THE ARROW OF TIME

Everything Has a Beginning, a Middle, and an End

Machines wear down and die. Living systems, if they learn and adapt, do not.

— Margaret Wheatley

What Science Teaches

The observable Universe and everything in it moves in one direction: from birth to death, from hot to cold, from creative energy to useless energy, from order to disorder. Everything comes from what preceded it. Nothing is reversible. This is the Arrow of Time.

The arrow of time applies to all closed systems in the known Universe, but the new sciences revealed that it is not the predetermined fate of living systems. A living system has permeable boundaries and sense-making capacities. It is an open system, capable of exchanging energy with its environment rather than using up a finite amount. If it opens to its environment, it takes in information, a form of energy. It notices changes and disturbances that it then processes, free to choose its response.

This is life's essential process-using cognition and self-organization to adapt and change. A living system can reorganize itself to become more fit, in the evolutionary sense, to survive. Through its exchanges of information, it creates newness and diversity, sustaining itself through shifts, crises, and catastrophes. All of this is possible and commonplace as long as the system remains open, willing to learn and adapt.

However, if a living system closes itself off, there is no possibility for change and growth. Closed systems have no potential for life's adaptive capacity. They work like machines, passive travelers on the arrow of time, deteriorating and losing capacity, predetermined to waste away because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics-the trajectory of heat energy from useful to useless. (The First Law of Thermodynamics states that the quantity of energy is always conserved, neither created nor destroyed as it changes form. The Second Law describes how the quality of energy deteriorates in a closed system.) In a closed system, every interaction has an energy cost; some amount of its energy becomes useless through its activities. This is entropy, the measure of disordered energy. More entropy describes greater levels of disorder.

What distinguishes living systems from machines is their ability to learn. They resist the arrow of time and the Universe's movement to increasing disorder by using their cognition to adapt. They stay alert to what's going on in their internal and external environments and respond intelligently.

A healthy living system is a good learner and can thrive even though its environment is moving toward increasing disorder. But to do so it must be actively engaged and aware.

If living systems close down, they wear down and death is assured.

The Rise and Fall of Civilizations

The movement of civilizations along the arrow of time has been a mesmerizing field of study from the time of classical Greek scholars such as Plato up to our present. Historians want to know what has gone before, not from intellectual curiosity, but from a desire that their current civilization avoid a similar fate. And there is a plethora of examples for study: Globally there have been dozens of complex civilizations during the last 5,000 years of recorded human history (by 3000 BCE there were already seven known to Western scholars). Every one of them illustrates the same pattern of ascendancy and collapse. In addition, excellent archeological research on the causes of decline removes any doubt about the strong commonalities among these civilizations and the descriptive accuracy of the pattern of collapse.

Still, it was astonishing to read of a ninth-century Arab moralist's lament about the celebrity pop singers who flooded the capital city in great numbers singing erotic songs, using obscene language, whose influence on young people degraded their morality and normalized vulgar. Or to read that in the eleventh century, education in the Arab empire changed from learning to technical training for high-paying jobs.

There is nothing new under the sun.

The pattern is crystal-clear. We humans, no matter where we are or what our cultural belief system is, always organize in the same way. We create glorious buildings, cities, transportation and trade routes, music, aqueducts, dance, poetry, theater, sewage systems, canals, pottery, fabrics, farms, statues, monuments. And yet, these magnificent cultural manifestations are guaranteed to disappear, destroyed at the end by disease, famine, or invaders that attack a society already weakened by moral decay and internal warring. We are incredible organizers and creators, and then are brought down by our arrogance, pettiness, and greed. Always.

But in our bright, shiny, techno-optimistic twenty-first-century global culture, we believe we have stepped off the arrow of time. Our technological and scientific genius gives us the capacity to bypass the fate that has overtaken all other complex civilizations. In our arrogance, we believe that we can use our superior intelligence as never before, changing history, bounding forward in great leaps, no longer subject to the arrow of time. We believe we are the height of human evolution rather than just its most recent, predictably problematic manifestation. The belief in never-ending progress is fueled by our inexplicable arrogance that we can supersede the laws of the Universe. Our constantly expanding technologies and innovations may appear to be adaptive responses to the environment. But this is not true. Quite the opposite: for the first time in history, humans are changing the global environment rather than adapting to it.

For those of us not blinded by the false promise of progress, we may understand the dire state of this civilization. If you're paying any attention to the news from everywhere, it's hard to avoid the specter of collapse. But then what happens? Do we, as most do, fall into private collapse consumed by fear and despair? Do we become one who does nothing but complain for what's been lost? Do we succumb to grief for the suffering of so many? Do we give up and spend whatever time is left in hedonistic pursuits? Do we cocoon in self-protective bubbles with a nine-foot TV screen and SurroundSound?

Or do we acknowledge where we are and step forward to serve? Those who have studied the pattern of collapse always conclude their analyses with an urgent plea that we take notice, that we wake up to where we are in order to positively change where we are. The natural march of time toward disorder can be counteracted and even reversed by awareness and learning. Blind reactivity and fear are not the answer. Self-protection is not...