This morning’s New York Times (7-28-2013)
has an editorial entitled “Mr. Putin’s War on Gays: Will his crackdown keep people from the
Winter Olympics in Sochi next year?” It
recounts these actions taken by Putin:
Earlier
this month, he signed a law banning the adoption of Russian-born children to
gay couples and to any couple or single parent living in any country where
marriage equality exists. Last month, Mr. Putin signed a law allowing the
police to arrest tourists and foreigners suspected of being gay or pro-gay and
detain them for up to 14 days. He also signed a bill classifying “homosexual”
propaganda as pornography with vague wording that could subject anyone arguing
for tolerance or educating children about homosexuality to arrest and fines.
Regarding the Winter Olympics to be hosted by Russia next
year, the editorial also raises the interesting prospect that “Gay athletes and
supporters of gay rights could decide not to attend the Games, or nascent calls
for a formal Olympic boycott could gather steam.”
This is the
type of power conflict that a complexity theory of power can elucidate.
In traditional
power theory, the core characteristic of power is domination. A exercises power
over B. It is a unilateral form of power
in which party A imposes its will on party B, typically through some form of
coercion. This certainly captures one
important aspect of power phenomena, including Putin’s current behavior. Whether it’s a matter of locking up parents
who educate their children about homosexuality, or jailing tourists suspected
of being gay or pro-gay, or trying to extend abroad the long arm of the Russian
state by prohibiting adoptions by citizens of countries where marriage equality
exists (read USA as of U.S. vs. Windsor), state power is used in a punitive
manner in the hope of getting others to conform to a vision of a gay-free
universe.
But if
domination is the core characteristic of power, where does this leave the
dominated, the disempowered, the people who are the victims of such crackdowns? If A exercises power over B, what does B have
to do in order to become empowered? Must B exercise power over A? Is it just a matter of turning the tables on
A? While it may be unlikely at this
point, what if a boycott of the Olympics causes Putin to back down and exercise
tolerance toward gays? Would the newly
empowered Russian gays and their allies now be exercising unilateral power over
Putin and other Russian homophobes?
No, this is
where the unilateral view of power breaks down as an overall model. And this is where the complexity theory of
power that I am in the process of developing can go to bat.
Before
proceeding, a few words are in order about complexity theory and obstacles it
faces in finding more adherents. Complexity
theory originates in the physical sciences, notably in the thermodynamics of
Ilya Prigogine. The notion that this can
lead to a human complexity theory causes alarm bells to go off on both
sides of the two culture divide between the physical and the social
sciences. There are indeed justifiable
reasons for social scientists not to want to do business with physical
scientists. Human freedom cannot fare
well guided a mechanistic, deterministic, Newtonian science, the type of
science which has prevailed for almost 400 years. What most social scientists are still unaware
of and what most physical scientists have still not completely bought into is
the birth in recent decades of a revolutionary new complexity-oriented physical
science which is indeterminist and anti-mechanistic, something beautifully explained
in Fritjof Capra’s Web of Life.
It is the kind of science advocated by Ilya Prigogine, one that sees in
matter a self-organizing potential dating back in evolution as far as pre-biotic
matter, hence the evolutionary emergence of myriad forms of life and eventually
human societies from seemingly inanimate matter.
Another issue is internal to complexity theory. Many complexity theorists fail to make
disorganization as analytically important as self-organization. Once we do so, however, we can deploy the
full thermodynamic paradigm of not only opening but closing thermodynamic
systems. We can then detect how human societal growth correlates with far from equilibrium
movement toward the less probable and societal breakdown with movement toward equilibrium
and the more probable. This is not to
equate human societies with thermodynamic systems as physicists perceive
them. Human societies are after all far
more complex than anything studied by physicists. It is to suggest, however, that the novelties
of life and human society emerged out of pre-biotic self-organizing matter and
as a consequence possess a certain thermodynamic resonance which we have only
begun to explore. Power exercised to
dominate, to incapacitate, to disorganize correlates with closure, the
increasingly probable, the entropic. Power exercised to advance cooperation
and collaboration correlates with opening, the less probable, with self-organization.
Domination is a form of linear power. It is a one-way street going from A to
B. It structures inequality of the sort
exemplified by gay exclusion in the draconian Russian measures. It imposes entropic probability on a human
net. But such unfairness produces instability
or bifurcation crises. Gays who now
organize to boycott the 2014 Olympics in Russia are using power not to impose another
sort of inequality but rather to achieve equality. Non-linear, far from equilibrium social and
political structures do not depend on coercion because millions of people agree
on what is fair and just and behave accordingly. Presumably consenting adult heterosexuals in
Russia are free from persecution and partake in such a non-linear structure. Russian gays are now confronted by the need
to dismantle the linear power which deprives them of choice and achieve equal admittance
to the non-linear dimension already enjoyed by the rest of their society in
this respect.
The same dynamic applies broadly
and particularly to the challenges women have faced in overcoming the culture
of male superiority and blacks in dismantling the structures of white racial
superiority. In these cases the
disempowered have sought not to exercise power over others but to use tactics, whether
boycotts, civil disobedience or other non-violent ways of raising hell, which highlight
inequities for all to see and oppose, paving the way toward more equitable,
more just, humanly richer, more complex societies.
