The Simple Message of our Nation's Complexity

We depend upon so much. Events like this demonstrate that. In shaping politics, we need to keep in mind that for all the fun and games we play here, there is a practical consequence for who we elect.

Right now, my home, still mostly intact, lacks power. We still have phone. We don’t have the power to run the computers that get us the internet, so I’m writing this from somewhere else.

Over the past few days, I’ve seen how people can come together on their own. We don’t need government to tell us to do some things. People naturally gather together, if they are of good conscience, to help each other out.

But there are some things we cannot do. Since Saturday, nearly the entire neighborhood, with few exceptions, is without power. What can we do about that? We’ve piled debris high. What can we do about that? The stores can only sell somethings, but nothing really perishable. By luck we get ice to cool some things. A warm meal has been a rarity.

How long can we tolerate this? The flashlights will eventually run low. The patience of people and the caution of criminals and mischief makers will do so as well, sooner or later. We are lucky that a cold front came through, dropping nightime temperatures into the sixties. This time last year, we were probably seeing eighties and nineties.

A word about stoplights. You will know the value of coordination if you have to navigate our streets. Try negotiating an intersection with an stoplight out, when it’s got two main lanes and a turning lane on each side. Four way stop stop sounding good at that point. At some point, at some degree of complexity, people’s ability to efficiently coordinate between each other on an ad hoc basis becomes snarled in conflicting impulses and signals.

Perhaps we’re bothered by the burdens of taxation and regulation. We shouldn’t take on much more of those than we need, nor ignore the necessity of keeping such systems cost efficient. However, the notion that a society like ours, an interstate, independent modern-day America, can function like many conservatives dream of it functioning is foolhardy. It’s not that the average person does worse with their own money or that the government knows better. It’s simply that we no longer live our lives independently, rustically, able or required to fend for ourselves. We live more interconnected, more dependent on one another, and without some agreed upon rules and common effort, we’re not going to do a good job of negotiating our problems and setting our priorities, and some problems that would remain one’s own problem under the old system (say, like bad meat from a cow) will nowadays become many folk’s problem very quickly.

Disasters like Hurricane Ike highlight just how dependent we are on those other than ourselves, and this dependency cannot be wished away by conservatives looking to do everything on a private basis, or have the private actors be freed of obligation to those that depend upon them. There is simply no way to go it on our own to that degree.

The coming political changes, I think, are a recognition of that. But it’s not simply some cyclical return to the old-fashioned liberalism. We’ve learned a great deal in that time, and more to the point, the world where the old politics made sense is as dead as the world in which conservative dogmas made sense. There may not be a clear precedent for the approaches we take as we leave the old conservative system behind. I think both Republicans and Democrats need to rethink their goals and methods. The Republicans especially. Some answers of yesterday still apply today and make sense today, but some attitudes are relics of a time when conditions better suited their line of thinking. The Republicans, I feel, have done a lot of damage to our system trying to make policy in America conform to such sensibilities. Still, Democrats could do their own damage, if they insist on their party’s old policies with too much of a sense, you could say, of conservatism about it.

One of the things I have tried to do is bring thinking from beyond the political world into it, Small Worlds Theory and Complexity Theory among them. I do not believe that politics is a self-sufficient system of logic which can be relied upon exclusively to make political decisions. I believe that we must allow other wisdom to permeate our judgments, other considerations besides just “political realities”.

As I sit at home, most likely without power tonight, I will be counting upon the power company and others to do their job on my behalf. I sure hope that “political realities or “economic realities” of one kind or another don’t lead people to make what are in real reality stupid mistakes. I sure hope somebody coordinates these people properly, and doesn’t get in their way. I sure hope that deregulation or sloppiness hasn’t lead to an equipment or infrastructure problem that slows down recovery. As a person who knows he doesn’t run his own life completely, and never will, I hope that, in our division of labor, other people do their best job at what they are best at, and enable me to do my best job as well.

Full article: The Simple Message of our Nation's Complexity

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• Save the U.S. Auto Industry?
• Climate-Change Rival
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