"We do not know where we are going. Nor do most of us care. For us it is enough that we are on our way.
"-Le Matelot."
-Poul Anderson, "Hiding Place" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 555-609 AT INTRODUCTION, p. 556.
"They are also, all unawares, generating whole new societies of their own." (see here.)
Can social change be consciously controlled? Not yet. If it is to happen, then changes must be implemented by society acting together, not by a minority of managers or bureaucrats.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
With all due respect for you personally, here I find yet again at least a wishful desire for a planned, "rational" society. Presumably by idealistic and dedicated men. And we both too well of how much HARM has been done by well meaning fanatics. Where you differ from many such persons is your wish for "rational" changes to be implemented by a "society acting together, not by a minority of managers and bureaucrats."
Where I differ from you is my distrust and skepticism of many of the ideas proposed for a "rational" society. And I have even more distrust and skepticism when it comes to the people who try to implement them. I simply don't believe anything like what you desire is possible because of how FLAWED all of us are.
I recently finished rereading THE PLAGUE OF MASTERS and Chapter V includes a discussion of how Biocontrol came to rule Unan Besar. The founders of that oligarchy were idealists who subscribed to some kind Pschotechnocracy. They used their control of the manufacturing of antitoxin to seize power and allegedly implement a program of "reforms." And ran at once into the fact of how difficult and messy actual politics and governing was. To say nothing of sheer human cussedness.
No, a "rational," "planned" human society is impossible, a contradiction in terms.
Sean
The problem with planning of any sort is that the information necessary and its interactions rapidly become so complex that things get completely out of hand and unanticipated consequences bang off each other in ways that rapidly become uncontrollable.
Areas where actual forward planning is possible are usually artificially simplified, like some sorts of engineering. Organic chemistry, for example.
Planning is both essential and impossible, one of the paradoxes of human existence. (One member of the German General Staff remarked that "planning is everything, the plan is nothing".)
So you have to plan the agricultural year, for example, but you can never know the precise circumstances -- exactly what the weather will be, if mutation or other factors will produce new fungi or other problems for your crops and livestock, and so forth.
I think the main lesson is "avoid overconfidence" and "don't overanticipate". You can't predict everything, including the unforeseen consequences of your own actions, so take things one step at a time and be ready to correct.
To take a contemporary example, compare forward planning in the development of rocket systems at NASA and SpaceX. NASA compulsively overplans, because they're paralyzingly afraid of failure. They try to anticipate everything, and end up moving very, very slowly at enormous expense.
SpaceX plans with allowance for failure and for learning for failure. If the rocket blows up, you regard it as an opportunity to avoid that problem in the future -- it was an unanticipated problem -fhe first time-.
This mimics the way natural selection functions.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree! Planning is both necessary and impossible. We HAVE to plan but we also need to avoid both overconfidence and over anticipating. And I far prefer the model SpaceX follows, over that of NASA. The former is willing to accept the chance of failure, and treat it as the opportunity to learn how to solve a problem. NASA's is heartbreakingly slow and NOTHING seems to get DONE.
Sean
Note on planning: in 1914 the German General Staff had only -one- war plan; they suspended all others over the period 1910-1914. That's rather astonishing, since they were the people who came up with the method of having many alternative plans on file and ready to be modified according to circumstances.
And it was a -war- plan, not a mobilization plan; it involved invading France from a standing start, before mobilization was even complete, as soon as the -Russians- started to mobilize, because it depended on beating the French before the Russians, with their slower system, were ready.
(All the other powers had plans which allowed them to mobilize and then take several alternative courses of action.)
The plan worked well in some respects -- the Germans had one complete battalion-sized train crossing the Rhine bridges every 10 minutes for a week -- but it was utterly inflexible and made no allowance for chance and contingency.
That's an act of astonishing recklessness, and it's a classic illustration of what happens when you forget that "planning is everything, the plan is nothing" and become totally committed to a plan which attempts to shape the future down to the last detail.
Mr Stirling,
Lenin called tactical changes "bending the stick."
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Again, very interesting comments. I have heard of the plan Germany wanted to us if war broke out around 1914, but not that ALL other possible plans had been discarded. As you said, that was astonishingly reckless of the General Staff! You might have a favored plan, but it's wise to have other plans, in case of need.
Sean
Sean: there was a confluence of factors.
It wasn't that the generals were stupid or oblivious to developments (defensive firepower, for example) that argued for a long war of attrition. Everyone knew that machine-guns were deadly and that modern artillery had much greater destructive potential.
It was because they were desperately committed to -avoiding- precisely that all the Great Powers tended to emphasize offensive action, sweeping maneuvers, or both, in the war planning before 1914.
And they all tended to hope and/or believe that sheer willpower could overcome firepower. Even the Germans did this to a certain extent... though they also built a lot more mortars and field howitzers than anyone else, just in case!
The general opinion, particularly in Germany, was that precisely because a stalemate was possible or even probable, every effort had to be made to win the war quickly -- otherwise the strain might well cause social revolution.
So "motivated reasoning" swung into action, the inherent human tendency to believe that "the necessary must be possible".
Ironically, the core states of Western/Central Europe proved to be astonishingly resilient and able to sustain much greater efforts and losses than the military and civilian elites feared. They had underestimated their own peoples. Note also that it was the industrialized, urbanized nation-states that lasted longest, and the peasant armies which broke under the hammer of industrial-era war.
Another reason for this tendency was the professional self-image of the officer corps of all the Great Powers.
They mostly thought of themselves as 'leaders' in a classic, heroic mold, inspirers and exemplars who swept men forward by courage and determination.
And they all tended to be a particular type of romantic who exalted human factors over technical ones.
The Germans were probably the 'least guilty'. Their plan involved trying to -avoid- frontal assaults, rather than just relying on mystical gibberish about guts and the bayonet, but they had an element of that too. The French were the worst, and as a result lost 250,000 dead in a couple of weeks in the opening battles.
General Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, was -still- operating from those assumptions in 1917-18; he believed that trench warfare was due to European moral failings and inferior 'national character' and that his army could drive the war out of the trenches and into the open field with rifle and bayonet. This despite having observers on the Western Front; their evidence was disregarded, or explained away in a manner that didn't contradict deeply held beliefs and worldviews.
It took some very painful lessons before modern infantry tactics emerged, and apparently only direct experience of the costs could get the old system out of men's heads. Pershing never did learn the lesson, because American intervention came when the Germans were nearly beaten anyway.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree with you! I did know of the desperate determination of Germany to win and end the Great War as rapidly as possible precisely to avoid the grisly deadlock of the Western Front. And, yes, Tsarist Russia was the first major belligerent to collapse. At least in part because of not being as advanced as the other Powers.
I have sometimes wondered what might have happened if the US had stayed out of WW I. Either a victory by the Central Powers or a compromise peace of exhaustion?
Sean
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