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Adam Curtis explores this apparent feeling of helplessness in ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’, a powerful and unsettling three part documentary broadcast in June this year by the BBC. He identifies three key strands of thought that have helped shape the 20th century ethos. Briefly put, these are: •
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that market stability enabled by technology will liberate us from all forms of political control and help us all become Randian heroes in control of our own destinies; that old hierarchies will be replaced by (eco)systems that can organize themselves ‘naturally’; that we are all soft machines driven by the impulses of our genes and therefore not responsible for the unforeseen consequences of our acts.
Such ideas have caused us to embrace a fatalistic philosophy that sees human beings as cogs in a mechanistic system or as self-contained computing machines, helpless and disillusioned in the face of those in power, with no idea of what comes next or of how to challenge and change the status quo. Isn’t this a great excuse for our political failure to change the world? But this is not the discourse we want to hear! No, we are not cogs in machines. We are not ants in a swarming ant hill. And we are certainly not doomed or pre-determined – or at least it is healthy to suppose we are not! One of my favorite quotes from Goethe offers an antidote to such deterministic thinking and shows a way forward: “If we take man as he is, we make him worse. But if we take him as what he could potentially be, then we make him capable of becoming what he can be.” We need to hang on to our belief in mankind and our ability to change the world for the better! As Maturana and Varela point out in their “The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding”, while machine systems or biological organisms restrict the individual creativity of their component parts because these parts exist solely for the organism itself, human social systems, on the contrary, amplify the individual creativity of their component parts because the system exists for these parts. However, we are not selfish components in the system. As components of a social system, we are both a whole (an individual self) and a part(co-determined by our relationships with others and our environment)at one and the same time. In other words, we do not solely exist so that the system can thrive; the human social system exists for the parts to thrive, individually and collectively, in all their vast networks of interactions and relationships. We can only survive and thrive if we uphold both our “wholeness” and our “partness”. This notion of ‘agency in communion’ as Wilber calls it, or allocentric individualism is a leap beyond the polarization of individualism and collectivism that has underpinned 20th century thought and given us the idiocentric objectivism of Ayn Rand, the post WWI collectivist and totalitarian regimes and the communal ideologies of the 1970s. Agency is our capacity to make choices and act. Our increasing ability to author, connect and share through communication technologies has made it easier to keep our human individuality and interactions independent of the infrastructure and the system – even if we are still to ensure that this remains so. At the same time, our individuality and our interactions are not separately determined. As much as we are shaped by what is around us and by our interactions with our peers, we can still influence and even create our social and natural environment through our choices and decisions.
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