"It was the best of times It was the worst of times." Charles Dicken's description captures the rapidly shifting ground in the USA today regarding the "united" part of "United States". All biological species tend to fly apart, as do all flocks of birds or schools of fish. Species that survive need a strong force that continually pulls them back towards the center of mass of the group.
For humans, research has shown that you can generate a face that will be considered "beautiful" by finding the center of every feature across all races and combining them - giving a result like Catherine Zeta-Jones that seems familiar to everyone and yet a little exotic to all in a pleasant way.
Similarly, the behavior of a flying flock of birds can be generated in a computer with just a few simple rules, one of which is "Move towards the center of the flock", and another being "Don't run into the bird next to you." (If you have Java enabled, there is a cool animated interactive flock simulator that you can experiment with here.)
So it is startling to me to see a collapse of this principle in the central governing body of the US, the US Congress, or in the government of the states of Michigan and California. Congress is playing with fire and a current extension it granted itself on its homework until this Friday, Dec. 14th. (It was due October 1st, and I wrote earlier about the pending US Government shutdown here. )
The mood is described in a New York Times article today : Muscle Flexing in Senate: G.O.P. Defends Strategy, which I excerpt here:
So, it seems clear that the strategy of focusing on differences and amplifying them instead of seeking common ground has managed to stop operation of the Congress almost entirely. And it seems clear that the Republicans don't deny that, and are delighted with that result, figuring voters, or maybe corporate supporters, will be thankful and reward them for preventing any motion in the direction the elected Democratic majority wants to go now.WASHINGTON —...
[...it] was more than a little telling when Mr. McConnell laid down his mark in the current budget fight on Tuesday, informing the Capitol Hill press corps that he was ready to offer Democrats a deal ...the Republicans should get virtually everything they want.
Mr. McConnell and his fellow Republicans are playing such tight defense, blocking nearly every bill proposed by the slim Democratic majority that they are increasingly able to dictate what they want...
It also explains why so little is getting done in Congress right now.
But there are also risks. The latest New York Times/CBS News poll found that the stagnation in Congress has made an impression. Just 21 percent of Americans say they have a favorable view of Congress and 64 percent disapprove. And the two parties have been unyielding, calculating that voters will blame the other side.
“I am not seeing much common ground, meeting in the center,” said Senator Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, a Republican who is seeking a third term. “And if we don’t find that, the Senate will fail in its governing responsibilities.
“The thing that’s important to remember is that the Senate was structured to govern from the center, to find the common sense. There is little sense about this place right now.”
Democrats say the Republican stance, especially on spending, is reckless and aimed at shutting down the government.
By the calculation of Mr. McConnell and other Republicans, voters will reward them for stopping the Democrats from doing all sorts of things that the Republicans view as foolish.
Aides to the Republican leadership said they hoped to supplement that message with an agenda that they plan to lay out early next year and that they said would show clear differences with the Democrats.
In the meantime, Mr. McConnell and the Republicans, with Mr. Bush’s support, effectively have a stranglehold on the Senate. That has in turn created bitterness between Democrats in the Senate and House, where Democrats have a larger majority and more leverage.
Mr. Reid met Tuesday afternoon with Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California as the Democrats continued to struggle to formulate an “omnibus” spending package that would bundle 11 appropriations bills and avoid a shutdown of government agencies.
This also seems to be an unprecedented focus on winning everything possible today, regardless of whatever hard feelings or long term damage to working relationships it may cause the future.
It also seems to be an embodiment of the assumption that the way to get maximum long-term benefits is to keep on fighting intense battles for maximum short-term benefits. The belief being apparently that winning every battle will surely win the war.
The fallacy in that logic was a subject here recently. Only certain kinds of things have the property that short-term and long-term values are the same. The Japanese seem to be at one end of the spectrum, focusing on long-term gain, and the US seems to be at the other end, focusing on short-term gain.
Why is that?
One obvious reason may be a simple lack of education in the country that short-term and long-term results may go in opposite directions. This doesn't seem to explain how the US at one point 200 years ago "knew" that, and has increasingly been "forgetting" it.
It is not just the Congress, of course, that shares this misconception. Most US businesses seem to be in the grip of the myth of "EVA" - Economic Value Added, trying desperately to maximize short-term profits, and not understanding why that strategy isn't helping long-term prosperity.
But the article a few days ago by Stanley Fish in the New York Times, advocating a Machiavellian government, ready to cheat and lie at any time to gain its way, seems part and parcel of this approach. Again, there is an obsession with "pragmatism" that seems to me just a code-word for short-term victory and a lack of contemplation of the long-term impact of everyone following such a strategy.
But it goes both ways, and has a feedback loop, and closes in on itself and latches. If, in fact, you assume that the other side in any disagreement is bargaining in bad faith and has no intention of living up to its word or keep its promises, then why should you accept any promise of future benefit at the cost of an immediate loss?
The whole concept of "horse-trading" as it was called assumes that a man's word is good for something. It assumes that people care about their social reputation for honesty, because that is the currency needed to keep the system running. No lawyer will be around to enforce the back-room verbal deals that have to be made, so they must rely on the core value of honor, even among thieves.
So it may be that abandoning all pretense of caring about honest-dealing, as Mr. Fish advocates, and as many other apparently go along with, has the result of destroying the entire basis on which compromises necessary to keep the country from fracturing are based.
Certainly, a flock of birds simulated in a computer, if the instructions are changed to fly away from instead of towards the center, will immediately break apart.
What I think the Republican strategists are missing is that it will not split into two flocks, because there is momentum and a long term impact to deal with. If every person on the Republican side has come around to believing in and advocating emphasis on divisiveness and differences, yes, the flock will split into two -- and then the Republican portion will explode into a million separate pieces.
Because, at that point, why should any Republican trust any other Republican to deliver on promises that are made? Even "loyalty" is based on the concept that present suffering will be rewarded later. If that promise is worthless, why should anyone be loyal?
It's like the old joke of a man who asks a Boy Scout if he would trip an old lady for a million dollars, and the Scout considers and says "Yes." Then the man asks him if he would do it for one dollar, and the Scout replies "What do you take me for?"
And the man answers: "I already know what you are. I'm just trying to find your price."
I'm not on a personal vendetta here against Republicans, and I'm trying to be neutral but scientific. I simply can't see how a strategy of developing strong muscles and momentum pushing us apart instead of pulling us together and overcoming differences can possibly work.
By my calculations and logic if the Republicans "win" that battle, they lose the war.
Maybe I missed something. The hot-lines are open, and anonymous comments are welcome and won't be removed unless they involve personal attacks, inappropriate language, or advertising. I really am curious what the thinking is here of how this is going to play out.
Maybe the thinking is that cooperation is not required, only obedience; and obedience can be obtained by the swift and merciless execution of raw power, punishing those who disobey and break ranks of loyalty. This is "theory X" of corporate power, writ large.
And, there are two things wrong with that strategy.
One is that life is too complex these days to be understood from any one point of view, regardless how strongly enforced. More precisely, the stronger the single view is enforced and dissent suppressed, the more blind that leadership becomes to anything outside their limited experience. People may be brought into line, but Life will not. Global warming cannot be bullied into compliance. Gravity will continue to work. New infectious viruses will not care what you think. Life goes on. Domination of the whole world is simply not possible.
Similarly, the efforts to achieve "control" by continually simplifying the world until it becomes manageable is the myth that has brought many large corporations down. It won't simplify just because you wish it would, and you only end up with a simple model that has no connection to reality, producing results that refuse to stay in line. As any biologist knows, simplification of an ecosystem is the pathway to death. Diversity is power, when it comes to survival. Well, diversity with a continual distributed, voluntary restoring force towards the middle.
The second thing wrong with that strategy is that the most serious risk to stable control is not external, but internal.
No person, or group of people, has some sort of absolute reference frame. As soon as you break off input from outside, the internal world is free to start rotating and twisting, which will be entirely invisible from inside. The rubber sheet of the world stretches and shrinks, and the people embedded in that world stretch and shrink with it, unaware of these changes because it still looks "right" to them. But "right" has become disconnected to the larger world, and starts drifting, both overall, and then breaking apart into separate pools of "right" that differ with each other.
This may be quite visible to those outside that world, but will be invisible and denied to those inside its clutches.
I am not sure, but from the examples I can see I think that pathway leads to a collapse of morale, motivation, and to complete fatigue and depression as well. Certainly this is true, overall, to people who become fragmented from society. Fragmentation is followed very quickly with increasing isolation, depression, deterioration of health on all fronts, and perhaps violence against the world, which seems to be going wrong, or against oneself, possibly suicide.
It's the larger scale version of what our cells do in our body if they are removed from the body -- a process called "apoptosis" kicks in, and the cells commit suicide.
We seem to rely on some connection and alignment with the outside world, through all sorts of invisible pathways that we can only dimly sense, indirectly.
It makes sense. Life on Earth has evolved for billions of years, developing immune systems and the ability to police itself and restore health. If some part breaks off and starts growing on its own, which we'd call cancer, generally the body moves in and destroys it or by cutting it off from nutrition, kills it off. Life is way bigger than any one person, or group of people, and if they go head-to-head with Life, I think Life generally wins. It has about a billion years more practice and experience at this sort of thing.
Our bodies aren't built with a single Rambo-cell using super-human powers to command and direct all the other cells to do what they need to for the body to work. The idea is absurd. No cell could possibly understand, let alone keep track of all the required activities that need to go on for life to continue, let alone manage them centrally.
Past a certain size, either the body manages itself, or it dies. It cannot be "run" from some command post. It's not a question of raw power of the bullying type -- if the King cell had a super-death-ray that could kill any cell that disobeyed, it wouldn't help. It simply can't be run from the top.
That's not how very large aggregates of living things work. There are no successful examples based on the Rambo model. Those simply violate the underlying physics and math of Life. All attempts at centrally planned economies have failed, for the same underlying reason -- it can't be done.
There's just too much to plan, and the best a central authority can do is "prioritize" and work on a few "top things", and that requires building a mental context to get mental arms around a problem, and you can only do a few of those context shifts a day, if that. But reality has thousands of new "top things" that have to be dealt with each day, every day, or they will crash and burn and damage the overall system. Just picture trying to centrally manage how to feed 8 million New Yorkers every day, and what would happen if the Government, any government, tried to "manage" that process and "plan" it. Let alone a government that specialized in paralysis and stopping all planning operations dead in their tracks. So in a month or two we'll restart the food? That's not a plan. Now multiply that by a billion.
For that matter, imagine how much you'd get done if you had to spend your day regulating your own digestion and metabolism on a second by second basis.
That's the task. No one can "manage" that centrally. The more it's managed the worse it gets.
Oh, it does need management and structure, but the control system required is distributed and emergent, a system thing, not central and designed by mere humans.
And that requires all the parts to work together, above their diverse functions, in an overarching unity that recognizes a common bond and a common support system.
That's the model Life uses. It's the only model we know that works. I think we should pay more attention to understanding it and aligning our selves with it, or at least with the principles involved in developing healthy strength and a prospering, functioning body.
So, who's right? Well, everyone's partly right, as usual. A monolithic central planning government, trying to run everything will not work. An absence of any control structure will not work. We need to evolve the same kind of emergent yet distributed control that our bodies have, simultaneously globally aware, operating as with a single spirit, and still locally active, specializing in a billion local issues. We need both "freedom" and "law and order".
That is not, however, the end point of unfettered competition and "freedom" of every part to do its own thing on its own schedule. The parts still have to submit to the whole -- but the whole is not run by any single part. I think they had that idea 200 years ago when the US was formed.
And, curiously, if the shouting and screaming and pushing and name-calling would take a break, I think everyone actually agrees with the goal, just not how to get there.
Maybe it needs a better and more vivid simulation and animation to get more widely understood. There is no solution where one person, or one small group, or one religion, or culture, or political part, or corporation, or one nation-state "runs" everything and everyone.
This jockeying to be "in charge" and to be that "one" is based on a total misunderstanding of what is possible anymore in a small but fractally-complex world.
A different kind of overarching common spirit and unity is where we need to go. We are so close,with instant world-wide communication, and it is the best of times. But we are so much in apoplectic panic about loss of control and the risks of not being "number one" that it is the worst of times.
I agree that humans, or cells, or corporations, or nations left to their own devices and free-will will behave badly. I also believe that, as our human bodies discovered, it is still possible to constrain that free-will without killing it, if some level of submission to the whole is accepted.
It's not a loss - it's a gain. It's giving up a false hope of something we could never have for a real plan for getting something we could all use, and a world economy and political and military system that isn't as unstable and prone to collapse or self-destruction as this one.
I should state that my thinking here is guided by my own limited understanding of the teachings of the Baha'i Faith, and I recommend reading up on it directly for any readers who are not familiar with it. But, I am not the spokesman for the Baha'is, so I'll simply close with their own statement on the subject:
If the Baha'i experience can contribute in whatever measure to reinforcing hope in the unity of the human race, we are happy to offer it as a model for study.Wade
From: The Promise of World Peace, a statement of the Baha'i Universal House of Justice, October, 1985.
Here's the Dicken's quote in context:
Photo credit: "fighting fan" by K0P (on flickr)
- It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
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