A Non-Integrated Social Ideal
The View from Oregon — 321: Friday 27 December 2024
In this final newsletter of 2024 I will try to wrap up a line of thought I developed across several newsletters — not to say that I am definitively finished with this, as I’m certainly not finished with it, but to present another piece of the puzzle I realized to be missing from the previous formulations. The account of non-integrated science, technology, and industry that I sketched in “Non-Integrated Industrial Production” (newsletter 315), “Permutations of Devolved Industrial Production” (newsletter 316), and “Science in a Non-Integrated World” (newsletter 317), has a natural political correlate, and that is, or would be, a non-integrated society. What could constitute a non-integrated society in the sense that I intend this? Primarily I have decentralization of social and political institutions in mind, but insofar as there is an implicit ideal in any descriptive account I would give of a non-integrated society, there are a great many other subtle elements that I haven’t yet captured.
The descriptions I gave of non-integrated science, technology, and industry in previous newsletters were the result of thinking through various social collapse scenarios, but the more I thought about them the less disastrous they seemed to me, and that’s when I began to glimpse a social ideal as the silver lining of a scenario of social collapse. If a scenario of rapid and dramatic social change were simply about collapse and nothing else, there would be little of interest in them, but in newsletter 318 I discussed the possibility of a complex adaptive system reducing complexity while retaining functionality (trait simplification), which would greatly benefit said complex adaptive system through greater energy efficiency. If a social formation could retain functionality while reducing complexity, that society would have an obvious advantage over other societies that maintain their functionality through higher levels of complexity. Significantly, there are a lot of obvious variations on this theme.
For example, a society that experienced a slight reduction in functionality coupled with a dramatic decrease in complexity would also experience a dramatic increase in efficiency, and if the marginal complexity it lost was not an essential competitive advantage, the loss need not negatively impact that society. And a society that experienced a slight increase in functionality but at the cost of dramatic increase in complexity would also suffer a dramatic loss of efficiency, and perhaps also a dramatic loss in competitiveness. Arguably, it is a process like this — slight gains at high costs, which can be called more simply diminishing returns — that results in major weapons systems (air superiority fighters, aircraft carriers, and nuclear strategic defense) entering into a “death spiral” in which the unit cost rises so high that it is impossible to build a sufficient number of units to constitute a credible military force.
The US seemed to be reaching this threshold with the F-35 fighter jet, but then military drones, in classic disruptive-technology style, suddenly came to dominate the dreams of military planners, as drone capacities rapidly improved and the cost per unit was relatively low, and much, much lower than the unit cost of an air superiority fighter. (Carroll Quigley’s last work, Weapons Systems and Political Stability: A History, published posthumously, was in part about this problem, though Quigley took in the longue durée of changing weapons systems and their development.)
A non-integrated society would be a society that had exchanged some degree of functionality for some degree of complexity, accepting a somewhat reduced functionality for significantly reduced complexity. It would also be a society in which the institutions of science, technology, and industry were non-integrated to a significant degree. We have a model of sorts for such a society. There is a passage in Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation that caught my attention the first time I heard it, and I have returned to it many times since. Speaking of northern Europe immediately prior to the Protestant Reformation Clark said:
“In the late Middle Ages, the civilization of northern Europe seemed designed to last forever — rich merchants, self-satisfied guilds, a conveniently loose political organization — no material reasons for change. And yet, in a few years, in a single generation, is the first of those explosions that were to create contemporary man — what we call the Reformation. What went wrong with that solid-looking world?”
Interestingly, this is how Clark begins the sixth episode of the television series, but the opening paragraph of the sixth chapter in the book version is completely different. There are several minor divergences between the television version and the book version; this is one of them. That aside, it is interesting that Clark identifies this “conveniently loose political organization” as a highly stable society, and I think this is correct. A loosely organized society has a great deal of adaptive “give” in is structure that can readily accommodate itself to shocks and changes. Indeed, it may have been the stability and resilience of late medieval civilization that explains the intact transition of civilization from the medieval world to the modern world, without a social collapse such as characterized the end of the western Roman Empire.
Another example occurs to me. Some years ago in a longish blog post on Centauri Dreams, “Space Development Futures” (one of my better pieces of futurism, I think), I cited several short- to mid-term forecasts of what I called institutional futurism, several of which employed two variables, each of which defines a continuum, giving a quadrant of four possible futures. The whole trick is in choosing the right variables. If we really could narrow the future down to roughly four scenarios, we would have made great progress, but it usually happens that the variables that appear important today aren’t the variables that end up being determinative of a broad-brush account of the future. One of these forecasts was the 2010 Rockefeller Foundation study, Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development, the two variables of which were alignment and adaptive capacity, each ranging from strong to weak. What I have here been calling non-integration or devolution the Rockefeller Foundation called alignment, and I grant this is an important variable. The scenario of the Rockefeller Foundation study they called “smart scramble,” which was high adaptive capacity coupled with low alignment. I think these are plausible premises for a future post-collapse scenario in which local industrialized relicts retain their ability to innovate and exploit the rapidly changing currents of an unstable world (this is the adaptive “give” I mentioned earlier), while the decreasing efficacy of centralized governments renders them shock-prone to the same forces that resilient actors can exploit.
The same Centauri Dreams post in which I discussed the Rockefeller Foundation report I also discussed several futurist scenarios of the Tellus Institute. They divided their scenarios among the bad, the conventional, and the good. Their two “good” scenarios were “eco-communalism” and “New Paradigm.” The Tellus Institute focuses on what they call “great transitions,” which are somewhat like what I call transcendence events when I civilization transcends its former structures and becomes something new. So I recognize that these kind of events do occur, in history, but the Tellus Institute communicates them in a way that is temperamentally averse to my own perspective, and, I think, in a way that is naïve and simplistic. That being said, to their credit, the Tellus Institute explicitly recognizes that the eco-communalist model is only likely to emerge in a post-collapse scenario, which is exactly that I’ve been talking about. So people like me, who are skeptical of everything, and people like those at the Tellus Institute, can both see the possibility of a world in which localized governance is the norm, people live within their limits without necessarily compromising their ambition or accepting lowered horizons, and human activities have a less deleterious impact on the planet — what the Tellus Institute calls “a patchwork of self-sustaining communities.”
It has become a familiar talking point that the ideals of the political left and the political right approach each other as they approximate their extreme and ideal forms. The vulgar, of course, call this “horseshoe theory,” because the ends of a horseshoe wrap around and almost touch each other though coming from opposite directions. I’ve always hated that term, so I’m not going to use it, but I have been noticing this for many years, i.e., that both those on the left and the right want small communities where people know their neighbors and they live more-or-less in harmony with their environment. The obvious source of this common yearning is that industrialized civilization has brought us to the point where it is manifestly not the case — cities are large and growing, individuals are isolated and without a sense of community, and individual alienation is transformed into a variety of social problems that governments superficially address, but which they cannot take at their root, because their root is the structure of our contemporary society, which is deeply sick, but which cannot admit to its sickness on pain of acknowledging the elephants in the room.
Earlier in this newsletter I touched on the tension between complexity and functionality, but that discussion in this and earlier newsletters suffers from a flaw — the flaw of assuming that all forms of complexity are essentially the same and therefore fungible. They are not. This sort of thing always happens when discussing societies at a high level of generality. We need the generality to see societies whole, but we also need to check our generalities against the reality. A flood of particulars can overwhelm a generality, just as a flood of cheap drones can overcome a small number of extremely expensive air superiority fighters. Ultimately, we have to think dialectically, passing continuously between the general and the particular, so that we don’t lose touch with either one.
The class of complexities that many people today (and at least for the past century) feel have deleteriously impacted the ordinary business of life almost all stem from large, anonymous cities were people are packed together into alienated masses, who each day make their way to seemingly meaningless jobs, making it home in time to eat and shower and sleep so they can do the same thing again tomorrow. No one wants this way of life, but it has been normalized, and it’s difficult to imagine how a mass society can function without this level of regularity and organization. If it were possible to eliminate these complexities specifically, retaining as much of the functionality of industrialized civilization as is possible, not only would there be a great gain in efficiency, but there would also be a significant improvement to the human condition. If this dysfunction is the marginal complexity that is lost, it would be no loss at all, but rather an improvement. Dare I say that people would be happier, judge their lives to be of greater value, and that they would experience higher levels of life satisfaction? And I don’t think this is a pipe dream. I believe it to be possible, though I also believe that there are deeply entrenched economic interests — rent seekers in the present economy — that will fight tooth-and-nail to present any change to the public as though it were a disaster, but it would only be through radical change that the transition that needs to happen could happen. And I believe that a non-integrated society, built from non-integrated subsidiary institutions such as non-integrated science, technology, and industry, that is the answer to this conundrum. Always mindful of the fact that one man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia, I find the vision of a non-integrated world to be an optimistic and hopeful one for the future.
The wealth afforded by our contemporary integrated industrial infrastructure poses a challenge to any successor regime, since populations will have demands and expectations based on that paradigm until it is entirely lost to living memory, which probably requires three generations. When the grandchildren of those who witness a social collapse die off, the social order they leave their descendants will define baseline social expectations. Thus if a social collapse endures for a century or more, it probably permanently reduces the complexity of a civilization, if that civilization doesn’t go extinct outright. The achievement of a non-integrated world labors under the same burden. Even if our dysfunctional world is replaced by a better one, there will always be those who feel nostalgia for the lost world, as indeed my vision of a non-integrated world involves a certain nostalgia for the world before industrialization. The true test of human mettle will be whether we can control industrialization or whether we are going to allow industrialization to control us.
