes from, what it means, and why it is important for the church.
First: What does it mean? Look it up in a dictionary or wikipedia. Let me know if it helps. Basically it's the idea that most things, especially biological things, are greater than the sum of their parts. The world is not made up of machines, whose function can be reduced to different parts, broken, replaced, and fixed. Rather most biological and human systems emerge from simpler systems but cannot be reduced to those simpler systems. For instance the formation of bee hives. The order and complexity that is expressed in these formations cannot be explained simply by reference to each individual bee and their capacity for design and construction. The hive can only be explained by the interaction and relationship of the bee's together. The hive emerges from the bees acting as if they were one. We see similar behavior in most social insects: wasps, ants, etc.
It's not a new idea, but it is a difficult one for people to sometimes grasp because we have a very mechanistic view of the world, that everything can be reduced to simpler things: gears, valves, pistons, that each explain, one to one, how the more complex thing works. That's how engines work, but it is not how daisies and termites and gnus and chimpanzees and humans work.
As you can probably tell, the term is used in the sciences quite a bit, but first arose from philosophy as a way of explaining certain observations of the world. It is vital for evolutionary biology as a model for understanding complex, irreducible systems like plants, animals, and biological environments. Emergence is especially important in understanding how adaptations happen, particularly in the formation of complex animals: for instance how all of your organs work together to keep you alive as an individual or how the brain gives rise to consciousness, or rather how “mind” emerges from the brain and its interaction with the world. What is tricky about emergence is that it is nearly impossible to predict what might emerge from adaptation. For instance: That self-reflective consciousness would emerge as a survival adaptation is pretty much impossible to predict from what we know about the evolution of life on earth. But here we are.
What does that have to do with the church? Well, take a look at the Bishop's letter in this month's Lutheran (the one with the cheerleaders on the cover). “Transformation, paradigm shift, change, sustainability.” All these are words related to emergent adaptation. We are faced with something new in our culture. Not utterly unfounded, but definitely a new context and a new environment. In these cases we can't predict the future or know what is to come, or how the church will evolve. Only that it will. One of the consequences of this uncertainty is that there are no experts, no know-it-alls. If an alien space craft landed outside the White House, we would presume the president would go out to speak. But there is nothing that informs that decision other than our old assumptions about the world. It might actually be better if his dog goes out to greet our new visitors. We simply can't make assumptions in that case.
What do we do about all this? The story of Lent is the challenge of change: dieing to our old self and being made new by Christ. Perhaps the most important thing we can do is take up our cross and die, so that we can be raised; lose our life so that we can gain it. Does that mean we lose who we are? Of course not. That never happens: righteousness and peace have kissed and nothing is ever truly lost. But when we seek to hold on too tightly, life slips from our grasp. It is only in letting go that we emerge as a new creation.
