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.