2019-05-17
I’m inclined to see the world through a lens of complexity science, where high-level patterns at one scale (e.g., cell death in biological systems) can perhaps teach us things about patterns that will fare best at other scales (e.g., governance systems in society).
I’ve been slightly disconcerted by the fact that centralization seems to “win” in most every biological system — most every creature that gets to a certain level of complexity, also develops central nervous systems. The skin cell of the finger becomes subservient to the brain cell. What might this say about authorianism vs democracy?
The optimist in me wants to believe that maybe, if the universe favours centralization, then maybe this could be the force that humanity rallies against. Because we’re good at raging against things. It seems to be part of how humans operate, and work together. And so we often rage against one another. But maybe, we could create a shared understanding that the very fabric and tendencies of the universe are conspiring against some shared democratic ideals. And so then we could just rage against that non-human enemy, the entropic laws of the universe itself. What a perpetual underdog story that would be. It could perhaps occupy our attention and energy for a long time.
But anyhow, today, I realized a bit of a catch in some of my thinking. I often look at the patterns in the world around me, and try to learn from them. So I’d look at how brains (one example of a network highly saturated in activity) seem to have evolved a need for sleep, a period of rest. And then I might wonder what that might teach us about how our comtemporary society (another network of nodes that is increasingly saturated with signal) might be begging for similar interventions — periods of rest from the high activity, for re-organization.
Or I might look at how we see the relationship between structure and anarchy in living symbiotic systems that are animal bodies — the hierarchy of the traditionally conceived “host” animal, and the anarchic gut biome that plays such an important role in processing raw components from the wider world. What might that teach us about the role of chaotic spaces adjacent to government? (Hat-tip to MH for a conversation that sparked those particular thoughts.)
I believe that these comparisons aren’t simply analogy, but rather, they’re examples of multiple systems converging on similar outcomes due to the shared properties of networks more generally. Each network operates and is built from different substrates, different components, but there are common underlying dynamics at play. This is what I understand from complexity science.
And this is particularly important in our current situation. We are now running network experiments on global scales. We don’t necessarily have, in our systems, the capacity to run a million iterations of the system. Ecosystems could run millions of cycles among populations of individuals. Bacterial biomes could run many cycles. Some parts of human culture have had the space to run a scant few experiments, as cultures rise and fall. But we’re getting to a place we must learn from other layers of the network, because we don’t have space or time to run the experiments to completion at the scale we’ve arrived, at the global scale.
But anyhow, it occured to me today that perhaps there’s something I should be wary of while looking to learn from the patterns that have “won” at lower levels. Because those patterns are often ones that emerged in networks where hierarchy prevailed. So I should be cautious not to look too much to them for my learning. Because perhaps some of them are patterns of appeasement to hierarchy. Perhaps some of them represent ways to survive in the cracks between towering structures of central control, rather than an imagining of what might be possible if we exercised human-scale democratic values at our level.