I also acquired, but have so far only skim read in parts, his 1948 collection of essays that starts with “The Yogi and the Commissar”. Interesting to see in other translated works, which include novels, drama and autobiography as well as non-fiction, includes that 600 page Sleepwalkers listed as an “Essay”(!)
Koestler was a fully-paid-up Marxist-Leninist Communist under Stalin, but like Orwell who cited Koestler as a major influence and also experienced the Spanish civil war, wrote about the corrupting pitfalls of totalitarian forms of Socialism from first-hand experience.
[Post Note – Another “Socialist” who fell out with Stalin’s ways and contributed seminally to Complex Systems Thinking – via both the novel and non-fiction forms – was Aleksandr Bogdanov. Another Mike Jackson / Hull Centre for Systems Studies source – and the connection of both Science and Social Systems thinking with Eastern thought with Nagarjuna as well as Bogdanov in Rovelli’s book Helgoland – it’s all connected– is it ever?!? – subject of my next post, here.]
Just a holding post for a dialogue I just don’t have the bandwidth to engage right now. I admire the work of both Dave Snowden and Mike Jackson in the wider “Complex Adaptive/Anthropic/Critical-Systems Thinking” space. Known them and their work back to the origins of my Psybertron work, but first referred to the both in them same breath here a couple of years ago.
1 – The origins of ST are in the Macy Conferences, not Systems Dynamics – they came a decade early. And in those events, the split between Ashby and Bateson is significant. I would argue that Bateson is a precursor of complexity science, while most ST followed Ashby
2 – The use of archetypal characters and a questionnaire is useful only if you see the categories as modulators of team behaviour. Categorising individuals runs into the same problems as pseudo-sciences such as Myers-Briggs.
For me Dave’s points 1 and 3 are about understanding the origins / history / genetics of how different systems & complexity, cybernetics & dynamics branches evolved to be – post-Macy for me too – but this shouldn’t lead to tighter definitions of each labelled branch. On the contrary it’s about flexible/porous #GoodFences and better understanding the whole in terms of relationships between the branches, but never feeling bound by the limitations of any one branch simply because one label is chosen in dialogue. Surely anyone bringing an enlightened view to their endeavours cares about the whole?
Pretty much what was behind my response to an earlier LinkedIn post from Dave. (Somewhere Dave has edited one of his responses out of that thread, my response is across two comments. I had already answered his second plea.)
Dave’s point 2 – is pretty much my #MoreThanScience agenda. Just because something isn’t science is no reason to debunk it as pseudo-science. Valuable stuff exists beyond science – simply more honest not to call it science. (See values and labels in the previous otherwise completely unrelated post too.)
How an amoral metaphysics enables social power to influence shared cultural dialogue in an untold number of ways. Thankfully there’s a solution.
His focus here is explicitly the labels<>values contrast, and I have some questions to ask about his use of labels, but first I need to affirm my agreement with the central point in his sub-heading. The world runs predominantly on the subject-object metaphysics he calls amoral and he correctly emphasises the “cultural” dimension of how our real-world dialogues are deeply influenced by it and why its amoral influence enables any number of immoral interpretations and uses by those with power to act. The solution he alludes to is Robert Pirsig’s metaphysics of quality. No argument from me, being values-based, morality is built into Pirsig’s MoQ.
Labels Generally? I use a concept I refer to as #GoodFences. The idea that the names we give things – labels – are a necessary component of any constructive dialogue. But, however much formal, logical, objective – and contractual / legal – discourse depends on such labels and things being “well-defined”, in the real world they are best treated as good fences. Linguistic this-not-that dividing lines between the objects of our dialogue necessary for the purpose of having the dialogue but nevertheless movable and evolvable as part of that dialogue. Not rigidly cast in stone, except in artificially constrained contexts. Since subject-object metaphysics is predicated on those labelled things it unsurprisingly relies entirely on their definitions. So again, no argument, fixed rigid labels are bad for real world dialogue.
Labels Specifically? We need to look at the words David uses:
His starting topic is the idea of “socialism” in US political discourse – most associated with Bernie Sanders. Those scare quotes suggest #GoodFences to me, that we’re avoiding rigid definitions, and yet to have any meaningful dialogue, we clearly need to distinguish socialism from the alternative(s). Capitalism and Social-Democracy (he says “democratic socialism”).
He suggests Bernie and his supporters wear the socialist label with pride – necessary when your binary-partisan opponents are labelling you with it pejoratively anyway. I would however suggest most of us using such a short-hand label in intelligent good-faith dialogue are intending social-democracy not literally “social-ism”?
However either term includes the “social” root and David uses this to bring-up the relation to the social level in Pirsig’s MoQ. I would question whether Pirsig’s use of social is the same as understood in general real-world usage and political dialogue? And, either way, whether people favour capitalism over socialism or vice-versa, or any “mixed” version of the two, anyone that discounts the democratic element has a whole different set of questions to answer. [Aside – in my own “Psybernetic” researches and writings, I’ve long and regularly concluded all roads from Cybernetics (ie Governance) lead to Democracy and the systems we envisage to implement it. Most recently here. And, more comprehensively here, updating left and right with freedoms on economic and social axes, etc.]
Assuming for the moment we can equate or otherwise reconcile Pirsig’s use of social with more general usage of the word, then this claim holds:
“that label [socialism] quietly smuggles in: not care, not fairness, but an acceptance of social-level power concentrating under the cover of higher intellectual or moral authority. Cries that capitalism’s immorality can only be solved through socialism or communism are common, but they miss the deeper problem entirely”
“The issue isn’t capitalism as such – it’s what values control culture, and who and what gets to enforce them.”
Elite(s)? At this point he introduces elite(s), proceeds to use the word many more times, and, since he lays the blame at their / our door, socialist or capitalist, I need to understand what he means by elite? If I get myself elected to a position of temporary delegated power, do I become a member of an elite? If I consider I hold an intellectual understanding of Pirsig’s social and intellectual levels, do I get labelled a member of an elite? In Pirsigian terms what does it mean to refer to “an intellectual class” as an elite?
This one question aside, David nevertheless makes plenty of important true statements:
“Left unchecked, capitalism doesn’t just respond to Dynamic Quality – it converts social power into permanence, allowing those who win early or win big to shape the rules in their favour. Capitalism alone, then, is no more virtuous than socialism alone. Both become immoral when they’re absolutised.”
“From an MOQ perspective, democracy’s moral strength is precisely this openness. It does not freeze value at the social or intellectual level. Instead, it creates the conditions under which better ideas, better arrangements, and better values can emerge over time. When democracy fails, it is usually because this Dynamic function has been undermined, not because democracy itself was the problem.
Towards the end he concludes:
“Because despite everything, people still do share remarkably similar underlying values: meaningful work, security, distrust of elites, and a genuine voice in shaping their future. What is fractured: is not the culture itself, but the language and metaphysics people are given to understand it.”
That includes “elites” as the bad guys again, so in order to agree I’d need to read that as a bad kind of elites, rather than elites per se? Help me. That last sentence is also somewhat tautologous to me in the sense that it is the prevailing culture that gives us those shared understandings?
And in the final paragraph:
“[The MoQ] keeps evolutionary conflicts of morality at the front of mind whilst [common folks] evaluate elite suggestions. And the key here is that with this better metaphysics they can uniquely do so in the intellectual language of the elites.”
More of the us and them in there again – common folks vs elites – so understanding the use of “elite” is crucial to understanding, without it becoming simply another “rigid label”?
Overall worth a read, and I’d be interested in how others read it, Pirsigians or otherwise.
