That question is the key question in politics as far as I am concerned. This being the third in a series of diaries about what complexity science has to tell us about politics, I'll build on the first two by linking them at the end. Otherwise, I hope this reads well as a self-contained unit as well. One lesson that is very clear from complexity science is that we have been seduced by the Cartesian "Machine Metaphor". Given that modern technology is the result of this, it can't be all that bad, can it? Well, let us look a little more carefully. As long as what we are dealing with has the properties of a man made machine, the physics and related science that we use to deal with machines is really pretty potent stuff. Now the question is to determine just how much of the world around us has the attributes of a man-made machine and whether politics can gain anything from these methods. I'll try to answer that question below the break if you are interested.
The table below sums up the distinction being made. It has lots of content buried in it so it will not be possible to explain it all in this one diary. However, the gestalt is important so that you are aware that we have a true dichotomy here. This may seem surprising, yet it does all hang together. Keep in mind that we are dealing with our human perception of the world around us and the formal systems we have created to try to understand them.
COMPLEX SYSTEMS VS SIMPLE MECHANISMS
COMPLEX SYSTEM: SIMPLE MECHANISM
NO LARGEST MODEL HAS LARGEST MODEL
WHOLE MORE THAN SUM OF PARTS WHOLE IS SUM OF PARTS
CAUSAL RELATIONS RICH AND INTERTWINED CAUSAL RELATIONS DISTINCT
GENERIC N0N-GENERIC
ANALYTIC MODELS NOT SAME AS SYNTHETIC ANALYTIC = SYNTHETIC
NON-FRAGMENTABLE FRAGMENTABLE
NON-COMPUTABLE COMPUTABLE
REAL WORLD FORMAL SYTEM
So what is the relevance of such a categorization for politics? It is simply this: Real world political systems are like the left side of the chart while our human capacity for understanding has been developed around the right side. This is a very important distinction to grasp. Science, technology, and all the attempts to follow in their paths to come up with models of socio-political systems are not going to suddenly jump from being machine like to being a real world complex system. The consequences of this are very important as we attempt to "fix" a broken socio-political system. Even if we had a working model of what we want to achieve, by its very nature it would resist any attempt at reverse engineering and redesign as we might pull off with a machine.
In a very real sense, that is what government is all about. Government is the only instrument we have to try to manage the complex system we are part of. If what I have said so far is understood, the role of government is not to design society as if it were a new machine. The role of government is to place bounds and regulate the system to make it operate within acceptable limits. The role of government is to correct and change the system in ways that allow change to occur in stable, manageable increments rather than by catastrophe. The size of government therefore is very relevant. Remove its capacity to perform these functions by shrinking it and you invite disaster.
Do we need evidence for this? Not at this point in history. So how do we proceed? We first must acknowledge the mistakes that led us to this point so they are not repeated. That is easier said than done since they can be easily repeated with new labels if we fail to understand their relationship to the old labels. At this point in time that might be one of the biggest dangers we face. We do not have a clean slate. The slogans and framing techniques that allowed for the destruction of the government we needed to keep disaster from happening are still out there in the minds of people. We are no where near a stable situation and no one can predict when we will be or what it will look like.
It seems like one of the worst mistakes we can make now is to believe that all the king's horses and all the king's men can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Rather, we need to visualize the kind of society we want at the end of this turmoil and then begin to see that government is our only hope. What does that mean? We are the government. We must know the nature of our own problem and not allow "mechanics" from the last round to be the ones who recreate another pseudo-machine in our minds as the new model of what we are as a system. This is no easy task for the totality of the Cartesian thought system has penetrated more deeply than we realize. We have a lot of work to do.
Here are the first two installments in this series:
Why do we resist change? The stability of systems.
Systems Science and Political Science: How are they related?