In the last post, I limned out one of Leopold Kohr's suggestions for overdeveloped societies such as ours: Contraction to Uninstrumented Visibility. Though an admittedly technical phrase, I find that it concisely expresses a vital dimension of attaining social equity and environmental sustainability that often goes unrecognized. E. F. Schumacher captured the rationale behind the CUV approach in his own inimitable way: "There is wisdom in smallness, if only on account of the smallness and patchiness of human knowledge, which relies on experience far more than understanding." If you'd like a good historical account of the socially and environmentally disastrous outcomes caused by the confusion of understanding with experience, check out James Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999). Although Scott focuses on the pitfalls of a fundamentalist belief in expertise and top-down social engineering, one could just as easily observe the human and ecological wreckage caused by a fundamentalist belief in capitalism and free market globalization.
The CUV approach draws attention to the diseconomies of scale that are hidden below a merely superficial view of our economy. Kohr emphasized the high cost of "instrumented visibility"--that is, dependence on data collection and processing, theories, statistics, viability studies, analyses, etc.--required to run highly developed societies. You could call this sort of instrumented visibility "mediated experience." Once an optimal threshold of development has been passed, Kohr argued, the capacity to turn information into useful experience declines in a manner similar to the other diseconomies of scale. The cost of figuring out a problem caused by development, and doing something about it, increases in scale faster than the benefits derived from said development. Or, as Anatol Murad put it, "Each further step in the direction of integration, consolidation, automation, then begins to contribute not to the solution of problems, but their scale." Each person theoretically has access to vastly more information than ever before, and we as a society can manipulate our environment far more than ever before. But this has come at the cost of each person's area of experience becoming narrower and narrower in a surrounding swamp of greater and greater ignorance. We might be masters of our own tiny domains, but we haven't the faintest idea whether the direction in which we are all collectively going is good or bad. When it becomes clear that the direction is bad--as with, e.g., global climate change or Peak Oil--the issue seems so vast that individual paralysis sets in.
In this post, I would like to focus on how overdevelopment has compromised academia in much the same way as other aspects of our living arrangement. As a Ph.D. candidate, I currently occupy a position somewhere in the middle stories of an academic edifice that I feel quite uncomfortable inhabiting. It will probably collapse in the foreseeable future in any case. I neglected to bring up this collapse bit in my previous post in any depth. Besides the argument that we should take the CUV approach to both improve living standards and overcome our inertia in dealing with global climate change, it is becoming clear that we have to anyway, and soon. The reason for this is the decline in global petroleum supplies (Peak Oil), and the corresponding declines in other key resources (metals, fertilizers, etc.). By all reasonable indicators, Peak Oil is going on right now. As I've pointed out previously, the current configuration of persons, things, and ideas that we call "modern civilization" requires a great deal of socioeconomic complexity--that is, specialization, the division of labor, etc. Increasing socioeconomic complexity requires increasing surpluses of energy and material. When these surpluses cease to exist and start to decline, societies need to simplify. This means less specialization, less political integration, and less economic interdependence. I cannot do better than recommend John Michael Greer's explanation of the process. Additionally, Greer's piece helps to strip the term "collapse" of its pejorative connotations, which is helpful in light of the fact that the CUV approach is essentially a controlled form of it. I have not found a single convincing argument that we will find a replacement (or array of replacements ) for fossil fuel energy any time soon, so I am forced to assume that simplification is imminent.
So how does academia fit into this picture? The trend toward greater complexity and specialization made possible by fossil fuels applies to academia as much as anywhere else. Although universities, like governmental and religious establishments, often stress their long-held and august traditions, its role in society underwent some profound changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many of these changes, I would argue, have left academia badly maladapted for what is coming at us in the near future. I'll do my best to explain why I think this is the case.
The real innovators of the university in the nineteenth century were the scientists, whose knowledge of natural phenomena was advancing with ever-accelerating speed, and who required a novel structure for disseminating and testing their hypotheses. The fields of inquiry that would eventually become chemistry, biology, physics, geology, ecology, etc. had previously been the domain of gentlemen scholars, the medical trades, and craftsmen in the "mechanical arts." Their incorporation into the university was part of a larger tendency whereby science gained more prestige and importance in society as a whole. Although, counterfactually, this shift almost certainly would have happened without the bursting onto the scene of fossil-fueled technologies, they had a profound impact on the particular shape that "science" would take.
The increasing funding of the sciences, both applied and basic, became necessary for the continuation of industrialization by the end of the nineteenth century. This fact was not lost on power holders and the public. Besides the legitimate concern for improving living standards using scientific methods (which strictly speaking didn't require fossil-fueled industrialization at all), there was a competitive impulse at play. To maintain both economic and military viability in a rapidly changing world, it became clear that it was no longer adequate to rely on amateurish, unsystematic approaches to mastering the material world. As in society at large, specialization and professionalism in the sciences exploded, as did investment in "scientific infrastructure," such as laboratories, journals, repositories, and philanthropic and state funding organizations. Any doubt about the need for a well-heeled scientific establishment were put to rest by the invention and deployment of the atomic bomb during World War II. It was seen as the culmination of pure and applied sciences, engineering know-how, highly sophisticated instrumentation, and government support.
Underpinning this heady change was an emerging assumption, shared by all the mainstream political ideologies of the modern era. They were all rooted in a belief that industrialism, professionalism, and scientific knowledge would continue to grow indefinitely. This belief influenced all of academia, and not just the sciences. By the 1890s at the latest, "progress" had become the standard by which universities measured themselves. For centuries previously, it was the job of the university to preserve and transmit an eternal body of knowledge, in which all the other branches were seen as sub-disciplines of theology. "Free thinking" generally had to take place extra muros. But from the latter half of the nineteenth century onward, the university was generally seen as a creator of new knowledge . Under this new conception, the teaching (transmission) function and the research (novelty) function became essentially one and the same. Education was no longer about replication, but advancement and innovation. Each succeeding generation of students was supposed to start with the advantages their predecessors had won. On this view, according to Andrew Delblanco, "history becomes a sort of relay race, in which no runner retreads trodden ground--an idea fundamentally at odds with the meaning of humanistic knowledge, which must be re-learned by each generation, and put to the test of individual experience." Particularly from the post-World War II years onward, the idea was that the university would train the next generation of professionals--businessmen, scientists, educators, statesmen--who in turn would generate more "development," allowing for more funding of the university in the next generation, and so on, ad nauseum.
As part and parcel of this change, the faculty of the university were transformed from a pastoral or curatorial to a professional role. Humanists tried, in keeping with the times, to refashion themselves on the scientific model. The emergence in the late 1800s and early 1900s of the "social sciences," with their insistence on "methodology," was one such response. Professional organizations and credentialing standards arose, and the site for scholarly exchange shifted from the local campus, cafe, or public forum to the national or international peer group. The humanities developed an incentive system similar to that of the sciences: attaining a Ph.D. or tenure requires that one do "novel" or "original" research in a particular specialized topic, which itself was supposed to fit into some specialized field. Graduate students are absolutely admonished from writing for a wider audience. Although this form of training and policing certainly has its virtues, a serious problem of overproduction has arisen, with scholars in the same discipline hardly reading each other's work anymore, let alone across disciplines. A professor could try to "go public," but only after a safely long gestation inside the rather different academic environment.
These incentives have had some far-reaching structural effects. One is to push the faculty, using the terminology of David Riesman and Christopher Jencks in The Academic Revolution (1968), toward the academic and away from the intellectual. An academic question is "one raised by some lacuna or ambiguity in the data or interpretations of a... discipline. It is a question asked by one's colleagues or on their behalf, and answered primarily as a service to those colleagues." An intellectual, conversely, is a kind of amateur. He or she asks questions not about internal professional debates, but about experience. (Recall the distinction drawn above.) And an intellectual's natural audience is the broader public within and beyond the university.
The upshot of increased academization has been the creation of many areas of intellectual pursuit whose wider relevance in a future of smaller energy (read: money) surpluses is entirely questionable. I am guessing that there will be little public sympathy for continued support of, say, some arcane debate in astrophysics or linguistics if the highway system is falling apart. But, as it now stands, most well-established members of academia have utterly no incentives to bother changing course. What's worse, masses of recently credentialed specialists are trying desperately to jump onto the careening academic ship while they still can, hoping to do so before it sinks, or totally unaware that it is going to.
But, to return to the earlier line of argument regarding the CUV approach, this could be a blessing in disguise. Much of the specialization and professionalism in which we have indulged over the past decades has actually been quite needless and counterproductive. If we want to prevent academia from reverting back to becoming the preserve of the very wealthy and powerful (even more so than it is now), we need to consider the essential purpose of the university--finding the truth--and provide the means for attaining this as equitably as possible. I'll save my more specific (still quite speculative) proposals on the issue for a future post. But the general gist of my case is that the university would benefit by re-scaling its operations in much the same way as other aspects of society. Academia should become more translucent. In other words, the barriers, literally and figuratively, between the university and the public should become more porous, but not completely so. To be clear, I am not making a mock-populist jab at "academia." Its mores and practices are vital for civilization.
To close, I would like to return to something of considerable relevance that Leopold Kohr wrote in The Breakdown of Nations (1957). The "efficiency of the small," according to Kohr, applies not just to the political and economic, but to the the intellectual and cultural spheres as well. (Note: When he refers to "large" and "small" states, he doesn't mean it in an exclusively political or geographical sense. There are a number of other criteria, which have come up on this blog before, having to do with the degree of mobility, specialization, etc.). Here Kohr is examining the reason behind the "intense cultural productivity of the small, and the intellectual sterility of the large, state":
Societies may have patrons of the arts as rulers. But even so they could do little without artists. And they may provide the facilities for leisure and musing. But, again, these alone might not produce the creative impulse. What is needed in addition is the opportunity for individuals to learn the truth without which neither art, nor literature, nor philosophy can be developed. But to learn the truth in a world that is as manifold as ours and which manifests itself in such countless forms, incidents, and relationships, a creative individual must be able to participate in a great variety of personal experiences. Not in a great number, but in a great variety. And this is infinitely easier in a small state than in a large one.In a large state, we are forced to live in tightly specialized compartments, since populous societies not only make large-scale specialization possible but necessary. As a result, our life's experience is confined to a narrow segment whose borders we almost never cross, but within which we become great single-purpose experts....Instead of experiencing many different things within surveyable limits, as did our enviable ancestors, we experience only one thing on a colossal plane. But this we experience innumerable times. Mechanics now only meet mechanics, doctors doctors, commercial artists commercial artists, garment workers garment workers, journalists journalists....Because modern life makes it technically impossible to participate in manifold experiences, anything written nowadays in the massive crowd states is drawn not from life, but from the co-ordinated study of life. The world no longer crosses an author's path. He must go out of his way and discover it indirectly and laboriously from the encyclopedias and monographs, or from the writings of other hard-working students....The great advantage of the little state then is that, once it has 'attained a population sufficient for a good life in the political community,' it offers not only the advantages of a reasonable degree of specialization but also the opportunity for everybody to experience everything simply by looking out the window. There is no passion or problem disturbing the heart of man or the peace of a large empire that would not exist also in a small country. But in contrast to the large empire, where their meaning lies hidden under the weight of countless duplications and in a multitude of disjointed specialized realms, they unfold themselves without the intermediary of analysts and experts before the eyes of everybody, and with a clarity of outline and purpose that cannot be perceived elsewhere. A small state has the same governmental problems as the most monumental power on earth, even as a small circle has the same number of degrees as a large one. But what in the latter cannot be discerned by an army of statisticians and specialized interpreters, could be perceived by every leisurely stroller in ancient Athens. As a result, if we really want to go to the bottom of things, we have even today no other recourse after having tried Harvard and Oxford than to take down from their dusty shelves Plato or Aristotle. Indeed, the worth of Harvard and Oxford lies largely in the fact that they keep on their shelves the great men of little states.Yet these were no supermen. The secret of their wisdom was that they lived in a small society that displayed all the secrets of life before everybody's eyes. They saw each problem not as a giant part of an unsurveyable tableau, but as a fraction of the composite picture to which it belonged. Philosophers, as also poets and artists, were by nature universal geniuses because they also saw the totality of life in its full richness, variety, and harmony without having to rely on secondhand information or to resort to superhuman efforts.
3 comments:
Perhaps I've only got a hammer and am looking for a nail, but a lot of this has congruency to software engineering and network effects, both areas that involve complex systems, such as an economy, and therefore may serve as small models from which we can learn something about human societies.
In software engineering, the diseconomy of scale is well known, and has been a source of failure whenever it is ignored. In the course of documenting the failure of a software project, the Mythical Man Month shows how adding workers to a late software project will result in delaying the project even more, largely due to the difficulty of organizing communication between many people. The only way to deal with the communication burden is to develop hierarchies of tightly knit cells of workers. At the same time, the organization must be flexible enough so that when distant leaves of the hierarchical tree need to communicate that they can do it without layers of intervening management. Many people cite Windows Vista as a recent and well-known example of failure due to poor management of the diseconomy of scale. It was a project that requires a huge amount of work and couldn't be accomplished by a team of, say, 20 programmers, necessitating the inefficiencies of dealing with more than a thousand people who must communicate intimately. There are projects on this scale that do succeed, however, so it's not that the diseconomy of scale is absolute, it must just be bowed to and dealt with.
Converse to the principle of the Mythical Man Month, the rule of thumb referred to as Metcalfe's Law says that the value of a network (such as the internet, or social network), grows faster than linearly in the number of connected nodes (meaning, people, or computers). The "Law" part of the name is tongue-in-cheek. Originally Metcalfe postulated that the value would be the number of interconnections, which is approximately n^2, but others have since reduced that value to n*log(n), as clearly the marginal value of a new connection reduces as each person's or computer's ability to process all communication maxes out.
The contexts of the Mythical Man Month and Metcalfe's Law are different. To throw in yet another common metaphor from the field, it's the difference between the cathedral and the bazaar, respectively. When the work of people is extremely tightly coupled and interdependent, a diseconomy of scale becomes a problem. An arch cannot be built without an intermediate support, and once it is built, every stone is essential. When there's more individual autonomy and independence, then it's no longer having to associate with many people to accomplish your goals, but the possibility of being empowered by such associations.
In the case of the university, I see much more bazaar than I do cathedral. As far as I can tell, widespread fear of overspecialization has been around since at least the 1980s. However, at least in the sciences, these fears are slowly receding. Specialization has resulted in much more collaboration, and allowed much more in depth and thoughtful studies than would be possible from a single investigator. Due to better communication forms, I can work intimately with people I have never seen before, and with whom we share only a very small sliver of common knowledge. If we're lucky, we may meet in person once or twice, but that's certainly not necessary for us to share our knowledge and analysis skills to come up with more than either of us would have on our own. The key is to work hard to come up with effective ways of communicating knowledge. This is the same activity that occurs when teaching undergraduates, and while there is much to criticize in the US's mixing of teaching, research, and service, good teaching skills are becoming absolutely essential for good collaboration, and therefore good research.
There is much hand-wringing about the transition of a society that uses physical books and journals for written communication to a society that uses electronic blog posts more and books and journals to a lesser degree. I, and many others, view this as the same quality of hand-wringing that occurred with the invention of the printing press, a mere conservative nostalgia for being a member of a small elite group of authors. By lowering the barrier to publication, all these "vapid" MySpace blogs are training hordes of people to write that may not otherwise.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the industrial machine has increased the maximum effecitve size for a university's knowledge economy, through the magic of the Internet. Specialization allows us to reap some of the benefits of the small while living in a larger sea of big.
I'm not yet convinced that "The cost of figuring out a problem caused by development, and doing something about it, increases in scale faster than the benefits derived from said development." Perhaps I'm just ignorant of the relevant studies. Collapse may well be imminent in our society, but the proposition seems to be that collapse is more likely in a highly developed society than in a less developed one, and I find that an absolutely fascinating question. However, the empiricist in me says that there's not really a convincing way to reason this ab initio due to our incomplete knowledge of a very complex system; the results must be observed. This is a problem when our maximum sample size is one.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Charlie. By way of a brief reply, I am intending on writing another post in the future on "the information economy" and its impact on academia. Your final paragraph cuts to the bone of this "overdevelopment" concept--there is really no "scientific" way to prove it because the concept itself includes the generation and deployment of scientific knowledge! I'm afraid to say this may be unsatisfying for people who want clear methodology, falsifiability, and replicability. Even though there are compelling ecological reasons for simplification, my argument has a strong normative component that falls outside the sphere of the scientific.
Suffice it to say at this point that I don't think the lack of "interdisciplinarity" in academia is the root of the problem. Intellectuals have been gnashing their teeth about overspecialization and information overload since the nineteenth century and earlier. To use a somewhat clumsy metaphor, interdisciplinary interactions may increase the number and precision of tools in the toolbox, but they don't change the nature of the overly complex machine they're supposed to fix. But like I said in an earlier post, I'm not rejecting social complexity entirely. I do think that there are areas where there are clearly benefits to simplification, and others where it is not so clear or even harmful.
I'm also by no means nostalgic for the pre-Internet days. As with other massively significant social changes, there are good and bad aspects to it. Computers and the Internet have been very liberating in the sense that they are breaking down professional monopolies on knowledge that I find harmful. They are also thankfully revealing how vapid and destructive our system of compulsory graded schooling is. But I don't think I'm nearly as sanguine as some of my more tech-savvy friends in other regards, namely ecological ones. Arguments about "hierarchy" versus "nested cells" aside, one of the main points of this blog is that much of our current economic activity requires drawing on polluting and finite resources that are typically very distant from the individuals who catalyzed their exploitation. People who are on the "clean" end of all this activity--generally, the wealthiest members of the world economy ensconced in an affluent and advantageous financial and built environment--also happen to be the greatest beneficiaries of the computer revolution. As a corollary, I think there is a widespread under-appreciation of the role and function of non-human nature in maintaining our livelihoods, even in developed parts of the world where "ecosystem services" and "environmental sustainability" are now habitually gestured to but hardly understood. We've made leaps in understanding complex systems in the past few decades, but in certain respects the over-extension of metaphors originally developed in the realm of computers and economics has only deepened what I see as a dangerous faith in "information" to solve problems only solved by experience--direct, or nearly direct, involvement with the living "systems" that provide us with the basics of our physical existence. Just because our highly complex society has not yet "collapsed" does not mean we shouldn't heed the previous 10,000+ years of our experience with nature that we have accumulated. Here I'm back to the first point in this reply--that a hardcore empiricist can't be satisfied with my initial position. But, in any case, hardcore empiricism can be used to reinforce an ethically questionable status quo (I'm thinking here of Karl Popper and his ilk during the Cold War). I think the current huge gap between production and consumption of many basic goods is one of the more common-sense areas you can point to and see solid environmental AND social reasons for simplification. Ironically, keeping computers and the Internet around may be one of the few areas of our highly complex, globalized economy worth keeping around despite the ecological costs.
Mike Davis, at a UW talk 11/6/08, discusses the university. Davis is obviously focused on the Urban. He sketches that with the environmental facts, the city also holds not just the negative (it's feeding of global warming) but at the same time the positive (as in the best a dense urban center can offer). He imagines the University, as a space, a utopia, where humans live in high density locales, with mass transit, feet, bikes, as well as public space for social interaction, learning, mingling, reproduction..those social objects and events that humans draw themselves to. Focusing on such as this, perhaps, limits the more horizontal sprawl, travel, etc...this just notes how perhaps the best of public space cities can adjust urban impacts on the environment. Of course, in his talk, this aspect was introduced first by a long litany of the research suggesting, in that global warming realm, it is already too late. How might thinking about what is best of a city, especially of a part of the city such as a University, interact with your observations?
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