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Mistah Kurtz -- he dead. (II)
Can we devise complex social systems, better reflecting both the complexity of nature and our rapidly developing contemporary technologies? Most specifically, can we evolve governance? This is a question mostly ignored for the past century, outside brief flirtations with a sort of neo-Incan, industrial communism. With modernity, the great revolution of governance was the reintroduction of ancient republicanism, which proves increasingly insufficient and failing in regards to healthily influencing technological development, among plenty of other things.
The problem goes back well beyond republicanism to the birth and development of government itself. From the beginning, governance not simply shunned complexity, but actively sought to diminish it. The history of recorded government goes hand in hand with the rise of agrarianism, humanity's first powerful technological homogenizing of nature's complexity, promoting an ever decreasing selection of plants and animals.
Central control can only be realized via uniform, commanded standards, whether beliefs, laws, processes, or technologies. The need for standardization helped develop seemingly eternal cultural laws and commandments upheld by the rule of heavenly bestowed kings and emperors. Unlike the constantly interacting, ever evolving chaos, the rioting of nature, centralized governance sought to represent the immovable, the permanent.
Only for limited and relatively brief times in recorded history, with systems of democracy, did government become less stringent and more flexible, accomplished with government structures and processes demanding greater citizen participation, thus greater complexity, somewhat paradoxically accomplished atop a general ethos of citizen equality. However, modern republicanism sought to wrap itself in government's traditional mantle of permanence. The great democratic thinker Hannah Arendt noted many of the American founders sought to create a system of government for the ages. Modern republicanism could not gain legitimacy through ancient government notions of a supposed unchanging past, but through an eternal, unchanging future. The constitution became enshrined.
Thomas Jefferson, alone among America's founding pantheon, thought each generation should amend and restructure government. “Earth belongs to the living” and governance must evolve so “laws and institutions go hand in hand with progress of the human mind.” Creating a more complex democratic structure “is not to trust it all to one; but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to.” Jefferson understood democracy is directly opposite “the generalisng and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the Autocrats of Russia or France, or of the Aristocrats of a Venetian Senate,” and today's militaristic, corporate oligarchy of Washington DC.
In two letters, both written in 1816, he briefly outlined ideas for expanding democracy with the idea of “ward republics” instituted “by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great National one down thro’ all its subordinations.”
Jefferson continues,
“The elementary republics of the wards, the county republics, the State republics, and the republic of the Union, would form a gradation of authorities, standing each on the basis of law, holding every one its delegated share of powers, and constituting truly a system of fundamental balances and checks for the government.”
This essential understanding concerning checks and balances necessary for any self-government is lost to American education. It wasn’t just the three branches of government in Washington that served as checks and balances against concentration of unwarranted power, but just as importantly the structures of state and local government. Just as check and balances now fail in every respect in Washington, the checks and balances of local and state government were previously lost over the last century and half with the processes of industrialization and power ever more greatly concentrated in DC.
Jefferson's thought is constrained by the notion of gradient power, the ancient idea of centralized, hierarchical, pyramid shaped government order. Yet, it was also Jefferson amongst the enshrined founders who warned the constitution insured the gradual centralization of all political power in the Federal government. Forty years later, he concluded constitutional reform required the “division and subdivision of duties alone, that all matters, great & small, can be managed to perfection and the whole is cemented by giving to every citizen personally a part in the administration of the public affairs” – democratic complexity.
Though of the Enlightenment, Jefferson lived before the great industrial technological revolution. He was completely bereft of any understanding of the underlying importance of the political shaping forces of technology. He writes, “Let it be agreed that a government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns, (not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city, or small township).” The century after Jefferson's death saw industrial and then broadcast technologies completely transcend, redefine, and make meaningless the established limits of township, city, state, and nation.
In the past century, knowledge gained through physics and biology completely upended ancient notions of any centralized control in nature. The organization of fundamental physical particles and energy, of organisms and ecologies worked completely opposite. Order rises not from the top but from below, through the constant interaction of distributedly networked atoms and cells. It’s nature’s reality of distributedly networked order, complexity, which can allow government to evolve and provide democratic capabilities to influence the development of technologies based on this very same knowledge of natural order. If only influenced by centralized, uniform political order, including the power of mega-corporations, technology will increasingly become distorted, harmful, and dangerous. Also, it is basically assured centralized control will become incapable of either advantageously directing technological complexity or systemically reacting robustly to its implementation.
The great political questions of our times are how humanity reorganizes institutions, both government and private, to be distributedly networked, that is to better mimic nature's order. It requires a reforming of physical organization and just as imperatively evolving how we socially process information. The US has an advantage in that it still has a robust local government infrastructure. A gradual devolution can take place, moving political power from DC and state governments back to the local level. Simultaneously, local governments must begin to be horizontally networked together, learning to act together in concert on many matters, while independently being allowed to take advantage of local environments.
Local government itself needs to be restructured to become much more participatory. Social, political, economic and cultural structures would become more participatory and distributedly networked. Humanity needs to create a global distributed information system, maybe metaphorically thought of as a global nervous system or complex ecological system. With limited understanding how to accomplish this, it will be an organic process evolving around need and success.
All nodes of this vast, complex, largely horizontal network would create and edit information, constantly communicating both internally and across the network, incessantly making decisions. It requires democratic methods of controlling information, a necessity of open access and free movement. Technological and information standards need to be open. Copyrights and patents need to be reassessed. In short, a revaluation of the value of information based not exclusively or even primarily on entrenched, uniform, industrial economic thinking or centralized government’s ancient notion of controlling information, but information access and implementation in relation to the beneficial development of human needs, democracy, and technology.
The greatest change such a networked society offers in regards to technological development is a cyclical system where feedback is valued to as great a degree as initiation, unlike industrialization's ignoring feedback of the complex ecological systems we altered. It is a reformation of society, technological and process development better fit to nature's complexity. Doing so requires evolving the idea of government's foundation on eternal commandments, unalterable decrees, and fixed laws to one much more malleable, consistently evolving through ceaseless interaction. Permanence comes in assembly, the nodes of the network, that is the people themselves, as Jefferson stated “the whole is cemented by giving to every citizen personally a part in the administration of the public affairs.”
No doubt jettisoning ideas of unalterable permeance and centralized authority cause great consternation, agitated chattering, and a sickness unto to death, as the scrawny, nervous Dane decried. But fear and tremble not, there’s no need to completely discard or dismiss the idea of uniformity or of unwavering principles, but they need to be derived out of the understanding of the basic, shared, equal fundamental nature of each of us as part of the species Homo sapiens and our relation with nature's complexity.
In many ways the symbolic father of this new era, J. Robert Oppenheimer claimed with all the change of the last several centuries since the advancement of knowledge under the Scientific Revolution “there remains no gospel greater than Saint Mathew’s or the Bhagavad Gita.” So, after two-thousand years, why not trying implementing the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” as a foundational societal ethos. That alone would initiate a political revolution, a confronting and overcoming of the savage in each and every one of us.
Homo sapiens evolved from and remain defined by the complexities of nature. For millennia, our technologies have grown into increasingly powerful forces shaping us individually and socially, simultaneously restructuring, much of it destructively, the natural world that birthed us. The last half-century witnesses nature's complexity growing in the technologies themselves, requiring a political embrace of complexity.
Mistah Kurtz – he dead.
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