Particles and Waves, Stars and Galaxies, Forests and Trees

If you've read any of my posts on this site before, you have heard me harp on the notion of Identity.  While I feel inclined to apologize for repeating myself, I feel equally impelled to keep harping.  I am convinced that looking closely at our notions of Identity is a crucial step forward from this tribalist, nationalist, whatever-ist quagmire we seem stuck in.  Today, however, I have a slightly different chord to play as I harp on the issue.

The old idiom that accuses us of "not being able to see the forest for the trees" is a good one.  And I ask you to consider its meaning for a moment.

For long stretches in the history of human consciousness, people have been stuck in particularity—in focusing on the small disparate particles, rather than the whole.  Instead of looking at the vast network of connections between us, people often choose to look more often at separateness.  In measuring time, for example, we tend to focus at hours and minutes and markers, like ticks on a clock, rather than a seamless wave of interwoven cause and consequence.  

In social relations, people often focus only on those who participate in the same social group identity, whether that be race, religion, political affiliation, township, sports team, neighborhood or nation.  The particle (the small self) is easier to perceive, and therefore it dominates the viewpoint.  In medicine, chemistry and physics, scientists have attempted to understand the whole by understanding the constituent parts, and so they have broken down the fundamental relationships between all that is into tissues and then cells and then nucleotides, molecules and then atoms and then particles.  And meanwhile, the whole of the greater system is often ignored.  (Quantum Theory gives us a beautiful opportunity to reconcile this, though, with its clear demonstration that at the sub-amotic level, particles are indistinguishable from waves.) 

But the issue, of course, is that we cannot understand the whole by looking at the parts alone for a number of reasons.  First, the most obvious, that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.  We cannot understand the spirit of a dog companion, the value of its friendship, the relationships that it has with others, by chopping it up and studying its organs and hormones, or even its DNA-- not completely.  We cannot understand the mysteries of human consciousness by looking at individual neurons in the brain as if they were stars in a constellation-- we can't even say for certain that consciousness exists in the brain.

Particularity is a fact of reality, no question: the things of the world are made of smaller constituent parts,  but allowing one’s consciousness to become limited by those smaller parts is incredibly dangerous, both metaphysically and socially, especially as long as humans continue to keep their sense of identity small.  If we only identify with the particular groups that share obvious traits with us, our perception becomes stunted, we create conflict with or even vilify the Other, but worse, we become so focused on the individual pixels that we cannot see with resolution the vast spiral galaxy of our shared life together.