Archive for the ‘individualism’ Tag
Signs of the Times – 1/19/12
Filed under: dual nature, emergent, signs of the times | Tags: bottom up, failing institutions, government, individualism
Leave a Comment I often come across items that I believe reflect the changes I’m describing on this blog. To me they are “signs of the times.” Here are a couple.
“The Rise of the New Groupthink”
The New York Times recently ran an article about a paradox in the way we work today. For many organizations, there is an emphasis on the idea of collaboration. As author Susan Cain notes:
Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
However, she notes that there is a problem with this approach:
Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.
Later in the article she says:
…I’m not suggesting that we abolish teamwork. Indeed, recent studies suggest that influential academic work is increasingly conducted by teams rather than by individuals. (Although teams whose members collaborate remotely, from separate universities, appear to be the most influential of all.) The problems we face in science, economics and many other fields are more complex than ever before, and we’ll need to stand on one another’s shoulders if we can possibly hope to solve them.
But even if the problems are different, human nature remains the same. And most humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.
To me this is an example of a basic principle of the Quantum Age: contrary to the popular myth that we must choose between individualism and collectivism, we are inherently both individualistic and collective by nature. We often have a hard time grasping this because it’s impossible to see both qualities simultaneously. You can see a group or you can see a person in that group; you can’t see both at the same time. But just as subatomic particles have an intrinsic dual particle/wave nature, we humans have a dual individual/collective nature. We will only resolve many of our current problems when we recognize this fact and proceed accordingly, disposing of the prevalent mythology regarding individualism versus collectivism.
Country in Crisis: Looking to America’s Mayors to Rise to the Challenge
Arianna Huffington recently wrote an article regarding how America’s mayors are working to develop solutions to problems that seem to be stumping the politicians in Washington. As she notes:
We’re now in the midst of a battle to see who will sit atop the pyramid in official Washington. This battle will dominate the media in the year ahead, but what the last year showed is that the more important story is what’s happening outside Washington. It was a year in which Time declared “The Protester” its Person of the Year and “Occupy” was named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. It was a year of solutions and energy and activism from the bottom up. And given that top-down thinking not only brought us a Depression-level crisis, but also shows no signs of getting us out of it, it’s bottom-up innovation that will be more relevant.
The rest of her article offers examples of such bottom-up innovation.
These examples demonstrate the power of emergence, the principle that living, self-organizing systems develop from the bottom up, within the context of their environment. As I’ve written here and here, many heads of institutions believe things are best run from the top down; that is a major reason why many of those institutions are in trouble. The solution will not be to accord more power and wealth to the heads of those institutions. The solution will be to recognize the power of emergence, and to learn how to rebuild our institutions in a way that harnesses that power.
Self-reliance
Filed under: dual nature, interconnected, quanta | Tags: failure, Herman Cain, individualism, internet, linked world, reality, self-reliance, success, the rich, Wall St
Leave a Comment There’s a lot of talk these days about self-reliance. According to some, our lot in life – our success or failure – is all up to us. As GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain recently said:
“Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself. It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed.”
According to psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner, Cain’s perception of self-reliance is common among the rich. As MSNBC’s Brian Alexander reports:
…rich people are more likely to think about themselves. “They think that economic success and political outcomes, and personal outcomes, have to do with individual behavior, a good work ethic,” said Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Because the rich gloss over the ways family connections, money and education helped, they come to denigrate the role of government and vigorously oppose taxes to fund it.
This focus on self-reliance can be found among the non-rich as well:
…a strong allegiance to the American Dream can lead even regular folks to overestimate their own self-reliance in the same way as rich people.
As behavioral economist Mark Wilhelm of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis pointed out, most people could quickly tell you how much they paid in taxes last year but few could put a dollar amount on how they benefited from government by, say, driving on interstate highways, taking drugs gleaned from federally funded medical research, or using inventions created by people educated in public schools.
However, focusing solely on individual self-reliance ignores the reality of our dual particle/wave nature. None of us exists in a vacuum; we are all dependent on people and forces outside of us. As Albert Einstein once said:
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others.
Our focus on self-reliance can even blind us about our selves. Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer-winning book The Denial of Death, noted:
We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center.
This preoccupation with self-reliance flies in the face of today’s interconnected world. It also limits our potential. To understand this, think for a moment about computers. A computer by itself can make you productive in doing things like managing a business’s finances or writing a book. But a computer connected to the internet can do so much more.
The same applies to people. To succeed in life it’s not enough to simply be self-reliant; we need to be connected to the world around us as well.
Ten Years After
Filed under: interconnected | Tags: 9/11, America, individualism, linked world, reality
Leave a Comment There’s been a lot of talk this week about how 9/11 has changed things. For example, the Huffington Post has introduced a section titled “9/11: A Decade After” in which, according to Arianna Huffington, they will explore “all the ways in which we’re different since that day.” Also, PBS recently had a piece in which some of their reporters reflected on “the day that changed everything” and MSNBC had an article about how 9/11 had changed individual lives.
In many ways 9/11 has changed things on a personal level. Clearly, those who lost friends or loved ones on that day have experienced a profound change in their lives. In addition, members of the military and their families have made many sacrifices for our country since that day. For the rest of us, we’ve experienced changes like stricter security in many public gathering places and when traveling by air.
But in a fundamental way, 9/11 didn’t really change our country. As NPR quotes from a New Yorker article written by George Packer:
The attacks were supposed to have signaled one of the great transformations in the country’s history. But the decade that followed did not live up to expectations. In most of the ways that mattered, 9/11 changed nothing.
One change we have experienced as Americans has been a new, acute awareness of a change to the world that had been going on for some time.
Globalization and the inter-weaving of different parts of the world had been happening for years. Many of these changes had been creating stress and upheaval in other parts of the world, like countries in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. But we Americans tended to feel removed from that turmoil, protected by oceans the way some communities feel safe behind gates.
We generally hadn’t noticed that change because it happened gradually over time. It’s like the change from summer to fall: the weather changes gradually for weeks, but we don’t really notice it until one day we realize summer’s hot days have “suddenly” been replaced by the crisp days of fall.
In a similar way, 9/11 suddenly made us aware of how the world had changed and had become much more tightly interconnected. As Joel Achenbach noted in the Washington Post:
Blessed by geographic isolation from the rest of the world, Americans did not feel vulnerable on their home soil. Most terrorism events had happened in distant places such as Lebanon, Kenya, Tanzania, Yemen.
What 9/11 did was remove the illusion of American invulnerability; of safety provided by great distances.
So what are we to do with this hard-earned loss of illusion? Perhaps we should start by recognizing and coming to terms with the realities of our interconnected and interdependent world.
This is not a new idea; it was proposed by Robert Wright in a Slate article in November 2001. In writing about the post-9/11 world, Wright pointed to a “big idea” that would help us understand this world: interdependence.
The idea that modern history makes the peoples of the world increasingly interdependent goes back at least as far as Kant and includes such contemporary writers as Joseph Nye, Robert Keohane, and, lately, me.
He went on to suggest that Bin Laden was a reflection rather than a source of this change:
Is “interdependent” really the best way to describe our relationship with a cave-dwelling man who is bent on destroying our civilization? No, but Osama Bin Laden is just the foam on the ocean. He is the guy that history happened to cough up as a surface manifestation of underlying forces of growing interdependence. He is also a handy reminder that interdependence isn’t all sweetness and light.
Today, awareness of our global interdependence should be widely acknowledged. A rational analysis of today’s global economy, in which trouble in one place can upset the apple cart halfway around the world, makes clear how interconnected we all are.
Still, some people seem consumed with the notion that we can regain our old illusions. They devoutly pursue a faith in “Individualism” for both our country and its people. To them, any problems we face today are purely the fault of liberals and the government. All that’s needed is to let everyone do whatever they want to do – at least economically – and everything will be just fine.
But in the long run, any world view that passionately denies the reality of our interconnected, interdependent world is doomed to failure. Such passion can create a great deal of suffering for individuals, and it can cause our country to be passed by as other nations not subject to that passion successfully adapt to today’s world. But the world as it is – interconnected and interdependent, is here to stay.
Ten years after 9/11, it’s high time we accepted that fact and started dealing with it.
Who’s the brains of this outfit? Maybe all of us
Filed under: dual nature, emergent, interconnected | Tags: change, individualism, linked world, technology
Leave a Comment Robert Wright has an interesting piece in the NY Times titled “Building One Big Brain.” In response to concerns that modern technology is affecting the way we think, he has a suggestion:
But maybe the terms of the debate — good for us or bad for us? — are a sign that we’re missing the point. Maybe the essential thing about technological evolution is that it’s not about us. Maybe it’s about something bigger than us — maybe something big and wonderful, maybe something big and spooky, but in any event something really, really big.
He goes on to propose that
…technology is weaving humans into electronic webs that resemble big brains — corporations, online hobby groups, far-flung N.G.O.s. And I personally don’t think it’s outlandish to talk about us being, increasingly, neurons in a giant superorganism; certainly an observer from outer space, watching the emergence of the Internet, could be excused for looking at us that way.
While this may feel to us like a new phenomena, Wright notes that it’s happened before:
If it’s any consolation, we’re not the first humans to go cellular. The telephone (and for that matter the postal system before it) let people increase the number of other brains they linked up with. People spent less time with their few inherited affiliations — kin and neighbors — and more time with affiliations that reflected vocational or avocational choices.
This earlier case, Wright observes, had a major effect on Americans’ social behavior:
In the 1950 sociology classic “The Lonely Crowd,” David Riesman and two colleagues argued that the “inner-directed” American, guided by values shared with a small and stable group of kin and friends, was giving way to an “other-directed” American. Other-directed people had more social contacts, and shallower contacts, and they had more malleable values — a flexibility that let them network with more kinds of people.
In other words, Riesman, like Carr, noted a loss of coherence within the individual. He saw a loss of normative coherence — a weakening of our internal moral gyroscope — and Carr sees a loss of cognitive coherence. But in both cases this fragmenting at the individual level translates, however ironically, into broader and more intricate cohesion at the social level — cohesion of an increasingly organic sort. We’ve been building bigger social brains for some time.
The phenomena of “bigger social brains” stands as an interesting counterpoint to the fervent passion for individualism expressed today by many in politics and the media. Perhaps in some way these passionate individualists are sensing this emerging change and, frightened by the prospect, are fighting it with all they’ve got. Perhaps this is partly at the root of the fierce anger we see expressed at Tea Party gatherings and the like.
Perhaps. But if that is the case, it seems pretty clear their efforts are doomed unless they roll back technology to a time before the internet and television…and probably the telephone.
If change is being created by technology, then the only way to prevent it would be to get rid of that technology. But that’s not going to happen. Advances in technology often give new power to those who have that technology. People tend to not give up such power, especially if they see themselves engaged in a mortal fight for the “good old ways” over what they perceive as “evil new changes.” Sooner or later they’ll decide to keep the power and adapt to the change.
In any event, I think this perceived tension between individualism and the collectivism inherent in “social brains” is another reflection of an outmoded way of thinking. Sooner or later we will come to recognize that the wave/particle duality applies to humans as well as elementary particles: we are always and simultaneously both individuals and members of collective groups.
Now if we could just wrap our brains around that – both individually and socially.
Out of Many, One
Filed under: dual nature | Tags: cancer, cycling, individualism, Pan-Mass Challenge
Leave a Comment When my father was dying of leukemia in 2001, I learned that with cancer it’s not death so much as the dying that is so terrible. I also learned that while we may feel helpless as individuals in confronting this disease, we can find tremendous power as a group.
Clearly in pain and ready to go, my father lingered for a number of days, slowly losing those aspects of life – mobility, speech, awareness, dignity – that were so much of what he was. In a few short days he melted from “Dad,” an 81 year old man who had been athletic, active and mentally sharp for as long as I’d known him, into a semi-concious organism lying inert in a bed. We were lucky at the time to have home care provided by Hospice of Central New York. (My father wanted to die at home, near my mother, my sister and me.) But even with their help, it was a very trying time.
Watching someone close to you die from cancer creates such a helpless feeling. You want to do something to fight back, to stop the pain, to exact revenge against such a terrible disease. But what can you do? You’re just one person, without any special healing powers or even any medical knowledge. I could ensure that Dad’s last wishes to die at home were fulfilled, and that final arrangements for his remains were carried out. But I couldn’t stop his pain and I couldn’t cure the disease. I was only one person.
But sometimes what is impossible for a lone individual can become possible when you are part of a group.
Since 1995 I have been riding in a “bikeathon” called the Pan-Mass Challenge that raises money for the Jimmy Fund and cancer research and treatment at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Before 2001 I had felt the emotional power of the ride: there are countless people and signs that cheer the riders on along the route, as well as personal messages and photographs many riders carry with them during the ride. Cancer has caused a great deal of pain to many people, and the PMC is one place where people feel free to express and confront that pain.
Rider at Saturday finish, Mass Maritime Academy
Seeing such things made a deep impression on me when I rode in the PMC. I can still remember quite clearly climbing the first big hill back in 1995, slowly passing a bagpiper playing Amazing Grace in the early morning haze. The poignancy of that moment brought a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes as I sensed the depth of feeling associated with the ride.
Although I had lost friends and co-workers to cancer over the years, I didn’t truly understand the power of the PMC until my father died from cancer.
I started out the ride that year apathetic and depressed, feeling very much alone even though there were over 2,000 riders around me. Over the early part of that ride I had an internal conversation in which I asked questions and just waited for answers to arise from where ever. I asked why suffering seemed so integral to life – why did people have to suffer from cancer like my father had, and why the pain of the bike ride was such an important part of the PMC. The answer I received was that suffering is the path to redemption – and rising to our best. I questioned why such suffering and redemption were necessary; the answer I got back was that we all need redemption, to get beyond whatever negativity and guilt we may feel about ourselves.
After 40 miles or so it began to rain, lightly at first. Around 80 miles into the ride I was part of a paceline that gradually lengthened as we went along. I started to notice flashes of lightning, the rumble of thunder and an increasing intensity of the rain. The storm became more severe, with occasional vivid lightning followed by loud crashes of thunder. With no reasonable place to stop, we rode on, the energy of the weather and the energy of the other riders increasing my energy to ride quickly and to get through the storm. Everything became a dimly lit, watery blur; I had no idea where we were, how far we’d gone or how far we had to go. We were just a stream of cyclists rushing down the flooded road, with the splashing wake of oncoming cars occasionally washing over our calves and feet.
Eventually the storm tapered off and the sky brightened. We soon came upon the 101-mile waterstop, and I realized we’d ridden right by the previous waterstop in the middle of the storm. After stopping briefly, I rode on to the finish, barely six hours after I’d started 111 miles away. It was the fastest I’d ever ridden the route from Sturbridge to Bourne.
That ride gave me a deeper sense of the power of the PMC. I had started out a lone rider, emotionally cut off from those around me. But riding with that group of riders through that storm had transformed my perspective. My alienation and bitterness had been washed away by the storm and the experience, and I happily joked with friends when I joined them at the finish line.
You might think, given the cause of the ride and the depth of feeling of the riders and those along the route, that the PMC has a somber, funereal quality to it. Nothing could be farther from the truth. What I learned in 2001 was that the PMC enables individuals who have been personally shaken by cancer to join together in a meaningful, powerful way to fight back. The collective power of thousands of riders raising millions of dollars for cancer research and treatment is tremendously uplifting. Aside from the pain of the actual riding, the PMC is really a quite festive affair.
Saturday Finish, members of Team L.E.G.S. ("Legs Ending Great Suffering")
We’ve all been touched by cancer in one way or another; we’ve all experienced feelings of helplessness and despair when confronted with this dread disease. At the PMC, we all have our individual stories about cancer. But we come together in early August as one, sharing a common goal of fighting back and of eventually overcoming cancer. As the years have gone by – it was the 30th PMC last weekend – the riders share the growing confidence of the doctors from Dana-Farber who speak each year at the opening ceremonies on the night before the ride. The tide is turning, our collective knowledge and understanding of how cancer works is growing, and it’s only a matter of time before we – as a group – beat cancer.
Wave Riding
Filed under: dual nature, energy/flow | Tags: cycling, individualism
Comments (1) The Tour de France – the world’s greatest bike race – ended yesterday. The Pan-Mass Challenge – America’s greatest cycling fund raiser – takes place this coming weekend. In honor of those two major cycling events, I’m reviving an essay I wrote twelve years ago about cycling and the wave/particle duality. (Hey – blogs didn’t exist in 1997!)
Many people who are not avid cyclists – or French – have a hard time understanding bike racing. What they usually get from the mass media focuses on the individual accomplishments of riders like Lance Armstrong or Greg Lemond. A lot of people are surprised to learn that bike racing is really a team sport.
Especially in America, where we constantly hear arguments based on the idea that we must chose between either individualism or collectivism, the idea that the interests of both the individual and the group are intertwined seems alien and unfathomable.
In spite of any preconceptions we may harbor, the fact is that bike racing, and high performance cycling in general, revolve around this both/and dynamic of group and individual interests. For those of us avid riders and Tour followers, the interplay between these interests is part of what makes cycling so appealing.
What I’ve said so far is pretty abstract; my essay spells things out more clearly. The only thing I’d note is that it was written twelve years ago; I’m not quite so speedy on a bike these days…
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During the summer, I spend a fair amount of time on a bicycle, riding over 3,000 miles per year. I find cycling offers a number of benefits, including better health, an enhanced sense of self, and the opportunity to explore the suburban and rural countryside in New York State’s Capital Region. It also gives me a lot of time to think. And sometimes, cycling gives me an insight that could be pertinent to living in the Quantum Age.
To introduce you to this particular insight, let me begin by telling you about my cycling experiences over the course of a week in July, 1997.
On Tuesday, I decide to squeeze in a quick solo ride after work. I ride from my house to the nearby state office and university campuses, each ringed with a lightly traveled access road. The route is generally flat and I’m able to ride at what feels like a fairly quick and constant speed. After a little over an hour of riding, I return home, having ridden at an average speed of 18.2 miles per hour for 19 miles.
On Thursday, I meet a group of friends for our weekly ride. On this sunny summer evening, I ride with the group up and down over the rolling countryside of southern Albany County. Although we’re often cruising at 20 to 28 miles per hour on the flat stretches, I’m feeling relaxed and enjoy some spectacular views southward to the dark green peaks of the Catskills, looming over bright green fields glowing in the late day sun. However, after an hour or so I begin to feel the effects of the hills we’ve been climbing, as well as an apprehension about a long, steady hill I know we’ll have to deal with near the end of the ride. Near the turn for this hill, I slow a bit to drink some water and consume a packet of energy gel. In doing so, I get slightly separated from the pack. This separation widens when I see the group go by the turn we’re supposed to take for the big hill. I slow a bit and yell to them that they’d missed the turn, but they continue down a steady grade. I try to speed up to catch them, but they fade gradually from view. I continue on my own, not as quickly as before, but fast enough to finish with an average speed of 18.3 miles per hour over 32 miles.
On Saturday, seven of us gather in the morning at a lake house in Bolton, on the west shore of Lake George in the Adirondacks. Our planned route is fairly straightforward: ride around Lake George. We start out shortly after 9 AM, heading south to Lake George Village. We ride easily as we warm up, focused on the steady flow of traffic passing on our left as it heads south to the village. But as we head east out of the village, we pick up our pace. When we stop in Whitehall to take a short break after riding 35 miles, our average speed is 21 mph. This average drops a bit on the rolling hills between Whitehall and Ticonderoga, and drops some more as we ride over Tongue Mountain on the way down the west side of the lake back to Bolton. Still, we average 18.4 mph for the entire 94 mile ride.
There are many things cyclists disagree about, from what is the best bike equipment to where the best places to ride are. However, pretty much every road cyclist will agree that it’s easier and faster riding in a group than riding by oneself. This is generally attributed to the aerodynamic benefits that come from cyclists taking turns drafting in the pack. But I think there is something else at work here as well.
As I’ve noted before, through quantum physics we know that everything can be seen as both a wave and a particle. However, we are accustomed to thinking of people from an individual, particle perspective. If we see a group of cyclists riding together, we tend to think that they are staying together through the individual effort of each rider, and that the only benefit they get from this grouping is aerodynamics. And from a particle perspective, we’re right.
But there is another, less tangible benefit at work here. Riders in a group will often feel a higher level of energy, as well as an inclination to “get in synch” with the others in the group. This can lead to a higher level of performance. The effect is like that of waves moving in the same direction: just as such waves amplify each other and create a larger wave, riders in a group can amplify each other’s performance.
But this doesn’t just apply to those riding within the aerodynamic “cocoon” of the group. Individual riders close to the group may feel this effect as well. If I suddenly see a group coming up behind me, I may feel a rise in my energy level, urging me to either stay ahead of them or (more likely) to prepare for the faster pace I’ll need to maintain to keep up with them when they catch me. If I’m close behind, I will push myself to speed up and join the group. In either case, my attention will tend to focus on the group, and my inclination will be to synchronize my pace with its own.
However, there appear to be several variables that can alter this effect.
One is the difference in speed between the individual and the group. If a group is going either too fast or too slow, I will not feel much inclined to join them and will feel little effect from our passing each other. I have to be going at close to the same speed as the group for me to feel the effect of their presence. Even if I do join the group, the effect will be more or less powerful depending on how closely I feel in synch to the group’s pace. If they’re going somewhat faster or slower than I’m inclined to go, I may gradually feel less attuned to the group’s energy and either break away or drop behind.
Another variable is the size of a group. All other things being equal, I will feel more energized from a group of 50 than I will from a group of 2 or 3. It is as if the larger the group, the more anonymous I become and the more I can lose myself in it. By giving a part of myself over to the group, my sense of my own aches, pains and limitations seems diminished, and I’m able to perform at a higher level.
One other variable is the distance between myself and the group. The farther behind or in front of me the group is, the less effect I’ll feel from it and the less inclined I’ll feel to join it. If the group is too far behind, I’ll be inclined to disregard it until it gets close enough to judge its speed and size. If I’m too far behind a group I’ve been dropped by, I will get a sense that it is out of reach and adjust my pace to a rate I can sustain by myself. However, if I catch a glimpse of a group ahead of me that I hadn’t seen before, I may quicken my pace a little to see if I can catch up to it.
While I have been discussing this phenomena in terms of cycling, it can be seen in many other areas of life as well. I believe it is at work on the highway, where you can often see cars grouped together in packs while other stretches of highway are virtually empty. It could also apply to spectator sports, in which teams often seem to play much better “at home” then they do “on the road.” It might even explain why people tend to live together in villages or cities, and why the energy level and tension seems to be higher in areas with higher population densities.
Some of the problems we face today come from our thinking of people only from the individual/particle perspective, disregarding the importance of our simultaneous group/wave nature. Laws often appear to be written to prohibit individual behaviors, usually without due consideration of the social or group dynamics that might be encouraging such prohibited behaviors. Social programs often seem to focus on an individual’s needs for food and shelter, without consideration of his or her needs for social interaction and involvement. And in the workplace managers frequently relate to workers as a collection of isolated individuals, disregarding the subculture of the work group that is usually the ultimate shaper of employees’ values and beliefs.
In the midst of all this, we tend to view our selves as solitary souls, overwhelmed and powerless against the monolithic corporations, bureaucracies and other obstacles that confront us. We describe ourselves as merely “cogs in the machine” or “pawns in the game of life.” And all too often we avoid confronting the stupidity or inhumanity we encounter, settling instead for an uneasy peace.
Maybe we need to broaden our perspective, and recognize the power that can come from our wave-nature as well. Life is a balance between the particle and the wave, between the individual and the group. And just as an expert cyclist recognizes that maximum performance comes from being able to ride both alone and in a group, maybe we need to transcend our one-dimensional Newtonian solitude and draw power from our quantum duality.
An Illuminating Paradox
Filed under: complexity, dual nature, emergent | Tags: bottom up, individualism, regulation, traffic safety
Comments (2) One time, while driving on an interstate highway when the weather was gray and misty, I noticed a curious paradox.
Although it was only sprinkling occasionally, nearly every car had its headlights on, complying with an obscure New York Sate law requiring headlight use when it rains. However, nearly every car was also going 65-75 miles per hour. This was certainly not in compliance with the well-known and publicized 55 miles per hour speed limit in effect at the time. It also didn’t make sense. Why would people obey a law they were unlikely to get ticketed or punished for breaking, while at the same time they disobeyed a law that they could easily get ticketed for, with substantial costs in fines and higher insurance?
This question stuck with me for a long time. While the behavior I witnessed did not seem logical, I was inclined to believe there had to be some reasonable explanation for it. After all, I was doing the same thing most of the other drivers on the road were doing. But beyond that, I sensed this observation might provide a key to getting people to be better drivers. This was particularly relevant to me at the time, as I was on my way to a traffic safety conference when I observed this paradox.
Around this time, I was reading M. Mitchell Waldrop’s book “Complexity.” While I was vaguely familiar with the concept of entropy, in which things are seen to be perpetually running down, I was totally unfamiliar with the new science of complexity, in which things are seen to be perpetually evolving into ever more complex and sophisticated ways of being.
And yet, while I had never heard of complexity, I recognized many examples of the phenomena it focused on. The cars we drive today are much more complex than even those I had admired in the 1960’s. Likewise, the economy we work in that enables us to produce and purchase those cars has also grown in complexity from that of the seemingly straightforward days of the 60’s; that economy in turn was much more complex than that of say, 100 years ago.
Perhaps, I thought, the paradoxical behavior I had observed on the highway was somehow a reflection of this tendency to evolve to increasingly more complex patterns of behavior. One of the qualities that Waldrop discussed was the “bottom up” nature of self organizing systems. Increasing complexity comes about because that is what the users of a given system want; it is not imposed from on high somewhere. Cars today are increasingly complex largely because we expect more and more from them.
This seems to be a natural function of the way we are. The more something like a car can provide us, the more we tend to want. Even if our present car is reliable, luxurious and sporty in its performance, after some time has passed we are likely to be drawn to a newer car that is better designed, more luxurious and sportier. And to provide us with such qualities in a car, manufacturers have to continually strive to use more refined and complex technology to improve on their product.
I felt this “bottom up” quality was important in understanding the motorists’ behavior I had observed. Clearly, the authoritative power of the State, conveyed both through the raw power of the police and the cajoling power of slogans like “55 Saves Lives” did not seem to be greatly altering their behavior. Something within each motorist seemed to be propelling them forward in the behavior they were pursuing. But what? And how?
Some time later I stumbled upon what is arguably one of the most revolutionary concepts in modern science. This is the dual, wave/particle nature of matter. I vaguely remembered something from the few weeks’ of high school physics I’d had about the dual nature of light, and how it behaved as both a particle and a wave. But I had always assumed, as most people do, that some things were particles while other things were waves. In a foggy kind of logic, I had presumed that tangible things like a table or a chair were made up of particles, while forms of energy like light or sound were composed of waves. However, modern science has discovered that, at it most basic level, everything is both particles and waves simultaneously.
At first I found this concept hard to understand. But with more reading and thinking, I gradually realized that the world around us is full of examples of this dualism. The catch is that at any one time you can only perceive something as either a particle or a wave. For example, you can see the ocean’s wave quality in the way it rhythmically crashes on the shore. Take a drop of sea water and put it under a strong enough microscope and you would see the particles that water is made up of. But you cannot see the particle and the wave nature of the ocean at the same time; you have to adjust your focus to perceive either one or the other.
The same is true of a crowd creating a “wave” in a stadium. You can either focus on the movement of the wave or you can focus on some individuals participating in it; you cannot focus on both at the same time.
With this new awareness, I realized what had been happening on that highway that morning. Viewed from the individual, particle perspective, the behavior of those motorists did not make sense. They were obeying a minor law while flagrantly disobeying a much more important one. This did not seem to be in their own, individual/particle interests. But viewed from a group/wave perspective, there suddenly appeared a logic to their seemingly inconsistent behavior. In terms of both the minor and the more important law, their behaviors reflected those of the other motorists they observed on the highway.
If I see many other drivers turning on their headlights because it is raining, I will feel an inclination to do the same. If I see them going ten miles per hour over the speed limit, I will feel an inclination to do that as well. In both cases, the behavior reflects the “bottom up” quality complexity science focuses on. The drivers themselves create the norms for their behavior. While the State may establish a context for this behavior, through headlight laws or speed limits, the actual behavior has an ad hoc quality to it.
The reason often given by traffic safety authorities for drivers mirroring others’ behavior is because they (the drivers) feel there is less possibility in a group of being caught. However this reflects only the self interest, particle perspective, which leads us back to the original paradox. It might explain the speeding, but what about the minimally enforced headlight law? Why did they obey that?
I believe the answer to this question lies in recognizing the group/wave side of our behavior. We are individuals, yes, but we are also social beings with a strong inclination to synchronize our behaviors with those of a larger group. Even when that group happens to consist of anonymous motorists on a superhighway.
A version of this post was originally published on the web site Quantum Age in October, 1996.
E pluribus pluribus
Filed under: interconnected | Tags: corporations, economy, individualism
Leave a Comment E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) – Seal of the United States
A big topic in today’s news was a rant by Rick Santelli, a hyper correspondent for CNBC who appears to believe yelling can compensate for a lack of sense.
The Atlantic’s Chris Good noted that this rant appeared to be part of a growing theme among Republicans/conservatives. For those folks, everything comes down to “American and Patriotic spirit; one that demands respect for individual rights and property.”
This rant is just one of many instances of an extreme individualistic bent common on the Right that has been promoted since at least the beginning of the Reagan era. The idea seems to be that individuals/corporations should be free to do whatever they want – materially, anyway – without any guff from government or the rest of society.
For people with this world view there is no sense of interconnection between individuals and other people, society in general, or the planet itself. Everyone is on their own, and let the chips fall where they may.
In this world, it appears perfectly reasonable to ask, as George Will recently did, “…it is mysterious whose interests, other than those of their shareholders, corporations are supposed to be controlled by.” Apparently the well-being of employees, neighbors or the nation that protects them and makes their very existence possible is irrelevant.
A mystery to me is what such followers of this “Church of Me” make of the motto in the Seal of the United States: E pluribus unum. At what point do they mentally move from their many individuals to the greater one of the nation?
Surprisingly, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks offers a helpful awareness of our interconnectedness in his column “Money for Idiots.” Concerning the Obama administration’s approach to the current crisis, he writes:
…they seem to understand the big thing. The nation’s economy is not just the sum of its individuals. It is an interwoven context that we all share. To stabilize that communal landscape, sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent. The greedy idiots may be greedy idiots, but they are our countrymen. And at some level, we’re all in this together. If their lives don’t stabilize, then our lives don’t stabilize.
Unfortunately, Brooks betrays an underlying bias by referring to those facing foreclosure as greedy idiots. While there are indeed many greedy idiots involved, in actuality many people facing foreclosure on their homes are collateral damage of the current economic downturn. A more sensitive – and humorous – response to Santelli’s rant was provided by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.
It’s reassuring to see that at least some people are maintaining an even keel during these trying times.
What Do Libertarian Farmers Grow?
Filed under: dual nature, emergent | Tags: future, individualism, libertarianism
Leave a Comment Washington Post writer and blogger Joel Achenbach recently wrote a piece called “Inventing the Future” for his alumni publication. It’s about a brainy fellow Princeton alum named Nathan Myhrvold, who according to Achenbach is brilliant in many areas – physics, software design, cooking, photography, etc. In his article, one quote by Myhrvold caught my attention:
“Broadly, overall, the way society works is emergent, and it is built on progress — it generally runs downhill toward something better,” Myhrvold says as we get deep into the philosophical weeds on all this stuff. The world is a better place now than it was 500 years ago, he declares. Driving that improvement is, he believes, technology. He’s an unabashed technophile. And he seems to have a strong libertarian streak.
A taste of that libertarian streak comes out a couple paragraphs later:
Many of the visionaries today talk of building a “sustainable” society, a word that seems to rile Myhrvold. “The most sustainable thing about human society is that we innovate,” he says. Later, he elaborates in an e-mail: “The answer is not to pine for a past golden age when things were better (there was no such place or time), but rather to ask how we can use more technology and innovation.” Change, he thinks, is intrinsic to our nature. The future will be different. Survival will not involve preservation of things as they existed before: It will require their creative destruction and replacement.
OK…first of all, I’d love to see a debate between Mr. Myhrvold (aka Mr. T – as in Technology) and James Kunstler (aka Mr. Doomed – as in “we all are…”). They both sound bright and opinionated, and they share an interest in predicting the future. But one expresses great optimism about technolgy and the future, while the other is generally very pessimistic. It would be a fun debate – in an intellectual “fight club” kind of way.
Beyond that, up to a point I agree with Mr. Myhrvold about society being emergent: the way a society is and the way people behave in it develops from the bottom up. However, I believe this is only a part of the picture.
I suspect Myhrvold’s sense of emergence is at the heart of a lot of libertarian thought: “just get out of the way and let things emerge!” Libertarians apparently assume things exist in some vaguely positive state – sort of a social petri dish filled with a fertile growth medium. Given that neutral state, things will always work out for the best eventually. If and when they don’t – like the current financial crisis – libertarians just write it off as “creative destruction.”
There are indeed cases in which The Old must collapse in order for The New to come to fruition. (After all, that’s one of the main ideas behind this blog and my website,) But as we’ve seen too often recently, destruction can often be a product of stupidity or greed rather than creativity.
What Myhrvold and other libertarians fail to recognize is the other side of the bottom-up nature of emergence. Things don’t just emerge willy nilly out of nothing; they emerge in a context. The environment in which they exist will usually play a huge role in their outcome.
Take farming, for example. What a farmer grows and how successful he or she is in growing it will largely be determined by the context of his or her farm: the climate, the soil, water availability, general nature of the land, etc. Any farmer who tries to grow corn in the mountains of Colombia is likely to have as little success as one trying to grow coffee in Iowa.
Crops are an emergent phenomena; a farmer may plant the seeds, but then nature takes over. However, the farmer’s success depends on him or her being mindful of the context of the farm and the crops that are most likely to thrive in it for a sustainable period of time. In addition, to get the most productive crop the farmer must keep in mind the specific needs – water, nutrition, etc. – of the crop over the course of the growing season. Otherwise, under/over-fertilization or a drought can have a serious effect on the yield of the crop.
In the same way, individuals and businesses exist within the context of human society. That society, in turn, exists within the larger context of the local and global physical environment. We are each a part of the world, not apart from it.
This may be easier to understand if we borrow an idea from modern science. Physics has found that at its most elementary level, matter is simultaneously an individual particle and part of a collective wave. It’s dual-natured.
The same is true of people and businesses: we are not just a solitary individual or a part of the group. We are always both at the same time. It’s just a matter of perception, like watching a crowd doing a “wave” in a packed stadium. You can watch the wave of humanity roll around the stadium or you can watch a person participate by standing up and then sitting down with those around them. But you can never see both at the same time.
The problem with libertarianism is that by always being focused on the individual it is blind to context. It’s all particle and no wave. At that stadium, it would see a person getting up and sitting down; it wouldn’t see the wave that individual was a part of. On Wall Street the focus was only on the success of individuals; there was no thought of the way the behavior of those individuals was damaging the financial system as a whole. No wonder so many “experts” were caught off guard by the inevitable collapse. They literally never saw it coming.
If a person tried to farm with a libertarian’s blindness to context, they’d most likely lose the farm in short order. They would plant whatever they thought would be most profitable, regardless of its suitability for local climate and soil. Once planted, the crop would be at the mercy of the “invisible hand” of nature. Maybe it would rain, maybe it wouldn’t; being averse to “regulatory meddling,” it would be against libertarian ideology to alter the natural course of things by watering.
With a blindness to context and an aversion to “meddling,” there’s only one crop a libertarian would be likely to have by the end of a growing season: weeds.
Slay Riding to Oblivion
Filed under: dual nature, energy/flow | Tags: corporations, democracy, digital, individualism, information, media, technology
Leave a Comment Slate has an article – The Digital Slay-Ride – that discusses the ways modern technology is revolutionizing our lives. As Jack Shafer notes:
Folks giggled at Wired founder Louis Rossetto’s bombastic formulation in 1993 that the “digital revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon” and upsetting the old order. But Rossetto is getting the last laugh. Wherever digital zeros and ones can dislodge analog processes, they either have or are. Call it a digital slay-ride.
I think he is spot-on about how digital processes are changing our lives. But when it comes to identifying problems in the newspaper business, his analysis ignores other major issues besides technology – like greedy owners who are detached from the whole point of their business.
Shafer also seems rather cavalier about the fate of newspapers in general:
Before we get too weepy about lost journalistic jobs and folded publications, let’s ask how often reporters lamented the decline of other industries, products, and services swamped by Rossetto’s digital typhoon.
The thing is, newspapers are not just another industry. Since the very beginning of the US of A, they have been an integral part of our democracy. As Thomas Jefferson once wrote “I would rather live in a country with newspapers and without a government, than in a country with a government but without newspapers.” There might not have even been a United States of America if it wasn’t for newspapers’ ability to spread news about developments throughout the 13 disparate colonies.
The need for newspapers to keep citizens informed continues today. As Chris Hedges notes:
A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth. Take this away and a democracy dies. The fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind.
For any organization to survive and thrive there must be a healthy balance between the interests of individuals and the interests of the group. Too much individualism, and things fall apart; too much group-think and things become static and unable to respond to changes within and outside the organization.
The key ingredient for ensuring that healthy balance in any organization is the free flow of information that can accurately reflect the way things are. For the United States of America, that information has historically been provided by newspapers. If the decline of newspapers leads to a decline in the dispersion of accurate information about the way things are, the result will be a grave threat to our democracy.
