THE VIEW FROM COMPLEXITY
This is not a Schelling simulation.
by hanzi freinacht
In our days, there is a lot of talk about chaos and complexity. And it’s not just buzz and academic fashion—as some commentators have claimed—but a real development that has bearings on pretty much all the sciences.
When it comes to understanding society, you have the mushrooming field of complexity economics and some very promising developments in mathematical sociology. Major sociologists like the recently deceased John Urry have attempted to draw conclusions for a view of society, what you might call “a view from complexity”.[i] You even have a gathering of prominent scientists called the “Gulbekian Commission” in which Immanuel Wallerstein (the originator of the world-systems theory, which is a big deal in leftwing economics) works together with the systems theorist and chemist Ilya Prigogine (he won a Nobel Prize but his reputation has since been tarnished due to his spiritual leanings) to help introduce the understanding of chaos, complexity and emergence into our way of thinking about society.
I suppose you could say that you have preludes to this development already in the so-called cybernetics back in the 1950s—and notably in the work of the polymath biologist Gregory Bateson.
Today, the by far best source for understanding chaos and complexity is the Santa Fe Institute, a research center that gathers some of the top people in computational science and actually from most other sciences (in Santa Fe, New Mexico).[ii] And you have a growing community of people from around the world—from all sciences—who are inspired by the work of Albert-László Barabási, a Hungarian physicist known for his work on network theory.
But when it comes to understanding society and politics, what is the “view from complexity”? Can we bring it down to some general understanding? Yes, we can.
One of the first examples of complexity taught in textbooks is what they call a Schelling simulation. And it shows us something about how racism and segregation works. Basically it’s a chessboard with rings and crosses that move across the board. Every time you press enter on the computer, the rings and crosses move one step or stay put. So you keep pressing enter and the markers keep moving around the chessboard.
Now if you program the rings and crosses to only have a slight preference for moving closer to their own kind, patterns will soon emerge and stabilize: patterns of dramatic segregation. And not only that—in some cases a somewhat lower level of preference your own kind can cause a more segregated chessboard.
If you look at the pattern that emerges, you would think that these rings and crosses must be really racist. But that’s not necessarily the case. They’re just a little racist. The dramatic segregation is an emergent property of the system as a whole. Where a leftwing, critical sociologist would rage against power structures and the historical supremacy of rings over crosses, and the psychoanalyst would speculate about a deeply ingrained racism in their unconscious, with the view from complexity one sees that these explanations can only ever be very partial. Relatively small, simple changes in the behaviors of each single ring or cross can produce an entirely different chessboard.
And you would think that racism is a nasty variable that “causes” segregation. But sometimes, even tolerance can actually “cause” segregation. There is no “evil essence” that you can get rid of; only variables you can tweak, with different—often unexpected and counter-intuitive—results.
With the view from complexity, it becomes apparent that you can’t really blame the individual behaviors of the many people who interact, and you can’t really identify an evil “power structure” out there, which you can just get rid of and things will be fine. You have to look at the rules of the game, at the patterns of interactions, and how we create one another through those interactions—and how that in turn produces society as a whole.
If you want to change society, you need to change these games. You have to change minute things in people’s behaviors and you have to develop the quality of their relationships.
Let’s take another example, one from criminology and police research. In 1992, a British criminologist named Robert Reiner noted that there appear to be five interacting mechanisms that make the police direct more attention towards certain ethnic minorities:
Categorical discrimination, i.e. that the police themselves choose to stop and frisk more black people (or other minorities).
Transferred discrimination, i.e. that people in the general public call the police more often when they see black people around.
Interactional discretion, i.e. that the police have more cultural difficulties when it comes to interacting with certain groups and hence more often end up in situations that escalate to violence and arrest.
Institutionalized discrimination, i.e. that some areas with higher criminality are patrolled more and thus more people in these areas are put under surveillance.
Statistical discrimination, i.e. that the crime statistics of certain groups start bad cycles as the police direct their attention to these groups and hence reinforce the statistical overrepresentation of criminality within this group.
Reiner contended that categorical discrimination—the one we generally think of when it comes to police racism—is the least powerful mechanism. In other words, Reiner was telling us that the rules of the game generated racism and discrimination (rather than the racism of the police officers themselves).[iii] In my own work on police ethnography, I have found plenty of reasons to believe that Reiner was right. With the view from complexity you see, again, that racism is an emergent pattern; a phenomenon that emerges not through the actions of individual people, but as a result of the interactions of many different people.
Another example: sexist commercials. A lot of women feel objectified. They also feel that they have to compare themselves to constantly tooted impossible ideals whenever they move around downtown. It’s everywhere: fashion models wearing the latest underwear, being all thin when they eat ice-cream with perfect skin and perfect teeth. It’s just too much; it makes a lot of women and young girls uncomfortable (and it has psychologically adverse effects on men as well). Surely it must be the social power of males and patriarchy, allied to capitalism, that subjects us to this treatment?
Well, think about it. If only some people are only a little more likely to buy things when the person on the commercial is more good-looking, this means that the companies that have more good-looking people in their ads will sell a little more. And in the long run, they will outcompete those that don’t. This means that most companies are likely to have good-looking models on pictures with their products. And not only that, the companies who then have more good-looking people, and are better at displaying them, will have an advantage over the others. This creates a competition ad absurdum—a bizarre race for sexiness, which in turn creates a whole market for marketing companies, models, photographers and photoshoppers.
Now ask yourself—and be honest—do you yourself have a slight tendency to spontaneously like good-looking people better? If your honest answer is yes—and it is—this means that you have just explained a large part of our super-sexist woman-objectifying urban landscapes. This small, relatively innocent urge within yourself is what grows through complex interactions and creates a terribly sexist society that nobody wants and many of us are suffering from.
Adam Smith, the father of economics, described “the invisible hand” of the free market, i.e. the emergent property of economic growth and increasing wealth within industrializing open markets. But there is really no reason to assume that the invisible hand only does benevolent things. The moment we look away, it can also subject us to racism, sexism and environmental degradation.
The view from complexity may seem less exciting than images of a villainous patriarchy or the grim towers of capitalism. Somehow, it seems silly to gather in the hundreds and march down the street shouting: “Let’s develop our behaviors and slightly tweak the games of everyday life so that we, together, in the long run, produce dramatically better emergent properties!” There’s just not that oomph, not that “zing”. If you know what I mean.
But here’s the deal. The more primitive and stupid your ideas about society, the cruder your “bad-guy theory” will be. To the Nazis, the bad-guys are the Jews, plain and simple. To the nationalist conservatives, the bad-guys are not necessarily Arabs, but certain problematic aspects of their culture and religion. To the modern libertarian, the bad-guys are laziness and lacking sense of responsibility—and all those pesky leftwing control freaks. To the Left it is capitalism. To the critical sociologist it is power structures. To the ecologist it is industrialism and a consumer society disconnected from the ecological systems.
To the metamodernist, there are almost no bad-guys left, nobody and nothing to blame: not even an impersonal structure. With the view from complexity, there is only the painstaking tweaking of many small things that can help us fix the failures of our society and mitigate the tragedies of existence. Fighting the power structures and killing the Jews might be more exciting. But it won’t solve our problems, I’m afraid.
From The Listening Society published by Metamoderna ApS (March 10, 2017)
Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian and sociologist, author of the books The Listening Society, Nordic Ideology and The 6 Hidden Patterns of World History. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps.
footnotes
[i] Urry, J., 2002. Global Complexity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
[ii] See their excellent introductory courses on www.complexityexplorer.org.
[iii] Reiner, R., 1992. The Politics of the Police. London: Wheatsheaf.