Change Theory Deep Dive Part 1
Social Change, Week 3
Things are getting deep so buckle up. JT Mudge wasn’t kidding when he said this would be the most academic course of the program. Great futures content ahead but you might find it a little dry.
Macrohistory and the Nature of Progress
This week we dug deeper into different theories of change and covered a couple of general schools of thought from Noble’s Social Theory and Social Change. The first of these is the reactionary or conservative school, which is skeptical of change and dismissive that “progress” is a real concept. There are a couple of potential flavors of this. The nostalgic position is taken by Ferdinand Tönnies, who saw two basic orientations of society’s institutions: gemeinschaft, spheres where there’s a natural will derived from shared being; and gesellschaft, where there’s a rational will derived from shared doing (ie some future-oriented goal). Thus the family or the town, where we work out how to live together but aren’t ruled by any particular metric, is gemeinschaft, whereas a business, focused on profit, wages, etc, is gesellschaft. Tönnies’s contention is two-fold: gesellschaft suppresses or excludes normal human relationships because of its transitory and role-based nature; and society has tilted in recent times heavily toward gesellschaft arrangements1. This is a civilizational tragedy to Tönnies, and the attempts to counterfeit gemeinschaft within gesellschaft will leave people unfulfilled (think of things like a company telling its employees “we’re a family”); thus “progress” has actually resulted in a degradation in the social condition2. Other conservatives question progress because of cynicism; for example, Vilfredo “80-20 rule” “possibly a fascist” Pareto says that every action humans take is due to one of six instincts: grouping, labeling, and making patterns; maintaining the patterns and routines that exist; expressing feelings; connecting socially with other humans; self-preservation; and sex. All the reasons people give for their actions are just post-hoc rationalizations, and society itself it ruled by an alternating sequence of elites: clever elites who follow the first instinct and build new things to adapt to changing circumstances (the Foxes), and then strong elites who follow the second and maintain the structures in place (the Lions), and then back again. Thus, all supposed progress in society is just window-dressing over an unchanging core reality.
As an alternative approach, many theorists see a clear story in history about progressively increasing complexity3 and try to make sense of it. For example, August Comte, writing in the first half of the 19th century, described this progression in societal stages from theological4 (explanations and ideas are based on religion) to metaphysical (based on logic and philosophy) to positive (based on science). Positivism, which Comte saw starting to emerge in Europe, represented the pinnacle of human achievement and the end of history. Herbert Spencer, on the other hand, was greatly influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and saw society as following an “Iron Law” of evolution towards increasing internal heterogeneity/differentiation of society over time. Societies evolved from families to clans to tribes to nations by increasingly specialized roles, the building out of more complicated hierarchies, etc, all because those made societies more “fit” for survival and the civilizations that didn’t adopt them stagnated or declined5. Later theorists have built on this work, such as W W Rostow explaining how societies modernize rather than just describing the stages: traditional societies are stimulated by outside events that trigger cultural/social change, and then downstream psychological/political change; increasing risk tolerance leads to increased investment, supporting a higher population growth rate; the population shifts efforts from agriculture to manufacturing and services, the economy becomes more national in scope, birthrates fall, and the extra wealth being generated is still invested in growth; and then society reaches a stage where it can choose where to invest its surplus — wars and expansion, social welfare, or increased wealth accumulation (which keeps the investment-wealth cycle going).
As an example of how slightly less academic theories of change stack up against the evaluation criteria, take a look at the 1997 pop-history smash Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. The basic question the book tries to answer is why, if humanity started from shared ancestry, were the conquests of the colonial era so decisive? Why was the result almost uniformly something between crushing defeat and genocide of the populations of the Americas and Africa by the peoples of Europe and Asia? Diamond starts with a conviction that it’s not due to any inherent racial differences, and instead tells a story about how geographic luck in where societies started kicked off cycles and processes that led to wildly different levels of development, especially in the kinds of things that are good for conquering. His theory kind of evokes the way Stewart Brand’s pace layers conceptualize the different rate of change of different factors:
In terms of Diamond’s correspondence with the big questions of change theory from week 1, his theory is clearly very society-oriented instead of focused on individual agency, based mostly on material conditions rather than ideas, and uses rationality to describe a carefully organized set of observations rather than making broad logical assumptions about how societies operate6.
Future History
Roman Krznaric is well-known (at least in Futures circles) for his book The Good Ancestor, but his new book, History for Tomorrow, is specifically about lessons and patterns of history relevant to those trying to make changes in the future, and will be a major source for the class. His first chapter is a treatment of the “radical flank effect”, the idea that a violent/destructive fringe group advocating for change can shift the frame of discussion and accelerate the efforts of those pushing for similar changes by less extreme means. He cites as examples the Black Panther movement on the flank of the nonviolent civil rights movement in the US, or the slave revolts in Jamaica on the flank of British abolitionists like William Wilberforce working through normal channels for Parliamentary action7. Krznaric’s basic argument is that this is not only an effective strategy, but also a moral good in the world, and it can be applied to the climate crisis precisely in the ways groups like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion are pursuing: “it has history on its side”. This point generated a lot of conversation in class, and I found myself taking offense while reading the chapter and needing to unpack it.
There’s the obvious issue that it’s important to understand the circumstances under which radical action will help vs hurt the chances of a particular change, Part of the issue is that Krznaric is pretty squishy on what kind of actions are justified: there’s publicity-grabbing, to inconvenience such as road-blocking, to property destruction, to the threat of or actual violence against people, and a line has to be drawn somewhere; his main contention is that property is less valuable than the future suffering of the climate crisis, and so drastic action is justified: “we should question the ideological fixation with the sacredness of private property, especially when that very property is helping to destabilise the ecological systems on which all life depends”. This is my first point of objection: a) surely the lives of a few people are also much less valuable than the hundreds of millions (or the entire species) at risk from worst-case climate-change outcomes, so his same logic seems to cover some pretty abhorrent actions; b) even if you’ve decided just to destroy public or private property, deciding that you get to be the arbiter of moral trade-offs for society8, in a situation where you aren’t getting the policy outcomes you want, is deeply undemocratic9. My moral compass allows space for people who aren’t offered access to peaceful means for change to pursue more violent means (revolutions, slave revolts, etc), but not just because they don’t like the outcome of a process they had meaningful access to. My second objection is almost theological: if, in fact, important change isn’t possible even in a democracy without illegal and possibly violent actions, then it suggests that civilization itself (by which I mean a mutual agreement to forego violence for better decision-making processes) is a fraud — which I guess could be true but would be a pretty ugly reality that lends support to the atavists of the world. Yuck.
A great example would be social media, where “friends” “like” the things you share, but all of these are reduced to metrics that drive vanity and/or monetization.
This is interesting, because there is some data to support it. For example, look at this paper, which proposes that although adopting agriculture makes pretty much every measure of health and mortality worse, these societies actually grow faster by dramatically increasing the birthrate (more calories more regularly and not having to move around as much leaves more energy to support child-bearing). In modern society, we’ve dramatically reduced mortality and physical disease from agricultural society, but we’ve (maybe) dramatically multiplied in things like existential crises and mental health issues. So maybe we’ve been giving things up, but we’re facing better and better problems as we go forward in time?
Which, to be clear, is not necessarily the same idea of progress, which requires a value judgment; in practice, though, the two often go together.
And, exposing the severe Western bias, the Theological state evolves as well through subdivisions, from animism to polytheism and then to its natural zenith of monotheism.
Of course, the democratic movement over the last several centuries, the abolition of slavery in most of the world, and the various movements for civil rights have tended to flatten hierarchies around the world significantly — I have no idea what Spencer would make of that.
Interestingly, this makes it kind of hard to apply Diamond’s work to the future. Now technological innovations disseminate extremely quickly because the barriers to information have dramatically decreased — what will determine success in the future? Are we back to climate, where those with big currently-cold tracts of land are in the optimal position? Or is it about effective adoption of technology, and we should focus on patents, trade practices, etc?
Compounding this was the Captain Swing riots creating pressure for the Parliamentary reform that allowed Whigs like Wilberforce to have the political power to push these changes through.
This is way deeper than just what kind of action is taken. For example, what roads will you block, and which groups of people will be most inconvenienced by it?
To put it more bluntly, the January 6th rioters were acting as a radical flank for the myriad legal/political efforts to reshape elections in the name of security and integrity. If they believe in that cause, was the action justified?