The Age of the Unthinkable

On or about summer 1977, the world suddenly started to become a much more complicated place when Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel prize in Chemistry for his work on “dissipative structures” which led to the field for which he is better known – self-organising systems. His Order out of Chaos - man’s new dialogue with nature wasn’t published in the USA until 1984 although it had been released in french the same year he had won the Nobel prize.

A few years later Chaos – making a new science (1987) was the first book to popularise the remarkable changes which were beginning to undermine the way we thought we had understood the world and science since Isaac Newton’s time.

Einstein’s theory of relativity had, of course, been a bit of a challenge a hundred years ago – but somehow we had ridden that out. But the findings of what was variously called systems, complexity or chaos theory have, for the last couple of decades, been challenging everything we thought we knew about cause and effect! 

This blog has several times tried to understand what the new approach actually meant – one of my first efforts appearing exactly ten years ago but has had to admit failure – this post containing the reading list I was using last December in a continuing effort to make sense of what the basic message and its implications actually were.

A highly readable book, however, has persuaded me to give the subject yet another chance. It is The Age of the Unthinkable – why the new global order constantly surprises us and what to do about it by J Cooper Ramo which actually appeared in 2009 - 12 years ago - but, curiously for such a great read, doesn’t appear to have made much impression. But he knows how to tell a good story – and they soon had a sufficient grip on me to be willing to put my prejudice aside about his being a Director of a Henry Kissinger institute. 

One story he uses is the famous one told by Isaiah Berlin about foxes and hedgehogs – with the latter knowing a lot about one subject and the former a little about a lot of subjects. He also makes good use of Richard Nesbitt’s work on the very different ways Asians and Westerners apparently think – with the former seeing more the context and background and the latter individuals. 

Indeed, apart from the story of a Danish scientist I hadn’t heard of (Per Bak who worked on what causes an individual grain of sand suddenly to cause collapse of an entire heap) Ramo doesn’t refer all that much to the extensive literature on systems and complexity theory. Perhaps indeed, that’s why I enjoyed the book so much! He chooses instead to focus on the ability of a few creative people to think outside the box. Indeed his book has parallels with Range – Why Generalists triumph in a specialised world by David Epstein and Rebel ideas – the power of diverse thinking by Matthew Syed

Let’s see what another of the (rare) reviewers of Ramo’s book had to say about it - 

The US-led ‘war on terror’ has succeeded only in creating more terrorists..... Largely self-regulating global capital markets have proven to be incapable of balancing or regulating effectively enough to stave off economic misery to millions. Capitalism itself, and its Cold War foe, communism, have in most cases achieved the very opposite of their aims of bringing prosperity, health and happiness to all.

Ramos does not suggest that the world is anarchic, however. His view is that the world is in a state of ‘organised instability’, a concept drawn from the physical sciences, in particular chaos theory and complexity science.

In this system, we never know what event, object or person may prove to be responsible for triggering unexpected and occasionally catastrophic change. 

Our current institutions are inherently incapable of grasping the idea of ‘organised instability’ and therefore formulate policy via outmoded thought and practice. Essentially, they make bad policy because they do not understand the environment in which they operate, and are too lethargic and inflexible to adapt and respond.

Ramo is encouraging policy-makers to take a good hard look at the world around them and at themselves and then begin reconfiguring power structures and decision-making processes in order to generate good and appropriate policy that reflects the dynamism of a complex world. Through a series of diverse case studies Ramo draws conclusions about how some people and organisations are thriving in an unstable world.  

At the heart of them all is a reliance on quick-wittedness, innovation, pragmatism, and an eye for opportunity. This holds true as much for Hizballah as it does for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The bulkof the book is taken up with describing how people are adaptingsuccessfully across the world while traditional structures are falling behind.

Ramo writes in engaging fashion, is adept at linking across times and subjects, and the reader is left in little doubt that he is definitely on to something. His suggestion that we view threats as systems, rather than objects, is wise but already part of military planning, if not political decision-making. 

In the next post, I want to go back to Ilya Prigigone’s 1984 book – not least because it has an extensive introduction written by no less a figure than Alvin Toffler