(The following essay is in large part drawn from and inspired by conversations I have had recently with my friend Dr. Mark Foster on these subjects. The opinions expressed, however, are my own. You can find Mark’s blog, “Healthy Living in Colorado,” at http://markfosterdo.blogspot.com/.)
I’ve previously discussed various aspects of the creative tension between the individual and the society, how it implies a more subtle and complex conceptualization of “liberty” than is currently in vogue, and how it reaches to the heart of how we define ourselves as individuals and how we organize ourselves as societies. These essays most explicitly include Liberty & Interdependence, Liberty & Society, Rights v. Security, Freedom & Coherence, Inclusivity & Exclusivity, E Pluribus Unum, The Meaning of “Representation”, Free Will, Determinism, Quantum Mechanics, & Personal & Social Responsibility, Social Coherence and Disintegration, Collective Action (and Time Horizon) Problems, The Genius of the Many, and The Inherent Contradiction of Extreme Individualism, to name a few, but really include most of the essays on Colorado Confluence to some degree or another, because the creative tension between the individual and the society is at the heart of so many issues, on so many levels, through so many disciplines.
One aspect of this creative tension involves a set of interrelated issues on both the individual and social levels, touching upon our notions of mental illness, deviance, human variation, professionalism, and tolerance or accommodation, and how all of these things integrate into our social systemic reality.
Mental Health has traditionally been conceptualized as a duality: Those that are mentally ill, and those that are not. Some things that used to be considered mental illnesses (such as homosexuality, until 1974 according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association) no longer are, but it involved the moving of an item from one category to another, not a reconceptualization of the categories themselves. I addressed this somewhat in Sound Mind, Sound Body, Sound Society; Sound Good?
The similar duality involving deviance v. social conformity has experienced some parallel developments. It could be argued that homosexuality, removed from the rolls of mental illnesses in the 1970s, has remained until recently, in many or most minds, within the broader category of “social deviance” (and remains there in the minds of too many). At both the individual level of what we define as “mentally ill,” and at the societal level of what we define as “socially deviant,” we are addressing the issue of where we draw the line between that degree of deviation from the norm that is tolerable, and that degree which exceeds the limits of our tolerance.
To be fair, it is not a one-sided affair, merely a matter of how much diversity society will tolerate, but also a matter of how much deviation from the norm is functionally possible. A person must be able to integrate him- or herself into a society to a degree adequate to thrive within it. A person who deviates from the norm in a way which makes engaging in any productive contribution impossible, for instance, regardless of how accommodating the society strives to be (such as, for instance, by simply refusing to work under any and all conditions), will have a hard time paying the bills. (On the other hand, someone who disengages equally in terms of contribution and in terms of benefits is more easily tolerated.)
Generally, a deviation which involves drawing upon our collective production of wealth and welfare without contributing anything to it is deemed to be parasitic. It makes sense, on some level, not to tolerate such deviance, even if we might want to look beyond it and figure out what is motivating it and what might be done to address it. At that point, considering it either a mental health issue, or a character flaw, and how to encourage or facilitate a change of heart, becomes a functional necessity.
More emphatically, we clearly don’t and can’t tolerate forms of deviance that involve acts of violence or predation against others. This is an important point, because I believe that one of the reasons for relatively low tolerance of less threatening forms of deviance is that they challenge our faith that more threatening forms might not be implicated. For instance, if someone walks toward us acting in extremely odd ways, even if not in any explicit way threatening violence, most of us feel some apprehension that the norms which most of us follow, including those which protect us from one another, are not well enough in evidense to feel secure that they will be adhered to. In other words, when someone is acting oddly in a non-violent way, we generally have raised apprehension that he or she has above-average likelihood of acting oddly in a violent way as well.
But there is a dialectic between, on the one hand, how accommodating and flexible and tolerant a society is, and, on the other, how well that society incorporates and benefits from the true diversity within it. A police state is, by definition, a state in which there is an authoritarian stifling of all officially intolerated deviance, which is usually that deviance which is most threatening to those in power. But it tends to include almost all forms of ordinary minor deviance as well, since authoritarian states tend toward “overcontrol,” considering all variability generally threatening to the status quo from which they benefit.
In America today, those who are the most inclined to support more rather than less stringent enforcement and punishment of laws, and who are least tolerant of human variation (e.g., homosexuality, bilingualism, etc.) are also those who come “wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Ironically, many who most readily invoke the word “liberty” in America are least tolerant of human variation (i.e., the liberty to deviate from social norms). “Liberty” to them means only the opposite of “collectivism,” which leads to the perverse conclusion that it is better for our social systems to be coopted by powerful individuals and groups than for the polity as a whole to exercise, through its elected agents, some public oversight in the public interest.
In other words, the modern right-wing concept of “liberty” has become co-opted by an authoritarian world view. A true commitment to liberty would involve recognizing the dialectic between the individual and the society, the legitimate demands by society for some degree of conformity or “articulation” by the individual, and the legitimate countervailing force of individuals testing and stretching those limits by deviating from the norm and advocating for a social systemic evolution which ever more organically accommodates such deviations.
There is a dynamic and creative tension between the individual and the society. The society is, and must be, coherent, able to maintain its coherence, to function with the greatest possible efficiency in producing and distributing wealth (and other forms of human welfare), and in doing so in a sustainable manner. But societies benefit from individual initiative and diversity. The division of labor is a more robust creator of wealth than all people doing identical work (e.g., farming). The markets that emerge from a substantial degree of individual liberty in finding one’s niche is more robust than a command economy. But a failure to enforce the laws within which such markets function would result in a disappearance of that robustness; in other words, some centralized conforming forces are necessary and useful. The trick is to figure out how and where to draw the line.
Though we fancy ourselves a society defined by the utmost respect for individual liberty, we may in fact be a more conformity-demanding society than most other developed nations. In any case, we are a more conformity-demanding society than is optimal. This is most apparent in our prevalent standards of “professionalism,” and the impact they have on the vibrancy of our professions.
“Professionalism” has come to mean, to too great an extent, being sufficiently bland and conformist within the professional institutional setting. A doctor who blogs about the over-prescription of drugs in the treatment of mental illnesses may lose his job as a result (as one I know did), or a particularly outstanding teacher who rocks the boat by having too much personality may be driven from the profession, as many are. We are, to some extent, prisoner’s of Max Weber’s “Iron Cage of Rationality,” sterilizing our environment and ourselves in the interests of conformity and the smooth operations that it facilitates.
This does not mean that any and all behaviors should be blithely tolerated, but rather that we need to work at loosening up our social institutional framework, making it flexible enough to accommodate more rather than less human variation, tapping into that variation as a resource whenever and however possible, and demoting it to the status of a self-imposed burden as reluctantly as possible. We have to recognize that our differences, even some of our more dramatic ones, aren’t threats to our collective welfare unless we refuse to accept them and adapt to them, that we don’t have to cure ever deviation from the norm, nor dismiss every person who isn’t enough like every other person.
Liberty requires tolerance. Prosperity requires utilizing rather than ostracizing our diverse human resources. Mental health requires accepting and accommodating our differences more and seeking to eradicate them less.
There is a Buddhist story that when the Buddha achieved enlightenment beneath the bodhi tree, his choice to continue to live as a human being was due to his recognition that there are two levels of enlightenment: That which is achieved by the individual, and that which can be achieved by humanity. The first is incomplete without the second. However one takes this story, whether literally or allegorically, the meaning is the same: There is an ideal to which we aspire, that perhaps defies clear definition but that we know exists. We implicitly recognize it whenever we strive to excel for the sake of excelling, whether in sports, or academics, or any other sphere of life. But true excellence, as Isaac Newton noted of his own genius, always “stands on the shoulders of giants.” Or, perhaps more precisely, of one giant, the giant that is the collective genius of a civilization (see The Genius of the Many and The Hollow Mountain).
Many people may conceptualize “human potential” as an individualistic concept, a thing that individuals achieve, individually. In reality, like the human mind itself, it is a collective aspiration, achievable only through our social unity. Even the most individualistic of achievements, such as running the fastest 100 meter dash, or jumping the highest or longest, is a feat built from the techniques and training that involve both people engaged in the same endeavor over time, and the transmission of their knowledge to and through the individual who excels.
But not only are most sports team sports, the mind itself is a team mind. We think in languages, mobilizing concepts, in communication with others, all of which are the product of a collective human history. My mind, like all others, is defined by a combination of genes and memes, most of which are broadly shared, and are only marginally individuated in me (see The Fractal Geometry of Social Change). Even our minds are, in the final analysis, mostly common property. The question, therefore, is not so much how we each might excel individually, but rather how we all might excel together.
To a great extent, the processes by which this happens are organic and unintentional. Human history has produced a proliferation of techniques, of refinements, of “progress.” Not all of it is beneficial, and not all chapters of the story have been laudable, but it is certainly arguable that, on balance, we have stumbled toward various improvements in the quality of life, at least in certain limited regions, and by certain limited criteria. But intentionality plays a role as well; the intentionality that led to the development of scientific methodology, and the intentionality that led to the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, for examples. Such intentionality in our shared enterprise is always, essentially, political in nature.
The question then becomes: What is the political meaning and process of “realizing human potential”? In a political context, what we normally think of as “human potential,” of excelling in various kinds of endeavors, is less an end in itself than a means to an end. Certainly, there is a certain euphoria attached to excelling, whether athletically, academically, artistically, professionally, or in some other kind of skill or endeavor, but it is really in how this excellence is applied that its political and social significance begins to become clear. Also, other kinds of “excellence” are brought into the discussion: excellence in kindness, in dedication, in mobilizing people, in leadership, and in performing myriad small and mundane tasks that contribute to human welfare. Mere individual “excellence,” in and of itself, is a paltry form of realizing human potential, a source of individual gratification and public entertainment. But excellence in contributing to our human endeavor, in liberating our collective genius, and in increasing our collective welfare, is a catalyst of something far greater.
In one sense, realizing our individual and collective “potential” is the goal, as well as the means to achieving it, for fragments of the greatest joy can be achieved through the expression of our humanity to the fullest possible extent in one field of endeavor, whether as dedicated humanitarians, phenomenal athletes, brilliant scholars, or visionary artists. But the whole, the compilation of those fragments, requires a balance among the various aspects of our humanity, and a balance between a focus on individual and collective excellence. Through this lens, working together to satisfy human needs, augment opportunities, and enrich lives is merely one aspect of the goal that “human potential” encompasses, but it is the most basic and fundamental aspect, the one upon which the rest is built.
To excel in our individual contributions to our collective genius and collective welfare, we have to understand the arena in which we are operating. Political ideological space can be plotted along three dimensions: 1) a commitment to the improvement of the human condition; 2) a commitment to ideological certainties; 3) a commitment to crude self or localized interest. Most of us are comprised of some mixture of these three, and are thus located within this space in an area that is defined by the intersection of our “values” along each of these three dimensions.
The first dimension involves liberating the genius of the many (i.e., improving the processes by which the products of human genius are produced), but also mobilizing that genius to our collective welfare. In other words, it is comprised of both “effectiveness” (how well we accomplish our goals) and “social responsibility” (the extent to which our individual goals serve the general welfare). “Effectiveness” is the quality all purposive actors want to permeate the processes by which they do things, and “social responsibility” is the quality all socially responsible people want to permeate the substantive goals of what they are doing. I will refer to these two qualities as “functional rationality” (how well we accomplish what we set out to accomplish) and “substantive rationality” (how well what we set out to accomplish servies human welfare).
The second dimension is comprised of all of the simplifications that our minds rely on, all of the accepted certainties that we variously gravitate to and refrain from reexamining. This is not something that can be eliminated: The world is too complex, our minds too limited, and our time and attention too constrained to allow us to be perfectly “open minded” on a continuous basis. In fact, such perfect open-mindedness is dysfunctional, erasing past mental processes that had arrived at conclusions and understandings in order to leave them forever in question, forestalling any cumulative progress in our understandings by removing the previous steps taken toward such process. So, part of the challenge of not letting the second dimension pre-empt the first one is in very carefully selecting that which we considered settled, using processes that increase rather than decrease both the functional and substantive rationality of our individual cognitive landscapes.
The third dimension is ever-present. We each, almost without exception, are more concerned for our own welfare, and for the welfare of those closest to us, than we are with the welfare of others with whom we have little or no direct connection. It is true that we are hard-wired for empathy and cooperation, and that our own individual welfare depends on at least some commitment to the welfare of others, even independenly of how that commitment may materially benefit us. But we clearly are not a fundamentally altruistic species, else we would be unable to endure the gross inequities that those reading this are benefiting from. Self-interest is a real and significant dimension of our shared existence.
The precise location of any individual doctrine within this political ideological space can be contentious. For example, “Libertarianism,” if fervently adhered to, would be located far along the “ideological certainty” and “self-interest” axes. But libertarians also make arguments about the social value of extreme individualism. Therefore, it’s precise location along the “commitment to the improvement of the human condition” axis is a subject of debate. But, to the extent that any doctrine retains a high “ideological certainty” value, it’s “commitment to the improvement of the human condition” value is correspondingly reduced, because rather than subject the doctrine to the crucible of reason in service to that goal, it is adhered to as a thing unto itself. Therefore, the dimension of “commitment to the improvement of the human condition” requires freeing oneself from ideological certainties, and focusing instead on this goal which they may purport to serve.
In other words, adherence to substantive doctrines is in a tension with one’s commitment to improving the human condition, yet is a requirement of cognitive economics. And maximizing our commitment to the general welfare requires recognizing our degree of self-interest. A major challenge for those most committed to improving the human condition is how to reconcile these competing demands. Meeting this challenge is served by focusing on the development of disciplines, individual and collective procedures that those who truly want to improve the human condition attempt to adhere to, in order to maximize both the effectiveness of their efforts, and the wisdom of the goals we identify as serving the ultimate goal of robust, sustainable, and fairly distributed human welfare. (See A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill for a discussion of how to go about doing this).
Simplifying the above discussion a bit, we are all either trying to make the world kinder and more rational, or are pursuing more foolish (usually blindly ideological) goals, or are behaving indifferently or antagonistically to the welfare of others. Most of us are defined by some mixture of these three. The question, for those of us who are consciously committed to improving the general welfare, is how to increase in ourselves and others our individual and shared commitment to reason (functional and substantive rationality) and goodwill (in service to the general welfare).
Some people balk at one or both of these values, believing “reason” to be either unattainable or undesirable, and “goodwill” expressed in public policy to be either an affront to “liberty” or a ceding of power to the enemy. But if we clearly define “reason” to mean most effectively acting in accord with and in service to the welfare of those we care about, and “goodwill” to mean either caring about all others or, at least, preferring our actions and choices to assist rather than obstruct others in their efforts to serve the interests of those they care about, then the vast majority of people will claim either to be, or to be striving to be, or to agree that we all should strive to be, reasonable people of goodwill.
That is the foundation on which we can build. We need a movement that recognizes that our current ideological balkanization does not serve these values, even if each is convinced that their own personal ideological convictions do. At stake is how well or poorly we meet the challenges of our shared endeavor.
The gap between our current capabilities for more robustly, sustainably, and fairly producing and distributing “human welfare” (a concept which includes material wealth, physical and mental well-being, and the various elements of a rich and fulfilling life) and our realization of those capabilities is a challenge to which all reasonable people of goodwill should address themselves. Those of us most committed to closing that gap need to step back from the endless urgency of now, and from the specific issues on which we each may be working, and ask ourselves how to create, implement, and maintain the most effective movement possible for closing the gap between what is and what can be.
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We can do better. We, the people, can do better. One important step toward doing better is to ask ourselves “how,” and then commit ourselves to implementing it. There are several components to the answer to this question, but I would suggest that one crucial component is letting go of our false certainties, just as I once let go of a fallen tree I was clinging to in the rapids of The Current River in Missouri.
I was on a canoe trip with three college buddies, about 33 years ago. We were drifting down a lazy stretch of the river, holding our two canoes together, sharing a little something now used for medicinal purposes in Colorado. As we floated around a bend in the river, we hit the rapids and, at the same time, saw a tree fallen from the left bank, obstructing about two thirds of the width of the river. Jack and Andy, in the canoe on the right, were able to skirt the tree, but Ed and I, on the left, had to angle more sharply across the current, and were pushed sideways up against the fallen tree. We watched helplessly as our canoe filled with water and disappeared beneath us.
The next thing we knew, we were clinging to the tree on the other side, soaking wet, bumped and bruised by being sucked under the tree, desperately struggling against the torrential current trying to sweep us away. Neither of us could pull ourself up onto the tree trunk against that overwhelming force, and panic began to set in. Until Ed stood up. And the river was mid-thigh deep. So I stood up as well.
Mid-thigh deep rapids are not easy to stand in. The torrent still threatened to sweep us away. But we were able to stand our ground, to wade over to the small island downstream where Jack and Andy had recovered our canoe, to build a fire and warm up and dry off, and then to get back into our canoes and navigate our way downstream.
That tree trunk represents for me false certainty, the false certainty we were clinging to to avoid being swept away by a river we did not really understand. The river bed that we finally realized we can stand on, that is solid and unmoving, are the core values that never change, that are always there and on which you can always depend as the solid foundation on which to pause and reassess. People sometimes mistake the silt stirred up from those values, but carried by the current, for the river bed itself, and try to stand on it. But there is no footing on that silt. You have to plant your feet beneath it, on the core values themselves, the ones that lie even beneath the words we use to describe them, beneath ambiguity. I will refer to them as “reason” and “universal goodwill,” though these words, too, are mere approximations.
The river we are all on together is not The Current River of Missouri, but rather the forever forking river of human history. It does not flow to a single destination, but rather to an almost unlimited array of possible futures determined by the choices we make, the forks we take. Some forks rejoin others, and permit lost opportunities to be regained. Some foreclose certain other possibilities, perhaps forever. The river bed is not always comprised of reason and goodwill, but all too frequently of looser gravel, of less reliable values, sometimes even of muck so deep that there is nothing to stand on, only something to sink into. Our choices are consequential, sometimes momentous. We need to continue to improve our ability to make them wisely.
The river we are on is strewn with fallen trees, with obstacles that do not flow with the current but rather stand against it. These obstacles are our false certainties, our blind ideologies, fresh and alive until they fall across the stream and become something we crash against and cling to rather than admire and use for momentary guidance. Great ideas, like once noble trees lining the banks, becoming rotting trunks that we mistakenly believe mark a point that is as far as we need to go. But those who cling to them will only end up watching history pass them by, and will eventually rush to catch up or languish, because there is no life to be had clinging to a single spot, real or imagined, terrified of the river that we all must continue to navigate.
There is debris floating on the river, ideas we can hold onto and that still help us float downstream. But we must be careful to be ready to let them go when the time comes, to follow the branches of the river with the most solid of river beds, most strongly founded on reason and goodwill. Neither alone is quite enough: Goodwill without reason leads to good intentions poorly executed, which can be as harmful to humanity as malicious intentions rationally executed (i.e., “reason” without goodwill). The two must always be combined: We fare well neither atop the loose gravel of goodwill irrationally expressed, nor atop the thick muck of malice, regardless of how well or poorly executed it may be.
(This is a good place to pause, and make an important distinction between functional and substantive rationality. Functional rationality refers to pursuing a goal in a manner which most effectively achieves it, while substantive rationality refers to selecting goals which are most rational to achieve. There is a bit of a conceptual hierarchy to it, involving more proximate and more ultimate goals, and thus intermediate goals whose substantive rationality depends on how well they serve the ultimate goals beyond them. But it is important to understand that our knowledge of human irrationality, that humans do not make decisions and form opinions primarily through reason, and that recourse to rational arguments are not the best means of persuasion, refers only to functional rationality, to the fact that understanding and working with irrational congitive realities is necessary to functional rationality. It does not refer to substantive rationality, to the challenge facing each and every one of us to pursue those goals which best serve our collective welfare. We may have to appeal to cognitive frames and narratives to convince people to come on board, but we must exercise great discipline while doing so to ensure that we are inviting them aboard a sound vessel bound for a desirable destination.)
For some simple issues, goodwill is nearly enough on its own. Many civil rights issues fall into this category, such as legalizing civil unions and gay marriage. But many issues, particularly economic issues, involve complex dynamical systems, feedback loops, and numerous counterintuitive consequences to particular actions and policies. On such issues, it is critical that people let go of their ideological certainties, and agree instead to try to become part of a process which favors the best analyses, most in service to universal goodwill. There are real challenges to establishing such processes, but they are not insurmountable challenges. They are the kinds of challenges that we are most fundamentally called upon to confront affirmatively and effectively.
I have made some initial efforts in outlining how to pursue this vision, how to concretize a commitment to reason and goodwill, even in an irrational world laden with zealously defended competing interests (see, e.g., A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill, The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified, and How to make a kinder and more reasonable world). I have elaborated on several of the components (see, e.g., Meta-messaging with Frames and Narratives and Community Action Groups (CAGs) & Network (CAN)). I have identified and analyzed several of the challenges involved, several of the underlying concepts and dynamics, including The Signal-To-Noise Ratio, Ideology v. Methodology, Collective Action (and Time Horizon) Problems, The Variable Malleability of Reality, and a whole series of essays on “The evolutionary ecology of natural, human, and technological systems” (see second box at Catalogue of Selected Posts). I am also in the processes of having a page developed dedicated to this project at http://sharedpurpose.net/.
I’m asking people to join me in this effort to reach down to the most fundamental level of our shared existence, to base a movement not merely on the imperfect certainties floating on the surface of our historical stream, but on the rock-solid riverbed beneath. We can build a long-term and powerfully attractive movement based on Reason and Goodwill themselves, not expecting people to be anything other than what we are, but learning how to work with that in the ways which yield the most positive outcomes. It’s time to let our imaginations and our far-sightedness shape for us a methodology, a process, a movement whose purpose is not to triumph on this issue or that, or to win an electoral majority for this party or that, but rather to cultivate the minds and hearts and hands of all of us in ways which favor wiser and more compassionate thought and action, and wiser and more compassionate public policies. Until we consciously undertake that challenge, we have not even truly begun to realize our potential as a people.
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There is a great deal of emphasis on “messaging,” which, as it is commonly used and understood among blogosphere politicos, means out-sloganeering the opposition. While this is a necessary aspect of the political strategic struggle we are trapped in, it is also a surrender to that which traps us in it, and a ceding of the subtler and more essential narrative to those positions which benefit most from the reduction rather than expansion of information. That which is less rational, and that which is less motivated by goodwill, gain strength from the characterization of the competing positions on diverse issues as mere opposite and equal ideological convictions, on an issue-by-issue basis. That achievement obscures the fact that underneath this issue-by-issue struggle is the deeper, more coherent struggle between reason and goodwill, on the one hand, and irrationality and indifference to the welfare of others (if not outright malice) on the other.
The remedy to this problem lies in adding a new layer to our efforts. We cannot abandon the superficial political struggle, the battle of messages in service to reason and goodwill on an issue-by-issue basis. But that does not mean that we cannot also confront the deeper and more consequential challenge of writing the underlying narrative in favor of reason and goodwill, not as they relate to each issue, but rather as they inform all issues. This is what I call “meta-messaging.”
Perhaps the subtlest and least “nailed down” aspect of my proposal (A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill, The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified, How to make a kinder and more reasonable world) is how to use frames and narratives in service to reason and goodwill. In the posts I linked to, I used the example of “A Christmas Carol,” which is both such a form of communication, and is a story about a magical analogy of such communication. Another that is very similar in both of these respects is Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Obviously, there is a Christmas “goodwill” narrative that is reinforced in several Christmas stories.
But many other narratives also qualify, including several fictionalized popularizations of real people and real events. Some examples are “Gandhi,” “Invictus” (which I just watched last night), “Amistad,” to name a few that come immediately to mind. There are real events, documented and incorporated into our national meme-scape, like Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and countless movies and stories that reinforce the idea that goodwill makes us whole and happy, whereas malice and extreme individualism diminish us.
There are competing narratives as well, narratives that glorify individualism, that make a virtue out of mutual indifference, that rationalize and justify social irresponsibility. In one sense, the political substructure, the zeitgeist, is the product of a complex articulation of narratives, and the political struggle at that level is over influencing how these narratives aggregate, what overarching paradigms emerge as a result. And that is the struggle that is most critical to win (see The Politics of Consciousness).
I believe that narratives informed by reason and goodwill enjoy a “comparative advantage” (as economists put it), particularly in the long run, for two reasons: 1) They engender a more pleasant feeling in those who embrace them than the opposing narratives engender in those who embrace those (just as Scrooge was happier when he embraced the former, after his transformation, than he was throughout the many years in which he succumbed to the latter, prior to his transformation); and 2) the slight but constant pressure on history favoring rationality, or “utility,” causes those arrangements which yield greater aggregate benefits to prevail in the long run over those that don’t.
So the challenge is to play on these advantages, but not to passively rely on them. We need to compose, coopt, weave together, reinforce, assemble, and disseminate “armies” of narratives which coalesce into the maximum transmission of the desired effect, using all of the skills of the human mind and of human organization available to us. This is the second component of my proposal, which forms a kind of bridge between organizing in service only to mutual goodwill (not substantive political agendas), and lubricating the means of making well-informed and well-reasoned assessments of what public policies serve goodwill on a societal-wide scale.
This bridge, therefore, needs to take existing narratives in a particular direction, emphasizing our interdependence, emphasizing our ability to use government as an agency of a collective will, emphasizing the logical extension of interpersonal goodwill into public policy goodwill, and emphasizing that this is possible, that this is plausible, that this is right and good and natural.
There are huge bodies of existing literature to build on, from ancient epic myths to historical chapters to triumphs of collective will over shared adversity and in service to shared aspirations. Think how often we do this using the “Apollo Moon Landing” narrative: Every time someone wants to argue in favor of a concerted national effort to tackle a national problem, the fact that we collectively landed a man on the moon is invoked as a narrative argument in favor of national collective action in pursuit of difficult to achieve massive goals.
But it has been, up until now, a haphazard, decentralized, seat-of-the-pants strategy, used sporadically in service to uncoordinated and disparate arguments. This, in a sense, is my central point: Rather than invoking powerful tools in scattered and uncoordinated ways, it’s time to make an effort to focus them on pressure points that underwrite the entire spectrum of reasonable policies in service to universal goodwill. It’s time to work on developing, consciously and painstakingly, one integrated, powerful narrative to reinforce one coherent and unifying pair of values, and by doing so, advocating for everything that adheres to those values.
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(originally written as a list of discussion points concerning why the national Coffee Party Movement should incorporate my model of “the politics of reason and goodwill” into their platform, on request after a long and robust dialogue on CPM’s “shared purpose website,” http://sharedpurpose.net/home/index.cfm?tq=579379&login=100803, mostly on the “plenary forum” page: http://sharedpurpose.net/groups/forum.cfm?tq=579379&login=100803, from March 16 to March 23, 2011)
1) The ultimate political battle field is the human mind. We are all, ultimately, fighting over what people believe and don’t believe. The salience of money in politics is due to its influence on what people believe (which is what the campaign contributions go toward influencing).
2) It makes sense for a political movement to zero in on that ultimate goal, rather than get lost in the various means of addressing it, or attempts to circumvent it. Attempts to circumvent it (e.g., pass legislation without popular support) only have lasting success to the extent that they ultimately affect what people believe. Awareness of the means of affecting popular opinion should not displace a focus on the ends those means serve.
3) Nothing is taken off the table by focusing on the struggle over what people believe. It merely is the ball we need to keep our eye on. All of the ways in which it can be affected are relevant and salient.
4) We can attempt to affect what people believe on an issue-by-issue basis, or we can attempt to affect what people believe by focusing on underlying values that underwrite support for all of the positions on issues we advocate for.
5) If we ask ourselves, “what qualities must a position have for it to be a position that I support?” hopefully, the answer we ultimately arrive at if we peel back the layers is “reason and goodwill.” We support policies that serve humanity rather than particular individuals at the expense of other individuals (“goodwill”). And we support them because they effectively serve humanity rather than ineffectively serve humanity (“reason”). We are really, when you get to the core of the matter, advocates for reason and goodwill. (Those of us who aren’t, or when we ourselves fail to live up to that ideal, are the ones in error. If and when our commitments are not defined by reason and goodwill, then it is our commitments that are in error.)
6) Since the postions on issues we hope to support are all defined by the degree to which the positions are recommended by reason and goodwill, then, to the extent that we can successfully advocate for reason and goodwill themselves, we have invested in the cultivation of popular support for the entire array of positions we advocate.
7) The political ideological landscape is dominated by competing substantive certainties, which, if charted on a graph defined by the axes “reason” and “goodwill,” would not lead us to conclude that we, as a people, are doing a particularly good job of aligning our certainties to those ideals.
8) Each adherent to each ideological certainty knows that his or her certainty is not to blame; it’s everyone else’s certainties that are not in accord with his or hers that are to blame. But reason itself informs us that this belief, held by virtually everyone of every ideological stripe, is the problem. If this chaos of conflicting substantive certainties is a major factor in reducing the salience of reason and goodwill in our political landscape, then we should work at diminishing the breadth and depth of our commitment to substantive certainties.
9) Reproducing this error by creating just another point source of such political ideological certainty does not contribute the kind of evolutionary/revolutionary change to the political ideological landscape that we, in the CPM, are aspiring to contribute.
10) To the extent that acting on conclusions about which policies are preferable is a necessary component of responsible citizenship, even when one is wise enough to recognize their conclusions as tentative and fallible, there are already plenty of vehicles for doing so. Adding another that repeats the work of larger and better funded movements advocating the same positions on the same issues is not a significant improvement on the current political ideological landscape.
11) Advocacy for focusing our efforts on something other than the substantive certainties subsets of us currently hold is not an argument to “do nothing,” but rather is an argument to “do something different.”
12) That “something different” includes establishing networks of community organizations whose purposes are to a) do good works in the community (e.g., tutor and mentor local kids, organize volunteer services and events that benefit the community in various ways, etc.), b) create a context for improved civil discourse among community members of all political ideological inclinations, and c) create bridges among these community organizations, to create a transpartisan political network steeped only in the commitment to reason and goodwill.
13) These community organizations and networks should not be political advocacy organizations, but rather simply organizations and networks committed to the principles of reason and goodwill. Again, to the extent that a commitment to these principles can be cultivated, popular support for the positions we favor can be marginally but significantly (perhaps, over time, dramatically) increased.
14) In conjunction with this network of community organizations, we should work at establishing a data base, or internet portal, which provides easy access to concise and accessible summaries of all policy arguments and counterarguments, including all arguments and counterarguments concerning what interests are being served or harmed by the proposed policy or position. This includes conservative arguments, “monetarist” economic arguments, and so on. It excludes “messaging,” all of the political noise produced by the marketing techniques that are designed to manipulate people and cultivate support for positions by circumventing reason and goodwill.
15) The community organizations can then sponsor community forums on issues of public concern, referring community members to the data base, or internet portal, through which they can access all arguments on the topic to be discussed.
16) The clearly expressed purpose of the community organizations would be that they are intended to be vehicles for civil discourse, for listening to one another, and for challenging our assumptions together to do a better job of governing ourselves wisely and compassionately. Those who do not agree with this purpose are free not to join or participate.
17) Despite the large number of people who reject this premise, in my experience, the vast majority of Americans consider themselves reasonable, and believe in the values of reason and goodwill. Those who explicitly reject these values will always exist, but we don’t have to continue to let them dominate a national discourse among a polity that overwhelmingly rejects the notion that it is better to strive to be irrational people of ill-will than reasonable people of goodwill.
18) In conjunction with this synthesis of community organizations and facilitation of rational and well-informed discourse on matters of public interest, we can also engage in meta-messaging in support of the values of reason and goodwll. An old and revered example of such meta-messaging is Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Few people watch “A Christmas Carol” believing that one is better off by being Scrooge before his transformation, and worse off for being Scrooge after his transformation. The transformation itself is effected by reaching into his own frames and narratives, and drawing on his formative past, incomplete present, and foreboding future to persuade him that he would be better served by acting with a greater commitment to universal goodwill.
19) The story itself is an example of meta-messaging, reinforcing the commitment to goodwill itself, rather than to any particular policy informed by goodwill. It is also a representation of meta-messaging, imagining spectral ministers who are able to reach into the minds of the most hardened among us and find the frames and narratives on which to work in order to effect such a transformation.
20) Modern cognitive science offers some insight into how to attempt to do the work of Marley’s Ghost and the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future on a societal wide scale. Making it a part of a social-political movement to generate and broadly communicate, continuously, messages that have the effect of beloved Christmas stories on people’s feelings of goodwill, helps to build the bridge between organizing in mutual goodwill within our communities, and instituting public policies that are motivated by the same spirit on state and national levels.
21) As such, the three components of this proposal combine to comprise an integration of thought (the data base or portal), communication (the meta-messaging), and action (the community organizations), all mutually reinforcing various aspects of a commitment to reason and goodwill.
22) By creating a social-political movement committed specifically to this goal, to increasing the popular commitment to reason and goodwill as motivating values, we “soften the ground” for all of the other substantive political advocacy that we and others might engage in, promoting policies in service to reason and goodwill. It also focuses on the purpose of political advocacy, helping to keep the advocates themselves on track, and supporting substantive policies which actually are informed by reason and goodwill.
23) Such a movement does not have to catalyze dramatic changes in a large number of people to be dramatically successful. Very slight shifts in attitude among a very small minority of the population could have enormously significant effects on our political landscape.
24) Furthermore, the large, silent, moderate majority is looking for an attractive, sane, reasonable and goodwilled political alternative to which to flock. This proposal provides precisely that.
(please see The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified and A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill for more on this topic)
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La “confluencia colorado” es una confluencia de culturas, de sueños y esperanzas. Es una confluencia de esfuerzos, todos ayudándose los unos a los otros. O así se espera. Es la confluencia de gente, de pueblos, de valores, de ideas. Es la confluencia de humanidad.
Quiero animar a los lectores (y escritores) hispanos a participar en este “blog,” o en español o inglés (o ambos idiomas). El nombre de nuestro estado es un nombre español, como todos ustedes saben. Refiere al color del Río Colorado, por el hierro en las rocas y, por la erosión, en el río también. El símbolo mas conocido del oeste, una parte grande de la mitología estadounidense -el vaquero- es mas hispano que norteamericano en sus orígenes, incluyendo el monte, el sombrero, y el pistolero. Debemos una deuda cultural a los hispanos que dominaron este hemisferio desde la conquista, y aún la sangre y las culturas de los conquistados está incorporada en las culturas hispanas, con tradiciones antiguas e indígenas.
La historia de nuestro continente y de nuestro país es una historia tanto de los hispanos (y gente indígena) que vivieron aqui antes de los gringos, como de los ingleses y otros europeos. La ciudad de San Agustino (St. Augustine) en Florida (establecido por los españoles en 1588) y Santa Fe, Nuevo México (1610) son entre nuestras primeras ciudades (ambas mas viejas que Plymouth Rock, establecido en 1620, y San Agustino es mas antigua que Jamestown, la primera colonia inglesa, establecida en 1607).
Los Estados Unidos nunca ha sido un país sin influencia hispana. Aún en sus raises mas profundas, es un país en gran parte hispano. Como dicen los hispanos del oeste frecuentemente, “la frontera nos ha cruzado.” La gente y el gobierno de los estados unidos se apoderaron de esta tercera parte del terreno del país por medio de una historia de mentiras y oportunismo. Los colonizadores estadounidenses los cuales colonizaron a Texas temprano en siglo XIX prometieron obedecer las leyes Mexicanas, pero después decidieron que preferían tener sus esclavos y su propia religión (ambos prohibidos por las leyes Mexicanas de esa época). La guerra de independencia de Texas, seguida por la anexion a los estados unidos, era un robo de terreno. Y la guerra Mexico-Americano siguiendo esa por un década era otro robo de terreno mucho mas grande.
Así es la historia: No es para quejarse ni para recuperar el terreno que debemos reconocer en la historia, sino para entender la relación histórica entre las culturas que constituyen a nuestro país, incluyendo las injusticias históricas. Porque el método de los conservadores aquí en este país y este estado es identificar a algunos grupos de personas como menos miembros de nuestra sociedad, como si pertenecieran a este terreno menos que los gringos. Y en muchas maneras, es completemente al revés.
Tenemos muchos desafíos en este país y este estado, no solamente la intolerancia en contra de los hispanos. Es mi deseo que todos nosotros, toda gente razonable y de buena voluntad, trabajen juntos como un pueblo, como una sociedad, mejorando la calidad de la vida para todos, y para todos nuestros niños y nietos y bisnietos. Por eso, los invito a todos ustedes que lean esto para juntarse conmigo en mi proyecto, que se llama “las políticas de razón y buena voluntad” (A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill). En cualquier idioma, tenemos que recordar que la meta de nuestros esfuerzos como miembros de una sociedad debe ser alimentar y facilitar a “la audacia de la esperanza.” En cualquier idioma, que siempre entonemos “¡si se puede!”
Un error de la izquierda estadounidense siempre ha sido dividir nuestros esfuerzos entre varios intereses, sin reconocer y desarrollar la unidad del movimiento, la idea sencilla en su centro: Vivimos juntos en este mundo, una humanidad. Somos interdependientes, los unos con los otros, y todos con la naturaleza. El desafío de ser un ser humano, un miembro de una sociedad, un miembro de humanidad, es trabajar juntos como gente razonable y de buena voluntad, intentando mejorar nuestra existencia compartida. Así todos ganan.
Si se puede.
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Though I had intended not to make any new posts until after I take the Bar in late February, the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona raises an issue that truly does require our attention, and every voice of reason and goodwill in this country needs to urge in unison that we attend to it.
The question is not whether this shooting was influenced by the overheated rhetoric of an implicitly violent right-wing movement currently infesting the United States, but rather whether there is a reasonable concern that the violent rhetoric and imagery of that movement, the ten-fold rise in membership in armed militia movements in this country in recent years, the anger and vitriol spewing forth from radios and social media accounts and one television broadcast network in particular, contribute to an environment conducive to violence and not conducive to civil discourse and rational self-governance. The answer is, clearly, “yes,” and an incident like this one, regardless of what the impetus for it turns out to have been, serves as a wake-up call for all of us.
One thing needs to be made clear about this incident and this conversation: It makes absolutely no difference what the explanation turns out to be for Loughner’s attack. The fact remains that we are a violent society suffering the disease of a (thus far mostly implicitly) violent political movement, and the probable result is an increase in incidents such as this one (as indeed is already in evidence, even independently of this incident). We are a society in which reason and goodwill have been sacrificed to blind fanaticisms, a society in the throes of an angry mania.
It is natural that when a member of the group that those infected with this cognitive virus call every pejorative imaginable gets shot in an act of predictable and predicted violence, the inference will be that it was probably a direct symptom of that implicitly violent political movement. Whether it was or wasn’t doesn’t matter; the probability remains intact. It’s the same as the original assumption that the Oklahoma federal building bombing was committed by Middle Eastern terrorists; the fact that it wasn’t didn’t mean that the danger of attack from Middle Eastern terrorists wasn’t real (and that recognition of that danger led many to make an inference that turned out to be mistaken in the particular, but correct in general). Similarly, in this case, if it turns out that the most probable interpretation is incorrect, that doesn’t change the fact that it was the most probable interpretation, and that the danger and general dysfunctionality it recognizes still exists.
There is nothing wrong with people feeling and arguing passionately in service to their beliefs about what best serves the public interest. We can all hope that those beliefs will be as informed as possible, as reasonable as possible, as committed to humanity as possible, but whether or not that is always the case, we live in a country that thrives by having a robust marketplace of ideas, and all ideas are fair game. Vigorous debate on matters of public interest and public policy is good and proper; let it ensue. But we must strive to remember that we are all entitled to be participants in that debate, that those who disagree with us are not our enemies just for disagreeing with us, that none of us has a monopoly on the one infallible truth, and that usually others with whom we disagree have something of value embedded somewhere in their perspective. We need to strive to be less certain, and more open to the possibility that we each may be wrong about some things, and that others with whom we disagree may be right. We need to be civil.
But this incident is relevant beyond how we engage in public discourse and debate. It is relevant to the substance of the ideas held and expressed in that debate as well. The Tea Party is not just about the rhetoric and imagery of violence, it is also about an attitude of social disintegration, of extreme individualism, of indifference to the welfare of others, to a dismissal of a sense of mutual responsibility to one another. And, in that way, it contributes not just to violence in service to a political ideology, but is a political ideology in service to violence.
We are interdependent, and our actions have consequences that ripple outward, beyond their immediate vicinity. When our words or actions implicitly or explicitly condone violence, they contribute to the violence that actually occurs. When they try to reinforce mutual goodwill, or reason, or generosity, they contribute to the mutual goodwill, reason, and generosity in the world. There are reverberations, feedback loops, in human systems, amplifying our words and deeds in how they affect others. No one is all of the sudden, after the fact, noticing the potential for inciting violence that this violent imagery and rhetoric carries with it; many have been very aware of it for quite some time. When the predictable and predicted consequences of an attitude and mode of behavior actually result, it makes perfect sense to say, there you go, this is what we’ve been talking about.
In The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions and The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, I described how memes spread through the social institutional landscape, defining and redefining it constantly, and how our own words and actions contribute to that process. This is an example of how that works: People churn the waters with certain ideas and attitudes, and our world is transformed by the cumulative and sometimes mutually reinforcing effects.
Blaming Sarah Palin for this is a distraction, and beside the point. I have no way of knowing and no reason to suspect that Palin’s rhetoric itself, directly and sufficiently, inspired the actions of the shooter. But I do have reason to know that she contributed to an atmosphere conducive to those actions, whether they were relevant in this instance or not. And that is on her; that is her culpability, by contributing to the creation of a hateful and violent cultural context. More importantly, it is the responsibility of all who have participated in that dynamic to step back, take a breath, and recognize that it’s not what we want to be as a people.
We all have a responsibility for doing what we can to increase the roles of reason and goodwill in our world, and decrease the roles of anger, hatred, and irrationality. We all slip up (at least I do), but underneath all of the politics and rallies and fighting for certain policies, what I hope we’re all really struggling for is a kinder, gentler, and wiser world. Few things are more frustrating than the extent to which humanity inflicts suffering on itself. And every unkind word, every attempt to put someone else down, is a drop in the ocean of anger that crests, as it did today in Arizona, in acts of violence. Let’s all strive to do better.
(See A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill and The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified for specific ideas about how to do better.)
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In a modification of my last post, The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions, in which I described how memes and paradigms form and spread and combine into social institutions, I added on a few paragraphs describing the fractal geometry of that social institutional landscape, which form the first few paragraphs (following this one) of this post.
The social institutional landscape has a nested and overlapping dynamical fractal structure, with some small subset of memes shared almost universally by global humanity, and the rest by smaller swathes of humanity of every magnitude down to the individual level. Transnational linguistic groups, national or regional cultures, international professional communities, aficionados of theater or a local sports team, local peer groups and families, these and almost unlimited other such groupings can share meme-sets ranging from specialized professional knowledge through games and entertainments to particular opinions or judgments. Rumors, observations, shared jokes, novel insights, technical innovations all swirl and sweep through humanity like gusting breezes through endless grasslands.
Some are highly contagious, articulating well with human psychological predispositions or existing internal cognitive landscapes, or proliferating due to their economic or military utility, spreading far and wide. Some become obsolete, dated by the flow of events or by the duration of attention spans, and contract again into oblivion after “lives” ranging from the very local and fleeting to the very widespread and long enduring.
Individual internal cognitive landscapes are comprised of a unique intersection of these differentially distributed memes, most, though shared in essence, slightly modified in the individual mind by the already existing cognitive landscape of metaphorical frames and narratives into which they fit themselves. And all of this is in constant flux at all levels, new memes emerging, spreading out in branching and expanding tentacles, which themselves are branching and expanding recursively, shrinking back, billions doing so simultaneously, converging into new coherent sets of memes which take on lives of their own.
If we imagine each meme as a color, and each variation as a shade of that color, then we would have innumerable distinct colors and shades flowing in diverse expanding and contracting fractal patterns through the mind of humanity, the hues shifting as the memes evolve, interacting in almost unlimited unique and creative ways as they converge in particular minds and groups of minds, each individual human being defined, in conjunction with its unique set of genes (and subsequent physical affects of variable environmental factors), by its unique set of memes organized into simultaneously shared and individuated metaphorical frames and narratives. This is the graphic of our social institutional landscape: mind-bogglingly complex, flowing and dynamic, throbbing with a life of its own, shot through with the transient borders and categories imposed by our imaginations, borders and categories which themselves are artifacts of the mind in constant flux on varying time scales. (See The Mandelbrot Set: Images of Complexity for a static but in-depth version of the imagery described above.)
But distinct memes themselves are changing as they flow, being modified in individual minds or synthesized with other memes to produce new ones, displacing or disproving others, in a constant dance of creation and destruction interspersed with the flowing patterns of modification, dispersion, expansion, and contraction. Memes are catalysts, interacting with human predispositions, existing cognitive architectures, and the natural environment to produce new forms, new technologies, new social institutions, and to render old ones obsolete or out of favor.
As discussed in The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology, some of those memes are intentionally cobbled into purposive systems, or “technologies,” programming or channeling some set of natural or behavioral phenomena in service to desired ends. Those that program natural phenomena are the ones conventionally thought of as “technologies,” enabling us to do things we were once unable to do, and to produce wealth and comfort and opportunity (as well both intentional and unintentional damage to human beings, their physical infrastructure, and the natural environment) far in excess of what we once were able to produce. These technologies and technological domains (e.g., electrical, digital, etc., as well as, as explained below, market, contractual, etc.) interact with the more haphazardly accumulating and evolving meme-clusters of the social institutional landscape. Technologies can be thought of as the engineered architectures carved out of the social institutional “natural environment,” the latter comprised of the wilderness of foundational linguistic and cultural forms as well as the economic, political, and ideological accretions diffusely growing in conjunction with our various purposive systems.
(The distinction between “engineered architectures” and the rest of the social institutional landscape can be a bit hazy, since the rest of the landscape is a function of human purposive action as well. The difference is that the architectures are consciously invented components, such as the airplane or the US Constitution, while the rest is everything that organically grows around and in conjunction with them, such as social norms, cultural motifs, and folk beliefs. In a sense, it might be correct to say that the entire social institutional landscape is composed of microcosmic “architectures,” if examined closely enough, since it is the accretion of individual purposive actions. Indeed, technologies are to the social institutional landscape what the social institutional landscape is to Nature itself, an increased focusing and intentionality -in a sense, a distillation- of diffusely accreting “purposiveness.” This is one more aspect of the fractal recursiveness of The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix.)
While technologies programming physical phenomena are what we most commonly think of when we think of “technologies,” there are undeniable social institutional technologies as well, such as currency instruments (facilitating multilateral, global, on-going exchange, and the enormous economy based on it), enforceable contracts (allowing people to bind one another to mutually beneficial collective action that would have been difficult or impossible in the absence of such instruments), scientific methodology (allowing a more robust and reliable growth in knowledge of the underlying dynamics of the natural world than had been previously possible, and, in fact, underwriting an explosion in the proliferation and sophistication of new technologies), and legal procedure (allowing a more reliable and vigilant system of determining truth in disputes between individuals or between individuals and the state). The United States Constitution, in fact, is the codification of an intentionally invented social institutional purposive system.
New social institutional technologies are constantly being explored, experimented with, implemented, and either proliferate or languish according to their relative reproductive success. In fact, governments are factories of such technologies, passing laws and regulations, creating administrative agencies, establishing new systems and markets, signing treaties with verification and enforcement provisions, forging new social institutions to deal with emergent or suddenly more salient issues and challenges (such as the creation of the United Nations in the wake of World War II, or of tradable carbon market instruments in the context of the Kyoto Protocol. See, e.g., Political Market Instruments).
But just as new technologies in the conventional sense can be created in people’s garages or in small start-ups formed by highly educated young people, so too can new social institutional technologies emerge in contexts more humble than those of the halls of government or international treaty conferences. Many diffuse technological innovations, of both the conventional and social institutional varieties, have occurred in conjunction with information technologies, which have come to form such a vital framework within our social institutional landscape. The Netroots movement is an excellent example of diffuse social institutional innovation in conjunction with emerging physical technologies, contributing substantially to the success of Obama’s 2008 presidential victory.
A particularly good example of a set of robust social institutional innovations contrived by a very small cadre of political entrepreneurs is described in the book The Blueprint: How Democrats Won Colorado, by (pre-eminent Colorado political broadcast journalist) Adam Schrager and (former Republican Colorado state house representative) Rob Witwer. The book describes a confluence of new state laws (both campaign finance and term-limit limitations), a very small group of highly motivated and capable extremely wealthy individuals (“the gang of four”), and the targeted channeling of huge amounts of money by them into non-campaign organizations such as political 527s, 501(c)(3) charitable organizations, and 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations, each with its own advantages and limitations, to affect state legislature races, transforming the Colorado political landscape in the process.
The Tea Party movement, as well, clearly has both some grass roots political entrepreneurial characteristics to it, as well as more centrally orchestrated aspects, both involving some social institutional purposive systems, channeling the deep well of jingoistic “Political Fundamentalism” in the United States, and the reactionary anger to the combination of the Obama victory in 2008 and the perception of Big Government (“socialist”) actions and policies, tapping into inchoate bigotries and xenophobia, all in service, ultimately, to corporate interests (“small government” meaning non-regulation of corporate behavior, which in turn means foisting costs of production in the forms of externalities onto the public).
The question facing those who want to affect the dynamical fractal geometry of our ever-changing social institutional landscape in purposive and guided ways is how best to do so, where and how to flap the butterfly’s wings in such a way so as to cascade through the system in reverberating, self-amplifying winds of social change. As I put it near the end of The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology:
Negotiating this evolving ecosystem of social institutions, technologies, and their interactions with both individuals and the natural environment involves more than hammering together a set of purposive systems. It is a vibrant whole, a metabolism, more organic than mechanistic. Understanding how it flows, how changes ripple through it, how its complexity and interconnectedness form the roiling currents we are riding, is the ultimate art and science of consciously articulating our lives with their context in ways that allow us to fulfil potentials we have only barely begun to imagine. To some extent, these potentials will be realized by technologies, including social institutional technologies. But human consciousness is more than the sum of its parts, and the more our technologies and ideologies flow and undulate with the rhythms of the evolving natural, social institutional, and technological systems within which they are embedded, and with which they articulate, the more fully we will realize the full breadth and depth of our humanity.
I invite and implore all readers to continue to contemplate this question, to consider how best to dance with these complex systems in ways which yield greater human welfare and liberation, greater realization of our humanity and our consciousness. In the meantime, please consider my own evolving “A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill” (or the short version: The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified) as one possible starting point. This social institutional world of ours is both a product and source of our genius, in an articulation of coherence and individuation, of interdependence and liberty, of collective and individual consciousness. It is the collective mind upon which we draw, and which draws upon us. It is a narrative we write and act out together in a sprawling improvisation, more subtle and complex than any that has ever been bound into volumes or performed on a stage. Let’s write it well.
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Social institutions, technologies, and ideologies and conceptual frameworks are comprised of memes (cognitions) linked together into coherent bundles according to organizing principles called “paradigms.” For instance, a government or economy is comprised of the memes which define the roles of all actors in the system, the rules and processes involved, and the underlying principles which inform and guide it (the paradigm). This is true of informal as well as formal institutions, across levels of organization, including everything from religions and industries to popular beliefs and customs of all kinds.
Memes and paradigms are in constant flux, evolving by several interrelated mechanisms. At core, as in biological evolution, is the variable reproductive success of the underlying memes. Memes, like genes, are packets of information which reproduce (are communicated), mutate (change in the various minds of those to whom they are communicated), differentially thrive (sometimes in direct competition, and sometimes due merely to contextual circumstances), and thus evolve (those mutations that are more reproductively successful proliferate while those that are less so fade away). Memes and sets of memes can also be combined in novel ways through intentional human effort to innovate, producing new memes and sets of memes from the consciously mediated synthesis of existing ones.
The relative reproductive success of memes is driven by a combination of reflexive and reflective individual human responses. Motivating these responses are psychological and emotional predispositions, general utility, and localized utility, blended into both rote and strategic interactions. The localized utility of certain memes and sets of memes can coalesce into social institutional power (often originated by, and implicitly underwritten by, access to physical force), allowing the imposition of paradigms that yield differentiated costs and benefits to those organized under them.
The evolution of technological memes and sets of memes, for instance, is driven at one level by general utility (see The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology), from which individuals involved in their creation, production and utilization draw localized utility, and, when combined with facilitating organizational memes, can give differentiated power to those groups of people with differentiated access to them or ability to utilize them for maximum benefit. The evolution of popular beliefs, on the other hand, is driven more by identifiable and inherent psychological and emotional predispositions, in a process of adaptation to and articulation with memes and paradigms evolving under the lathe of utility (which in turn adapt to and articulate with memes and paradigms evolving under the lathe of psychological and emotional predispositions).
Social institutions (including social institutional purposive systems that program human behavioral phenomena, or social institutional “technologies,” but excluding other technologies that program natural phenomena) coalesce around organizational adaptations to technologies of all kinds, as well as in both haphazard (decentralized, organic, and cumulative) and intentional (centralized, purposive, and punctuated) response to collective action and (to a lesser extent) time horizon problems (see Collective Action (and Time Horizon) Problems; in brief, collective action problems are situations in which individual rational self-interested behavior leads to worse outcomes for everyone involved than could be achieved through mutual commitment to cooperative action, and time horizon problems occur when the discounting of future costs and benefits leads to a sub-optimal short-sightedness in rational self-interested individual and collective behavior).
Separating out social institutions from non-social-institutional technologies (i.e., what we normally think of when we think of “technologies”), we can discern four social institutional modalities: Hierarchies, markets, norms, and ideologies. Hierarchies are authority structures comprised of formal rules centrally enforced by means of explicit rewards and punishments. Markets are mutually beneficial systems of exchange, in which one’s share of the benefits of collective action is determined by the market value of their contribution to it. Norms are unwritten rules diffusely and informally enforced through the social approval and disapproval of others. And ideologies are internalized beliefs and values enforced through self-policing and auto-sanctioned by cognitive dissonance (in the form of self-inflicted feelings of guilt or shame).
Actual social institutions and social institutional paradigms are comprised of blends and hybrids of these modalities, articulated with technologies, responding to a combination of the organizational demands and opportunities presented by technologies, related and independent collective action and time horizon problems, and the demands and opportunities posed by the diffuse organic psychological and emotional reflexive reactions to all of these other changes.
The various social sciences, with differing focal points but considerable overlap, examine the dynamics of the various aspects and various overlapping and cross-cutting organizing principles (“paradigms”) of this social institutional landscape. Though differing disciplines and schools within disciplines often utilize superficially conflicting or incompatible theoretical lenses, much of the perceived mutual exclusivity of perspectives evaporates when these perspectives are combined under the umbrella of a comprehensive social systems paradigm such as the one I am describing here (much as string theory in physics reconciles quantum mechanics and relativity).
Paradigms shift when a new guiding principle is used, or an old guiding principle is used in a new way, in the social institutional as well as social theoretical context. Changing physical power sources, for instance (such as the advent of the steam engine or electrification), creates rippling new challenges and opportunities, a need to adapt architecturally, organizationally, and economically to the new principle. The change from monarchy to popular sovereignty that occurred during the 17th-19th centuries in several Western European and Western European derived nations reversed the principal-agent relationship between government and populace (transforming the government from principal to agent, and the populace from agent to principal), accompanied by continuing cascades of social institutional and ideological accommodations and adaptations. (Interestingly, the political ideology in the United States today that is rooted in 18th century American Revolutionary ideology is based largely on the anachronistic rejection of government as principal and populace as agent that motivated the American Revolution).
Revolutions (whether political, technological, economic, or cultural) are essentially just such paradigm shifts, in science catalyzed by an accumulation of anomalies within an existing paradigm; in technology by limits imposed by existing technologies combined with “opportunity niches” provided by the current technological and economic landscape (see The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology); in politics by the limits imposed by the current regime on certain empowered or ready-to-be-self-empowered interest groups and the opportunities they perceive (e.g., American Independence, African American Civil Rights, various post-colonial national independence movements); and in culture by the diffuse organic adaptations and adjustments that ripple through the institutional landscape as a result of these other changes, involving a combination of aesthetics (fine arts, music, cuisine, etc.), entertainments and public celebrations, and psychologically and emotionally motivated cognitive adaptations and reactions.
There are two types of processes that memes can undergo during their residence in a human mind: 1) They can be implicitly accepted intact and modified only unconsciously and unintentionally (if at all), or 2) they can be worked on, in conjunction with and through utilization of other memes, critiqued, evaluated, intentionally modified, synthesized, and/or woven into a larger cognitive framework. Technological memes as discussed by Brian Arthur in The Nature of Technology, for instance, undergo the second process.
Sometimes and to some extent these clash with sets of memes associated primarily with the first process, memes that are reproduced as elements of authoritative traditions, taken as “gospel.” Sometimes and to some extent the two types of meme processes articulate with one another in mutually reinforcing and synergistic ways. And these two interactions can occur simultaneously between the same two sets of memes. It can be argued, for instance, that though the memes of the Medieval Catholic Church and the early products of modern science were often and most obviously in conflict with one another, they were also in some ways mutually reinforcing, the monotheism at the heart of Catholicism providing a coherent “creation” for science to explore.
The conflicts themselves can generate or invigorate particular social institutional innovations. The rise in popularity of home schooling in the United States, for instance, emerges to a large extent from the aversion of some religious fundamentalists to the secularized secondary socialization provided by public schools.
The social institutional landscape has a nested and overlapping dynamical fractal structure, with some small subset of memes shared almost universally by global humanity, and the rest by smaller swathes of humanity of every magnitude down to the individual level. Transnational linguistic groups, national or regional cultures, international professional communities, afficianados of theater or a local sports team, local peer groups and families, these and almost unlimited other such groupings can share meme-sets ranging from specialized shared knowledge to particular opinions or judgments, rumors or observations or shared jokes rustling through them like a breeze through tall grass.
Some are highly contagious, articulating well with human psychological predispositions or existing internal cognitive landscapes, spreading far and wide. Some become obsolete, dated by the flow of events or by the duration of attention spans, and contract again into oblivion after “lives” ranging from the very local and fleeting to the very widespread and long enduring.
Individual internal cognitive landscapes are comprised of a unique intersection of these differentially distributed memes, most, though shared in essence, slightly modified in the individual mind by the already existing cognitive landscape of metaphorical frames and narratives into which they fit themselves. And all of this is in constant flux at all levels, new memes emerging, spreading out in branching and expanding tentacles, which themselves are branching and expanding recursively, shrinking back, billions doing so simultaneously, converging into new coherent sets of memes which take on lives of their own.
If we imagine each meme as a color, and each variation as a shade of that color, then we would have billions of distinct colors and trillions of distinct shades flowing in diverse expanding and contracting fractal patterns through the mind of humanity, interacting in almost unlimited unique and creative ways as they converge in particular minds and groups of minds, each individual human being defined, in conjunction with their unique set of genes, by their unique set of memes organized into simultaneously shared and individuated metaphorical frames and narratives. This is the graphic of our social institutional landscape: mind-bogglingly complex, flowing and dynamic, throbbing with a life of its own, shot through with the transient borders and categories imposed by our imaginations, borders and categories which themselves are artifacts of the mind in constant flux on varying time scales. (See The Fractal Geometry of Social Change for a continuation of this theme).
Precise analyses of various kinds -political, economic, and cultural- can be organized under this paradigmatic umbrella, articulating with one another in new and more robust ways. In future posts, I will frequently explore specific historical developments, current events, and political, economic, and social issues in the light of the framework outlined above (as I have in fact done in many previous posts). Much is gained by creating an accommodating and encompassing analytical language through which to explore and examine the complex and subtle dynamics of the world in which we live.
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Brian Arthur’s thesis on the evolution of technology in his book The Nature of Technology (with thanks to Rick Munoz for the gift) dovetails so nicely with my broader paradigm of human social institutional ecology, addressing precisely that aspect which I had mostly left to the side (see, e.g., The Politics of Consciousness, in which I identify “social institutional and technological regimes” as the paradigms into which evolving memes aggregate, but focus on social institutions and ideologies), that this post is largely a synopsis of Arthur’s ideas, extended into and blended with “my own” marginal contribution. (The book is well worth reading; my summary here does not do it justice).
In brief, Arthur’s thesis is that technologies, which are essentially “programmed” natural phenomena, are comprised of assemblies and components, and subassemblies and subcomponents, down to an elemental level, with constant marginal modifications and recombinations of subcomponents, creating technological domains (e.g., digital, electronic, genetic, etc.), thus evolving within the context of these technological ecosystems (an idea I began to address before reading Arthur’s book, in The Evolutionary Ecology of Audio-Visual Entertainment (& the nested & overlapping subsystems of Gaia), Information and Energy: Past, Present, and Future, and The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix). The entire corpus of technology, in articulation with the evolving economy and legal system, evolves as well, causing cascades of destruction of linkages to technologies made obsolete by innovations, and cascades of new technologies made possible or necessary by other recent innovations.
The key to Arthur’s paradigm is that technologies are purposive programmings of natural phenomena (including human behavioral phenomena), and so both include (along with what is more conventionally visualized as “technology”) those social institutional innovations that are purposive (e.g., currency instruments) and exclude anything that developed haphazardly (e.g., informal social norms), though they both coevolve, adapting to one another. Technological evolution differs from Darwinian biological evolution primarily in the fact that new “species” (i.e., inventions) do not emerge merely as the result of an accretion of incremental changes selected by virtue of their relative reproductive success, but also by virtue of rather sudden new configurations of old technologies, and applications of new principles to old challenges. But these novel forms, whether the small increments of engineers making new applications of old technologies to solve novel problems, or the larger innovations of inventors utilizing new principles to address new or old challenges, are then subjected to that same Darwinian lathe.
Some of the distinguishing characteristics of technologies are that they are recursive (they are comprised of components that are themselves technologies, which in turn are comprised of components that are in turn technologies), modular (comprised of main assemblies performing main functions and subassemblies performing auxiliary functions), programmings of natural phenomena, and constantly evolving from earlier forms, midwifed by human ingenuity, but generated, in a sense, by earlier innovations. Each problem confronted implicates both backward and forward linkages, affecting the components of the technology worked with, and the possibilities with which new problems can be addressed.
Technologies form a kind of language within their domain, which practitioners draw on the way a composer or author draws on the musical or written language that is their medium, expressing a desired objective through recourse to the known phrases and grammars of those languages. It develops according to a combinatorial evolution, with something that developed in another domain for another reason available to those who recognize a novel use for it elsewhere. The memes of technological evolution are free radicals, able to attach to any other group of memes where they may have a particular basis for thriving.
Technology evolves in tandem with science, both the means of scientific discovery (the instruments used) and informed by science (finding the principles on which to base technological advances).
Technology evolves from few to many, from simple to complex, beginning with direct exploitations of natural phenomena (fire, sharp objects, etc.), and growing on the possibilities created by their exploitation, with new technologies and technological domains opening up new opportunities for yet more innovations. This is not unlike the evolution of biological and social institutional forms, which evolved from a single cell into the plethora of life now on Earth, and from more or less homogeneous primate cultures to the great variation of human cultures generated by geographic dispersion and differentiation.
Nor is the winnowing out process particularly different, in which some technologies (species, cultures) become dominant and widespread, eclipsing others, sometimes even eliminating them all together, forming distinct branches where an undifferentiated continuum would otherwise have been.
The processes of innovation rippling through the system (by posing new problems and creating new opportunities, by requiring new auxiliary assemblies, by rendering old ones obsolete, and the linkages that depended wholly on them obsolete as well), sweeping up economic and legal structures with it (creating new needs for new infrastructure, new forms of organization, new legal contexts, etc., while rendering others obsolete and archaic), includes a variety of stages, such as “standard engineering” (adapting an existing technology to varying contexts), adding on (improving performance and addressing problems by tacking on new subsystems), reaching limits and being faced with needs (trying to capture new potentialities that would require some improvement that current technologies can’t yet provide, and seeking a new principle to exploit to provide it), and undergoing a paradigm shift as a result (creating a new technology, that then sets in motion all of the rippling changes new technologies set into motion).
What does this mean for public policy? Public policy is, essentially, the attempt to establish and implement social institutional technologies, based on principles of human behavioral phenomena. From the haphazardly accumulated mass of social institutional materials, the challenge is to find components and assemblies that are usable, to combine and recombine them in fluent ways, in pursuit of specific objectives. One example would be what I have called “Political Market Instruments” (see Deforestation: Losing an Area the Size of England Every Year), which simply adapt the combined technologies of market exchange and regulatory oversight to the goal of increasing the production of a public good or decreasing the production of a public bad. It is an excellent example of Arthur’s modularity in action, since it is the integration of technologies that had not previously been so combined.
Some examples of social institutional technologies and how they combine include Democracy, the U.S. Constitution, and corporate business organization, resulting in, among other things, constitutionally protected massive funding for commercial-saturated campaign cycles. Many would argue that new technologies are demanded by the problems created through this combination of old ones. Another example is the borrowing from markets to combine its principles to public education in the form of vouchers. These examples point to the fact that while we gain much from our technologies, we also create new problems with them, and need to pick and choose how and when to implement them, always in service to a vision of how to forge our way into the future most in service to human well-being in the fullest sense.
Human social institutional and technological evolution is not something that occurs exclusively “in” the human mind, via the differentially successful reproduction of memes and their aggregation into paradigms (shifting in response to accumulations of anomalies). At least in regards to successful purposive systems, the natural phenomena upon which those memes and paradigms are working are in some ways (as Arthur points out) more the “genetic material” of those evolving forms than the packets of information working them. The programmed phenomena themselves form the alphabet and vocabulary of technological innovation, which the memes order into a grammar.
An example of an obvious human behavioral phenomenon on which the social institutional technologies of markets draw is: People will exchange what they have for something they value more highly. Another one, which allows the shift from barter to currency, is: People will recognize some fungible and generally fairly compact thing of agreed upon value, in large enough supply to serve the purpose but small enough supply to retain its value, as a medium of exchange. Many such social institutional technologies exist, based on how we respond to potential costs and benefits (including hierarchically imposed rewards and punishments and diffusely imposed social approval and disapproval), how we internalize values, and so on. The need to base social policies on an understanding of these phenomena is critical.
But, in a sense, there are two interwoven currents in our social institutional evolutionary ecology: The evolution of technologies (“purposive systems”), including social institutional technologies, and the haphazard maelstrom of psychologically and emotionally (rather than social systemically and economically) motivated reactions to it. The distinction is similar to the natural landscape around us, from which we have sculpted some architectures of our own. (Both, it might be argued, are evolutionary ecologies, and bear some of the characteristics described by Arthur, since even the haphazardly evolving social institutional landscape can borrow from other cultures or social institutional milieu and combine forms in new ways).
The purposeful and utlilitarian stream is characterized by a relatively high signal-to-noise ratio (see The Signal-To-Noise Ratio), utilizing the grammar of various domains relatively fluently. The psychologically and emotionally unreflective reactions to it are characterized by a relatively low signal-to-noise ratio, speaking internal languages whose correspondence to external reality is less disciplined (see Ideology v. Methodology). Technologies correspond to scientific and legal methodologies, while the evolutionary currents around them correspond to collections of arbitrary or unreflectively formed beliefs and rituals. The latter evolve as well, and may serve many human needs, but with less precision and reliability.
To be sure, sometimes technologies are quite toxic, and cultural rituals are quite benign. But the toxicity of the former can not be nullified by the benign qualities of the latter: It can only be addressed through another purposeful system, another technology, designed with the intention of addressing it. When there is a purpose beyond the inherent value of the thing itself, an architecture is required (such as shelter from the elements); when there is no purpose beyond that inherent value (such as a conversation with a friend or a party), no architecture beyond that which facilitates the event is required.
So the purposeful processes by which technologies emerge and develop, particularly social institutional technologies, and particularly those mediated by government action, slog through the viscous resistance of emotionally and psychologically motivated beliefs and rituals, bludgeoned by Luddites and chased by torch-bearing mobs. The progress of human consciousness (including that portion designed to address the problems caused by other products of the same process) is thus encumbered by those clinging to some sacred tradition and determined to tether all humanity to it.
The result is not stagnation, since change is constant. It is not an avoidance of the pitfalls and dangers of progress, but rather a blindfolding of it, an assurance that though forward progress will be slower and clumsier, it will also more certainly and more heavily be laden with the catastrophes of self-destruction that are inherent to stumbling down unexamined and danger-strewn paths.
Negotiating this evolving ecosystem of social institutions, technologies, and their interactions with both individuals and the natural environment involves more than hammering together a set of purposive systems. It is a vibrant whole, a metabolism, more organic than mechanistic. Understanding how it flows, how changes ripple through it, how its complexity and interconnectedness forms the roiling currents we are riding, is the ultimate art and science of consciously articulating our lives with their context in ways that allow us to fulfil potentials we have only barely begun to imagine. To some extent, these potentials will be realized by technologies, including social institutional technologies. But human consciousness is more than the sum of its parts, and the more our technologies and ideologies flow and undulate with the rhythms of the evolving natural, social institutional, and technological systems within which they are embedded, and with which they articulate, the more fully we will realize the full breadth and depth of our humanity.
Ironically, the haphazardly formed social institutional landscape from which technology carves out its architectures is approximated again in the ecology of that architecture itself. It is not the escape from that beautiful dance of chaos that holds the greatest promise for humanity, but rather the perfection of the art of dancing to its rhythms.
(See The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions and The Fractal Geometry of Social Change for a continuation of this theme).
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