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DEANGELIS ON CIVILIZATIONAL RESILIENCE AND COMPLEXITY

Steve DeAngelis at ERMB was kind enough to devote a lengthy post to my thoughts on civilizational resilience and also those of the complexity theorist Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam.
In bringing his expertise to bear, Steve helpfully clarified many important aspects of civilizational resilience and complexity, including the issue of scalability, before delving into Bar-Yam’s biological model:

“The basic premise is that the complexity of connections increases as one moves from the random actions of individuals to the coordinated movements of great civilizations. Resilience increases as you move up this continuum from individuals (who survive at best around century) to civilizations (which can survive for thousands of years). Safranski asks where globalization fits into this scheme of things. Is globalization an ephemeral stage or a convergence of civilizations into something new?

… I agree with the basic premise that complexity grows as connections increase. I have argued that globalization has created a complexity gap which results when organizations try unsuccessfully to meet emerging challenges with traditional solutions. I started Enterra Solutions to help fill the complexity gap for organizations and Tom Barnett and I promote Development-in-a-Box as a way to fill the complexity gap for nation-states.

…Dynamic civilizations, like the Roman Empire, generally fall as a result of complacency and decadence. Whereas, static civilizations generally decline more gradually as the complexity gap increases and the people end up undereducated, underproductive, and impoverished”

This last point was really quite important.

Steve’s “Complexity Gap“ is a critical concept because it introduces the cognitive aspect of social and political problems that, if left unaddressed, is likely to render otherwise solvable political problems intractable. A phenomena we see in many failing states with a numerically tiny, Western (or Soviet bloc) educated elite and a semi-illiterate, rural majority, population. A reason why the introduction of mass education, particularly for in societies where, traditionally, education has been denied to women, often proves to be transformative on a multiplicity of levels.

On Bar-Yam:

“Although there is a Borg-like quality to Bar-Yam’s description of humanity as “a single organism,” his larger point is that we are all in this world together and many of the complex solutions to emerging challenges are going to require a coordinated effort. Since we all know how difficult (impossible?) it is to get international agreement on anything, we are left wondering how (if?) this coordinated effort will emerge.

If Bar-Yam is correct and we are heading toward a networked “civilization” and greater specialization, some of the topics I’ve blogged in the past will become even more important. For example, the able to create a “Medici Effect” (18 May post) among specializations will critical as will the establishment of “globally-integrated enterprises” (14 June post). The ability to establish and maintain “communities of practice” (27 & 29 June posts) will also be important. Each of these concepts shares a simple idea, when people connect good things can happen.”

Steve is, in my view, quite correct.

A networked civilization by definition will see greater interaction by these specialists across domains , in horizontal thinking fashion, and that such multidisciplinary collaboration ( which is happening with increasing frequency in the sciences) is a sign that such a society is starting to emerge. Not unlike the first shifts away from commons land agriculture and artisanal craftsmanship and toward consolidated landholdings, factories and worker specialization in the 17th-19th centuries. An economic and organizational transition that heralded the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Read Steve’s post in full.

“THE COMPLEXITY ECONOMICS REVOLUTION”

John Hagel, who I wish would post more frequently than he does, reviewing Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth, at Edge Perspectives:

“Beinhocker’s book takes on a more ambitious task. As he indicates in his preface,

Second, and related to the first, Eric’s rich discussion of business strategy towards the end of his book suffers from a tendency to focus solely on individual enterprises without exploring significant opportunities to pursue strategies that mobilize large networks or webs of participants. His discussion of strategy tends to assume a dichotomy of firm and market, without acknowledging the rich spectrum of relationships that exist between these two extremes. This is particularly surprising since, earlier in his book, Eric explores with great insight the role of networks in complex adaptive systems. “

Read John Hagel’s post in full.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ON THE 4th OF JULY, 1863

Speaking in the wake of the fall of Vicksburg to the Union army under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant and the defeat of General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate forces at Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln addressed a crowd outside the White House:

“Fellow-citizens: I am very glad to see you to-night. But yet I will not say I thank you for this call. But I do most sincerely thank Almighty God for the occasion on which you have called. How long ago is it? Eighty odd years since, upon the Fourth day of July, for the first time in the world, a union body of representatives was assembled to declare as a self-evident truth that all men were created equal.

That was the birthday of the United States of America. Since then the fourth day of July has had several very peculiar recognitions. The two most distinguished men who framed and supported that paper, including the particular declaration I have mentioned, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the one having framed it, and the other sustained it most ably in debate, the only two of the fifty-five or fifty-six who signed it, I believe, who were ever President of the United States, precisely fifty years after they put their hands to that paper it pleased the Almighty God to take away from this stage of action on the Fourth of July. This extraordinary coincidence we can understand to be a dispensation of the Almighty Ruler of Events.

Another of our Presidents, five years afterwards, was called from this stage of existence on the same day of the month, and now on this Fourth of July just past, when a gigantic rebellion has risen in the land, precisely at the bottom of which is an effort to overthrow that principle “that all men are created equal,” we have a surrender of one of their most powerful positions and powerful armies forced upon them on that very day. And I see in the succession of battles in Pennsylvania, which continued three days, so rapidly following each other as to be justly called one great battle, fought on the first, second and third of July; on the fourth the enemies of the declaration that all men are created equal had to turn tail and run “

Happy 4th of July !

THE RESILIENCE OF CIVILIZATIONS

This is an intriguing subject for me because I suspect that it is one of the fundamental questions of our time.

Globalization has had the effect of increasing integration of states and societies as well as weakening or disintegrating them; a paradox which has led to considerable debate regarding the trajectory of world affairs. Possibly, instead of viewing globalization as an either-or phenomena, unidimensional in effect, a continuum of effects might be better. Placement on the continuum would depend on how the particular (societies, states, civilizations) react when they increasingly engage the universal ( the global market).

For example, on one one pole of globalization we see the dynamic, interdependent, convergence of civilizations heralded by Thomas P.M. Barnett, Francis Fukuyama, and Thomas Friedman where the map is new, the Gap is shrinking and the world is flat. On the opposite pole we have Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations where cultures have “bloody borders”, the map has melted and Robert Kaplan’s coming anarchy reigns over a host of states that are doomed to decline, beset by 4GW warfare and John Robb’s global guerillas. A line that can accomodate Bill Gates and Bin Laden, Burma and Britain and the West and the Rest.

Previously, we have discussed building state resilience here and at ERMB, Steve DeAngelis has promoted “Development -in-a-Box” to orchestrate the building of resiliency tailored to the specific problems faced by institutions or states. Civilizations are a much larger, vastly older and an inherently more complex class of human organization than are mere states. Like states, civilizations are not eternal, they can decline and fall but even vanished civilizations leave behind a legacy lasting thousands of years. Many pass on at least part of their ” cultural DNA” to successors, as Greeks did for the Roman, Arab Muslim, Eastern Orthodox and Western civilizations.

This longitudinal endurance speaks to a inherently high level of resiliency but why are civilizations inordinately resilient ? And what determines the forms that such resiliency takes ? Civilizations differ after all. The ancient Egyptian and Chinese cultures both lasted an exceedingly long time and had their origins in the agricultural settlement of major river systems; yet one is dead and gone and the other is enjoying a second rise. In my view, this is not a historical accident.

The degree of resiliency possessed by civilizations, relative to lesser entities like states, corporations, armies, religions, tribes and so on, I would argue, is derived simply by the fact of their greater complexity. Viewing civilizations as another complex adaptive system lets us perceive it as a set of links, very dense and interconnected yet dynamically evolving. In the view of complexity theorist Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam, civilizations are a “superorganism“. While we do not have to adopt this biological analogy per se, it is a good way of indicating that civilizations are quatitatively and qualitatively superior, in terms of their connectivity, to lesser social systems. They have achieved a ” critical mass” of link density – a complexity of connectivity – to be essentially self-sustaining and independent of other systems.

The forms of resiliency a civilization exhibits are another matter. To continue to exist, a civilization as a complex system must negotiate the tension between stability and change over time. The determination of the form of resiliency would come from the core values of the civilization which in turn would govern the emergence of the structures of its institutions. A hierarchy functions differently than does a scale-free network as will societies organized along those different lines.

To generalize about civilizations at the broadest level we can see tendencies toward two kinds of resiliency:

A predisposition to dynamic adaptation is good for civilizational longevity and autonomy -think of the aggressive Romans or the Aztecs – but too much unchecked dynamism and the system is dangerously unstable -think of the creative but disunited Greeks whose self-destruction was the Peloponnesian War. In general, these dynamically adaptive civilizations are apt to lean toward political resilience, creating forms of government well suited to weathering change brought on by war, commerce or disaster.

The price of political resilience is a loss of control at the cultural level where evolution is allowed to proceed at a greatly accelerated rate. Technically, the Byzantine Empire was a direct and unbroken continuation of Roman rule but a pagan, Latin-speaking, citizen of the Republic in the days of the Punic Wars would be hard-pressed to recognize the mystical and orientalized, Greek-speaking, government of the Christian Basileus as the descendant of anything Roman.

On the other side of the coin, some systems have a bias toward maintaining stability at all costs and are culturally resilient. If you look at ancient Egypt from the time of King Narmer (circa 3100 B.C.) to Pharoah Akhenaten (circa 1379 B.C.) virtually no cultural change in the visual-symbolic presentation of the Pharoah of any lasting significance had been permitted to take place. An amazing record of cultural stasis and even Akhenaten’s revolutionary aesthetic and religious innovations were decisively rolled back after his death. So powerful was Egypt’s cultural resilience that even the late Greek Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, the heirs of Alexander the Great, found it politic to adopt Egyptian norms. Similar stability and cultural absorbtion of foreign conquerers exists in the record of Vedic and Chinese civilization.

The enforcement of cultural stasis or isolation from change seems to be politically debilitating. Governmental systems are cognitively cripppled by cultural restrictions in the face of novel challenges or conditions. Much of Hindu India spent seven centuries under Muslim rule before being swallowed up by the British Empire. The Persians, possessed of an proud and much admired culture, were the plaything of a succession of foreign conquerors with eastern Iran never having quite recovered from the scourges of the Mongols. The Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan froze Japanese development for 250 years, only avoiding being carved up by European powers by a timely revolution in favor of modernization.

Opting for Stasis or Dynamism and the resultant political or cultural resilience they entail, or striking some balance between the two, would appear to be a critical civilizational choice.

THEORY VS. PRACTICE

The Small Wars Council is one of my favorite discussion boards to peruse and read. Generally, as the board is primarily intended for former and current military personnel, I don’t comment there as frequently as I have in the past on history sites like HNN and H-Diplo but I add my two cents now and again.

One of those exceptions is a thread I began called “Theory vs. Practice“. The feedback and comments so far have been stellar as experienced veterans (including Sonny) discuss the impact, or lack thereof, of strategic theories on the reality of making war.

Hat tip to the esteemed Younghusband and the irascible J. Smith, a frequent commenter at Federalist X’s excellent blog Amendment Nine – both of whom inspired me to start the thread.