This interview in Grist Magazine (via Conservation News) of James Gustave Speth, dean of Yale's environment school, reveals an aspect of the problems with the environmental movement noted in the earlier post Natural Theology; the failure to learn from past experience. Speth still thinks that society can be changed by a cadre of committed agents with strong leadership, even though the 20th century made clear what prior history showed many times; you can't predictably change society, it changes itself as it will. Well being is an emergent property of healthy systems rather than an engineered result.

Speth's anachronistic views are clear in this interview exchange

Grist: What could the environmental movement be doing better or differently to attract new people?

Speth: One thing is clear: The needed changes will not simply happen. No hidden hand is guiding technology or the economy toward sustainability. The issues on the global environmental agenda are precisely the type of issues -- long-term, chronic, complex -- where genuine, farsighted leadership from elected officials is at a premium. But we have not seen this leadership emerge, and we have waited long enough. What we need now is an international movement of citizens and scientists, one capable of dramatically advancing the political and personal actions needed for the transition to sustainability.

Authoritarian approaches to social change based on the vision of self anointed prophets are counterproductive. They fail to promote desirable change, polarize society and cause backlash. This is the regressive rather than the progressive approach. This is a character defect, a personal failing of socialization, coupled with intellectual poverty, a failure of scholarship. A useful example of a paleo-environmentalist, Donella Meadows, that had a Damascene conversion was noted in the earlier post, Mental Tools.

People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.

I assumed that at first too. We all assumed it, as eager systems students at the great institution called MIT. More or less innocently, enchanted by what we could see through our new lens, we did what many discoverers do. We exaggerated our own ability to change the world. We did so not with any intent to deceive others, but in the expression of our own expectations and hopes. Systems thinking for us was more than subtle, complicated mindplay. It was going to Make Systems Work.

But self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can't optimize; we don't even know what to optimize. We can't keep track of everything. We can't find a proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create, if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror.

Unreconstructed authoritarians do a lot less predicting and engineering these days but they are no wiser. They have substituted "vision" for prediction and control as the foundation of the great leaps forward. We are asked to believe that such leaders have had revelations now that we have become scoffers about prediction. Apparently they didn't get the word that we became scoffers about vision even earlier.

Those who are better socialized and that have modern mental tools have a better appreciation for how systems change themselves in response to information. Each component of a system alters its behavior in situationally appropriate ways in response to information. The quality of change varies, some make mistakes while others make brilliant moves, but the system as a whole adjusts. The most effective thing we can do to accelerate human social change is to spread high quality information as widely as possible. The world needs information not persuasion.

Speth's beliefs not only blind him to effective techniques for fostering social change, they prevent him from seeing the changes in progress. While he and his fellow travelers have spun in confusion the world has been progressing towards sustainability. Though there are many more of us and we are very much more secure and comfortable than in the past, our impact on the environment is shrinking. We don't yet have a desirable and sustainable civilization but we are working toward that at every level of society. As with any system some of us, the agents, make mistakes and suffer while some of us make brilliant choices. To understand the vector of change all of the individual vectors must be added rather than dwelling on errors in the mistaken belief that each must be corrected. Error is information too, a necessary ingredient of progress.

Understanding how systems work, their need for accurate information, reveals the damage authoritarians such as Speth cause. Their attempts to persuade rather than inform lead them to spread false information. They exaggerate some information and suppress other information in the attempt to shape the public dialog, to force the social mind in directions divined by the prophets to be good. But since they don't, and can't, have complete control dissenters out them and attempt counter information war; meme war. This degrades society, slows it by making it necessary to decrypt the various lies to find nuggets of solid information. Speth and fellow travelers are social vandals, nihilists doing social damage for the pleasure of doing damage, to satisfy their emotional needs.

There are things we can do collectively to help society improve itself. We can work to discover empirical truth and work to make it widely available. To do so we must understand more about social networks, the importance of reputation rather than authority in peer-to-peer networks. We must understand more about human behavior both individually and in groups. We must like and trust humans, admire their achievements, empathize with their troubles and help them do as they will rather than as we insist. The desirable and sustainable civilization they will create isn't predictable, and isn't certain, but if it can be done they will have to do it.