What about in our own era? We’ve obviously gone through a large amount of societal fracturing over the last several decades, and people have been especially aware of this since the early 2010’s – which most commentators have pinned on the advent of smart phones and social media. I wouldn’t say it’s solely due to this information tsunami (as Martin Gurri calls it), but it may be the largest identifiable factor.
Margaret Heath and I had a very nice private chat about Stafford Beer’s VSM the other day. (The context was brainstorming her upcoming Research Circle series in the fall). Reference: Viable system model - Wikipedia
In VSM, System 4 is the one that is hungry for information. System 3 is likely trying to throttle down new information to maintain a current homeostasis. System 5 - which Margaret maps to “wisdom” - has to find the balance. New information did not break Song China, it could be argued, because Systems 3 and 5 had enough heft to hold society together. (Not enough heft to fight off northern barbarians, sadly).
Europe on continental scales has never been a viable system under Beer’s model. (The EU is trying - good luck with that!). To find coherent European systems, one must scale down the analysis to national or lesser levels. I’d argue that System 4 had an unusually large amount of freedom in Europe due to pope-emperor conflicts in the first instance, followed by a plethora of rising nation states in following centuries. That all allowed trading city networks to flourish - networks that moved information as well as cash and commodities. Very big System 4. As for European System 5 - "wisdom’ - well when was that ever a thing? Under the Druids, maybe? There was a reason Thomas Aquinas could not choke down Aristotle fast enough! Song China, by contrast, had Confucius. That tells me a lot.
Our reading club takeaways from the book:
- The human mind is inescapably fallible
- Knowledge is tenuous, often swayed more by primal psychology > accuracy
- Humility, careful observation, and cooperation are key
Additionally, the books offers a little post-mortem on the past several decades of increasing “epistemic chaos”
I see the book as less a solution, more an account of how civilization has attempted to find and establish truth, to date, and how those methodologies are challenged today.
When I look out in the world, I see people clutching tightly to bad facts and wobbly ideas, and I remain fascinated wth how to break that spell.
We can talk about breaking that spell at the level of individual, and the level of the collective. Both are necessary. My skew is toward the former, only as a matter of limited bandwidth.
All of it feels very futile. I have to find peace in reaching one mind at a time.
Those conclusions seem immediately intuitive to me.
I do question how extensive books can change perspectives. If they work within the same linguistic framework, it is like trying to teach someone how to fly using a boat.
Right. Just to clarify, in case I wasn’t clear, I wasn’t suggesting CoK (or any book) can really change society. Feels like we need something more. Where I personally focus is on this project, but I also came to this forum to find out what other people are up to, and possibly explore collaborations. As for my project, I fully realize it’s a small dent and only one part of a multi-part path.
Glad to find convergence here. I find these three bullets very motivating. (even before I read Rauch - his book just helped add clarity).
Finding agreement here suggests a common desire - a world where people see as clearly as possible, and make good-faith effort to cooperate. Of course, this sounds stupidly obvious, but I think people massively underestimate what “seeing clearly” means, since we are all born into this universal fallibility.
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Nice project! In my bubble, we call the bubble itself “culture”. Expanding it is generally a good idea, which can be achieved though engaging with other cultures.
On the topic of changing society, I would say that books are an important part of that process, although of course mere book publication on its own cannot be expected to result in immediate social change. I’m a fan of Donella Meadows’s systems thinking on “leverage”. In that scheme of things, highest leverage belongs to purely mental or perspectival activities like paradigm shift. That leverage decreases as it cascades out into policies, procedures, and tangible movements of physical things. That decrease in leverage is matched by an increase in visibility, however. Big changes in the physical or social world need to begin with less visible changes in the inner or psychological world. So books can be seen as inner perspective on its way to concretization. CoK makes a contribution in capturing the feelings many of us had about the cancel culture era and in documenting how some of the more noteworthy responses to that era turned out.
My personal experience of cancel culture circa 2023 (academic cancel culture from the left) is it was suffocating. I got involved in liminal web online spaces like this specifically to get away from it. The MAGA version of cancel culture (and its endless gaslighting) is even more obnoxious, but more like the danger at a distance than an enemy right in my face (that experience will of course be different for those in different situations). Eventually, I did figure out how to navigate ultra-progressive, race-based cancel culture and to construct a respected role for myself despite my patriarchal whiteness. Interestingly, a particular book was quite pivotal in helping me figure out how to untangle that problem space. It was bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress. IMO, there are passages in that book that can provide a portal out of race-based cancel culture into more of an experiential developmental perspective as represented to your project. So books are far from nothing! But any book requires its homework to be properly grasped and implemented in the form of social change. From that perspective, a book is only as good as the homework it inspires. I’d be interested in unpacking CoK (in a different post) from that POV of “homework”.