This
idea of humanism cannot continue. Who would seriously and deliberately want to
maintain that society could be formed on the model of a human being, that is,
with a head at the top and so on? Niklas Luhman
You can’t understand an ant colony by looking at a
single ant any more than staring at a Euro coin helps you understand the
economy. Knowing how the gears on a bike work doesn’t explain the Tour de
France; and human consciousness is not reducible to mere synapses snapping in
the soft-machine of the brain. Each of these are complex entities that are
better described when considered as systems. Systems thinking and systems
theories see the world through the prism of systems. Systems are understood
through the combinations of their component parts, operations and behaviour. Their
whole is greater than the sum of their parts, as the old cliché runs. Systems
thinking is a way of thinking about the world in terms of these wholes, rather
than their constituent parts. It considers outputs and behaviours and emergent
properties.
Systems reduce the complexity of their environments
and by doing so become, somewhat, distinct from them. The ant colony, just like
the bike race, is not reducible to its surroundings. They each have separate
identities even if the physical borders are hard to discern. Likewise an
economic system reduces all of the messy complication of the world into the
abstractions of financial transactions. To understand a system means to
understand what it does. Systems have functions which are particular to
themselves. The trick is in working out what, exactly, those functions might
be. But underlying everything else, systems have a primary function: all systems
operate in order to survive. Councils are also systems. They are comprised of
multiple elements: buildings, people, equipment and so on. They perform various
functions. And they will also operate in
order to survive.
A common use of the word “technology” is as a
technique, methodology or knowledge. If so then systems are a type of
technology. They are a way of taking the world, thinking about it, manipulating
it and doing things in it. It has been common throughout history for humans to
understand who and what they are in relation to prevailing technology. In early
Greek and Christian societies humans were clay infused with spirit. In the 3rd
Century BCE humans related themselves to hydraulic engineering; now the human
was understood as the site of canals and pipes for liquids such as the four
“humours.” In the 16th Century humans became machines; that is,
automata of cogs, gears and springs whilst in the following centuries metaphors
of chemistry, steam power and then electricity were used. The model of the
human as a computer subsequently emerged as the dominant metaphor for cognition
and behaviour with the establishment of the so-called Von Neumann architecture
which provides the conceptual model of more or less all existing computers.
This understands the body as a piece of organic hardware that processes
information about the world. Thought, then, is a sort of software that decodes
or represents the world through its own processes of simulation. Each of these
technologies and metaphors for humanity come with their own potentials and
restrictions. They each place humans within a particular worldview with a
particular horizon. Each world will have its own limit.
Systems give us another technique for thinking about
who we are. This requires understanding that our individuality is positioned
within a complex set of environmental coordinates. Humanity is positioned
within systems such as history, culture, language, architecture, economics,
chemistry, physics and so on. The human body is just one, biological, system
amongst many others. Some of these are necessary for our existence; others are
oblivious.
In an interview with Women’s Own magazine in 1987 Margaret
Thatcher made one of her most contentious and notorious claims:
“They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there’s no
such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are
families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people
must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and
then, also, to look after our neighbours.”
I think she couldn’t be more wrong. All people are is their relations. All of us get our identities from the systems we inhabit. And this is no cause for alarm; but rather a thrilling opportunity to rethink who, what and why we are.
