Science in a Non-Integrated World
The View from Oregon — 317: Friday 29 November 2024
I concluded last week’s newsletter saying that the devolution of industrial production to a local level gives me hope for the future. This hope was that the peculiar complexity of industrial production in the wake of a major disruption of social institutions could lead in its turn to new technological emergent complexity. I focused on technology and industrial production, but I assume that a parallel argument can be made for science and social institutions. Science too would take a major hit from a catastrophic failure of civilization — it might take a worse hit than technology — but it would not likely disappear completely. “Big science,” like CERN, the LHC, ITER, JWST, FAST, and TMT would probably be doomed, but some of the sophisticated scientific knowledge and technique of our time would be retained and pursued at a much smaller scale — precisely analogous to the retention of technology and industry at a smaller, simpler scale.
If a relic of big science, like FAST or the ground-based antennas that communicate with JWST were located within an industrialized relict, they could continue to function until the instrument itself breaks down beyond repair. Since the JWST was designed to operate for many years without being serviced (it is expected to function for at least ten years, but, like the Hubble Space Telescope, it will probably have a longer operational lifespan than conservative official estimates), as long as a ground-based station can communicate with the telescope (i.e., a station sufficiently sophisticated to direct the operation of this instrument), the flow of data will continue. The supercomputers that process the data would no longer continue to become larger and faster, but such as do survive could continue to grind away at the data, and it would not be impossible that a post-apocalyptic society could, in this way, have a more sophisticated understanding of cosmology than we possess at present.
In the fortunate circumstance that some major scientific instrument were saved from oblivion, it would be the change in perspective on the part of the theoreticians that might well be the greatest change to the sciences. An intact instrument will continue to function according to its design until it experiences some mechanical failure, but the human impact would be immediate; the data would be the same, but the scientists themselves would be transformed. Scientists would see themselves and their world differently, and this different perspective would lead to different scientific insights than would be produced in some future iteration of our integrated world. The theoreticians who still had access to this data, simply in virtue of their geographical proximity (because planetary-scale communications would suffer along with planetary-scale supply chains), would be disproportionately influenced by this data, and their work would be led in the direction of this data. Meanwhile, other geographically isolated groups of researchers clustered around some other surviving instrument would be led in a slightly different direction by the data to which they had access, and, over time, these local theoretical communities would diverge. Left to develop in this way, non-integrated science would speciate.
I just produced an episode on Nikolay Danilevsky that reminded me of his argument for distinct scientific traditions among distinct cultural-historical types (prefiguring but in some ways more explicit than Spengler’s analogous claim). Danilevsky’s conception of distinct forms of science (implying distinct forms of technology) would be more clearly exemplified in a world of devolved industrial production. The planetary integration of industrial production (and science) homogenizes the local varieties of science. In newsletter 307 I said that human races represent nascent speciation that was arrested by transportation technology; the same transportation technology (and its associated communications technology) means that the speciation of science, technology, and industrial production have been arrested, but in a non-integrated world the pressure for homogenization would largely disappear and these institutions would become more local, wedded to an indigenous and particularistic way of life.
When contemplating scenarios of the catastrophic failure of civilization, it’s easy to become pessimistic, so, with my hope for some alternative form of technological complexity, I was pleased to find at least one potential silver lining to the breakdown of planetary-scale industrial supply chains. The point is not that things would continue as before — they would not — the point is that this would mark a forking in the path of human development, which would not stop, but would rather continue on a different path. Contemporary planetary-scale supply chains for industry are highly complex, and from this complexity follows the emergent of Earth’s global economy, which has achieved great things. The failure of this global economy would result in the loss of this particular form of complexity, and my point was that other forms of complexity not seen at present could emerge from the re-localization of production. This is analogous to the redirection of the evolution of the biosphere following mass extinction events: life takes a new path based on surviving clades.
The kind of complexity that characterizes devolved industrial production is distinct from the kind of complexity that characterizes integrated industrial production: devolved production is reticulate, while integrated production is centralized. Reticulate structures, even if they don’t deliver gains as rapidly as integrated production, would have the opportunity to grow into rival centers of production without the competition of major centers of industrial production. The decentralized structure of non-integrated production would have some advantages. Any reticular network can connect to any other reticular network at any point and profit both networks through the interaction that trickles through this connection. As I noted earlier, progress would not happen as quickly, but the network is robust and resilient over the longue durée.
One of the features (or bugs) of life in an integrated industrial society that has been particularly burdensome for human beings has been the acceleration of the pace of life, which has led to the breakdown of social institutions and, in some case, has adversely affected the mental health of entire populations. Non-integrated industrial production suggests the possibility of an alternative social order that could be more humane. We can imagine a devolved and distributed network of science, technology, and industrial production in which the perennial rhythms of local and regional life continue in their undisturbed way over the longue durée even as small-scale science and technology continue in development (albeit slowly). This would be a very different kind of world than that typically imagined by futurists, without the gleaming, soaring cities and the familiar idée fixe of planetary-scale governance, but with ongoing scientific and technological progress.
In the past few newsletters I’ve been using “non-integrated production” and “devolved industrial production” synonymously, but it has just occurred to me that these two ideas are slightly different, and it would be worthwhile to keep them separate to preserve their distinct meanings. Devolved production implies a devolution from a previous state, and in the case of a catastrophic failure of social institutions, the devolution is from the previous state of higher social complexity to the present state of lower social complexity. Since science and industrial production are among the social institutions that devolve on the occasion of de-complexification, they parallel the fate of the society on the whole. Non-integrated production does not necessarily imply a previous condition of higher complexity or even a state of greater integration, since non-integrated production could conceivably arise on a planet as a natural consequence of the development of social evolution, not having been preceded by another kind of industrialism. If we were to experience the catastrophic failure of social institutions, the resulting industrial production would be devolved, because we had previously exemplified another model of industrialization; this we could also call post-integrated production, making explicit the historical sequence. This is one of the lessons I take away from the thinking represented by my last few newsletters.
Another distinction to be observed relevant to this discussion would be that between roundabout production processes and geographically distributed roundabout production processes. In roundabout production processes simpliciter, different stages in the production of a commodity are produced by different industries, so there is an industry for resource extraction, another industry for the refinement of raw resources, an industry for manufacturing components out of refined resources, and an industry to assemble components into end-use ready commodities. In geographically distributed roundabout production processes, the many distinct industries represented by roundabout production processes are geographically distributed, presumably according to principles of comparative advantage, which could be understood to comprehend the uneven geographical distribution of natural resources, if we grant that those in proximity to a resource develop expertise in its extraction and refining.
Needless to say, ideal conditions of geographical distribution, as would be implied by a strict observance of comparative advantage, and like ideal conditions for competition, do not obtain in the real world, since markets are skewed by many factors. These geographically distributed roundabout production processes give us planetary-scale industrial supply chains. It is possible that roundabout production processes could be developed within a single geographical region, though how widely we construe “geographical region” then becomes important; the larger the geographical region, the more likely that it could sustain roundabout production processes.
