It all started with a dream.
One night Tansley had an unsettling nightmare that involved him shooting his wife.

So he did the natural thing and started reading the works of Sigmund #Freud, and even went to be analysed by Freud himself.

Then Tansley came up with an extraordinary theory.
He took Freud's idea that the human brain is like an electrical machine – a network around which energy flowed – and argued that the same thing was true in nature.

That underneath the bewildering complexity of the natural world were interconnected systems around which energy also flowed.

He coined a name for them. He called them #ecosystems.

But Tansley went further. He said that the world was composed at every level of systems, and what's more, all these systems had a natural desire to stabilise themselves.

He grandly called it "the great universal law of equilibrium".

Everything, he wrote, from the human mind to nature to even human societies – all are tending towards a natural state of equilibrium.

Tansley admitted he had no real evidence for this.

And what he was really doing was taking an engineering concept of systems and networks and projecting it on to the natural world, turning nature into a machine.

But the idea, and the term "ecosystem", stuck.

But then Field Marshal Smuts came up with an even grander idea of nature. And Tansley hated it.

Field Marshal Smuts was one of the most powerful men in the British empire.

He ruled South Africa for the British empire and he exercised power ruthlessly.

When the Hottentots refused to pay their dog licences Smuts sent in planes to bomb them.
As a result the black people hated him.

But Smuts also saw himself as a philosopher – and he had a habit of walking up to the tops of mountains, taking off all his clothes, and dreaming up new theories about how nature and the world worked.

This culminated in 1926 when Smuts created his own philosophy.
He called it #Holism.

It said that the world was composed of lots of "wholes"
– the small wholes all evolving and fitting together into larger wholes until they all came together into one big whole
– a giant natural system that would find its own stability if all the wholes were in the right places.

#Einstein liked the theory, and it became one of the big ideas that lots of right-thinking intellectuals wrote about in the 1930s.
Even the #King became fascinated by it.

But Tansley attacked.

He publicly accused Smuts of what he called "the abuse of vegetational concepts"
– which at the time was considered very rude.

He said that Smuts had created a mystical philosophy of nature and its self-organisation in order to oppress black people.

Or what Tansley maliciously called the "less exalted wholes".

And Tansley wasn't alone.
Others, including HG #Wells, pointed out that really what Smuts was doing was using a scientific theory about order in nature to justify a particular order in society
– in this case the British empire.

Because it was clear that the global self-regulating system that Smuts described looked exactly like the empire.

And at the same time Smuts made a notorious speech saying that blacks should be segregated from whites in South Africa.

The implication was clear:
that blacks should stay in their natural "whole" and not disturb the system.

It clearly prefigured the arguments for apartheid.

#hierarchy #leaders #control #feedback #stabilise #Arthur #Tansley #Jan #Smuts