It _is_ interesting to think about what is LOST as we go up in scale in
social systems, as well as what might be gained. Organizations can in some
sense be much more stupid than individuals, though if we transpose this
observation to ecosystems vs, organisms, I wonder if we would still agree?
The problem may lie in the nature of our organizations, rather than in
their scale. (In another post I wax pessimistic about the nature of
professional organizations as environments for community and interpersonal
life, calling the currently dominant models pathological in some basic
human sense.)
The methodology problem is clearly related to the issue of scalability of
design. If your cultural model of organization is say a an authoritarian
control hierarchy with one Supreme Leader at the top, and you try to run a
community of several hundred this way, there is no basic design problem,
whatever we may think of the ethics and politics. But to run a community of
hundreds of trillions this way (the space-opera Galactic Empire) just does
not seem feasible. The design model does not scale. (It is by the way not
at all obvious than any known form of democracy scales up very far either).
Look at our typical models for cities, or for bureaucratic-corporate
organizations. How far up do they scale? Cities I know seem to reach some
maximum viable state with populations around 2 million, and by 10 million
or more they are veering toward unsustainability; at 20-30 million, with
present technology and present ideas about urban design, I'd say they would
fail. What about organizations? how cohesive can a global corporation
continue to be if it were ten times larger than the largest existing
corporations today? how liveable, or profitable would such a corporate
organization be at mega-scale? How viable would our legal, governmental,
and corporate (in the broad sense, including churches, educational
organizations, etc.) systems be, how viable would a nation-state design be
with a population of 10 billion? (How viable is it with any appreciable
fraction of 1 billion? Are China or India today actually nation-states in
the sense that the US or France are? Is even the US really governable at
its present population?).
I have posed these questions in terms of size rather than time; they are
more complex, and probably more interesting when looked at in terms of the
viability of integrating essential processes across timescales. How far
removed from the scale of face-to-face interaction can the locus of
decision-making that directly affects people's lives (via the heterochrony
of bureaucratic paperwork) become before the degree of alienation and
discontent breaks faith with 'the system'? I think the health-care system
debates (and experience) in the US are a good testcase for this right now.
In education in the US, the national standards movements are basically
doing the same thing to students and teachers that HMO's are doing
to patients and doctors. Alienation and discontent are growing rapidly in
both cases, and will get a lot worse to the extent that the educational
system becomes as successful at making mistakes in local cases as the
healthcare system has become.The legal system wisely stays moderately close
to the basic human interpersonal scale, but even then is widely regarded as
a failure in this country. The electoral-governmental system of course
shifts decision-making up even more scales of organization, but mainly
makes decisions which affect large organizations rather than individuals.
There is quite a bit of alienation from it even so. And of course those
governmental bureaucracies which DO make decisions that directly affect
people's lives are pretty universally hated and regarded as making wrong
decisions; governments tend to survive to the extent that only small or
relatively politically powerless segments of society suffer most at the
hands of these over-scaled organizational designs.
So, methodologically, while I favor, indeed think necessary and inevitable,
some integration of individual research efforts into longer-term collective
projects (which will of course take on a life of their own, with all the
unpredictability that implies) in order to understand our villages (by
getting at the top of their sandwich as well as the bottom), I would NOT
anticipate that such research collaborations should have too many layers of
formalized organization. Indeed just as few as one can get away with for
purposes of coordination. A mainly 'horizontal' design.
And here again may be the limit of my optimism: we don't yet know how to
design social organizations with minimal numbers of levels of organization
(maximally horizontal) that can span large social networks and long
timescales. The kinds of organizations we do know how to build would, in my
opinion, rapidly become self-defeating long before reaching the scale-size
necessary for the projects we might envision.
We are stuck at the moment with a lot of really bad models of social
organization; bad on the scales on which they work, in terms of what they
do to our humanity, and worse in terms of their lack of scalability. We are
no doubt so poor in tested social models on large scales because the
existing models have been built to serve the interests of small ruling
elites. There has never been a large-scale egalitarian form of social
organization on this planet. We don't have a clue what one would look like.
That may not be a methodological problem right now; but it's a pretty big
problem nonetheless.
JAY.
PS. yes, we are all watching the Internet social system to see what happens
there; you are welcome to optimism on a timescale in which we do not yet
know the outcome.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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