Dis-Covering the Delta Factor

In my work as a public health practitioner, I must constantly balance two realities.The first is currently the easiest to understand and deal with. It has to do with relationships that are fundamentally oriented towards energy exchange and are often embedded in hierarchies of systems.

Homoeostatic functioning would be an example. Humans are seen as organisms operating in their environment seeking to find an optimum balancing of energy systems in order to overcome the proximal effects of entropy. These are important models for helping us to understand and explain salient aspects of the various interactions.

The second reality is harder to understand or explain in terms of linear energy exchanges. Frankly, we are in danger of loosing our grip on this side of reality. There is the continuous danger of reducing what is distinctly human into a mere excrescence of the first reality.

The technocrats of the first reality have had their heyday. It is increasingly obvious that they cannot deal with everything. However, these technocrats continuously vie with one another to maintain a position of dominance in our culture.

Their way of looking at reality continues to carry the day on our television sets and in our public polemics. It does so in subtle and in not so subtle ways. It has left a whole society vulnerable to the predations of advertising men and the apologists for the growing dystopia.

We should not gainsay the continued importance of the first reality. Yet, we require a more adequate accounting for the whole of reality.

Walker Percy sought to explicate an important difference between humans and other organisms. He also tried to extricate his readers from the grip of a new manifestation of Leviathan. The issues leave those of the Matrix in the dust.

Or, rather, the moral of the Matrix trilogy is exactly what Percy was fighting against. He was offering a way of waking up which meant that something could be truly different. Waking up would not merely be a means of resolving all of the anomalies of a continuously dominant machine system.

We are not ultimately part of a system of eternal iterations and adaptations.

The “Delta Factor” was decisive for Percy. He was speaking about, and I will keep exploring, “a nonlinear nonenergetic natural phenomenon (that is to say, a natural phenomenon in which energy exchanges account for some but not all of what happens)” (Percy, The Message in the Bottle, 1975, p. 39). It will take us some time to even begin to sketch out what this means.

I would suggest that it is more than worth the while for the sake of a truly public health.