All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.
So said Edmund Burke, and he's right, though probably not for the reasons he would have cited. Burke died 68 years before the theory of entropy was proposed, but his famous quote speaks precisely to that theory. Both our current recession and the crisis in Gaza are examples of entropy in action.
More below the fold.
Entropy is a fundamental concept in the physical sciences. Although its roots and initial equations lay in thermodynamics, it also applies in cosmology where it explains the forward-only experience of time, and in information theory where it helps optimize the use of data channels. And while we rarely consider it, entropy also applies in social sciences like economics, politics, and international relations. But what is entropy, really?
Entropy in Brief:
UPDATE NOTE: In this discussion I am not referring to thermodynamic entropy, which has a very precise physical definition and laws which would arguably lead to the opposite of my conclusions. Rather, I am using the term entropy as it is applied in other fields, and specifically in complexity theory: referring to the state of order or disorder in the component elements of a dynamic system.
If you followed the links, you saw lots of mathematical equations, and unless you're a math geek they probably meant nothing to you. Fair enough, as most of us don't think in mathematical symbols. The easier explanation of entropy - the one we heard in high school - has to do with order vs. disorder: if you drop an egg, it will break into a mess (less order, higher entropy), but it won't "unbreak" back into an intact egg (more order, lower entropy). That's not entirely true, but it's experientially true.
A better and clearer explanation is given by physicist Brian Greene in The Fabric of the Cosmos. Greene asks us to imagine the pages of a book printed on separate sheets of paper, tossed up into a whirling ceiling fan, then gathered without looking at the page numbers. The probability that you will pick up the pages in precisely the correct order (page 1, page 2, etc.) is very, very small. If the book has 10 pages, there are 3,628,800 possible sequences, each equally likely. If the book has 20 pages, there are 2,432,902,008,176,640,000 (or 2.4x10^18) possible sequences. To put that number into scientific perspective, the Big Bang happened about 4x10^17 seconds ago. And if our pages comprise a typical novel manuscript of about 500 pages, there are over 10^1134 sequences, which is why Herself and I have a box of big rubber bands next to our printer....
In short, it's not that the pages of an average novel could not possibly randomly fall into the correct sequence (page 1, page 2, etc.), but that is so unlikely that you would probably never see it happen, not even if you could scatter and randomly gather the 500 pages of an average novel manuscript, once a second, every second, for the entire age of the universe. And likewise for the broken egg.
I used different numbers of pages in the examples to show how quickly the possibilities skyrocket when a system gets more complex. For a 10-page book, the possible page sequences are on the order of 10^6 (millions). Double the number of pages, and the possible sequences (10^18) are more than the age of the universe in seconds. This raises an important corollary to the theory of entropy: increasing the complexity of a system by only a slight amount vastly increases the number of possible states (e.g.: sequences of pages of a book) for that system.
I also noted that there is only one correct sequence for the pages of a book (page 1, page 2, etc.). This raises a second important corollary to the theory of entropy: decreasing the tolerance for error - fewer acceptably-ordered states in the set of possible states - vastly increases the probability that a randomly-derived state will be in disorder.
There is a third important concept in entropy. If you drop the novel manuscript (oops!) you can't rely on randomness to sort the pages back into the correct order. You have to sit down and sort them out (been there, done that). By doing so, you spend energy to decrease entropy ... you work to organize the system. Thus: the more complex the system, and/or the lower the tolerance for error, the more energy is required to achieve and maintain order.
Which brings us back to Edmund Burke:
All that is required for evil (disorder) to triumph is for good men to do nothing (spend no energy to achieve and maintain order).
Entropy and the Recession
A modern economy is astonishingly complex and sensitive. For an economy to function, you need access to resources, labor to transform resources into goods and services, markets by which to distribute those goods and services, and capital to fund both start-ups and major improvements. Those are all variables, each similar to a page in our book example above. And while there's not just one correct value for each variable, the variables must fall within a fairly narrow range.
The higher a society's material standard of living, the wider the range of goods and services the people expect to have available. That requires both more resources and a wider range of resources, more labor and more kinds of labor, a more complex market system to distribute the goods and services, and more capital to fund it. The more leveraged the economy - where most of the capital is borrowed against investments that are keyed to everything functioning as expected - the narrower the tolerances for disorder. A resource shortage here, a labor surplus there, a market that can't deliver a key good or service somewhere else, and the interlocking investments that are "capital" in that over-leveraged economy collapse.
The myth of laissez faire capitalism is that complex economies are self-organizing, that they magically evade entropy. They aren't, and they don't. All that is required for a complex, interdependent economy to fail is that institutions do nothing to prevent its failure. And as bonddad and NewDealDemocrat show, that's exactly what conservatism proposes government should do to prevent economic failure: nothing.
Entropy and Gaza
Peaceful coexistence is also a complex, ordered system. Nations can go to war for a variety of reasons: economic, egocentric, ethnocentric, imperialistic, political, or (on rare occasions) principled. Indeed, to list the reasons wars break out is to list - in the negative - the narrow conditions for peace to exist.
More specifically, nations remain at peace if and only if none of the conditions for war exists within that nation, or her neighbors, or her allies, or her neighbors-in-interest. The more neighbors she has, the more alliances to which she is bound, the more far-flung her interests, the more likely a causus belli will exist or emerge, somewhere in that system. And the angrier, more arrogant, and/or more fearful the people or their leaders, the lower their tolerance for those causi belli, those disorders in the system.
The geopolitical system as regards Israel and Gaza is hugely complex, more so than most Americans know or want to know.
Gazans are not in any sense a self-sufficient nation; they are too many people, packed into too little territory, with too few resources, and too few allies. They are predominantly Shi'a, so the Sunni leaders of the nearby Arab states have little real interest in them, except that they continue to be a thorn in Israel's side. The Gazan people are and have long been in dire poverty. U.N. and aid service statistics report nearly half of Gazan children suffering malnutrition. The Gazan people elected their current militant Hamas government, not so much because the people wanted Hamas' militancy, but because the only other major party (Fatah) had proved hopelessly corrupt and incapable of meeting the people's needs.
Israel is a small nation surrounded by historic enemies, with no space for defense-in-depth. The most fertile land in the region - along the Jordan River and in the Beka Valley - lies outside her original borders (in the West Bank and southern Lebanon, respectively). The Golan Heights are dominating terrain from which an enemy could observe and direct fire on any Israeli army maneuvering in the northern half of the country, and the Golan Heights are also outside her original borders (in Syria, with whom she is still officially at war). And Israel's comparatively recent rapprochements with Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all Sunni-dominated governments, came at the price of Israel siding with the Sunni in the ongoing Sunni-Shi'a divide within Islam. (This, more than any of the remarks of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is why Israel is so hostile toward Iran.) Finally, Israel's political system is historically chaotic, having seen a series of fragile coalition governments.
All that is required for peace to fail, in that complex and fragile context, is for institutions to do nothing to prevent its failure. And that is exactly what the relevant governments - Hamas, the Knesset, the Arab states, the U.S., and the EU - have done to prevent this latest round of fighting: nothing.
Conclusion: Entropy and the 21st Century World
The world we live in is significantly more complex, and more fragile, than any in recorded history. Globalization, both formal and informal, has made us economically and politically interdependent, increasing the number of variables affecting the lives of people everywhere. At the same time, living in the Information Age means that almost every tragedy, anywhere in the world, will be reported and known worldwide. For those of us who care about our fellow human beings, that greater awareness also means a lower tolerance for disorder. It's not enough that no bombs are falling in our hometowns, or even our own countries. We don't want bombs falling anywhere. Likewise for starvation, disease, and other suffering.
But entropy being what it is, the natural (dis)order of things is for war, starvation, disease, and other suffering to exist. That is to say, a world system as complex as ours, with tolerance for disorder as low as ours is, does not require "villains" to produce evil. No one has to "make" an economy fail, or a war break out, or a famine or epidemic to kill millions. Just do nothing, and those things will happen by the natural (dis)order of things. Entropy is the villain, and the more complex the system and/or the lower the tolerance for disorder, the more potent a villain entropy becomes.
The only antidote to entropy is energy committed to organization, on achieving and maintaining order. Theories and institutions that were sufficient in the 18th or 19th centuries are no longer enough when a failure anywhere in the world can trigger disaster everywhere. Whether the failure and disaster is an act of terrorism triggering a war, or an act of greed triggering a worldwide economic collapse, or just inaction in the face of a dangerously changing climate, anyone who says we need "less government" is ignoring a fundamental principle of science: entropy.
Or, more likely, they're political, economic, and social Darwinists who believe they and their kind will adapt and survive, and are happy to do so while the rest of humanity suffers. And that's a chillingly accurate portrait of conservatism.
All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.
Burke was right. The question is: are enough of us doing enough?