    14

    14

    The Whole Is Bigger Than the Sum of Its Parts

    There's a strange concept in the philosophy of science called an

    "entelechy."  An entelechy is something complex that emerges when you

    put a large number of simple objects together.  Examine one molecule of

    water in a vacuum, and you'll be utterly bored by the lack of activity in

    your vacuum tube.  Pour a bunch of molecules into a glass, and a new

    phenomenon crops up--a ring of ripples on the water's surface.

    Combine enough glasses of water in a big enough basin and you'll end

    up with something entirely different: an ocean.  Take the 26 letters of the

    English alphabet, lay them out in front of you, and you'll have a set of

    small squiggles, each of which evokes just one or two specific sounds.

    String a few million together in precisely the proper order and you'll

    have the collected works of Shakespeare.6

    These are entelechies.  A city, a town, a culture, a religion, a body

    of mythology, a hit record, a dirty joke...these, too, are the results of

    entelechies.  Take one human being, isolate him in a room from the time

    he's born until the time he dies, and you'll end up with a creature

    incapable of using language, with little in the way of imagination--an

    emotional and physical wreck.7  But put that baby together with 50

    others, and you'll end up with something entirely new--a culture.

    Cultures spring into existence only when the crowd is large

    enough. They are a phenomenon that sweeps across the face of the

    multitude like a wave.  The phenomenon that creates the Beatles, the

    phenomenon that makes a Hitler, the phenomenon that launches a new

    philosophy like Communism or Christian Fundamentalism, these are all

    entelechies at work, waves rolling over the surface of society,

    incorporating the minor moves of individual human beings into a

    massive force the way swells of the sea orchestrate insignificant twitches

    of water molecules into an overwhelming motion.

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