Inteversity
(From my thesis, ‘E Pluribus Unum: The Dream of Democracy,’ enjoy this little standalone section, where I coin a brand-new term that doesn’t exist anywhere on the internet. Cutting edge philosophical stuff happening here on Beatin’ Paths!)
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Inteversity
I’d like to propose a new word by smashing two words together: inteversity. Inteversity is the synthesis of integrity and diversity. It recognizes that, in some cases, integrity can serve diversity and diversity can serve integrity. Inteversity is a valuable quality in any autopoietic system. A system (the rainforest, the mind, the marketplace of ideas) is inteverse in so far as it links diversity in a single network of dialogue.
When existing nodes in a network engage in more relationships with and within the network, the network becomes more inteverse; and, when the network absorbs, generates, or integrates novel nodes, this also makes the network more inteverse. In mathematics, an inteverse system might look like a ‘fully-connected graph’, a network of nodes in which each node is uniquely connected with every other node. In a fully-connected network, the number of connections grows quadratically with the number of nodes.
To value inteversity is to recognize the intrinsically reciprocal relationship between parts and wholes which propels progress. Inteversity keeps systems healthy; I have a hunch that some ecologists and biologists have an intuitive sense for inteversity, just like Walt Whitman did. Inteversity maximizes interaction, maximizes communication. It promotes awareness of novelty. It measures ‘muchness,’ the total value of the system. One might just as truly say it’s the integral of diversity.
Inteversity’s use as a concept becomes clear when you imagine systems in which either integrity or diversity is present without proper reciprocity. Integrity without diversity cannot change, cannot progress through the collision of differences; these systems become brittle, inbred, unproductive. Diversity without integrity is not in dialogue; the diversity is unable to contribute to a shared whole. A colony of ants is integrated, but not diverse. Meanwhile, if a wise foreign man speaks a language I don’t understand, I am missing out on the chance to creatively integrate his novel contribution into my mind. If a body lacks integrity, it may have cancer; if a body lacks diversity, it might starve.
On the other hand, when integrity and diversity act symbiotically, we have inteversity. By linking more diverse nodes in dialogue within a network, the resulting interactions can produce greater novelty. In emerging within the system, this novelty increases the total unity of the system and improves its anti-fragility. Whitman’s synthesis of liberty and democracy is a good example of inteversity in the human world. In valuing individuals, the whole, every permutation of related groups within the whole, and relation itself— all as divine ends in themselves, all reciprocally related and mutually generative— we value inteversity.
The word ‘inteversity’ does not exist on the internet, which is ironic, because the internet is in some ways a striving for inteversity. One thing I like about the word ‘inteversity’ is that its phonetic sound contains the sense of collision between two words, representing the dialectic between parts and wholes that the word itself implies.
The quality of inteversity is one of the core values of the Dream of Democracy. This quality is valuable for the individual mind, the tribe, the Tribe of Tribes, and larger ecosystems. The ideal of liberal democracy— the synthesis of two non-sacrificeable, mutually-constitutive ideals, liberty and democracy— can be imagined as an ideal of societal inteversity.
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[Image: Rainforest]
Imagine a rainforest. The abundance of water affords a proliferation of life forms. Each new species finds a niche interacting with many other species. Every species continues to develop in novel directions through adaptive radiation. Keystone species enter into more reciprocal, symbiotic relationships with a greater diversity of the rainforest’s life.
On the Olympic Peninsula, Western red cedar provide shelter for birds, mammals, and insects; their strong water retention plays a key role in regulating the wet rainforest’s flows, releasing water slowly into their parents’ soil to maintain a stable ecosystem. Species which adapt to more diversity become more integral, more important to the inteversity of the whole ecosystem. By doing so, they become more individually powerful, more ‘fit’ to survive and thrive, supported by a thicker web of relation. Inteverse ecosystems are healthier, more robust, more-antifragile; they can survive the death of parts. They are also more capable of generating new life. Perhaps human minds and tribes are kind of like rainforests.
Imagine a clearcut line bisecting the rainforest; a road; a barrier. It removes only a thin rectangle of trees from the surface area of the rainforest. But the damage to inteversity goes far beyond that line. By cutting the area in half, we split the whole into two much smaller wholes. Inteversity scales nonlinearly with forest size, because interaction compounds. Two separate ecosystems unintegrated with one another have far less total speciation capacity than a single undivided ecosystem across the exact same surface area. The robustness, fitness, and generativeness of the rainforest has been slashed. Species extinction accelerates, the rainforest ecosystem becomes more likely to fall below critical thresholds of systemic collapse, and we miss out on the possible generation of untold novelties which would have required a much higher critical mass of integrated complexity. As Emerson said, “The only sin is limitation.”