of the Mesopotamian city-states, or perhaps even before, political
organization has reflected a peoples' understanding of the way the world is
organized. Those ziggurats themselves, along with the pyramids and other
structures that followed, from those of Egypt to the Mayans and the Khmers,
were themselves architectural metaphors for the structure of the universe.
By building models of the world-mountain at the center of the
universe, and placing the ruler in the same position as the chief of the
gods, these people demonstrated, illustrated, and legitimated their rule. As
our understanding of nature has changed, so has our understanding of society.
In Europe, royal sovereignty was explicitly modeled after the
Christian understanding of the role of God. A King ruled and guided his
subjects just as God ruled and guided his believers. Both church and palace
again modeled and demonstrated this understanding, which was an excellent
system for a ruler who preferred that his subjects not question his rule, as
the faithful would not question the will of God.
The political revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
in Europe explicitly drew their ideas from the scientific revolution against
Christian cosmology that preceded them, from Galileo and Copernicus to
Newton. Social thinkers like deCartes, Hume, Hobbes, and Locke were applying
the same methods to thinking about organizing human society and political
systems as had contemporary scientists to the study of the world, and both
had similarly revolutionary consequences.
Our understanding of physics and cosmology has progressed enormously
since Newton. Einstein's Theory of Relativity is only one small part of that
progress. Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, the development
of Quantum Theory through the work of dozens of seminal geniuses including
Max Plank, Erwin Schroedinger, Neil Bohr, right up to Richard Feynman's QED
Theory, the development of the computer beginning with the theories of Jon
von Neumann and Allan Turing, and most recently the work on Chaos and
Complexity Theory led by Murray Gell-Mann, Stuart Kauffman, and others at the
Santa Fe Institute, have all given us a new and more accurate understanding
of natural and physical processes. The amazing thing is that even though the
application of these theories to social and political theory is more obvious
and transparent that is the earlier connection between cosmology and
governance, there has been no similar application of this understanding
across fields. This is because either through ignorance or willful
misunderstanding, political and social thinkers have been unwilling to make
the connection.
There is a great irony in this failure. I have read in many contexts
how often social scientists -- economists, sociologists, psychologists, etc.
-- have sought to grant their specialties the same status as the "hard"
sciences, most notably physics. They have believed that they could attain
this status if their sciences were as mathematically precise as physics, with
its clean, elegant formulae such as Maxwell's four equations describing
electromagnetism, or the ubiquitous E=mc[CDN1]2. What has happened instead
is that physics -- and biology and chemistry and other subfields -- has moved
beyond simple linear formulae and recognized that the world works through the
action of nonlinear, local, algorithmic processes that are much closer to the
statistical models used in the "soft" sciences.
The hard sciences have move closer to the soft, rather than the other
way around.
So, you ask, what does this mean for political theory, or for the
practical problems of running a government? Are we supposed to model society
after the way nuclear particles interact in the core of a star? Well, not
exactly, of course, but we can use the same principles, the ones that I
outlined above, but that you, the reader, skimmed over because the words were
so unfamiliar.
What it means is that local rules can create global order. It means
that everything, from elementary particles to populations of species, follow
not rigid, universal rules, but general, often statistical guidelines for
actions. It means that the world is a much more complicated place than we've
yet given it credit for.
Let's be a little more specific, and work our way through this.
Richard Dwarkin, in his The Selfish Gene, has shown how optimum
Evolutionary Stable Strategies for populations of a species are not,
according to the principles worked out be Jon von Neumann in his Game Theory,
rigid, single reactions to stimuli. The most effective ESS for a species as
a whole is a mixture, with statistical probabilities that vary with the
circumstances, of reaction and strategies for living.
We can translate this into political terms simply by saying what
should be obvious but apparently isn't, that no one single strategy or theory
for dealing with the world is the best for every person in every situation.
It means that there are circumstances when laizze faire economics is not the
most optimum, when simple self-interest on the part of each actor in a
society or an economy is not the most productive in the long run (as has been
demonstrated time and again by computer models of variations of the
Prisoner's Dilemma Game).
On the level of chaotic systems, we can now know that turbulent
systems are inherently unpredictable. When John Sununu stated that he
"understood" the physics of the predictions of global warning, and was not
satisfied that the predictions were sufficiently precise and certain, he was
using an outdated understanding of both physics and engineering. He was
asking for the equations to be as simple and linear as the equations an
engineer uses to calculate loads on a bridge. What he refuses to recognize
is that the equations he was asking for are themselves merely approximations
that engineers use for convenience sake, and that they can -- as when a
bridge is broken not by exceeding it's load, but by a harmonic stress wave --
be unreliable. Sununu also does not understand that weather is a chaotic
system, and therefore inherently not subject to the kind of syllogistic,
mathematically precise prediction that he was asking for. It served his
ideological ends to ask for a precision that cannot be attained; it serves
the survival needs of the rest of the population to dismiss him altogether.
Thinking about a society as a complex emergent system of algorithmic
agents would lead us to conclude that government is not always the answer,
nor always the problem, but only one among many actors whose role balances
out the power of others, just as those others balance out government. It
also means that while the power of just reward for efforts is necessary for
the stimulation and growth of a society (we have just witnessed the collapse
of that great experiment in command economy called the Soviet Union as a
demonstration of this), the unrestricted practice of "winner-take-all" in an
economic system can be just as unstable in the long run (I would submit that
we are just now seeing this principle demonstrated in American professional
sports, and that we saw this principle demonstrated in the behavior of the
investment sector of the economy when the Reagan administration removed all
regulations in the 1980's).
It would also let us admit that the law of unintended consequences is
almost at the level of a "law of physics"; unavoidable. Thus we would be
able to recognize that reforming any part of the social system is a lot more
complicated that we have been willing to admit up to now. For instance, in
reforming the health or welfare system, we could see that evolution is a
better method than reinvention. Political reformers have always suffered
from the sin of hubris; the belief that they can foresee all the consequences
of their policies. That's not hubris; it's silly.
Clinton's -- or rather Ira Magaziner's -- big mistake in trying to
reform the U.S. health care system was this hubris. They believed that only
by reinventing the whole system could the system be reformed. They haven't
learned that social systems, just like the weather, are chaotic, which means
that small changes on the edges of the system can have disproportionately
large consequences. They didn't realize that all the actors in the system
act locally, and that is the point to concentrate on when designing any of
the small reforms. They also cannot admit to the American public that they
truly do not have the whole answer, that it is, indeed, better to make small
fixes, to "tweak the dials," rather than to promise to fix everything for all
time, which they can never do.
Politics itself is a complex emergent system, which is why all the
many efforts to reform it, to take the power of money out of it, to try to
remove the undue influence of "special interests" from politics, have failed.
The world is smarter than the reformers. More accurately, individual actors
can see the consequences of their individual actions much more clearly than
can anyone trying to predict the global outcome of acts throughout an entire
system for all time. It's impossible, but it's what voters, encouraged by
politicians, expect.
Just as physicists have shown that the universe has no center, so
have the most successful and dynamic innovations in recent history been those
that have developed without central control. Examples are the Internet
global computer communications system, and the amorphous movements that
sprang up throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and brought down
those centralized systems faster than anyone could possibly have imagined or
predicted.
After Newton demonstrated the unity and predictability of physical
forces, writers used as their favorite metaphor for the way the universe
worked the new mechanical gadget that was then revolutionizing work and life.
They said that the universe was a "clockwork mechanism," and applied that
metaphor to labor, economies, and all their lives. That was a vast
improvement in understanding over what had come before, but now we know
better. The universe isn't a clock; it's a computer. If we really
understand that this metaphor restores -- or rather at last establishes --
unpredictability, even free will, to our lives; if we apply this
understanding creatively rather than (you'll pardon the expression)
mechanically to dealing with social and political problems; if we allow
ourselves to see the creative advantages that each of us gain from losing
control of the world around us; then we can reap the benefits the this
metaphor offers to our lives.
The world is the way it is, and will always be unpredictable and
endlessly creative. Our choice is to fight that, or ride the wave.
[CDN1]
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C. David Noziglia
Wellington, New Zealand
noziglia@actrix.gen.nz
"Blessed are those who have no expectations,
for they will never be disappointed."
Kautiliya Shakhamuni Sidhartha Gautama Buddha
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