The Aim of Human Society

To what extent is the aim of human society to maintain its equilibrium, as the POSIWID principle would suggest? There is a line of French thinkers who resist the universalism to which some schools of cybernetics aspire, and see the construction of social norms as political rather than teleological or quasi-biological. Xavier Guchet traces the position of Canguilhem and Simondon back to Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

where it is argued that closed morality and religion are without a doubt morality and religion of conservation. Their function is to preserve the stability of the existing social order. On the contrary, open moralities and religions have the function of returning human societies to the élan of creation, of unmaking the existing social order, inventing another order and becoming something else. Guchet 2012

Whereas for Foucault and others, social norms are constructed to protect society from pathological variations that might threaten it, Simondon focused on invention and the creation of new norms.

(I am more familiar with Popper's notion of Open Society than with Bergson's. There appears to be some difference between the two notions, but I haven't done enough reading at this point to be able to explain the difference.) 

One way of talking about these questions is in terms of programming. Simon Mills quotes from a book by James Beniger, distinguishing between control (purposive influence toward a predetermined goal) and programming (setting of the goal to be achieved). Mills carries out a close reading of one technology advocate (Sandy Pentland), showing that the success stories of big data are largely based on relatively closed or autopoietic systems, delivering some degree of technocratic efficiency and resilience, but failing to answer the more fundamental question - what is the purpose of society as a whole. Where do the goals come from?

Another way of talking about these questions is in terms of organizational learning. Chris Argyris introduced the distinction between single-loop learning and double-loop learning, which very roughly corresponds to Beniger's distinction between control and programming. While single-loop learning uses simple feedback to improve the performance of a system relative to a fixed goal, double-loop learning allows for the modification of goals in the light of experience. Advanced technologies such as machine learning are not limited to single-loop learning, and may be able to do some limited double-loop learning, in suitably controlled environments. (To go beyond this, we may need some notion of triple-loop learning. But see article by Tosey Visser and Saunders problematizing such labels.)

Sometimes, technologies and sociotechnical innovations are spoken of as ethically and politically neutral instruments, which can simply be used to maintain established socioeconomic and cultural goals. So that falls naturally into the "closed" model of society identified by Bergson. But if technologies and innovations (sometimes the same ones) are described as disruptive, this seems to imply a more "open" model of society.

Obviously there are ethical issues both ways - whom does the disruption serve, but also whom does the preservation of the status quo serve?

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Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932)

Geoffrey Bowker, How to be universal: some cybernetic strategies, 1943-1970 (Social Studies of Science 23, 1993) pp 107-127 

Philip Boxer, Triple-Loop Learning (Asymmetric Leadership, 8 January 2007)

Xavier Guchet, Technology, Sociology, Humanism: Simondon and the Problem of the Human Sciences (SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012)

Simon Mills, Simondon and Big Data (Platform Journal of Media and Communication, Vol 6, 2015) 59-72. 

Alex "Sandy" Pentland, Reinventing Society in the Wake of Big Data (30 August 2012). Professor Pentland is also mentioned in John Thornhill, Trustworthy data will transform the world (FT, 5 March 2018, paywall)

Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (Routledge 1945)

Paul Tosey, Max Visser and Mark NK Saunders, The origins and conceptualizations of triple-loop learning: A critical review (Management Learning 2012 43: 291 originally published online 2 December 2011)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A cybernetic view of human nature, Henri Bergson, Karl Popper

Related posts: Three wishes (May 2009), A cybernetics view of data-driven (August 2020)

Recycling Glass

One of the most popular items of domestic waste to be recycled is glass. Local authorities provide facilities for collecting bottles, which are then melted down and made into new bottles. Or crushed into rubble to help make new roads.

People who participate in these schemes doubtless feel virtuous. Some may go on to recycle other stuff, but some may feel that they’ve already done their bit to save the planet.
It is undoubtedly better to recycle glass than put it into landfill. (Environmentalists may not be so enthusiastic about new roads though.)

But recycling glass isn’t the best way of saving the planet. The raw materials for glass are relatively cheap and readily available. And we still need a huge amount of energy to melt down perfectly good bottles and make new bottles. Ideally we should be recycling the bottles.

We have a milkman who brings full bottles of milk to the door, and takes away the empties for washing and reuse. We have a local shop that refills empty (plastic) bottles of detergent. But these schemes used to be much more common, in the UK and elsewhere. When I was a child, there used to be a deposit on lemonade bottles, and we would collect them up and take them back to the shop. When I lived in Germany over twenty-five years ago, there was a deposit on the beer bottles and on the crate as well.

The principle of the deposit has been eroded – partly by the current fashion for recycling glass. The bottle manufacturers are of course delighted with the present arrangements. The last thing they want is for people to recycle bottles.

Is it conceivable that we could go back to recycling bottles instead of recycling glass? And perhaps plastic bottles as well? What would such a change require? Let me identify the general pattern and make four observations.

General Pattern. Once people have latched onto a particular solution to a problem, the solution becomes entrenched/institutionalized. Established interests then equate the solution with the original problem, and resist the discussion and development of alternative solutions.

Observation One: it probably isn't worth appealing to the better nature of the organizations that are invested in the status quo - such as the local authorities that have invested political credibility as well as significant resources in the present schemes.

Observation Two: any such proposal is likely to be hotly disputed - not just by people who have an obvious commercial stake in the present schemes, but by people who are simply reluctant to question their habits (schlepping bottles to the recycling bins) or change their beliefs. Some people have an inbuilt resistance to any proposal that appears to involve going back to the past.

Observation Three: there are undoubtedly some practical difficulties and complexities to overcome in implementing any such proposal. (For example, how do you sort out all the different bottles and jars, and send the beer bottles back to the brewery and the jamjars back to the jam factory?) Some of these may be solved by ingenuity and/or technology. However, some people have an inbuilt optimism that technology will overcome all difficulties, which is probably unrealistic.

Observation Four: Even if the total benefits of the change will outweigh the total costs (economic and environmental), there will be winners and losers. Some intervention may be necessary to redistribute costs, benefits and risks. For example, environmental taxes that
place the costs of waste onto the manufacturer, and provide incentives for factories to put their products into reusable containers.

Further Reading

• Is it really worth recycling glass? (Observer article)
  
• Death of Recycling (excellent essay on Zero Waste)
  
• The Waste of Nations (complains about EU recycling regulations)
• Thoughts on Climate Change (includes some relevant evidence)