Little of the commentary or punditry about terrorism and current military efforts is either interesting or insightful. Timothy Burke at Easily Distracted has posted the exceedingly rare exception.

If you support the war as part of a battle against illiberalism, then illiberal conduct by your own "side" in the war has to mean something to you, have inescapable implications for your struggle. You can't just shrug off the creation of a gulag in Guantanamo where people have no rights, or evidence of a consistent policy of humiliation and abuse.

To understand this as a conflict that is resolvable strictly through military means or through the imposition of formalist structures is my mind to absolutely and completely misunderstand the nature of the larger conflict against terrorism...

Those who do misunderstand it this way almost all share two things. One, a belief in the universal and inescapable obligations of modern liberalism. It’s no accident that some Marxists, some liberals and many neoconservatives have found the war attractive, because they all derive tremendous intellectual strength from unversalist frameworks. This I find laudable and important and I recognize many supporters of the war who take this approach as intellectual cousins...

But these supporters on both left and right share another attribute which I do not share: a belief that liberalism comes from above, that it can be imposed by power, that it emanates from the structure of the state and is guaranteed by securing a working monopoly on the means of violence. Equally, these thinkers share a belief that illiberalism and oppression emanate from the top, have their source in malformed states and ruling elites who have illegitimately seized control of the state in spite of the natural and rational desire of most people for liberal democratic norms. In essence, many of them--some from the left, some from the right--are statists. This is what the shorthand of "Wilsonian" is all about: a grab-bag aggregate that usefully links ideologically diverse arguments through their common understanding of the nature of political change and the sources of illiberalism in the world.

Fundamentally, this is a clash between different models of change-by-design in the world, of how one does praxis. Even when I was more strongly influenced by Marxism, I was always drawn to the Gramscian vision of politics, to the notion of a “war of position”, because that seemed much closer to me to how meaningful, productive, generative change in the world actually comes about, in the messiness of everyday life, in the small and incremental transformation of consciousness. I do not believe, and have never believed, in revolutionary change, in the proposition that a sudden, sharp disjuncture between the flawed present and the shining future can be produced by a seismic transformation of social structure directed by the state, by political vanguards or other major social institutions that possess strong governmentality.

Real revolutions happen in history, and they are genuinely disjunctive, deeply and abruptly transformative. The ones that are productive largely happen by accident. They happen because smaller social transformations have been building towards a point of criticality, towards a sudden phase change. They do not happen by design or intention. Real revolutions can be guaranteed by changes at the top, by the creation of laws and rights and constitutions, but they don't come from those things.

Burke expresses in terms of political philosophy what students of complex adaptive systems can recognize as obvious good sense. In philosophical terms it is not obvious nor are the views widely shared. Most of those who oppose the current wars do so without useful understanding, more motivated by crude partisanship and a visceral dislike of the US administration. Most of those who support the war are equally clueless, often not even sharing the views of liberal internationalists that approve of foreign intervention in principle to achieve ideological objectives. Even Burke is not often lucid on these issues as he struggles with his own emotional antipathy to Bush, often succumbing to rage without reason.

Liberal internationalists, AKA neo-conservatives, though liberal internationalism, as Burke notes, is far older, make the same mental errors as the failed environmentalists discussed in Mental Tools. Their crude and false understanding of Systems Dynamics - warped by their socio-political context - is parallel to the liberal internationalist approach to terrorism.

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.

Meadows deserves partial credit for recognizing failure but still fails to grasp the causes. It is true that some minds formed in the industrial world have a mechanistic understanding of the world, a simplified or naively reductionist world view insufficiently cognizant of complexity or contingency, but Meadows still fails to grasp Burke's point that it is false to think that "liberalism comes from above, that it can be imposed by power, that it emanates from the structure of the state and is guaranteed by securing a working monopoly on the means of violence". Meadows retreated from control just slightly and offered seduction in place of conquest.

For those who stake their identity on the role of omniscient conqueror, the uncertainty exposed by systems thinking is hard to take. If you can't understand, predict, and control, what is there to do?

Systems thinking leads to another conclusion, however—waiting, shining, obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. It says that there is plenty to do, of a different sort of "doing." The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can't be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can't surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them.

No, we can't. We can't design or redesign natural systems whether they are ecologies or societies. We can engage with them and influence them but the price is that we are influenced in return. There is no place we can stand outside the system, no designers sky box from which to watch the game and send in advice to the coaches. We are all on the field and disengagement is not a valid option. We can't win, we can't break even and we can't get out of the game. All we can do is play and try to give as good as we get for as long as we are able.

Understanding of these truths can be arrived at by several paths, several ways of knowing, and that is what I find useful in Burke's post. He has expressed a useful insight in a cross disciplinary manner that can be understood by both political philosophers and natural philosophers.

» Sublimation from Crumb Trail
Up for even more quasi-political ranting with a geeky twist? If so, see this post beating an empty place where a horse once died so long ago it has since evaporated. The continued beating may be merely obsessive and I'm sure it's ineffective.......[read more]
Tracked: May 24, 2004 02:53 PM