After further elaboration, Ellerman leads into the second framework:
The Wright Stuff
A certain schema-parallel experimentation-has emerged from a remarkable variety of sources as the best means of learning and development under conditions of genuine uncertainty. But one of the most basic examples is the process of biological evolution itself. Evolutionary change involves the interplay between two processes: variation and selection (along with the transmission of the selected variants to the next generation). Variation expands the range of possibilities and selection narrows it. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was a theory about selection, the theory of natural selection. Darwin and Darwinism have had relatively little to say about the structure of variation aside from the fundamental contra-Lamarckian point that variation is "blind" in the sense of being independent of learning during the lifetime of an organism.
Sewall Wright (1889-1988) together with Ronald A. Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane were the three progenitors of one of the revolutions in modern biology, the mathematical theory of population genetics [see Provine 1971; 1986]. In the recent complexity science literature, Wright is more often mentioned as the inventor of the "fitness landscape" to represent optimization on a very rugged and cloudy landscape. Yet the fitness landscape was only a tool Wright used to expound his shifting balance theory of evolution.24
Natural selection is a mechanism to push a population up a fitness hill-but it may be a very low hill. "The problem of evolution as I see it is that of a mechanism by which the species may continually find its way from lower to higher peaks in such a field." [Wright 1932; reprinted in Wright 1986, 163-4] How does evolution ever get the population back down a hill and across a valley of low fitness to climb a much higher hill? If selection operates to cut down variety to the survival of the fittest, what is the mechanism to increase variety in order to find a path from low to higher hills?
From here, Ellerman goes to explain how Wright, like Darwin before him, turned to observation of how practitioners of artificial selection achieved their goals, and this turned out to involve a process of dividing populations into sub-populations, or sub-herds, and cross-breeding when a clearly superior example is produced. It's a tricky process, since sub-populations need to be small enough that variations will be emphasized through inbreeding, but large enough to avoid damage through inbreeding of negative traits. The question of when to cross-breed is similarly delicate. Doing it too often undercuts the entire purpose of separating into sub-herds. But doing it too infrequently fails to take advantage of the successes generated by pursuing that purpose. These are the basic elements of the shifting balance needed to produce and benefit from as much diversity in potential forms of fitness as possible.
Having observed and analyzed this process, Wright reasoned that a similar process must be at work in nature. The process is not being directed with conscious intent, so it works more slowly, but the same underlying processes are at work. Most significantly, when some new more adaptive variant emerges, producing more viable offspring, the result is a population increase leading to outward cross-breeding into other sub-populations.
Ellerman then sums up the conclusions that underlie the pragmatist approach as informed by these examples:
From the shifting balance theory and other examples, we might outline a general pragmatic schema-"the Wright stuff"-for experimentation and learning in the context of uncertainty and known ignorance:- different experiments ("demes") running concurrently with some common goal,
- with some semi-isolation from immediate competitive pressures,
- with benchmarking comparisons made between the experiments, and
- with the "migration" of discoveries between experiments wherever possible to ratchet up the performance of the whole population
Ellerman immediately goes on to offer the conduct of scientific researchers working in a field as a prime example of this approach. They work in groups of collaborators taking different approaches--parallel experimentation--and face "shifting balance decisions about working in bigger or smaller groups", as well as whether to follow similar lines of research, or strike off on their own. Successful innovations are transmitted via the scientific literature, increasing the knowledge base of all.
Politics provides another example, both through the pluralism of political parties and political subdivisions:
Another major example is the pluralism of political parties or organizations (e.g., cities or states in a federation) taking different positions and performing different experiments addressing common social problems. The rivalry between political parties is immediate and direct while the rivalry between diverse cities or states is more indirect. But in all cases, the idea is to have within the whole polity a number of positions being articulated and a number of parallel experiments going on with some form of benchmarking and cross-learning so that innovations will serve to ratchet up performance across the polity.
Self-proclaimed "scientific socialism" took a top-down, series approach to both science (Lysenkoism) and politics, Ellerman points out. But ideologues aren't the only ones who tend to oppose the pragmatic, parallel experimentation approach:
it comes even more often from authoritarian regimes or organizations who have no interest in sponsoring a genuine alternative. It may be a low hill but they are on top of it and any parallel experimentation would be downhill for them.
Decentralized Social Learning
The final two sections of the paper, before the concluding remarks, are devoted to decentralized social learning. The first takes a more business-and-technology focus, while the second takes a broader view of social, cultural and legal practices. In place of the centralized, top-down model, the decentralized model is used in large multi-plant businesses where innovations can be encouraged through quality circles or self-managed work teams, allowing for a de facto set of parallel experiments to find better ways of doing things. This approach has also been adopted by the Chinese government over the past 25 years or so, to spur innovation in production, and is part of the reason for China's superior performance:
Perhaps the best example of a parallel system of decentralized innovation and diffusion in a developing country is in China over the last quarter of a century. The Chinese recognized local reform models which could be in a region, county, commune, or even brigade, and could be in any sector or area such as administration, health, education, or industry. The center would recognize a "model" which could then be visited by groups from all over China who want to make a similar reform in their locality.
The diffusion of innovations in China is distinctive in that it is (1) more horizontal in nature, (2) less dependent upon scientific and technical expertise, and (3) more flexible in allowing re-invention of the innovation as it is implemented by local units. These aspects of decentralized diffusion are facilitated by China's use of such diffusion strategies as models and on-the-spot conferences. The "learning from others" approach to decentralized diffusion in China was adopted officially as a national policy in the national constitution in 1978. [Rogers 1983, 340-1]
Of course, such innovation was limited to the economic/industrial/technological sphere. Ellerman shifts to a broader focus on society at large, in the second section, "Charles Sabel and the Revival of Legal Pragmatism". Ellerman traces Sabel's work to the "Japanese system of just-in-time inventories, local problem-solving by teams, benchmarking between teams, and continuous improvement (kaizen)" which "can be seen as a system of parallel experimentation and social learning in production that induces problem-solving and ownership by the participants." Translating this to the legal realm, Ellerman explains:
Often legal and institutional development strategies are flawed by implicitly assuming that which needs to be created. This often takes the form of assuming an effective governance system is in place so that a development advisor simply has to pour some new wine into the sound bottle, e.g., design a comprehensive set of new laws to be passed in a developing country. In contrast, Sabel asks how collective action problems are solved in the small and how change does take place--without assuming an effective fiat from the center.
Clearly, we could use a tanker ship full of Sabel's insight on this point when it comes to our delusional attempts to... do whatever it is we think we're doing in Afghanistan. But I digress....
In Sabel's treatment of collective action problems, individuals are assumed to have some sociability, some powers of reflection and discussion, and incomplete identities always in the process of formation and change. They are often in problematic situations where some collective action would benefit the group but where each may be vulnerable to the non-cooperation of others (which could be defection or simply error). The problem being discussed is the group members' own common problem so that they would be involved in implementing any proposed solution (the "learning") and will thereby be monitoring the actions of others and hence the description "learning by monitoring." The discussion to arrive at a collective action plan must also include discussion of how to apportion the gains from cooperation and how to adjudicate differences that will arise.
While this represents a de facto departure from the corporate setting where goals and purposes are set from above, it's still compatible with a game-theoretic approach, consistent with Axelrod's "The Evolution of Cooperation." But Sabel goes further by adopting the Deweyian viewpoint that people are not fixed and finished creatures, but rather that they remake themselves as well as their social world in the process of assuming agency over the situations in which they live:
Sabel goes beyond the game-theoretic treatment by assuming that the self-definitions and identities of the participants are changed by the discussion and cooperative efforts. Part of the discussion is to reinterpret and reframe their past, to discover and clarify their interests, and to establish a group identity with which the members can start to identify so that the cooperation is based more and more on "who they are" than on a tenuous game-theoretic modus vivendi (cooperating today only to avoid retaliation tomorrow). The reciprocal belief that others also cooperate partly on the basis of identification (rather than strategy and guile) will lead to giving others some "benefit of the doubt" by interpreting occasional non-cooperation by members as error rather than betrayal. In such a manner, trust and the norms of reciprocity (social capital) can be developed.
This highlights a very significant way in which a very basic form of identity politics serves a progressive, inclusive function. This is directly analogous to the way in which Benjamin Barber conceives of civil society functioning based on a "strong democracy" model, in his book, A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong . In that model, people are responsible for creating, maintaining and choosing to participate in a multiplicity of organizations or institutions to structure the sphere of civil society. This model contrasts with the more communitarian or social conservative model on the one hand, in which such organizations and institutions pre-exist as unquestioned aspects of civil society; and on the other hand, it contrasts with the libertarian model, in which organizations and institutions either do not exist or are misrepresented as purely voluntary associations belonging to the private sphere.
The process that Sabel is describing can be seen as a less abstract rendering of of what Barber is describing in more philosophical terms.
This creates a different conception of the nature and role of leadership as well, on that might be analogized more fruitfully to midwifery than to military command models:
Central managers or coordinators, instead of being assumed as a deus ex machina, can be seen as agents of the group facilitating the "government by discussion" within the group and helping to minimize the vulnerabilities of cooperative action-while through benchmarking and other means of competitive stimulus helping to insure that the group continues to face the problems that come to light. Where a set of people have interdependent opportunities and fates, the group members through initial problem-solving discussion and action accompanied by mutual monitoring can start to "bootstrap" [Sabel 1995] a new collective identity that can help to stabilize future cooperative problem-solving and learning.
Summarizing the distinctive themes of this approach, Ellerman concludes:
Sabel's treatment of solving collective action problems illustrates the pragmatic themes of the incompleteness of the social world (people's values and beliefs), the constructive nature of social solutions, and the constitutive role of people's active involvement. Sabel and colleagues have also elaborated a remarkable range of what we termed "parallel experimentation schemes" in legal and institutional development, e.g., regimes of rolling rules and ratcheting standards.
Reflections
There are countless ideas and themes that could be developed from the above. The following are by no means exclusive, or even, probably, the best. They are, however, a way to keep the conversation going, and invite others to expand it.
(1) The two frameworks Ellerman provides suggest three important things: That alternatives to the social engineering approach are numerous, various and fundamental. The two examples are worlds apart, one from the foundation of how life evolves, the other from computer science--a field so recent that what Ellerman wrote about it would have been virtually indecipherable (if not unimaginable) 60 years ago. And yet both are fundamental in different ways. Furthermore, the whole point of this approach is that one must build up from what already exists, and so it is obvious that anywhere between these two extremes one can find fields of practice in which the same sort of distinction can be drawn.
(2) The anti-government strain of conservative ideology seriously distorts and interferes with the natural, logical decentralist tendencies of progressive thought. Late 60s progressive notions of "appropriate technology" and Schumacher's book Small is Beautiful, as well as the SDS's early-60s emphasis on "participatory democracy" are clear evidence that a pro-active decentralist progressive orientation existed before the modern conservative movement grabbed onto the racist invocation of "states rights" ideology and cloned it onto virtually every other aspect of their activism. The framework Ellerman articulates here--along with the antecedents he cites--is invaluable in clarifying a decentralist approach that can and should stand entirely apart from the pernicious (and often arbitrary) forms of decentralism preached on the right.
(3) To fully respect its integrity, the social learning model is not simply the means to an end. It cannot be abandoned once it's work is done. Its work is essentially unending. Barber's model in A Place For Us--essentially derived from SDS's notion of participatory democracy, and the Civil Rights Movements notion of the "Beloved Community"--is not a means to an end, but an end in itself as well as a means to a potentially limitless plenum of ends.
This helps to shed light on a basic contradiction of Obama's political development and operating philosophy, as described in a chapter section from a book that educationaction is working on, which he shared with me:
Top Down or Bottom Up-What was the Real Commitment?
Nor, it is clear, was Obama's campaign ever about giving control to the grassroots. . . . [T]he campaign shared tasks with its supporters, but didn't share power. . . . Obama's leadership team wasn't really interested in grassroots empowerment.
When he was running for the State Senate in Illinois, Obama proposed that politicians could help foster the organization of "ordinary citizens into bottom-up democracies that create their own strategies, programs, and campaigns and that forge alliances with other disaffected Americans."i It is not the goal of this chapter to contest Obama's real commitment to this vision. In fact, reporting on his early years has consistently stressed his integrity and his commitment to the values he expresses. But, as we have argued, Obama's vision of politicians catalyzing independent "bottom-up" organizing may have less relevance in the world of electoral politics than he had hoped. It is helpful to look at what happened to the Obama volunteer organization after the election to the presidency as an indicator of how much he has been able to sustain this "bottom-up" commitment.
After the campaign ended, Obama and key leaders met to decide what to do with the organization they had built. One group supported the creation of an independent pressure group "that would . . . take the raucous activist sprit that had animated the field troops of the Obama campaign and funnel it into a powerful policy movement." But, of course such a move would be dangerous, and involved giving up some control over what the group might do. Furthermore, the truth is that "Obama was hardly a liberal firebrand." He did not necessarily want a group that might intensify differences instead of focusing on consensus.
Instead, they took the recommendations of a second group and created Organizing for America (OFA). OFA would operate like an independent organization so it wouldn't alienate Obama supporters who were not also democrats, but it was placed under the Democratic National Committee, so this "independence" was largely illusory. The mission of OFA was simply "to support the president's agenda."
On one hand, the creation of OFA represented a fairly significant evolution of electoral politics in America. It was "the first time a political party has deployed permanent field program with its own communications channel to contact and organize volunteers to advance a policy agenda between elections." But OFA's actual activities post-election seem to reveal the limitations of an organization that operates under the control of a public official.
Normally in community organizing, the activity of planning and participating in issue campaigns provides the glue that holds people in relationship over the long term. But because OFA members have no control over their agenda or the strategy that will be used to pursue it, these are not available as community maintaining activities. Instead, OFA staff do "listening tours" to hear what members think training programs that seem to look much like the ones Ganz designed for the campaign. OFA has also engaged members in community service activities, including a "National Health Care Day of Service" in June 2009. Community service provides a way to keep people involved without engaging them in anything controversial or organizing them to fight for particular goals.
Because Obama's primary commitment was to his political career, this devolution into mere artifact was virtually pre-ordained. Although at one point he may have sincerely wanted to foster genuine grassroots democracy, because it was never a central concern as an end in itself, this devolution was pre-ordained from the beginning.
A useful contrast can be drawn by looking at the example of Tom Hayden, primary author of the "Port Huron Statement" in which SDS committed itself to participatory democracy. Following his unsuccessful primary campaign for US Senate in 1976, Hayden converted his campaign organization into a permanent organization, which went through a number of transformations. It was never an actual example of participatory democracy as SDS had imagined, and yet it did serve as a much more diversified vehicle, frequently crossing issue or constituency boundaries that constrained other groups. And it seemed to help keep alive a grassroots side of Hayden over a long period of time he spent as a state legislator. Indeed, although the organization faded away, Hayden found it surprisingly easy, at one point, to simply stop running for re-election when he reached the point that he thought he could be more effective as a citizen activist once again, as well as a write and teacher often cocerned to highlight the struggles of more marginal groups. This is a relatively minor accomplishment in the grand scheme of things, but it does serve to provide a sharp contrast with Obama's relatively conventional trajectory.
(4) To go beyond the prototypes represented by Obama or Hayden, we must also go beyond the models of any party or party-related structure. This is not to say that such structures are bad. Indeed, structures like Progressive Democrats of America are invaluable. But we also need structures that emerge out of the struggles of groups and individuals in civil society whose inter-relationships reflect the particular specificities of the struggles that gave birth to their civic activism. Examples include struggles for environmental justice, in which environmentalist, public health, civil rights, worker and consumer rights and other activist traditions are all implicated.
Furthermore, typically, there is no "typical" environmental justice struggle. It may focus around truckers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, mis-classified as "owner-operators" so that any effort to organize themselves is a violation of anti-trust laws! Or it may focus around mothers of children with asthma, suffering at rates dramatically higher than national averages, because of the unhealthy air their children are forced to breath. There is no pre-ordained commonality to these struggles, except that those without power are forced to bear the burden of those who have it. And in order to gain the power to redress their grievances, they must organize themselves in a process that is--at least potentially--endless both in what it requires of them, and in what it offers.
(5) A grand example of this can be seen in the People's World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, held in Bolivia this past week. I will be discussing this further in my last diary of the day, later this afternoon. |
