To be part of life and to be in service to life are two perspectives on one situation – the dynamical and the agential view of a single web of relationships.
Dynamically, life is one vast four-dimensional system: not a collection of separate organisms but the entire, time-extended web of relationships and nested Living Systems that living things participate in. An individual, seen this way, is a “time-like” pattern within it – a worldline correlated with other worldlines (Individuals are patterns in larger systems). To be part of life is simply to be embedded in this web, enmeshed in its relationships and its larger systems. Being in service to life is the agent-side correlate of that embeddedness: being in right relations within the web.
What “right relations” contributes
In the decolonial literature the phrase names a way of being accountable to the wider systems – human, more-than-human, ancestral – that one is part of, as against the modern stance of standing apart from them and managing them as resources. It shifts the basic unit from the autonomous individual to the relationship, and makes interconnectedness the thing to be tended rather than a nice-to-have.
Cancer shows what “service” means
The negation is Defection: a cell cut off from the feedback of its neighbours reverts to its own proliferation and destroys the organism, and itself. Being in service to life is the opposite mode – maintaining the interconnection and feedback that keep one in right relations with the larger living systems one is part of. Separation is the civilisational analogue of the cell cutting itself off, and much of modernity’s pathology is separation at scale.
A collective agent in service to life must itself be built on a self-model of interconnectedness, or it will reproduce the very separation it opposes.
Collective Power therefore accumulates not through coordination imposed from above but through the interconnection of committed relationships – which is why the relationship, not the individual or the organisation, is the site of transformation.
References
- Gram-Hanssen, Schafenacker & Bentz (2022), “Decolonizing transformations through ‘right relations’”
- Machado de Oliveira (2021), Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism
- Levin (2021), “Bioelectric signaling: Reprogrammable circuits underlying embryogenesis, regeneration, and cancer” (cancer as loss of the cellular collective’s connectivity)
- Krakauer et al. (2020), “The information theory of individuality” (individuals as correlated world lines)