Concerns over the devolution of Global Order in the assumptive “society” of nation states often neglects the fact that the world is always undergoing disassembly along with, and as a probable thermodynamic or entropic cost and consequence of, the sedimentation and progressively-aggregated order of usefully-patterned structural coherence. As in most things, we are not really experiencing or cultivating anything radically new or different, we are merely continuing to reproduce those same patterns of order and disorder that we have always cultivated, just at higher degrees of differentiation, refinement and resolution.
This progressively and recursively iterating Global organisational system finds itself currently biasing or trending towards greater disassembly, divergence and fracture than creative or recombinatory convergence. Over longer historical time scales it might be expected that such a bias would be self-correcting, pushing Global systems of interdependence and competition towards self-propagating homeostasis. There may be something to say about the ways in which a Global system of political and economic interdependence and interconnectivity is logically incapable of manifesting as a unified process; that the language, technology and narrative consciousness upon which we so implicitly depend to characterise unity and Global Order feature unacknowledged deeply and logically discontinuous foundations which may require radical axiomatic reconfiguration to transcend.
The possibility of Order that emerges at the point where technological sophistication, connectivity and interdependence provide a plausible or tangible realisation and implementation of such a Unity also simultaneously recedes away from us inversely proportional to the provision of the technical means and possibility of attaining that unification. We can’t have peace because we are unable to precisely and concisely define and sustain the conditions of assurance, continuity and coherence which could provide that peace within a contemporary, shared conceptual framework (such as it is).
The current environment is one in which an accelerating and divergent Global systemic self-replication and proliferating turbulence-towards-conflict has assumed primacy because the methods, rules and sets of all possible intelligible behaviours or cognitive styles within that system of behaviour, thought and activity are always already inflected by a discontinuity implicit to concepts of Totality, Completeness or Unification. The bias towards differentiation, difference and ideological distance may not be so much a consequence of ideological, political or leadership aspirations or empire-building as it may be a logical inevitability of any system of information, communication and object relations which has passed beyond a certain notional threshold of complexity. Conceding agency to the autonomous and self-propagating or parasitic, patterned flows of energy and information within which we are encapsulated is a conceptual leap that few egos and fewer nation states could ever be expected to successfully make.
It seems as though both the casino and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics are the only winners, yet again. I am not entirely convinced that Global peace or unity is impossible; the requisite harnessing and exploitation of useful organisational and systemic entropy is not beyond imagination but it probably does require a level of sophistication and subtlety hardly evident at the current level of international dialogue.
Daedelus Kite 