The complexity problem

The story of civilisation is in large part the story of increasing scale and complexity in human affairs. We are now reaching limits. Already civilised life is now so complex that further complexity threatens overall collapse. It is this stark reality that underpins many of the current headline issues.

The news is currently full of big changes, mostly containing some threatening aspect. For example, the IPCC recently realised its latest report on climate change confirming the size of the global warming problem and human culpability. The world economy staggers on with most of the problems of the financial crisis still there and most national economies still in trouble. Big financial corporations have been caught time and again breaking the law: JP Morgan recently paid out over $5 billion dollars for various crimes, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of financial shenanigans.

The US, and the global system it still runs, are in accelerating decline, with one recent disaster being the NSA spying fiasco (it seems the US's main intelligence agency has been operating pretty much out of control for years). Indeed, more and more stories appear about the growing role of digital technology in human affairs, from killer drones to the way it is shaping the plastic brains of the young.

All these matters reflect the growing problem that is the relationship between scale and complexity. Our modern world is now far beyond the understanding of all but a few, but we still live affected on a daily basis by what is happening. The roots of this problem go way back to when modern humans first evolved on earth.

In terms of scale, we have gone from hunter-gatherer band to agricultural hamlet to city to empire to nation state to global civilisation over 10,000 years. Hunter-gathers roamed far and wide but in small numbers, and life was comparatively simple (although it was already relations between humans that was driving the changes in our brains). Once we concentrated into communities they grew spatially larger and more numerous in terms of population. We went from small villages of hundreds to cities of thousands to empires and then nation-states of millions to a global system currently of over seven billion people. We developed social hierarchy, division of labour and new technology (like writing) to deal with the growing complexity caused by so many people.

In terms of spatial organisation and population we have pretty much reached our limits here on earth, and to expand further we'd need to head off into outer space. In the 1950s and 1960s this looked possible, even likely, but the spaceships that put men on the moon were the most complex machines ever built up till that time, and it was mostly dumb luck that enabled the manned space program to do as well as it did. Right now, except for unmanned research missions, manned space travel looks too difficult and we stay marooned on Earth.

Complexity is in part a function of scale as greater scale demands more complex systems to maintain control over distance. The key is speed of communications. A village could be organised by people talking to each other, a city by written edicts posted on walls or read aloud in main squares, an empire by reliable road and sea transport and coded communiques, and modern nation-states by telecommunications, these days digital in form.

The basic problem is that we have been used to creating more complexity to deal with failing control, but now the very level of complexity generates its own problems. Our institutions and their operations are so large, their interactions so speedy, we humans are increasingly left behind.

This explosion in complexity manifests in our daily lives as a sense of always being rushed for time, of having too many choices, of everything we do being over-complicated. Increasingly, people seek a 'sea change' or 'tree change' and slow food to recapture a sense of real value.

Perhaps the best example of this trend to over complexity is finance, which was originally devised to help control trade of goods and services. Originally trade was the dog, finance the tail, but now a huge tail wags a much smaller dog. Finance has had an international aspect since the first states and empires, it became really powerful in the nineteenth century in the hands of men like the Rothschilds, and became genuinely global in scale after the catastrophes off World Wars One and Two, led by the mostly American big banks.

Post-war reconstruction gave a new role to big finance, but it really took off due to two basic factors: Nixon ended the role of gold in 1971 and in the 1980s digital technology made 24 hour trading at a global level possible. Now the money that shuffles at near light speed around the world dwarfs the real world economy of goods and services, but the global finance system was inherently fragile. The global financial crisis that began in 2008 and has never really ended showed just how fragile.

It is doubtful that anyone actually understands how the global finance system works these days, let alone how to stop it from convulsing all the time. Financiers increasingly rely on software, or quants, to trade, but these programs just add to the complexity. Currently trading programs can complete 100,000 transactions in a tenth of a second, even as they seek to mislead other trading programs. So-called regulators have just about given up, following behind the latest scams and tut-tutting.

Finance leads the complexity rush because it is the activity least constrained by material factors, like materials, energy and human skill levels. But increasingly everything we experience, from jet travel to the latest mobile phones, is influenced by the trend to greater complexity, mostly manifest as ever more sophisticated digital code.

If we are reaching the manageable limits of complexity, what we need to do is to stop relying on more complexity and to simplify life. However, this would mean giving up a lot of things people in the rich west take for granted. Our fast-throughput, mass-consumption lifestyle has been largely enabled by the incredible advances in scale and complexity over the last two centuries. These were the years after the industrial revolution when the large scale use of fossil fuels and better access to cheaper raw materials drove accelerating economic growth.

The industrial revolution led to an explosion in the availability of new goods and services. We stopped relying so much on ourselves making and doing things, and more and more on others who we paid. Life increasingly came down to working for the money in order to consume ever more complex goods and services.

Now of course people do not readily give up something for nothing. It is like the old adage about giving up smoking: at the same time you give up, you take up something else to compensate. How can we manage a transition away from ever greater complexity?

The five century long history of the West itself suggests the solution. Until the Renaissance in the 16^th century and the Enlightenment in the 18^th century, life was dominated by concepts of religion. This was a very limited kind of spiritual experience but it provided a framework for living, and for a millennium of so the Catholic Church was the most important institution in the West. The Renaissance and Enlightenment undermined and then directly confronted religious obscurantism, instead throwing up the powerful productive forces of science and industrialisation. Basic improvements meant that the old foes of humanity, disease and famine, were at last beaten back, and continued improvements in the overall standard of living was a potent manifestation of science-based mass-industrialisation.

The Church may have told the poor to suffer and be rewarded in heaven, but science and industry increasingly fixed the problems here on earth for everyone.

What was not so apparent was that these new forces of materialism had their own self-reinforcing dynamics that would soon cause their own problems. Mass production of goods promoted capitalism, which tended to create a new kind of wealth disparity and whole new social classes with divergent interests. For millennia there had been basically a tiny ruling class (the aristocracy) and the great mass of the poor. Industrialisation created the middle classes and a new industrial working class. The politics of this new class conflict became increasingly toxic until extremes on the right and left generated militant totalitarian societies. Communism in Russia and later China and fascism/militarism in Italy, Germany and Japan generated powerful but unstable nation-states that tended towards military aggression. Combined with the new mass-industrial technologies, which could pump out shells, machine guns, cannon, tanks, warships and airplanes at an accelerating rate, this led to mass-warfare that eventually reached global scale in the worst three decades in human history. From 1914 to 1945 multimillions of human beings were killed and maimed and untold damage to property occurred.

In addition, the scale of resources extraction, industrial production and waste creation became so great it began to seriously interfere with natural systems. Pollution of air, water and land, limits on potable water and arable land, and availability of critical minerals and other substances became increasingly threatening. By the 1960s human civilisation was reaching some of the basic limits to socio-economic growth on this planet.

New ideas have emerged to help us understand and choose our place in things. We have the new intellectual content already apparent in the concepts of environmental sustainability and the quantum universe along with old ideas about community and morality that never lost their importance.

Along with that content we have the new form in the many digital technologies now available, from mobile phones to the Internet. Although digital technology presents its own problems of complexity, it ultimately represents an extraordinary development in the capacity of human beings to communicate with each other. It is this capacity that is causing all the headlines about spying, cybercrime, the loss of privacy, changes in the behaviour of children and adolescents, and so on.

In effect, digital technology itself has become so powerful and so pervasive it is fundamentally changing the way people live. It is enabling the aggregation of vast new collections of people and interests. This is reflected In a negative way by the instant celebrity culture that mars the web, and in a positive way by the rise of crowd sourcing, just two examples.

We have seen the creation of a myriad websites, including Online Opinion, each trying to play a part in a critical shift in consciousness. So far it has to be said that noise has drowned out any profound new message, and of course the existing powers – big corporations and governments - are in the game as well. But as things become more desperate, and the need for new ideas becomes clearer, the necessary structures and people may appear to enable a basic rethinking about how we live and how we can do better.

The general direction in which we must go seems clear. Technological and organisational complexity has reached its limits, so we must return to a life based in human capacities and human inclinations. We can use the techno-organisational systems we have created so far to promote this shift, bringing people together in new ways. We can, and must, maintain connections at global levels to avoid falling back into international conflict, reconstruct activity national and local levels by reinventing democracy and community, and find the time to prioritise the things that really matter to us and make life worthwhile.