Question Everything

Human social organization governance and sapience

What goes around comes around.

Long ago, before the advent of agriculture, the tribe was generally a collection of related and near related men, women, and children. Several of the men and women were old! They were the grand fathers and grand mothers. They did not reproduce, but assisted younger parents in raising their children, probably by instruction and demonstration to the young while the parents were gathering supplies.

Some of the old folk had accumulated tacit knowledge of how the world worked and what were the best behaviors to perform in various situations. They were the wise ones. The others listened and learned. They respected the wise ones precisely because they had lived so long and therefore, by evolutionary definition, were successful.

Larger tribes were organized and coordinated by the group of wisest of the old; I'd like to believe both men and women were afforded this position. The tribe followed the lead of the wise council not out of fear of retribution by the old ones, but by recognizing wisdom when they saw it. There is a form of wisdom of youth that allows one to appreciate the wisdom of age.

Then, about 10,000 years ago people turned to animal and plant husbandry as a substitute for making a living — producing food at a single site and forgoing migrations or wandering. It was a radical innovation. It took considerable cleverness for humans to recognize the advantage of farming over hunting and gathering. Except, it wasn't the advantage they thought. Farming does allow one to minimize one's energy expenditure to obtain an energy source in the short run. But at the expense of the flexibility and long-run nutritional advantages of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

It also required something else from them in terms of their mental models of the world. They needed to organize much more quickly. They needed to control nature immediately around them much more thoroughly. And these needs meant they had to control one another more strictly to make the energy advantage of agriculture work for them. A new emphasis on a hierarchy of human decision-makers emerged. Its form was quite different from the previous council of elders because it needed to accomplish coordination of the social grouping differently. Specialization set in more deeply as the skills of any given job type in agriculture and later, support of agricultural workers in the form of manufacture of plows, harnesses, etc, created the need for social centers — villages.

Another need for coordination soon emerged in the forms of trade with other villages and protection of the land. Now, the emphasis on controlling by power had become ingrained in human psyche. And the co-evolution of culture and human consciousness took off.

No longer was there selection for wisdom. No longer were the elderly as important to society for their accumulated wisdom of how to live in general. Now their value was strictly in how they could take care of the homestead and train children to do the trades they had done when they were younger. Education turned from learning to live and appreciate and understand to learning to work.

For the last 8 to 9 thousand years we have emphasized this kind of social framework as the world grew progressively, if slowly or in fits at times, toward greater and greater complexity as humans exercised their cleverness in so many ways.

Now mind you, I don't claim that all of this was bad. Cleverness is a good thing. We have improved the comfort in living. We have improved the enjoyment of aspects of life. We've learned incredible knowledge about how the world really works such that we are freed, if we choose to be so, from the mystical and magical explanations that our wiser, but ignorant ancestors lived believing.

No. The evolution of culture and knowledge and energy extraction has evolved exactly as might have been predicted from general evolution theory.

I can't help but wonder, though, if there had been a bit more balance between sapience and cleverness, would we have been in such a hurry to try new things? Might there have been a world in which atom bombs did not exist but atomic energy did? It is fun to speculate, but not worth much more than that. The world is the way it is. For the past several thousand years mankind has been engaged in actively selecting against wisdom and for power and cleverness. And that is just the way it is.

Except today it looks like all that power and cleverness have doomed humanity to extinction! Many very serious and very smart people are coming to that conclusion. Between global warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, sudden decline of energy availability after pumping oil out of the ground as if there were an infinite supply, and all of the old pestilences, wars, diseases, and selfish behavior, it looks like mankind has fouled the nest beyond repair. There are now so many of us that we, as a species, confiscate nearly a fourth of the world's primary production even though many more of us go hungry than eat enough to bulk our bodies. We are in a great deal of trouble and our current forms of government are failing to do the right things. They never could because we are no longer a sapient species.

Hope is not lost entirely. As with any characteristic — take intelligence for example — the human genetic pool will always contain variants with extreme consequences for development of the phenotype. Think the bell curve. Suppose that the genetic basis for sapience, what causes the prefrontal cortex to develop the way it does, follows a similar curve. Suppose there are people in the population who actually have not only the ancient propensity for sapience but have actually inherited a more advanced capacity. They would be the equivalent of sapience geniuses, far out in the right tail of the Gaussian distribution!

Now suppose we could find such people and nurture their sapience from an early age. And suppose we finally heed Plato's call for philosopher kings. Imagine a council of wise elders in place of a single executive. Imagine wise elders in the congresses or parliaments. Imagine wise judges. It's hard to do it because we've so rarely seen it. Wisdom is exceedingly rare because it depends on both the sapience processing competency of the brain and tacit knowledge of how to live life. The latter was largely killed of in the population by our rush to advance culture. The latter isn't really possible since living life now involves a thoroughly materialistic set of values (with occasional lapses of spiritual longing for something more).

I would have mankind recognize this picture. I would have us use our cleverness to understand this as best we can and to promote the wellbeing of highly sapient individuals.

Knowing as I do the legends of utopia and how we often turn the stories around to become frankesteinian (can't have too much of a good thing, right?), I realize that this isn't likely to happen. But perhaps those few wise folk who have grasped their situation will take steps to ensure their survival through what may very well be a not-too-far-off evolutionary bottleneck event.

All humans have hope.

How does Hierarchical Control Systems Theory help us?

In my last blog I asserted that a hierarchical control system (HCS) is nature's way of getting things to work together for the good of all. That is, I think, what we want from our government and social system. There is, of course, lots of wiggle room in the phrase, 'good of all'. What is good might depend on who is using the phrase. Nevertheless, we could probably agree that some kind of stability in income prospects, a reasonably comfortable standard of living, health care, and minimizing our fears of an unfair world would count as good things. The question then might be phrased: What kind of governance (remember this means government, economic system, and laws) would achieve this in this day and age?

To probe this question further I want to continue to explore HCS as a natural progression of governance as systems, be they animal brains or corporations, become more complex in a complex world.

A preliminary caveat: If you disbelieve the theory of evolution then you need read no further. Everything said here depends on a clear understanding of both the special evolution of biological species (neoDarwinism) and general evolution of systems. In biology (and the universe) "...nothing makes sense except in light of evolution." Theodore Dobzhansky. [My added perspective.]

Also, if you are a libertarian you can skip this post as it will probably make your blood boil. In fact unless you are open to learning principles from nature you might as well find something else to read, because this post will challenge many fondly held beliefs about governance, free market economies and democratic process. Leave your guns and ideologies at the entrance please.

There is a general law of evolution that goes something like this: As complexity increases an autonomous, adaptive agent (a special kind of dynamic system) must also evolve more regulatory mechanisms in order to maintain stability in the face of a changing environment. Evolution by selection means that any system that realizes less stability internally, or less capacity to remain stable in the environment will not pass into the next generation (or time period). It will either self destruct from within, or be culled from a competitive world.

More complexity, more regulation, both internal (operations) and external (behavior). It really is that simple. And it applies to all agents (systems). Examples in nature and even human organizations abound. In biological evolution this happens at the species level, more or less. But in more complex systems with looser boundary conditions, like ecosystems and corporations, the evolution takes place within the 'body' over a long time scale. Even so the principle of emergence of hierarchical control can be found in all of these systems. [Note: ecosystems are more loosely bounded than corporations and it is trickier to locate the mechanisms of some of the control loops, but they can be found when you know what to look for. I will try to provide a few examples as we go.]

Complexity is defined roughly as related to the number of different kinds of internal components, the number of different kinds of relationships those components can have with one another, and weighted in some way by the total number of each kind of component. Put simply, the more different kinds of things that go on inside a system (say your body) the more complex is that system. Similarly the external environment of the agent can be described in terms of complexity. The more kinds of things that an agent encounters in its environment, and the more kinds of interactions those things can have with each other and with the agent, the more complex the environment is. Both of these complexities have to be considered since the internal complexity determines how well the components work together to maintain the internal stability of the system. At the same time external complexities have to be considered in terms of the system making correct choices and behaving in ways to survive.

Markets are mediums of exchange and nothing more. They are a form of cooperation that works well when complete information is available for all parties. Cooperation is good. It is OK that a market is the only mechanism for achieving cooperation when systems are relatively simple. It also works best when cheaters don't muck up the works. Lately we've had ample examples of how this happens. But if the system is evolving in complexity and into more complex environments, internal cooperation just doesn't cut it.

As a system becomes more complex the opportunities for 'honest' competition among internal components increases with a subsequent reduction in both performance and efficiency. At some point in the evolution of a system competition overtakes or overshadows cooperation. Also, as complexity increases, the availability of relevant information degrades. Causal mechanisms become hidden from view and so agents have difficulty discerning the actual value of exchanges.

Sometime prior to the point at which competition begins to predominate and the system begins to break down, some sub-systems emerge as providing an information brokerage service that allows agents to cooperate somewhat better. This service can co-evolve with the agents such that the latter develop adaptive mechanisms internally tuned to the information service supplied by the broker. This is actually the beginning of evolution of control mechanisms - regulators in a cybernetic sub-system.

A higher level of regulation, above multiple operational units, evolves the capacity to coordinate the operations of these units. That is the meta-cybernetic sub-system takes over logistical and tactical decision making as I described in the last post.

In the case of animal brains this is reflected in the evolution of brain areas devoted to regulating bodily functions, controlling motor outputs, and coordinating appropriate behaviors based on information about the environment. Even very primitive animals have these functions and brains to match. As evolution has proceeded, animals with more elaborate control sub-systems have emerged to deal with more complex environments (niches) and having more complex bodies to do so.

Companies that grow from small operations to giant corporations show the same progression in developing management systems that cover these basic functions (along with strategic management).

Ecosystems have evolved in the fashion of certain species fulfilling roles at various 'trophic', that is, energetic, levels. Some species such as top carnivores regulate the abundance of food species, but in turn, are regulated by the latter in terms of controlling populations in a feedback loop. Logistically, the mixes of species in the system act to regulate the trophic flows.

It is inevitable that for a system to survive in a more complex environment it must develop more complex internal systems and therefore more elaborate regulating sub-systems. Furthermore, those regulators are going to exactly follow the form of the hierarchical control system discussed before. There are deep theoretical reasons for this that I couldn't adequately cover right now. But please believe me, this is the way of nature when it comes to control systems.

How does this relate to the governance of human society? I suspect that we have, through our own ingenuity, created a far more complex world than might have been appreciated by the founding fathers of the US (as one example). In fact I claim that the US government itself, as well as the democratic process for choosing who will participate in that government, has evolved exactly as expected. The various regulatory agencies such as the EPA are responses to the need for coordination level control. This is totally within keeping in the evolution of HCS.

Even the strategic level of control (represented by the prefrontal cortex in the human brain) is established in the Constitution in terms of the triune government model. The federal government fulfills the role of a strategic level control system — or at least it tries to.

The problem we have now is that while these systems are emerging and evolving toward their place in an HCS for social governance, they are still at an early emergence stage. As I have argued previously, the components of the government system are still ordinary human beings who have pretty ordinary levels of sapience or capacity for wisdom. And it isn't adequate for the job. Neither the citizens of such a complex social system nor the public servants they elect are adequately wise to make the right choices in elections and in policy. The government is imperfect, not because it is too big (according to the Republican mind set) or too incompetent in dealing with social issues (according to the Democrat mind set) but that it is based on human agents to achieve cooperation and coordination (and strategic vision). And those human beings are incompetent.

So what is the alternative? That is a good question. Humans are all we have to work with. As long as we formulate strict bureaucracies humans perform OK. We're not asking much of them. But we already know that such systems, like planned economies, and autocratic rule, just don't work either. What can we do to improve the wisdom of government when the wisdom of the individual components is so lacking? To begin to answer this question we have to look at the source of sapience in human brains and how it results in wisdom in the life of the human. We need to understand at a much deeper level how a wise person might emerge from the actions of non-wise neural networks. From insights gained there we might discern an outline for a form of government that transcends the weaknesses of humans.

Oh, and it isn't about the wisdom of the crowd metaphor either!

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Sorry about the image in the last post

The image in the last post is too big for the Typepad format so here is the URL to it:
http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/Background/basicPlan1.gif

You can see most of it in the post, but in case you were interested.

George

If not democracy, then what?

Recapping: democracy, even the representative form, requires citizens to be sufficiently cognizant of the nature of the issues that they can meaningfully participate in decisions regarding policy and who will represent them. The American experiment has proven something less than successful in that the modern citizen seems unable to cope with the immensity of the problems facing humanity. Citizens are under-educated and over-self-indulgent. Failing to understand the deeper significance of most of the issues facing them, they elect whoever 'looks' the best rather than who 'thinks' the best.

So is this a strictly American outcome? Is this due to a uniquely American psyche rather than a fault of democracy? That, of course, is a little harder to answer. Many European democracies have fared reasonably well. But I think even they have begun to show signs of weakness. As the American propensity to get caught up in the consumption and debt debacle seems to spread to other countries and cultures, we see signs of fabric rending there as well. It may be that democratic principles, while understandably better than historical autocratic rule, are still not completely adapted to provide an optimal organizing principle for humanity. Might there be some other form of organizational structure and decision process that better suits us?

It turns out that there is a natural form of organizational control for aggregates of purposive agents (you know like people) that evolves in systems that operate in highly dynamic and uncertain environments. We see its outline in human organizations like corporations and parliamentarian or legislative governments. It is hierarchical but not autocratic in its full form. The best model of this form of government is actually rattling around inside your head! It is called a hierarchical cybernetic system (HCS) — a control system — as you will see.

The HCS is divided into three layers or levels based on time scales and decision types. You will recognize the latter categorization immediately. It corresponds with the operational, tactical/logistical, and strategic decision-making in most organizations. Operational decisions are made roughly in real-time, the here and now. These are the decisions that keep the organization (and organism) running and responding to immediate environmental influences. In biology this is the level of physiology and homeostasis.

Logistical decisions are those designed to optimize the cooperation between operating sub-systems so that the system makes best overall use of resources and produces the best final product possible given constraints on availability of those resources. These decisions must be made over a somewhat longer time scale than operational decisions in that they are part of what conditions the latter. Logistical decision-making is associated with budgeting resources to the various components of a whole system.

Tactical decisions are involved with coordination between the whole system and its environment. Tactical generally refers to positioning ones self with respect to other agents in the environment in order to gain an advantage, or at least not loose an advantage. Most people are familiar with the military concept of tactics having to do with positioning troops for battle. This type of decision is also made over longer time scales than operational level decisions. It covers a broader scale in space and requires the decision-makers to have a good model of the environment and be in a position to anticipate other agents' movements (like a game plan).

Logistical and tactical decisions have to be made in cooperation. The logistics process has to provision operational units to meet tactical objectives. Hence they are at the same general level in terms of resources (allocated to making those decisions) and time domains.

Strategic decisions go far beyond tactical and logistical decisions in scales of both time and space. If tactics are about winning the battle, or raising sales, or capturing the prey, then strategics is about choosing which war to fight, which products and markets, and which prey and where to hunt. Strategic knowledge pushes farther into the future and looks farther afield in an overall planning effort to achieve some grander purpose.

Figure 1 shows the hierarchical structure of this cybernetic system.

Figure 1. The basic plan of a hierarchical cybernetic system.

Note a particular difference between this structure and more typical organizational structures that are shaped more like pyramids with single or few autocratic rulers at the top. In this diagram the more general form, in which strategic decisions are made by a much broader mechanism, shows that this kind of control system more closely resembles our democratic government structure. The strategic layer could easily be thought of as the federal government with its three branches making legislative, executive, and judicial kinds of decisions. So our government isn't that far away from the notion of a hierarchical control system. I'll be coming back to this observation in a bit.

But first I want to also show you that your brain is actually a hierarchical control system that evolved to allow you as an agent to act in an environment that includes (indeed is largely comprised of) other conspecific agents. The brain is sometimes viewed as composed of three basic and evolutionarily accreted parts. This is the Triune Brain theory. The core of the brain evolved in early reptiles. It takes care of all the operational level controls such as contracting the right muscles for motion, maintaining heart rates and blood chemistry, and interacting with the hormonal systems to regulate basic body functions (an early form of logistical control). Wrapped around this core, and having evolved in the early mammals and birds is the limbic system. This system provides for more elaborate tactical controls for mating, hunting, and offspring rearing, etc. More recent evolution of the limbic system includes emotions that couple tactical and logistical controls for better coordination between internal body states and external environment states.

Finally, the neocortex in the most recently evolved mammals and particularly in primates provides for a system that allows learning and adaptation based on highly changeable conditions in the environment. More elaborate behavior and more choices require strategic, e.g. longer-term planning. For most mammals, including our primate cousins, long-term means days, or possibly seasons (when the fruit ripens or migrations). The cerebral brain builds larger, more elaborate models of the world and uses those models to anticipate events and changes in a larger space-time framework.

In humans, the neocortex is most highly developed overall, but especially in the frontal lobes, which expanded greatly relative to the rest of the brain between 100k and 200k years ago. The frontal lobes are involved in what are called executive functions with respect to managing working memory and modulating emotions. In humans, not only did the frontal lobes expand tremendously, but the prefrontal cortex, the bulge of tissue right behind the eyebrows, expanded most of all. And this portion of brain is what is involved in the personal self. The self-aware self. It is also involved in our understanding of other selves, i.e. other people. This patch of neurons, etc. computes the most elaborate version of strategic control we know of.

Now, back to government. Your brain is the government of your person. You have autonomy because your strategic control system gives you a much wider view of the world and understanding of motives and feelings of other people. It is what makes you understand how the world works and what you need to do to work in that world to advantage. What if our social government were more like such an elaborate hierarchical control system with a well-developed strategic control layer?

Our current governance consists of a government that is attempting to provide strategic control but has not been constituted well to achieve that end. The reason is that we as individuals are not wise enough to elect the right representatives to do the strategic decision making. In other words, the real problem with our kind of government is that democracy as practiced is like choosing incompetent neurons to run our prefrontal cortex. In fact this is exactly what is going on in teenage and early adult development when the frontal lobes are still maturing. Judgment isn't the strong suit of people in this age bracket because their neurons are still incompetent (still developing).

The other major component of our governance approach is the so-called free market, or market mechanisms to arbitrate logistical (distribution of wealth) and tactical (foreign trade) decisions. Free(ish) markets allow agents to negotiate exchanges of value such that each agent receives what is dearer to her and, in a world of expanding opportunities, both can, in principle, walk away happy. But it really isn't a form of coordination. It is more of a cooperation based on goodwill. Early in the origin of life when molecules of varying kinds entered into autocatalytic cycles and formed the precursors of cellular metabolism some of those molecules found a kind of symbiotic cooperation with each other led to stability and a chance to replicate. Again when single celled eukaryotes began to form colonies (e.g. Euglena the control structure was strictly a chance cooperation between agents. Ecosystems today are another model of economy where market-like exchanges take place (usually not to the liking of the prey). So a phase of evolution in which cooperation between operational units is the major form of control is clear.

Coordination is the next phase in systems evolution. Coordination exists when one or more operational processes evolves a capability of processing information about other cooperating processes and provides a control feedback signal to those processes to enhance the cooperation. For example, nerve networks (no brains) in sponges is an example of this kind of early specialization (germ cell specialization was evolving at about the same time) of cells to help coordinate an otherwise merely cooperating mass of cells. Such examples of specialization for information and control processing are myriad in biology.

Thus, market economies are OK for cooperation-level control, but are insufficient for coordination control and totally useless for strategic control. Unfortunately for libertarians and other free-market advocates, this is a very primitive and ineffective mechanism for maintaining long life and stability in complex systems. Among other deficiencies it is simply too slow to provide fast, appropriate response to shocks. The market does play a role in small-scale, local transactions that merely involve trade of real value (no speculative instruments please).

But that is where we are today. We have a primitive version of strategic control based on immature decision processors (and a little too autocratic, it turns out, with unitary executive privileges!) We have a very primitive version of logistical control with markets alone (and note that we have moved steadily toward increasing market coordination controls up to the Reagan administration). And with democracy as practiced we have no good way of letting the system evolve to a more natural and effective structure, namely a true hierarchical control system similar in competency as the human brain.

This is just the beginning of exploration of this subject. It is obviously a big topic. If you have stayed with me this far you might be able to guess at the next question. How can we organize our political and governance systems to become more strategic and purposeful? Stay tuned.

How is representative democracy working out for us in the modern world?

The concept of democracy depends on citizens who understand the issues and the way things work. Representative democracy was born of a recognition that not all citizens can have such an understanding, but that there are a few people who are intelligent enough and wise enough to have that understanding of the world as it became more complex and more integrated (a republican federation). These few — leaders — would represent the interests of all of their constituents in a near-democracy.

But that was a world in which the biggest issues were farming, and manufacture and trade of basic goods. That was a world in which the most complex machines were precursors to the cotton gin (patented in 1793). That was a world that could be understood by intelligent and thoughtful people (in that day, of course, that would mean males).

That was also a time at the beginning of what would become a science and technology dominated world. Science was deepening and broadening in scope. Chemistry and physics were about to take off. It was blossoming as a source of understanding of how the world worked and, through technological exploitation, increasing the complexity of the human-built world. As this world became more complex and more dependent on technological advancement the ability for the common person with not much more than a high school education to understand their world (while making a living) could not keep up with the change.

Presumably the leaders, however, did still understand the issues and processes. The politics of representative democracy were and are based on geographical considerations. This is quite natural in a world of agriculture and low levels of distant communications and trade. The representative was tied to the geography to best represent the citizens of that region. As we moved into the industrial age the relationship  between governance and geography became less clear. Society was becoming more complex and travel, particularly with the invention of the automobile and the distilling of gasoline, became less restrictive. Cities were growing and people moved from region to region.  Still, the influence of science on society was not beyond the comprehension of those who chose a life of public service. Presidents like Hoover and Roosevelt (FDR) could readily understand the implications of electric power generation from great dams (Hoover and Grand Coulee). The issues were still oriented around people who, themselves were still capable of understanding the work they did, even if they were marginalized with respect to the whole process (think of Charlie Chaplain's "Modern Times"). Most work, in fact, involved trade skills in which the worker could see and understand his or her contribution. But the direction of change was starting to emerge. Politicians needed to understand the concerns of their still-geographically oriented constituencies, even while acknowledging the inherent conflicts between some regions - a competition for resources. Tensions were building in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Then came WWII and everything changed radically.

The science and technology outcomes of WWII were mind bending. The realms of science - atomic fission and bombs, chemicals like plastics, computers, and RADAR were far beyond any ordinary citizen. Indeed scientists themselves found it necessary to specialize. But most importantly, the public servants could no longer understand even a small part of how the world worked. One very under appreciated development during the war was the mathematical realm known as operations research. OR, as it is called, uses computational models to solve complex problems, usually attempting to find optimal solutions. An interesting aspect of OR is that it frequently produces results that can be counterintuitive. This aspect meant that once people were accustomed to the successes of OR, they became dependent on machine-based decision making. OR was quickly adopted by management as businesses were starting to grow to enormous sizes. Computers were adopted for more mundane tasks such as accounting, allowing corporations to handle unprecedented scales of sales and purchases. More and more of the jobs in business became opaque with respect to what the real products and services of the organization were.

People do 'something' for a living. They are given routines to follow. They have checklists to tick off. They do what they do and they get a check at the end of the week. How can anyone say what the relationship is between their check and what the did that week. In today's mechanical world there is little connection between effort and effect. Moreover, they are educated to do what they do. They are not educated to understand the world or how it works.

Citizens today have little to no comprehension of the important scientific knowledge needed to understand how and why things are happening. All they are left with today are "feelings" about their lives, their situations. All they have to gauge their situation is a sense of relative worth, a sense that comes from relative access to goods and services. All they can do is feel that they are not getting paid enough. All they can do is feel isolated from a community (churches today fill a big gap). All they can do is get a little good feeling from entertainment and toys.

And the would-be representatives? All they can do is pander to those feelings. They haven't either the intellectual capacity or the time or the judgment to sufficiently understand a modern world dominated by technology and spinning out of control. They are, after all, just human. They have to expend what intellectual resources they have on just understanding what about people's feelings will get them elected.

We are in an age when neither the citizen nor the representative/public servant has the capability to deeply grasp what is happening. None of their 'plans', none of their 'policies' even begin to reflect an understanding of how the modern world works. If it did, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in today.

Put simply, is the world too complex and dynamic for democracy, even representative democracy to work as a form of governance? Is the scale is too big? Indeed the scale is that of the earth as a whole, not just individual nations. Is the rate of change due almost completely to science and technology so far over the top that good old-fashioned deliberative democracy is doomed to the same historical garbage heap as feudalism and monarchies?

We have some serious problems that seem to reside in the twin concepts of democracy and free markets (including capitalism). Might not the solution start with questioning the notion that these bedrock ideas are made antique by a modern world needing better economics principles and better governance?

Might we have gotten it wrong about democracy?

What if we were wrong about democracy or even representative democracy (a republic) as being the best form of governance?

Bear with me. It's just a question.

I start by observing the political process as it has evolved in the United States. I'm old enough to claim I have had a reasonably sized window of observation. I first started thinking about politics while Ike was still in office (OK I was a bit precocious - I'm not ancient). I found it a peculiar process even then. But I went through public schools and learned all the necessary lessons on civics. Mostly I listened to and had no reason to not believe the story of democracy. I learned about the US's peculiar form and how it emerged after the revolution from England. I've read several of the Federalist Papers, especially No. 10, by James Madison, wherein the justification for representative democracy is explicated. And it seems to me that almost everything that Madison, Hamilton, and Jay warned us about the dangers of democracy are coming to pass.

Their argument for representative democracy was basically that it would avoid the problems associated with everyone, regardless of intellectual and learning background, having an equal vote on every issue that would come before the government. Aside from the sheer impossibility of providing timely information to the electorate, one argument for a republican form of governance (even so far as establishing an intervening body — the Electoral College — to determine who would sit in the executive seat) is that only a few citizens would ever rise to the level of competency, both in knowledge and reasoning ability, to have useful input on major decisions. They started with restrictions on who could vote — only the landed gentry — as a means for keeping the political process from degrading to argument among fools. Essentially they recognized the old saw that a camel is the result of a committee design of a horse.

Regrettably I have witnessed the phenomenon to which they alluded in the so-called shared governance of higher education. This concept, originally, I think, meant to provide faculties assurances of having and maintaining academic freedom (similar idea to Madison's notion of liberty) is embodied in several forms. Usually this is a senate body of representatives from all academic ares of a campus. The principle is that faculty share with administrators and regents (or similar governing boards) the decision powers regarding curriculum and other purely academic matters. Administrators are supposed to, well, administrate or manage resources to optimize the delivery of academic activities (generally categorized these days as teaching, research, and service). The whole governance structure is captured in a Faculty Code document similar to any constitution. And it really does look good on paper. The problem is how it works in practice.

After over 15 years in academia I am sorry to report that in practice I have seen the same kinds of phenomena take place as one finds in the national political process. To whit, faculty insisting on voting on issues that are not within their ken or even necessarily their authority under the code. I have sometimes characterized this as a personality trait of really smart people — I guess you have to be smarter than average to get a Ph.D. — who, by virtue of their title and position honestly believe they are perfectly free to hold any opinion on any topic and be right about it. I call it the I'm-supposed-to-know-everything syndrome. I've already blogged on the issue of critical thinking among some faculty so I won't revisit that complaint. But I suspect you get the idea.

Administrators are always under the gun to at least appear that they respect the spirit of shared governance so they frequently bring issues to faculty bodies that they should simply take care of themselves. They have a tendency to form committees for every little issue, with broad representation so that no one feels left out. Very egalitarian. But the problem with this is that it encourages people to think that they have some kind of right to vote on issues even if their opinion is uninformed. Ironically, these same people will argue that their opinion is informed, even if they demonstrate, through their actions and words, that it isn't. The I'm-supposed-to-know-everything syndrome again.

Now, I make this claim on the basis of personal observations of a good number of instances where I was involved with committee work in areas in which I did have expertise, working with people who simply believed they knew what they were talking about and invariably demonstrated that they didn't. I try to make it a habit to not volunteer for, or decline participation in, committees dealing with areas in which I have no expertise. So I hope I am consistent with not falling into the complaint I'm voicing here. I try to avoid speaking out on subjects that I know I have no explicit knowledge of, even when I have an opinion based on reasoning. I've learned (the hard way) that voicing an opinion based on reasoning, even so-called sound reasoning, when the premises which I used are not based on facts is generally a bad idea. People have been known to chide me for my silence in those situations!

Which leads me to the question and back to the political process that has evolved in the US (and elsewhere actually). The objective of democracy is liberty or freedom and participation in governance so as to assure that liberty. All well and good. But is that what we have achieved? A quick survey of politics and the government the US currently has suggests to me that we have not. Or rather that what we may have had for a time after the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified has eroded horribly and we have lost freedom. Indeed, with the election systems in place now, we can't even be sure that a single vote really counts for much. I think, and I believe by reading some political commentary, that many people believe our system is broken. I go further and wonder if it can be fixed.

I think I can point to a whole variety of problems that have led to this state of affairs, in the sense of proximate causes. Mass media and the rapidity of event reporting in a 24/7/365 news cycle enables more people to be informed nearly instantly. However, we strongly suspect that the media itself has been corrupted and what most people get is misinformation. The market-based economy and capitalism (both subjects I will be asking similar questions about) reinforce an illusion of freedom while advertising subverts rational choice in consuming. Certainly factionalism and lobbyist monies have brought Madison's fears to roost in Washington D.C. These and many other social forces (I include religious zeal among these) have contributed immediately to the destruction of what might have been liberty once. But they are only the proximate causes and symptoms rather than disease.

Given the examples from academia where very smart people often make foolish judgments about their own abilities to make decisions, I assert that, again, it isn't intelligence and creativity that are lacking in our world, in our species. It is the lack of a capacity to make good moral judgments on the broadest scales of space and time. It is the lack of higher sapience and the consequent lack of wisdom.

I've taken to characterizing sapience tersely as broad and long-term strategic thinking, based on comprehensive systemic thinking, and motivated by love for all aspects of the world, humanity and nature. I plan to go more deeply into all three of these in the future (my last blog introduced the idea that love, in its broadest sense, is an essential ingredient in wisdom). Strategic thinking involves the very human capability to model the complexities of the world (or in Homo sapiens case, a more limited portion of the world) in the mind and to anticipate future states and their consequences. This is essentially what strategic planning and management in organizations is all about. Systems thinking involves using intelligence and creativity within a framework of organization that accurately reflects how the world works in a general, abstract, sense. Chief among systems thinking components is recognizing interconnectedness of all other things and beings as well as understanding that everything is in dynamic evolution. Systems thinking applies to learning all the tacit knowledge that backs up sapience to produce wisdom.

In short, democracy would work if people were wise. Good judgment is crucial to good governance. Limited judgment, not limited intelligence, is what leads to the downfall of democracy and the failure of liberty. When too many people with too little adequate judgment are making the important decisions, we get what we have.

If this argument makes sense to you, you might end up feeling despair since looking around only exposes the poor judgments (as recognized after the fact) of so many leaders of late. But don't despair. There are no stone tablets inscribed with the words: "Democracy is the absolute best form of governance." It isn't a given that if the average person doesn't possess the wisdom of Solomon that we have a no-win situation. There are other routes to true liberty. We have to understand two things. What liberty means for human nature and how it can be realized in some other mechanism of governance. And to understand that we need to look to nature for systems of governance that actually work to achieve the result. It turns out that they are all around us. One example is the structure and function of the human brain itself! Your 'being' is governed yet your mind is free even when your body might be in shackles. Stay tuned for more.

Why can't we give love that one more chance?

 

Can't we give ourselves one more chance?
Why can't we give love that one more chance?
Why can't we give love give love give love?
Give love give love give love give love give love give love?

Under Pressure, Queen and David Bowie

OK, I admit it. I'm an unabashed lover of everything Queen! And at my age!

I actually didn't "discover" Queen until a little over a year ago. I had heard their popular (in the US) songs like We are the Champions and its companion, We will rock you, but I was only vaguely aware that they even went together. Same for Another one bites the dust. When I'm not listening to NPR on the radio I tune in an 'oldies' station and just let the music wash over me without paying much attention to the end-of-set announcements of who the artists were.

The first time I heard Bohemian Rhapsody was a snippet (the wild part) in a Wayne's World movie (OK, another guilty pleasure - Mike Myers). Another, more recent movie, Shawn of the Dead [What am I revealing about myself?!] had a scene with Don't stop me now and Shawn mentions Queen in a very funny line.

So little by little I had been growing in Queen consciousness over the years without realizing it. Our local oldies station started playing Bohemian often enough that I caught the whole thing and realized I actually liked it quite a lot. And I found out it was Queen. Then one day, I heard Under Pressure and was stricken. For whatever reason the words were completely intelligible and the message hit me like a brick.

Queen's music is, in my totally untrained ear's humble opinion, as rich in texture and nuance as the best classical works. I never thought I would hear myself saying so, but compared to my previous favorite band - The Beatles (who else?) - Queen takes the prize for fullness of experience. But back to the lyrics.

And in this case, specifically, with David Bowie's collaboration Under Pressure asks a very compelling question. As you should know by now I'm a sucker for good questions. After painting the picture of a world under stress, coming apart at the seams, they ask: "Why can't we give ourselves one more chance?" And then they answer it with another very good question: "Why can't we give love that one more chance?" That really is the question isn't it? Why can't we seem to achieve a world in which love, mutual respect, consideration, sharing, and all of the positive human capacities are the dominant characteristics of society. Isn't this what we expect the word 'civilization' to mean? Why aren't we, as a species, civil, not to avoid punishment, but because we love one another?

There are hints of answers. Consilience in the sciences of anthropology, evolutionary cognitive psychology, linguistics, and neurobiology is producing compelling evidence about the real nature of human nature. Put simply, humans, under pressure, seek to survive and that often means dominating, either by force of muscle or force of social messages. It is simple evolutionary logic for sentient beings who, for the vast majority of their history, lived in small tribal and familial groups.

As I have discussed in previous postings, my perspective is that humanity suffers from an imbalance between the raw combined powers of intelligence (problem solving) and creativity and the capacity to make good moral judgments to guide decisions in complex social matters — sapience. Humanity is under pressure due mostly to two factors. Its own ability to invent and construct artifacts has created a new world of things in the blink of an eye in evolutionary time scales. The world is incomprehensibly complex and generally beyond the human capacity to understand. The second factor is human numbers. There are just so many of us that it is beyond anyone's capacity to relate meaningfully to even a minuscule fraction of the people we encounter. We can't give love one more chance. We don't understand the pressure, and we don't have the capacity to love everyone.

It will take an extraordinary level of sapience, what I like to call eusapience, to produce an extraordinary level of wisdom. And it would take that level of wisdom to make good decisions that would lead to a better world - one with far less pressure. That wisdom could only work if the people are willing to acquiesce to those decisions. Even when the decisions might seem to go against conventional wisdom. That is where faith might be better applied, versus in religion. But, how sound is this logic if the premise is not fulfilled?

It is possible that normal variation in the human genome allows that there are some instances, some individuals, in the world today who possess at least the potential for this. If there are, and there is at least some recognition that these people should be our leaders, then it is possible that in spite of the 'normal' natures of humans to dominate under pressure, we could find a way to a better world. I have hope. I have observed a few individuals who, I think, rise to the level of eusapience and wisdom as evidenced in their works. I recognize them for the love that they have for the whole world. If there are a few that I have observed (and if I am correct about this), then there must be many more out there.

None of these people are currently in authoritarian leadership roles in the world. Many are, however, prominent leaders in their fields of endeavor. I suspect that most avoid the political limelight because they are wise enough to realize that that is a dead end for true leadership (at least in the US where money rules political process).

I'm betting that if you are reading this you have some thoughts about who is really wise enough to love and lead the world forward. Perhaps you'll share your thoughts. Why can't we give love (wisdom) that one more chance?