A Complexity Theory of Power Applied to “Putin’s War on Gays”

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.  

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

Welcome to Complexity Revolution Blog

There’s something happening here.

What it is ain’t exactly clear.

from “For What It’s Worth” by Stephen Stills

Link to Portuguese version

             I Googled “complexity revolution” a few times over the past few weeks. During that period, the number of hits went from 9,000 some to 12,500. Clearly something is stirring here. Another testimony to this is the fact that my first choice for a Google blogspot domain name --“ComplexityRevolution” -- is already taken. So I inserted a hyphen, making the full URL http://www.Complexity-Revolution.blogspot.com. (I have purchased a custom domain, ComplexityRevolution.org, but have been unsuccessful so far in pointing this blog to it.)

Whatever “complexity revolution”means, I am, with this blog, jumping into the dialogue – and the debate.

“Complexity” is a big umbrella. Instead of trying to come up with a definition -- something which eludes leading thinkers in the field [1] – I will simply say that complexity is a characteristic, to some degree, of all known phenomena and scientific investigators are making progress in understanding its underlying, often surprising patterns. As a political scientist, my special hope is that the complexity approach to science – both in spite of and because of its physical origins -- can help social scientists,political scientists in particular, build stronger claims to be scientists.

Social scientists have been sharply divided on whether or not to use physical science concepts and methodologies. As Immanuel Wallersteinhas described this situation, social science has been like “someone tied to two horses galloping in opposite directions.” [2] Exerting a strong pull in one direction has been social science envy of Newtonian physicists’ ability to pronounce mathematically precise, universal laws of nature. But such an approach has repelled other social scientists who oppose the deterministic implications of making human behavior as predictable as the tides.

As a partisan of the latter group, I find complexity science enormously exciting. It is part of a current of indeterminism that has sprung from the physical sciences for well over a century now – the rise of the improbable through biological evolution, the use of probability in closed system thermodynamics, the uncertainty principle in quantum physics and the notion of self-organization in open thermodynamic systems. Physical indeterminists not only offer tools which can be fashioned to criticize “Newtonian social science” but a view of the material world which can accommodate human free will and its intrinsic unpredictability. This makes them people with whom social scientists not only can but need to do business. Why need to? Because each and every human social system is a physical system. But neither physical scientists nor social scientists can explain, in their own terms, how this is so. This constitutes a gaping hole in ascientific perspective on reality. As Edgar Morin puts it,

“…natural science has no way to conceive of itself as a social reality; human social science has no means of conceiving its biophysical roots; science has no means to conceive of its social role and its own special nature in society." [3]

To fill this chasm between the“two cultures”, we need to develop physically-integrated views of human socialsystems. This requires communication between physical and social scientists. It requires the development of a common language to enable such communication. In the mid-twentieth century, cybernetics and general system theory took up this challenge but fell short. Complexity theory now seems poised to pick up their fallen banners. Various conceptual ingredients to make this possible seem to be available but the heavy lifting still needs to be done.

          My own entry into this dialogue is a combination of political power theory and complexity theory, what I call a complexity theory of power. Aside from a presentation I gave at a conference earlier this year [4], I have not gone public with these ideas. This blog is a way of thinking out loud, hopefully getting feedback and, at the same time, developing something for publication.

The theory, in a nutshell, goes like this: Thermodynamics is the core science of complexity. Disorganized complexity and organized complexity [5] correspond, respectively, to disorganization or disorder in closed thermodynamic systems and organization (or self-organization) in opens ystem thermodynamics. We can identify thermodynamic complexity in the exercise of power, when we distinguish between “power over” (power exercised as the choice of one person or group imposed on another) and “power with” (power exercised as mutual choice not ultimately imposed on others). Power exercised over others has a disorganizing function; it increases disorganized complexity in human social systems. Likewise, power exercised with others has a self-organizing function; it increases human self-organized complexity.

In this view we are not only great organizers but great disorganizers. We are, as Edgar Morin has long argued, not only Homo Sapiens but Homo Demens. “The reign of Sapiens”, wrote Morin, “corresponds to a massive introduction of disorder into the world” [6]. When we exercise power to dominate others,whether through the currently alarming levels of slavery [7] or dictatorship or far subtler forms of oppression and exploitation, we introduce disorder, we are disorganizing ourselves. When we subjugate nature rather than “dialogue with nature” (as Ilya Prigogine called for [8]), we are disorganizing ourselves. When, however, we exercise power with not over others, when we collaborate with others for the benefit of the whole commnity, when we deal with nature as an equal partner, we achieve greater degrees of self-organization. With such extraordinary powers we may be described, for better or worse, as Homo Potens.

           Are such comparisons between the physical and human realms mere metaphors or do they point toward the elusive physical dimension of human political systems? On the basis of what I have been able to say so far, it is understandable if you assume the former. But, in this blog, I shall try to build a plausible case for the latter.

I realize that, by associating thermodynamics and human social systems, I go out on a limb for most scientists, be they social or physical. And, I know that many, perhaps most,complexity theorists would contest the notion that thermodynamics is the core science of complexity. And, tossing a combustible like politics into the mix in no way simplifies matters.

All I can say in this space is that I have a picture to communicate but it is a mosaic. And the pieces of the mosaic are empirically-based analogies drawn between the physical and political realms. The case will rise or fall on the strength or resonance of these analogies as a group. If they prove to be just that – mere analogies -- the theory can be banished to the dust bin of scientific speculation. If, in the face of rigorous testing, the analogies resonate, the theory may stand, always subject, of course, to further review and testing.Wherever this may lead, your comments and criticism will be greatly appreciated.

*******

[1] Melanie Mitchell recounts how complexity theorists in a Santa Fe Institute symposium, when posed with the question of defining “complexity”, were unable to reach any consensus (Kindle location 1620). She suggests that, even though a single science or theory of complexity does not yet exist, it may be in a formative stage -- “…an essential feature of forming a new science is a struggle to define its central terms” (Kindle location 334). Complexity: A Guided Tour, 2009, NewYork: Oxford University Press.

[2] TheUncertainties of Knowledge, 2004:19. Philadelphia:Temple University Press.

[3] Translated from Ciência com Consciência (2001:20, Rio de Janeiro: Editora Bertrand Brasil). This in turn was translated from Science avec conscience. Unfortunately, Edgar Morin’s pioneering work in critical complexity theory is largely unavailable in English. I will refer to his ideas regularly in this blog.

[4] “A Complexity Theory of Politics”, 20^th Winter Chaos Theory Conference,Montpelier, VT, March 24, 2012.

[5] Warren Weaver’s seminal essay "Science and Complexity" (American Scientist, No. 36, 1948: 536-544) distinguished between organized and disorganized complexity. He did not make an explicit association between disorganized complexity and thermodynamics but implied as much when he related the study of disorganized complexity withWillard Gibbs and statistical mechanics.

[6] Translated from Le paradigme perdu:la nature humaine (1973:122. Paris: Éditions de Seuil).

[7] There are currently up to 100,000 slaves in the United States and possibly 27 million worldwide (New YorkTimes editorial, “Slavery in the Modern Age”, July 1, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/opinion/02sat3.html).

[8] “Science is a dialogue between man and nature…” (The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature, 1997:153, New York: The Free Press). Prigogine elaborated on this theme in Chapter 7 “Our Dialogue with Nature” (153-162).