Death

The means by which an ecosystem keeps itself alive, selects its fittest, controls its scale, gives peace to the tormented, enables young life, and accumulates a grammar of inherited meaning as generations change places.

A natural system lies in tension between life and death: death is as important to it as life. A lot of death is a sign of a healthy large population. Too much death is a sign that it is in danger; it is not coping; its terms of coexistence with its habitat are breaking down. Too little death is a sign of the population exploding to levels which will destroy it and the ecology that supports it. No death means that the system is already dead.

The reduction of life to an icon—the assertion that life (viz, human life) is sacred—disconnects the mind from the ecosystem to which it belongs. It is a fertile error. Beneath the exaggerated regard for life lies an impatience with, a disdain for, the actual processes that sustain the ecology that sustains us. Expressing faith in the sanctity of human life is a licence—in a series of little, well-intentioned, self-evident steps—to kill the ecology that supports it.

The large-scale system, relying on its size and technology, and making an enemy of death which should be its friend, joins a battle which it cannot win. In systems thinking, death is sacred.^D2

Related entries:

Sacrifice-and-Succession, Wheel of Life.