Rhetoric and reality -- a systems example

It is surprising – at least I find it surprising – that the idea there is an underlying complex structure underlying social systems is not more widely acknowledged and accepted. This is especially true as this complex social system goes by another name, “reality.” I claim that this reality is composed of a number of systemic tensions that give rise to our ongoing political debates, so it would be reasonable to ask that at least one tension be articulated. While there are many from which to choose – positive and normative, innocence and experience, affect and cognition, elitism and democracy – I’m going to start with rhetoric and reality because it reveals the others. In political science school, the role communication is ignored, or at least was ignored while I was there, but increasingly it seems to play a determinative role in politics. Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message,” and while true, the dictum is too abstract and compressed. The Rhetorical President by Jeffrey K. Tulis helps to explain and make clear the changes in the American polity that have led to our present state. That is, in the 20^th century there has been an increased reliance on information gained over an increasingly potent media rather than actual experience, and this has numerous political consequences.

I first thought about this while reading On Democracy: Toward a transformation of American society by Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers (1983), which is part of the “third-way” saving socialism literature. Cohen and Rogers argue that instead of all economic decisions being made by a central government committee, which didn’t work, then all decisions should be made by voting. Interestingly, this book was reviewed favorably by Frances Fox Piven of Cloward-Piven Strategy fame. The obvious problem with Cohen and Rogers’ argument is that if central-committee socialism failed because of distorted information channels, wouldn’t democracy-based decisions be subject to similar problematic information distortion? Part of this insight came from my experience in California elections in which tens of different ballot initiatives were put forth on a range of important topics. I know I didn’t know enough to make an informed decision, and I was probably more informed than most of my fellow voters, which made California’s extreme democracy inherently problematic. As a side not, Joshua Cohen’s response to this argument was to become incandescently angry, which was first experience “arguing” with progressives.

The point though is that communicating with a mass audience through a technical information channel – whether it be radio, TV, movies, or written media – rewards clarity and simplicity. The problem is that reality is complex, which argues against clarity. This makes the ascendency of the rhetorical presidency especially problematic because as we increasingly select our leaders based on their speaking capability, this will come at the expense of the experience that underlies an appreciation of our American complex social system that is necessary for effective policy. We need only look to the Affordable Care Act (i.e., “Obamacare”) to see the problems associated with selecting leaders based on their ability to communicate clearly and convincingly rather than, say, having a deep and accurate understanding of the subjects about which they’re talking. This is an enduring political system tension with a history going back to Plato’s Gorgias. Today’s media gives weight to rhetorical rather than technical expertise, hence the ongoing litany of policy failures and search for scapegoats.

Just to give a center to the argument, I find it curious that MIT, supposedly a hotbed of logical thought – and it certainly is with regards to engineering, physics, and computer science – continue to spew forth extreme leftists like Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, and Joshua Cohen. In the context of this argument, these thinkers are problematic because they dispense policy advice based on their own perspective rather than what’s actually workable or at least likely to work. Obamacare is only the most recent example of policies that are sold rhetorically only to fail in the real world. And these problems are entirely predictable and due to an overreliance on rhetoric. Richard Feynman (MIT 1939) got at the crux of this issue when he said,

The game I play is a very interesting one. It’s imagination in a tight straightjacket, which is this: that it has to agree with the known laws of physics. I’m not going to assume that maybe the laws of physics have changed, then I can design something. But I try --  supposing it’s everything that we know is true – as we think it is. If we do…. if we’re wrong, of course then we can design something with the new laws later. But the game is to try and figure out, with what we know what’s possible. So it requires imagination to think of what’s possible.  Then it requires an analysis back, a checking, to see whether it fits – it’s allowed with what is known.

So with regard to Cohen and Rogers’ On Democracy, it seems that they used imagination to articulate a new and camouflaged type of socialism but failed to perform the “analysis back” or the “checking” to see if it squares with what we know is possible. If centrally planned socialism fails do to information distortion, then it seems reasonable that democratically driven socialism by which decisions are made by voting rather than local expertise, is also problematic. This is the root cause of today’s political problems, and the evidence for media-based information distortion is accumulating steadily. Cohen’s response to this argument was basically the same as Herman Finer’s reaction to Friedrich von Hayek in Road to Reaction, which Hayek said was, "a specimen of abuse and invective which is probably unique in contemporary academic discussion." Of course, that was an earlier and gentler time, and such abuse and invective is becoming more frequent and regular from an increasingly beleaguered progressive movement. 

Fundamental tensions

In thinking about politics and its characteristics and contours, I take a systems approach, which implies several things. First, social systems are complex systems. Second, social systems include physical systems that have enduring characteristics – that is, a nature that can’t be wished away or changed. Third, there are a host of general rules or system guidelines that have been created to provide insight into the formation of policy and the maintenance of governance of social systems, which should be understood and applied by those who implement policy, but that is most certainly not the case currently.

The motivation here is to improve policy understanding the character of the system being governed. Without such an understanding, policies are implemented by aspiration or popularity resulting in the advertising ethic, “the truth is that which sells” – what the founding fathers called demagoguery. The problem is, policy should be judged by its long-term results, which has been more correctly characterized by the phrase, “a tree is known by its fruits,” which has been proven by the test of time.

This observation that all politics involves complex social systems is not new, with multiple philosophical constructs alluding to its enduring character including teleology, Trinitarianism, and dialecticism (and from the East, yin-yang-ism). However, what makes these subjects worth revisiting are the modern computational tools that allow progress to be make on achieving a deeper and more grounded understanding of these topics. That is, while previous generations of thinkers could only describe such systems in prose, modern computers allow us to actually specify, quantify, and analyze such systems.

Concentrating on a single thinker, Hegel provided a systemic understanding of political systems and also introduced the notion of history in the sense of dynamic complexity and the difficulties associated with understanding and predicting system behavior over time. This interplay between system dynamics and structure (what has been called “macrodynamics from mictrostructure”) isn’t just a theoretical exercise – indeed, for these observations to have any worth they must have consequences in the real-world. And that’s the point of this post, just to say that many of today’s debates provide insight into the deeper, underlying, complex and obscured systematic structures. However, we know enough today to start to articulate and define these structures, and the benefit of doing so is that they will allow for more effective policy, which is important because, per the aforementioned system guidelines, “high morality depends on accurate prophecy.” Today’s demagogic policy, in contrast, employs unrealistically optimistic prevarications to get enacted and then provides inevitably disappointing results, the antithesis of morality.

 So how do these systemic aspects get revealed, and what difference do they make? My contention is that these fundamental systemic tensions get revealed through enduring political debates. The debates we have, and their enduring nature reveals the contours of the underlying system if we’re sensitive to them and understand their nature – what might be characterized as complex conservatism. My next several posts will attempt to reveal some of these fundamental systemic tensions.