A Complexity Theory of Power: Part 2, 3-23-2012

[The following is based on part of a presentation I gave last year at the 20^th Winter Chaos Conference in Montpelier, VT on March 23, 2012.] 

So, after settling back into the U.S. in 1972, I was pursuing the conclusion I had arrived at shortly before ending my three year stay in Brazil, namely that information was the analytical key to understanding the military dictatorship.  But, that conclusion now had a new twist.  I had become intrigued by the possibility that information defined as negative entropy, the cornerstone of Claude Shannon’s information theory, had a political resonance.  Viewed strictly as a tool for electrical engineers, information theory provided no justification for drawing any conclusions about politics.  One electrical engineer who had studied with Shannon at MIT confirmed for me what I had read about Shannon, that he entertained no applications of information theory beyond the purely technical realm for which he had designed the theory.  It became clear to me that the safest way for me to make any claims about the political relevance of negative entropy would be in terms of analogy and metaphor.  Indeed this was the course recommended to me by Dave Burrell, CSC, an old friend and philosopher at Notre Dame.

I would spend the better part of the 1970s exploring the prospect of what might be called political information theory, partly through a Masters program at Stanford but largely through independent study.  The insertion of politics, with a little metaphorical license, into the conceptual core of information theory raised some incisive, challenging questions.  Norbert Wiener wrote "Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization.”  The political questions became: Is it possible then to view entropy as a measure of political disorganization and if so how?  Is political information carried by a set of messages is a measure of political organization?  Or might it be possible to build on Warren Weaver’s observation in the essay accompanying Shannon’s landmark 1948 publication that “Information is…a measure of one’s freedom of choice in selecting a message”?  Could information be used as a measure of one’s political freedom of choice in selecting a message?   

One approach I took was to suggest that electoral choice in political systems was analogous to choice in information theory.  I proposed a relationship between political organization and the ability to exercise choice and between political disorganization and the inability to exercise choice.

The analogy can be constructed with some commonsensical principles of information theory evident.  Consider the difference between the single possible outcome of a two-headed coin toss and the two possible outcomes of a regular coin toss. Because the choice presented by the two headed coin is a foregone conclusion, it really poses no choice at all.  A two-headed toss provides no news, no information.  The result of a regular coin toss, on the other hand, to the extent it is unpredictable, makes news.  It provides information. 

Plugging the number of possible outcomes into Shannon’s mathematical measure of information, the logarithm for the two headed toss, log (1) to any power, always equals 0. The logarithm for the regular coin, log (2) to any power, always has some value greater than zero.  Or, viewing information as a measure of organization, the regular toss, because it presents us with some choice, measures some organization.  The absence of choice posed by the single possible outcome, on the other hand, measures zero organization. 

A dictatorship like Brazil’s offered abundant examples of the denial of choice, whether in terms of banning elections or in the many ways it suppressed free political expression.  Take the situation of the Brazilian electorate during the 21year reign of the military dictatorship.  There were six presidents during that time, all Army generals, all dictated by the Armed Forces, none of whom ever had to face voters in an election.  It was as if the military Joints Chiefs of Staff in the United States suspended elections and took it upon themselves the power to appoint the president.  For Brazilian voters, it was in other words, a no-choice choice – just like a series of two-headed coin tosses.  By analogy, we can say that the imposed choice reflected a state of political disorganization whereas the national elections that have been held since 1985 in the country reflect some state of political organization.  This certainly makes sense if we think concretely about the organization of Brazil’s electorate.  A national electorate which has no choice to make, nothing to do for 21 years, clearly lacks organization. It is incapacitated.  An electorate, on the other hand, which has elections to participate in and actually votes in those elections, clearly, by comparison, possesses some qualities of organization.  The analogy applies equally as well to more particular sectors of Brazilian society during that were at the time similarly “disorganized” and to various degrees politically incapacitated by the dictatorship – the mass media which often had to face police censors in editorial rooms, artists whose songs or works in other media were banned, students whose organizations were made illegal, labor activists whose organizing activities were criminalized and so forth. 

I further argued that information theory offered a way to reinterpret the classical distinction between democratic tolerance of dissent and dictatorial intolerance of dissent (McCullough, 1977).  A probability boundary clearly distinguishes political systems that tolerate dissent from those that don’t.  On one side of the boundary, where there is effective legal protection of dissent, political communication is less predictable and therefore, by analogy, measures more political organization.  On the other side of the boundary, where systemic measures against dissent tend to succeed, political communication becomes more predictable and therefore, by analogy, measures less political organization. 

This brings me back to my opening speculation about a tie with thermodynamics.  When we recall that Shannon’s measure of information is mathematically identical to the one used by physicists to measure entropy, it is a short hop, skip and a jump to start speculating about something like political thermodynamics.   By analogy, a dictatorial system is not just less organized, it is more entropic – like a closed thermodynamic system.  And, by analogy, a democratic system is not just more organized, it is less entropic -- like an open thermodynamic system. If open and closed political systems are characterized by climates favoring, respectively, the improbable and the probable, if such systems may also be distinguished in terms of organization and disorganization, it seemed reasonable to draw the analogy to open and closed thermodynamic systems. In an independent studies paper I did for the Stanford Institute for Communication Research in 1975, I even proposed a nickname for political thermodynamics.  It was “polimix”.   Rhyming with “politics”, it combined “poli”, the first syllable of politics, and “mics”, the last syllable of “thermodynamics” to suggest a mix of the different fields.   

References

McCullough, Michael F., “Teilhard and the Information Revolution”, The Teilhard Review, February 1977

A Complexity Theory of Power, Part 1, 3-23-2012

[The following is based on a presentation I gave last year at the 20^th Winter Chaos Conference in Montpelier, VT on March 23, 2012.  Originally entitled “A Complexity Theory of Politics”, I now find it more appropriate to call it “A Complexity Theory of Power”.]

35 years ago, I made a bold claim when I wrote that “…dictatorship can be described as the politics of the probable or the politics of entropy and democracy as the politics of the improbable or the politics of negative entropy. Because democratic and dictatorial systems are in these terms respectively analogous to open and closed thermodynamic systems, we may begin to speculate about the possible future development of a science of political thermodynamics” (McCullough, 1977).

            I spent the better part of the 1970s focused on this prospect. Given that, over three decades later, I still don’t hear people talking quite along these lines, perhaps the wisest course of action is to let these ideas rest in peace.  But, in recent times, I have been drawn back into this line of thought as if pulled by some strange attractor.  In the process, I have found myself combining perspectives of complexity theory and political power theory.  The result is something which extends beyond political systems to broader processes, what I am calling a complexity theory of power.  

            I will get into the logic behind my theoretical speculations then and now – but first I’d like to say a few words about the personal experience that launched me on this out of the mainstream trajectory.  These ideas grew directly out of living in Brazil for almost three years during the height of its military dictatorship.  I arrived in Sao Paulo, Brazil in late 1968 with the Peace Corps.  Three weeks later, on December 13, 1968, there was a coup within the military coup in which hardliners took over the already four year old authoritarian regime.  This action ushered in an ominous new phase which most analysts now characterize as the most politically repressive period in Brazilian history.  On that day, Brazil’s military shut down the national Congress, replaced civilian with military judges on the Supreme Court, instituted rule by “decree-law’, placed censors in the newsrooms of all major media and suspended habeas corpus.  Most horribly it instituted a regime of torture of political opponents.  These repressive policies made Brazil a pariah nation in many quarters at the time.  An authoritarian U.S. foreign policy which embraced such regimes as long as they had an anti-communist intent became even more hard-edged in the Nixon-Kissinger era that had just begun. 

            As someone who had been involved in 1960s civil rights and anti-war protests in various ways, I fully expected that there would be massive demonstrations in the streets, just as there had been earlier that year in Brazil when huge protests against the dictatorship were held in major cities.  I was shocked when these draconian actions by the military were greeted with silence.  Not long into my stay I jotted in a notebook “the silence is deafening”.  What I was beginning to learn at that point and what I would discover over my three years in the country was that a dictatorship, one that lasts– and the Brazilian dictatorship lasted 21 years – actually succeeds in turning normal political behavior into a crime.  Although the military regime gradually liberalized before it finally permitted resumption of civilian presidential elections in 1985, the government I saw in action in those years was, you might say, a full throttle dictatorship.  Such a regime succeeds in putting a lid on street demonstrations, on political expression in the media, popular music and other art forms, and on organizations that can in any way question its authority.  Employing the classic tools of dictatorship – censorship, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, varied degrees of coercion, brutality and violence including torture and sometimes murder of regime opponents, it inculcates a politically paralyzing climate of fear.  It makes the price of opposition too high for most people and imposes in the end an eerie political silence in which the illusion of order and conformity masks the reality of a political life in shambles.

Weeks before leaving the country in 1971, I had a sort of epiphany-like, “Aha!” moment.  A single idea rose to the forefront of my mind: the concept of information.  Information, I concluded, was the analytical key to understanding the entire dictatorial phenomenon.  Among the various things that ended up pointing me in this direction, were official pronouncements by the regime that revealed a high degree of interest in controlling information.  I remember, for example, reading one official statement in Rio’s Jornal do Brasil that prohibited all messages public or private, direct or indirect, which in any manner violated national security.  While there was no way the regime could enforce such a drastic policy – it would have required an effort of totalitarian proportions – I was struck by the fact that elements within the regime had conceived their task of political repression in terms of message control.   It gave me a framework for viewing not only the strict media censorship in effect at the time but the way in which the vast majority of people ended up censoring themselves with anything having to do with politics.   

After I settled back into the U.S. in Manhattan in 1972, I began looking into the concept of information and soon encountered a strange notion -- Claude Shannon’s definition of information as negative entropy.  Having been an English Lit major with little scientific background, perhaps I should have turned around and run the other way.  But, as I investigated this view of information, a number of things drew me in.  I was amazed to discover (through readings like Norbert Weiner’s Human Use of Human Beings) that entropy could be viewed as a measure of the sameness or conformity in a system. It had an uncanny resonance with way I viewed the dictatorship.  If information was the negation of entropy, would not its systemic suppression by a dictatorship constitute a politics of entropy?  Indeed “political entropy” seemed to be an apt description of the marginalization of political activity, the imposition of political conformity and the snuffing out of political life.   And, if entropy was a measure of disorder, was not the suppression of information an indicator of disorder, making the dictatorship a force of disorder, the polar opposite of its proud claim to champion order?  This was certainly a counter-intuitive notion in terms of the popular association of “dictatorship” with “order” but it seemed an ideal way of criticizing the dictatorship so I eagerly grabbed onto it. 

Further encouraging me to pursue this line of investigation was Wiener’s depiction of entropy as a concept on the frontlines of a probability revolution that was overthrowing Newtonian absolutism.  I imagined that such a concept could also be fashioned into a means to criticize political absolutism of the sort I had just witnessed in Brazil. At this same time, a West Side neighbor (whose name I no longer recall) who got the drift of where I was headed loaned me Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory.   Somehow my Brazilian experience had plunged me into the fledgling efforts to find common ground between the natural sciences and the human sciences by way of the political.  

[Part of a 3-23-2012 presentation to be continued.]

References

McCullough, Michael F., “Teilhard and the Information Revolution”, The Teilhard Review, February 1977