Lewis Works

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Lewis Works Newsletter

The E-zine of Applied General Systems Science

By Hugh M. Lewis, PhD, MA, general editor

Vol. II:  No. 5

11/5/04 Copyright 2004 ©, Hugh M. Lewis.  Facsimiles of this page or parts of this page may be printed and distributed for non-profit research, consulting and educational purposes only, as governed by fair use policy.

On Top

Though I normally refrain from making political statements within this forum or in the context of my web-system or the Lewis Works framework, recent events in the US have directly influenced a strategic shift of focus in our efforts and intentions for implementation of designs for alternative development.

Given the outcomes of the latest American presidential election, the entire world should brace itself for a swelling wave of American neo-conservativism stemming from the religious right, and of course the unavoidable hypocrisy as American foreign policy becomes bound to a simpleton's view of a global Pax Americana resting upon the shoulders of a pack of charlatans. An expectable outcome of this election will be further regressive policies both domestically and internationally, an increase in socio-religious intolerance, and a relatively permanent entrenchment of American social structure divided into two antithetical camps. The entire government has been effectively railroaded by elite private interest groups, and domestic and international policies are effectively in the service of the promotion of these interests at the expense of the American taxpayer.

I would seek to explain anthropologically the strong religious reaction, particularly among white Americans across the entire spectrum of social stratification, as I have witnessed and experienced this first hand, as an indirect form of ethnic and communal solidarity that has been politically repressed and prevented from being practiced in public forums in its older forms as white racism or as white-based ethnic solidarity. Decolorizing this sense of communal American solidarity has made it attractive to many Americans "of color" in spite of preferential conditions favoring their status under policies of affirmative action. The American people have been under continuous assault by relatively unrestricted immigration at levels unprecedented in US history, and a significant amount of social displacement has resulted from this, reinforced and encouraged as it has been by government mandated policies towards preferential hiring and quotas. Recent terrorist events in the US have served to galvanize this trend and to bring more people into the right-wing camp under the banner of the American flag. Lack of class mobility and closure of a class stratified system has further exacerbated the sense of inter-positional ambivalence among many white Americans in particular, who are finding efforts at gaining social mobility systematically stymied, especially by far-reaching government and business policies that undercut employment opportunities. Hence, a growing sense of social frustration of many Americans with their predicament in their own system, has induced them to seek organized religion as a viable alternative for networking, for resource mobilization, distribution and allocation, and for social organization and empowerment. They gain a sense of legitimacy they cannot obtain otherwise. For these people the question of material well-being and sense of communal identity and security within an ideological religious umbrella outweighs the requirements for the exercise of independence of thought or normative freedom of individual action. The choice is relatively simple and fundamentally satisficing, and once having been made, there is an entire train of happy consequences as they find positive social reinforcement and enhanced status in their new found, but highly stratified and status-conscious, in-group. Once thus organized, typical mechanisms of social control and group-boundary maintenance take over and become the order of the day. Deliberate political policies that seek to play upon and even increase the social insecurities of people in the world tend to favor conservative platforms in the direction of even more regressive measures. 

Americans at least know what to expect over the next four years....

What most Americans have voted for:

Higher Gas Prices

More Administrative Authoritarianism

More Opaque Government

More American Casualties

More Victims of American War

Increasing likelihood of Terrorist Actions

Approximately Six Million More Illegal Aliens By 2008

More Windfall Profits for Halliburton Oil

More Violent Crime in American Streets

Greater Controls over the Press and Communications Media

Increasing Levels of Social Intolerance and Stratification

More Jobs Passed to Nations Overseas

Greater Tax Breaks for the Rich

Greater National Debt

And much, much more....

We would like to applaud the wisdom of most Americans.

Since so much of current American political policy, that is being articulated at so many levels, runs against the grain of the stated mission principles of Lewis Works (see below), and since the general social climate of conformism and closed-mindedness have grown so strong in the US, it has been decided that Lewis Works as an applied systems based framework will never prosper in such a social climate and cultural context of denial that has become the predominant norm of contemporary American society. It has been my decision therefore to seek its developmental contexts within truly international settings as much as possible, and to eventually and permanently cease all operations and remove all efforts for such an establishment within contemporary American contexts. I do not arrive at such a conclusion by impulse or by mere reaction to the disappointment of yesterday's election, but as a rational long-term consequence of lines of reason and decision making that has in effect been years in the making. The culture of denial and social repression has been extant for some time now, and it has made the advancement of any kind of reasonable business interests by Lewis Works extremely difficult if not entirely impossible within the prevailing contemporary American socio-cultural milieu.

On the other hand, I strongly resent other American's dictating policies of social conformism and I resent their deliberate attempts to stifle basic freedoms and human rights in the name of a narrow-minded, self-serving sense of ethos and worldview. I have therefore decided to launch a series of new sites and publications that deliberately target issues of growing concern in the US and abroad, with the idea of clearly exercising my freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom of the Internet, and, ultimately, freedom of thought and life. The practice of normative freedom to choose our own values and lifestyles demands the responsibility to exercise our fundamental rights upon a daily basis. The people in control of America's resources would love it if all intellectual dissenters moved to France or just somehow dropped off the edge of the Pacific. It is simply not going to play out the way they want or expect it to.

Criticisms/Comments, then Provide Feedback

Main Article

In the last quarter century in academic forums of American Anthropology there has been a strong and relatively aggressive trend towards trying to explain human behavior and social phenomena primarily in terms of biological determinants. Many physical anthropologists have crossed the line therefore separating their discipline from that of socio-cultural anthropology, and they have passed into the fields of socio-cultural anthropology with the deliberate intention of foisting their worldview and paradigm upon their colleagues in the other sub-disciplines. They manifest frequently the aim of monopolistic power and control over departmental resources as a principle motivational incentive for their social action and ideological proclamations. The remarkable thing about these theories are not so much what is intrinsic to the theories themselves, which becomes fairly trivial in short order, but the motivations that people demonstrate by adopting such thinking and by the strong sense of obsessive preoccupation demonstrated with extreme analytical reductionism. The positive correlation of this trend with regressive political conservativism on the right is obvious to most though it is strongly denied by those who adopt such frameworks of explanation for human systems.

My first acquaintance with this trend came in the early 1980's, a period of the "moral majority" in American politics, with Freeman's attempt to debunk the work of cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead by hypothesizing a "rape prone" genetic profile for the Samoan islanders, and engagement in the hot debate in academic forums that followed.

This kind of thinking has a had a long legacy that goes back at least to the 19th Century with Herbert Spencer's sociologism, and it ties Anthropology and the other social sciences indirectly to an earlier Christian worldview that linked biology and character of people on the Great Chain of Being. In the 80's it took the form of a basic socio-biologism, especially influenced by the writings of Konrad Lorenz and the statements of E. O. "Insect" Wilson, who sought to equate the social patterning of human beings with the social patterning of insects. By the 1990's, this trend had assumed the name of "bio-culturalism" and became expressed in models of gene-culture co-evolution, as put forward for instance by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and others. Later, the concept of "memes" (one should substitute herein the term "genes") as basic units of "memory" that are passed from generation to generation became popularly espoused by the year 2000.

What all these kinds of perspectives share in common are what can be called the biologistic fallacy, or rather the fallacy of biological determinism in attempting to explain one level of phenomena that is culturally and socially based, in terms of a completely different analytical level of natural systems articulation, namely that of biological genetic evolution. The central criticism of any such approach therefore comes from a systems point of view, and states that one cannot invoke the principles found operant upon one level of natural stratification of reality, to directly or indirectly explain the emergent phenomena that are found operating upon another level of systems integration. It is equivalent to attempting an explanation of population genetics in terms of the physical structure of the atoms that compose the organisms being described. Mixing levels of analytical stratification in our explanatory theories of natural systems is equivalent to mixing apples with oranges and rocks, and treating them as the same on the basis of their generally round shape. It results in two unfortunate consequences, the attribution of causal explanation to factors and mechanisms that have no direct bearing on the phenomena in question, and an ignorance of the mechanisms that do have a bearing on the phenomena in question.

The motivation of those who put forward biological explanations of human cultural and social phenomena, to the neglect of theories that deal with such phenomena in terms of systems integration at those levels of articulation, must be called into account and held suspect. It appears that such biologistic arguments are most promulgated during periods of relatively extreme political conservatism. Bio-cultural frameworks in anthropology can really be traced back in time to the period of Hitler's Germany when concerted efforts were organized to demonstrate a biological basis for the differences between different groupings of humanity--to demonstrate and justify a basis of racial inferiority/superiority.

Though most biologically inclined anthropologists are loath to be identified with such an intellectual legacy, they nevertheless happily promote a very stilted and jaundiced form of intellectual conformism and often have assumed a very active and aggressive stance in the posturing of their points of view in anthropology programs and forums.

One of the hallmarks of intellectual conformism seems to me to be the strong predilection and preference for relatively simplistic solutions to complex problem sets, and the foisting of rational arguments in support of an intellectual ideology, whether solid evidence for such an argument exists or not. 

Success in biological genetics, especially as this has impacted the study of DNA profiles in human populations, has had a dramatic impact in the same period of time in lending a sense of superficial credence to such biologistic arguments. By mapping out the human genome, social expectations were raised that one-to-one genetic trait correspondence could be found for all kinds of complex human behavioral patterns, such as homosexuality, alcoholism or other impulse control disorders, criminal behavior, characteriological disorder, mental illness, intelligence, even such relatively vague traits as social achievement, parenting abilities or other socially marginal tendencies.

Needless to say, when such biologistic arguments are put forward in cultural anthropological forums, there is then a built-in need to play down the importance or role for instance that environment will play in human learning, the question of the plasticity of the human mind or the plasticity of human cultural adaptation, the role of cultural transmission and social construction in the development of human cultural patterning, and the wide spectrum of variability of either human personality or human cultural patterning that occurs in the world. The concept of world-openness of human nature, not being bound by any strong instinct, and the importance the role of enculturation plays in shaping the human child's behavior and character, are largely ignored or considered insignificant in such thinking. The symbolic foundations of human consciousness and behavior underlying human social and cultural patterning, rooted as this is in the enormous complexity of the human brain, is generally construed as far too complex an issue to be dealt with in purely biologistic fashion, except through the over-simplistic invocation of such things as "memes" encoded by genes

We may refer to such theories based upon arguments for the biological determinism of human culture and social patterning for what they in truth are, and these are essentially folk theories and pseudo-scientific ideologies of the importance and value of biological inheritance and of the ethno-centric naturalization of cultural pattern. The danger of the promulgation of such theories, and their legitimization as received science, comes from the teleological and functional implications of such legitimization for certain policies or agendas, usually put forward by a political elite in relation to some social underclass or counter-reference "other."

To reiterate, the exclusive biological explanation of cultural and social phenomena suffers the fallacy of biological determinism and naturalization of constructed, reified cultural realities. This fallacy comes from the failure to apprehend basic principles of systems stratification and integration, and consequently depends upon the overemphasis upon a form of analytical reductionism carried to the extreme. Rules that apply to systems integration and emergent properties at one level of natural stratification, cannot be sufficiently explained in terms resorting to the rules and principles applying upon another level of natural stratification. While all phenomena may be systematically reduced to constituent forms and subsystems, all the way down the line, the behavior and properties of systems at one level of natural integration and stratification cannot be fully explained in terms of the patterns found below it, especially if removed at more than one or two levels of reductionist analysis.

This is not to say that biological factors do not indirectly influence and affect human patterning in general, but these factors cannot become thereby either the primary or ultimate causal explanation for why human psychological, cultural or social systems occur or develop as they do in the course of natural history. The question of the role of biology in human evolution is a non-trivial problem, and certainly the fact that human beings must meet certain basic biological requirements for survival and for achieving reproductive success are scientifically significant to understanding how humans organize themselves into groups and seek to perpetuate and extend themselves in the world. But answers to these kinds of questions by themselves cannot go far enough in the explanation of human cultural patterning and social behavior.

To a great extent, cultural and social patterns appear to occur largely independent of specific biological determinants. Direct evidence of cross-cultural adoptions and severe cultural deprivation demonstrate clearly the role played by culture in the determination of human behavior. This evidence cannot be explained by resorting to genetic or other biological factors. We can say for instance that human aggression and violence are so common place and widespread in the world because their are no if any instinctual inhibitions or constraints to the expression of human aggression, and this aggression is readily shaped through symbolic transformation, and learned through cultural transmission. Therefore control or explanation of widespread human violence cannot be sought or found upon a biological level of determination, but rather must be found upon a cultural and social level of institutional constraint and sublimation.

In conclusion we may say that all living organisms are biological systems that are made up of atoms and molecules, but these organisms possess properties of living systems that are not possessed of other physical entities like rocks or water. Similarly, human cultural and social systems are indeed made up of biological organisms with functional biological needs and requirements, composed of cells, in turn composed of complex organic molecules, in turn composed of atoms, in turn composed of subatomic energies and particles. But we do not thereby seek to explain human cultural behavior or social phenomena purely or exclusively in terms of the molecules that constitute the actor's body, or only in terms of the atoms the make up these molecules. Certainly, the element lithium dramatically affects a manic-depressive's behavior, as do many other kinds of chemical compounds, but this association does not constitute an explanation for the behavior of a manic depressive person or that of any other kind of individual in the first place.

Arguments based upon biological determinism are easily dismissed and disprovable from a Systems based perspective. They represent analytical attempts to explain socio-cultural phenomena reductionistically by resort to biological systems, and hence violate a basic principle of general systems theory that natural systems stratify upon multiple levels. It therefore comes as no surprise that Ludwig von Bertallanfy, founder of general systems theory, was himself a biologist and easily identified the symbolic basis of human culture and social patterning.

I suggest that such thinking and ideology persists and continues in the name of social science and anthropology because the conservative and backward looking political regimes and authoritarian administrative orders continue to exist that seek and find justification for their policies and practices in such narrow lines and modalities of thought. As long as people see something they think can be gained by intellectual conformism to some ideological status quo, we will have to contend for scientific research resources with ideologues who espouse self-serving ideologies. 

Announcements & Updates

Announcements of recent updates in our framework

*We are announcing a pre-launch of a new website, http://www.mynewsmedia.com that is intended to fully exercise freedom of press and the Internet in the reporting of factual information from around the world and in offering critical commentary concerning these reports.

*We are announcing the pre-launch of a reconfigured website, http://www.burntbooks.com, based upon the coming to market of our new text, Robidoux Chronicles, within a month. 

*We are announcing our e-bay based store-front reopening soon, at:

 http://www.hostingbookstuff.com

*We have been reconfiguring our web-system and tying up as many loose ends and failed links as possible. We have removed our footer-page and are redesigning this to be an optional dialog-window interface that will be installed on all our main-pages in the system. 

*We will be installing a new set of features that are fully functional within the forthcoming month.

Mission Statement

Lewis Works is dedicated to realizing new human adaptive possibilities in order to create alternative long-term frameworks for human & biological systems development on earth and beyond.

The primary mission of Lewis Works is to fundamentally empower all human beings, without regard or reference to their individual or cultural differences, so that they may function in a more constructive and non-violent manner by means of their integration within an applied systems framework that enables them to contextualize and focus their independent developmental efforts toward comprehensive solutions to common problems in resource distribution, environmental adaptation, and social-structural interaction.

Lewis Works Ten Point Mission Statement

• 1. Lewis Works seeks alternative meta-systems based development through applied general systems with the main goals of:

• a. Achieving a mutually stable and harmonic balance between future human systems and earthbound biological systems.

• b. Providing all human beings in unbiased structural or cultural contexts the alternative systems-based frameworks for their individual & social development by means of increased opportunities, productivity, security and resource availability that they would not otherwise have in conventional frameworks.

• c. Developing the infra-structural context and means for the regular extension of human and biological systems beyond the boundaries of the earth.

• 2. Lewis Works is dedicated to achieving a better world for all people and for all life-forms through the implementation and articulation of an applied general systems framework to general and specific problem sets that occur in the adaptive organization of human behavior in a shared natural environment.

• 3. Lewis Works is non-exclusive, open, non-authoritarian, philanthropic and pacifist in orientation.

• 4. Lewis Works pursues a combination of both profit and non-profit programs and projects to the achievement of its main goals.

• 5. Lewis Works protects and promotes universal human rights and human responsibilities throughout its various programs and projects by the systematic pursuit of human development strategies.

• 6. Lewis Works is law abiding and honest in all its dealings and transactions in all contexts, and respects and honors the customs and manners of all peoples and all ethnocultural groupings.

• 7. Lewis Works protects and promotes the confidentiality and legitimate interests of its clients and customers under all circumstances and in all cases.

• 8. Lewis Works seeks to efficiently provide a comprehensive range of profit-based services and related product lines within an open, web-based forum of exchange that is global in scope, regional in character, and local in focus, and that serves as the basis for the development of a structurally open meta-systems based context in the world transcending local, regional and national identities and affiliations.

• 9. Lewis Works seeks to promote non-profit programs in alternative human development for the sake of alleviating human suffering, educating people openly and in an unbiased manner, and promoting pro-social human development.

• 10. Lewis Works seeks to create trans-national meta-cultural orientations in the world through various organizational frameworks that promote open, democratic principles of government, fair-play and the rule of just law, and through the development of anti-structural multi-media based systems that provide humanity a common symbolic context for their meta-cultural integration.

Products & Services

Lewis Works strives to offer a genuinely comprehensive range of services and products for the global e-consumer in an informed, non-aggressive manner. It has taken us time to develop our resources into an integrated framework that will provide largely automated self-service to our members and other customers, bolstered by one-on-one account management and attention to personal details. But persistence & a great deal of patience is finally beginning to pay-off in terms of the emergence of a real web-system with an active presence on the Internet.

We act both as a reseller for other providers, and we also are increasing the product range that we actually own or buy ourselves wholesale and then resell. We also provide a range of peripheral options through associate/affiliate accounts. 

We seek to be as honest and transparent in our dealings and relations with the world as possible, putting as a premium in our transactions building the values of trust and reliability.

We also recommend our current Link Palette for related links & portals, though most of these are as yet unfinished.

For external topic-organized links, we recommend Hugh's Hot Links

For popular, top-search links, we recommend Haut Lynx

Query us for advertising on our Advertising Pages that are shown throughout our web-system on more than a eleven hundred distinct URLs.

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This Newsletter will be published at 4:30 PST each Saturday afternoon. 

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