Network theory is all the rage now. New visualization tools produce spidery webs of connect-the-dots puzzles that are supposed to show how things work together in a complex, dynamical system.
Like one of those cork-boards in a police-procedural TV drama, with pictures of sleazy characters and crime-scenes connected by bits of string all over the place, and the "node" representing the suspect is a "giant component" or "hub," with many connections to smaller nodes.
And that's only an example, it could be a map of air routes between major cities, each airport represented by a dot, connected by lines representing flight paths. You can dump just about any pile of data into some software and come up with one of these appealing images. Your social network or family tree; the global distribution of protein from farm to table; the whole internet. The "degrees" between you and Kevin Bacon (only about four hops now).
There's a really good one on a website about the history of the infamous eugenics movement, and its promoters and perpetrators, that's interactive, so you can drill down to the personal lives of the infamous eugenicists. Like Shockley, also famous as co-inventor of the transistor; without which there could be no such website, or internet either for that matter.
We look at a cloud of dots connected by lines, and focus on the dots, looking for patterns, maybe our own location. Organizational charts, flowcharts, subway and airline maps are all about the circles and boxes and ovoids and triangles. That node is an organization; that one's a hub connected to a lot of organizations.
But there's something missing.
If it's an airline map, the important thing about the lines is that they represent the shortest distance between two hubs. A graph of Covid transmission in 2020 may look similar, but the connections between the dots represent quite different dimensions, a regular air service route, and a pathogen vector. One you might want to get a ticket for; the other we all hope to avoid like, um, the plague.
With that eugenics graph the link between Francis Galton and Charles Darwin is in there, but it's a very different kind of link from the one that connects Shockley to the invention of the transistor, and different again from the link between Freud and Edward Bernays. The first is ideological: Galton misinterpreted Darwin's ideas as the basis for a terrifying racist breeding project that the Nazi Holocaust did not end. The second is biographical, the story of one of Galton's followers who happened to be a brilliant electrical engineer. The third is genealogical: Bernays was a Freud family nephew on both sides, and nothing to do with crazy notions about breeding better humans like livestock. But Bernays applied Freud's theories to advertising.
These connections or correlations can be seen as dimensions along which fall certain relationships. Some nodes appear on multiple dimensions for different views (like Freud with Galton's eugenics and Bernays' marketing). And Hitler: certainly a eugenicist, but Bernays, author of "Propaganda," said he declined Hitler's invitation. In any case eugenics reached all of these men on many dimensions, giving a terrible idea stubborn persistence.
I'm resurrecting all these monsters to illustrate that this kind of structure may be a key to understanding the incredibly tangled mat of disasters that now seem to be converging on what may well be our final stage of existence on the Earth.
We can't tackle these catastrophes in the usual way, as if they were separate problems that just happen to be coming to a head at the same time. They cross too many boundaries that are really insubstantial, just arbitrary boundaries of thinking, a legacy of bureaucratic departments and academic disciplines of the past. They're too hopelessly interrelated, like the Rubik's Cube puzzle, solving one problem un-solves another. The Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" was all about this, but people seized on the population aspect, and got that wrong too.
A network graph of our predicament shows the global overheating dot connected to the fossil fuels dot with a line, maybe with an arrowhead at one or both ends. Focusing on the connecting line, what dimension lies between oil burning and atmospheric temperature rise? Is it economic, political, spiritual, existential? If our graph is to be useful, it must show the kinds of dimensions, the specific relationships that constitute those systems. We may find points of leverage this way. Fulcrums (fulcra?) and places to stand.
Let's go a step further. What would a complex-systemic approach to the problem of global overheating look like? Not a technical analysis: even a rough sketch of what we really face could be of some use, if we attend to the constitutive relationships between the nodes.
Global overheating is caused by fossil fuel combustion; there's no serious argument now (dimension: Science).
Oil and coal burning must be shut down to stop the process of heating up the Earth (dimension: Extinction), and flooding, burning, and making us thirsty (dimension: Experience); but fossil fuels are indispensable (dimension: Vital Necessities) until renewables catch up. But energy companies block progress on renewables (dimension: Politics), because fossil fuels are still far more profitable (dimension: ROI), and not enough investors can be attracted to back renewables, but plenty for arms dealers, who rely on resource-wars (dimension: Energy); and the global economy depends on "growth" (dimension: ROI).
Put even more simply, players want to score, coaches want to improve scores, journalists want to report on the score, and spectators comment on the score by yelling "boo!" and "yay!" from the bleachers.
One might think the idea here is to work out a way to address all these problems at once according to their roles, attacking along one dimension at a time, or as if we could find a single dimension on which all of these complex dynamical systems line up like beads on a string. But that can't work, because everything is in constant flux. Can't change a tire at sixty (age, maybe, MPH, no).
But we've done something else here. We've teased out one aspect of the situation that's been very difficult to grasp. And it's no surprise that it's difficult. Grasping anything (be it a hamburger or an idea) is a particular function of one side of our brains. And this puzzle is a phenomenon for which the other hemisphere is really much better suited.
Each of the components--oil companies, banks, political factions (parties, ideologies, cults, religions, etc.), legal systems, criminal gangs, oligarchs, shareholders, "social" media platforms, and so on--functions on its own dimensions: businesses with profits, scientists with grant funding, militaries managing conflicts (not "winning wars", there's no backing for that any more, but a booming market for wars), economists with models (the "right" one, and if it doesn't fit reality there's something wrong with reality)...
It's pretty clear that we are not dealing with a complex systems approach: we are a complex system.
That's the bad news. The good news is that we don't actually have to count all those beans in the first place. We shouldn't ignore our challenges, but all our approaches so far have had no discernible effect, other than to keep a few people in high positions where they can go on abusing their power until we're all toast.
Buried in all this is a tiny fact that should not go unnoticed: everything we do changes everything else. The complex system we are, resonates. There are no exceptions.
The fact that we can't predict the broader impacts of what we do doesn't stop us, but it does impair our effectiveness. A tiny truth behind the tiny fact is that the intention behind any action shapes the resonance. And we can deal with that by paying attention when forming an intention.
This doesn't require grasping anything (be it an idea or a hamburger); it entrains the side of our brains that takes in the whole landscape at a glance. It's the side that doesn't talk, it's the side that just takes in everything, raw, and presents reality to our intellectual machinery. But we often seem to skip that first step, which is just to be quiet for a moment.
We need our intelligence. We do. But we need to support it at the foundations. We need to let it be intelligent about something other than itself. Otherwise it starts making assumptions, so it can do its thing; and before we know it, we're sawing off the limb we're sitting on.
This is, by the way, exactly what we hear happening in the field of AI: it's as if we cloned one side of the brain, the talking, calculating, urgently conscienceless side, the side with the ego in it, and ran it super-hot, just to see how far we could wind it up.