Archive for February, 2022

Moral change – Moral uncertainty

February 27, 2022

Morals change – partly because morals are inherently uncertain.

  1. Morals change when the situation changes. People behave differently in war and peace for example. Defining such changes in advance can be difficult and uncertain.
  2. Technologies introduce possibilities of action which were previously unthinkable. So people have to change or develop morals to deal with those courses of action, or stop the tech which is also a moral decision. What changes will be introduced is uncertain. It is often uncertain as to whether preventing a technology will be harmful as it may curtail good.
  3. Morals change with Culture. Different cultures have different moral sets and emphases. We no longer behave as the ancient Romans behave – and this would often seem a good thing. However, there is no real reason given the difference in cultures that Romans would accept present day Western morals. Moral improvement involves moral judgements.
  4. Morals change with social order. The moral rules of a feudal society are not appropriate for the smooth running of a democratic society, or a capitalist society, or any stateless society. Again, and for similar reasons, it is uncertain that moral arguments could resolve these issues.
  5. Morals usually support the behaviour of the power elites, to show that they are dominant because they are moral. For example, in capitalist societies wealth is often taken as an indicator of virtue. Not attempting to control corporations is taken as a virtue, money making is a virtue. People are said to be poor because they are judged to be lacking in a whole range of virtues, such as hard work, fortitude, persistence, talent etc
  6. Morals, and moral exceptions, change with ‘side’ and allegiance. We can have no doubt that had Clinton or any Democrat done what Trump has done, Republicans would be calling for prosecution. This is common. ‘Respectable people’ usually suffer less for their crimes than disreputable people and so on. Morality is uncertain in its application.
  7. When any people rise up from a position of oppression, then the morals enforcing that oppression may increasingly seem to be less good, and more arbitrary. Indeed part of the struggle will be to disqualify the old morals that keep them down.
  8. Morals usually involve some kind of socially enforced penalty. The penalty expected can sometimes overwhelm the moral position as the punishment can come to seem immoral in itself, again involving uncertainty, should the person be found not guilty, or the punishment changed.
  9. Morals can change when people try to be consistent. I would suggest that the decline of Christianity since the 18th Century had much to do with people realising the moral standards of Christianity were incoherent. It seemed increasingly unlikely to people that a supposedly loving God could have commanded genocide, rape, murder and eternal torture for anyone. Yet this is uncertain as after all God is supposedly infinitely powerful and wise.
  10. Morals can change when supposed moral exemplars are discovered to have behaved badly. The defense of pedophiles and rapists by various churches is an example of this, and it also explains why Churches defended them – because they feared losing moral influence. Perhaps the moral position was still valid even if proves impossible, or is used to shelter ‘evil’?
  11. Morals nearly always involve dispute because of social and situational change, alliance, and levels of consistency. Almost any legal case, political case, or so on will involve moral argument, and arguments about punishment and retribution. The argument may increase the apparent arbitrary nature of the morality, and point to its inevitable uncertainty, and lead to people trying to advance to another stage, or to them trying to fix the problems with violence and compulsions – which others may say is immoral. Ambiguity and uncertainty is present again.
  12. Whether morals should change is a moral question. All I’m saying is they will change. However, I suspect that if your morals will not change, then you are not open to the complexities of life, and you will make immoral decisions as a result.

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Technologies and struggles over use

February 21, 2022

None of this is original.

There is a long standing argument, going back at least to the early 19th Century, that complicated technologies intrinsically distance, or alienate, people from the natural world. Rather than interacting with the world face to face, as it were, complicated tech separates us from reality. It does most of the thinking and interaction and transformative work. It is like the difference between swords and missiles. They are both designed to kill. One gives you responsibility and the presence of death and what it means, while the other distances you from the mass death you are causing.

To some extent I think this argument might be correct. For example, the idea of overlaying reality with virtual images, could be the absolute instance of separation from the real world and its dynamics. We could, in theory, choose only to see days without pollution, destruction, misery or poverty, and thus cease to recognise that these problems exist. We could choose to make the world more interesting in fantastic ways, to also distract us from the accumulation of real problems which might require political action, rather than heroic questing for virtual items.

However, there is another argument that the problem is not so much technologies themselves, or the development of new technologies, but that technologies can be used and designed for oppressive or alienating purposes. For instance, industrial technology, throughout the 20th Century and now was generally not used to boost the craft, creativity or involvement of the workers in production and work, but to deskill them, control them second by second, and render them as replaceable as possible so as to increase the profit and power of another class of people who owned the tech.

Similarly with the media. We have the capacity for a ‘democratic’ and mass participatory media, but we do not have this – we have billionaire owned and controlled huge media corporations which are primarily devoted towards gaining an audience for advertising and to promote the media owner’s power and influence. We have online ghettoization into conflicting ‘information groups’ which reinforce bias and unreality (of other people of course!), which is encouraged by the algorithms set up by facebook and twitter etc. Youtube shows just tend to reuse the mainstream politicised material and exaggerate the views of the audience they want to attract – also for subscriptions and advertising purposes.

This is quite natural. Systems of social power and organisation generally aim at perpetuating those systems of power and organisaton, or increasing the rigour and effectiveness of that power, so as to benefit the dominant groups, and technology can be designed to be one of the tools in that process.

However sometimes technology can have unintended effects which may undermine dominance, produce destruction or which can be exploited by those who have to use it. This may undermine power and organisation. Thus fossil fuel use while responsible for many societies success, is likely to produce the conditions for their failure. Computers and internet, allowed the boom of new companies and new business models which have disrupted the corporate sector, and allowed new groups to participate, but the technologies have become reintegrated into that sector, transforming it in some ways and extending its power in others.

In all of these senses, technology is often a site of political struggle between dominant and exploited or oppressed groups, to use the tech as either a mode of control or a mode of ‘humanisation’.

It is for example, possible to see a struggle in energy transition. To simplify. There are those who struggle to retain: the established modes of energy production; the value of the capital invested in that technology; and the social dominance, and market influence, control over that technology gives them. There are those who seek to replace the established powers with massive wind or solar farms which retain the centralised energy and power structures of the old system, and those who seek to use renewable energy to boost the social power, independence, resilience and control of local communities who share and distribute the energy generated.

At the moment, it is not clear who will win the energy technology struggle, but governments tend to side with the first two positions. This should change. People into community energy usually now realise that they don’t just face technical problems, but the political and organisational problems of possibly deliberate resistance.

Hence the importance of the recognition that the problem may not always be the technology but the way it is used, and the power relations embedded in it.

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Some comments on complexity and its consequences

February 20, 2022

Every now and again I just try to give myself some summary of my understanding about complexity. This was originally written for the Anthropocene Transitions Project

Definition

A complex system is a system in which “nodes/beings” in the system alter their behaviour (automatically or consciously) is response to the activity of the rest of the system.
All living systems are complex systems.

Interconnection – systems

  • Everything that exists is interactive, or inter-being.
  • All beings depend on other beings for their existence in complex webs of inter-connection.
  • Therefore human beings depend on Earth systems, ecologies and other humans.
  • Often nodes or beings in a complex system are composed of multiple complex systems – all the way down.

Minds

  • As nodes do not exist in themselves, minds are present in systems, not in individuals alone. There is no originary or individual consciousness.
  • Humans become intelligent through interaction with others, and through sharing and competing with others.
  • Culture is essential for intelligence, and seems to be born in dispute and instruction.
  • Minds are not always harmonious – they contain dispute and contradiction.
  • Human psychologies are complex systems. Our attempts to impose order on our minds, or suppress pain, can create a disruptive personal unconscious – which is probably similar to other people’s personal unconscious.
  • This is like a microcosm of human action in the world – attempts to impose order can create the very disorder we fear.

Flux

  • Every being is in flux or process. Nothing is static forever.
  • Small events can produce big changes at tipping points.
  • Systems tend to seek equilibrium, but equilibrium processes change over time, with changes in other systems, and accidents.
  • The system can depart from equilibrium fairly quickly. Sometimes the disruptions to equilibrium are the result of chance ‘external’ events, such as an intense fire, an introduced plant seed, or a meteor crash. Tipping points are not always identifiable in advance.
  • Change is not always a “linear” process. Because nothing much has apparently happened yet, does not mean we are not approaching a tipping point in which change radically accelerates.

Harmony?

  • While the system can be thought of as ‘one,’ it does not have to be harmonious.
  • Nodes can compete, destroy each other and have differing aims.
  • Systems do not have to ‘aim’ to benefit humans.
  • While it is common to talk of Complex Adaptive Systems, as they change and adapt to change; from a human point of view some systems can be considered maladaptive or destructive.
  • Many economic systems, for example, do not seem to be geared to human survival.
  • Human organisation and power relations, can distribute harms and risks as well as ‘goods.’
  • Evolution occurs because of failure, to reproduce identically, or to survive.
  • It is probably worthwhile to try and identify maladaptive systems, and see if they can be modified.

Boundaries are not always clear

  • Many categories are not sharp and firmly bounded.
  • Beings and their categories are interconnected.
  • Everything affects everything.
  • Categories overlap.
  • Hierarchies are not always mutually exclusive and may overlap. The ‘upper’ levels of a hierarchy may be heavily influenced by the ‘lower’ levels.
  • Humans are ‘conditioned’ by planetary, social and cultural functions – but they can also influence those conditions in certain circumstances.
  • It does not always appear easy, appropriate or entirely accurate to separate a system from its ‘environment’ for purposes of study. This is especially so, if we then proceed to try and render the environment inert or without ongoing interactive effect on the system.
  • But you have to simplify. We cannot include everything ever.

Uncertainty is normal

  • The only true models of complex systems are the systems themselves.
  • Humans cannot always make exact predictions of events, but they can predict trends.
  • Hence human actions will likely have unintended consequences. This is fundamental to understanding human interaction with reality.
  • That a system is unpredictable in detail does not mean it is purely random – there are constraints at any moment. However these constraints may not continue forever.
  • None of this means a system cannot be modelled usefully, just that the models will not be the system. “The Map is not the Territory.”
  • We can, for example, predict that some bad human behaviours will affect your life deleteriously, but not exactly how or when. We can predict that weather will get more and more unstable if humans keep releasing greenhouse gases in increasing quantities, but we still cannot exactly predict the weather on a certain day, in a certain place, in a year’s time.
  • Lack of perfect models does not allow us to assume that everything will remain the same, or not be maladaptive, as when people argue that because climate models may be inherently inaccurate, we should do nothing. Nothing changing for the worse is an even more dubious model.

Some problems with Complexity

  • This view of complexity undermines a morality which seeks its justification in predicted consequences.
  • It implies lack of perfect control or domination, and hence the possibility of existential crisis, if human progress and control is central to human life.
  • As unintended consequences are normal, we may need to look for them as part of the system. For example, Ruskin’s idea of ‘illth’ the harm produced by the production of riches, cannot be ignored if we want to understand economics.
  • It implies politics should be experimental rather than dogmatic. We should expect policies to need adjustment or abandonment. Failure can be a learning experience.

Dealing with complexity

  • Slow down.
  • Be receptive to what is.
  • Lessen demands on reality, that it should be a certain way. “It is what it is.”
  • Lessen requirements we be in control.
  • Learn to live and work with the flow.
  • Suspend attempts at total understanding, as all understanding is provisional.
  • Accept a level of ignorance and expect contradictions, they are informative.
  • Be prepared to ‘feel’ your way through. You may fail, but it may just help you get there.
  • Create redundancy rather than “just in time” mechanisms.
  • Try to recover that which you have made yourself unconscious of.
  • Allow yourself to become aware of possible unexpected consequences of your acts no matter how well intended they are.

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