The New Uncertainty

I wondered in the last post why The Age of the Unthinkable – why the new global order constantly surprises us and what to do about it had – despite its readability – made so little impact when it came out in 2009. I suspect it was perhaps just a bit ahead of its time – if only by a year or so. At the time, most of us were trying to get our heads around the global financial crisis and hadn’t yet realised that this would be the first of a wave of crises to buffet us in the West. John Urry’s “What is the Future?” was published in 2016 and, in 3 pages, gives the titles of no fewer than 60 books which, between 2003 and 2015, spelled out the dystopian future which beckoned… starting with “Our Final Century” (Rees 2003) and finishing with “The Sixth Extinction” (Kolbert) 

The buzzwords of our new world are those from systems, chaos and complexity theory - interconnectedness, networks, feedbacks, emergence, nonlinear change, exponential, tipping points….

Arguably we started to become familiar with this language in 1977 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 but it has a powerful introduction written by the famous Alvin Toffler which starts – 

One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split-up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again. This skill is perhaps most finely honed in science. There we not only routinely break problems down into bite-sized chunks and mini-chunks, we then very often isolate each one from its environment by means of a useful trick. We say ceteris paribus-all other things being equal. In this way we can ignore the complex interactions between our problem and the rest of the universe.

llya Prigogine, who won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his work on the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium systems , is not satisfied, however, with merely taking things apart. He has spent the better part of a lifetime trying to "put the pieces back together again"-the pieces in this case being biology and physics, necessity and chance, science and humanity. 

And the decline of the industrial age forces us to confront the painful limitations of the machine model of reality. Of course, most of these limitations are not freshly discovered. The notion that the world is a clockwork, the planets timelessly orbiting, all systems operating deterministically in equilibrium, all subject to universal laws that an outside observer could discover-this model has come under withering fire ever since it first arose.

In the early nineteenth century, thermodynamics challenged the timelessness implied in the mechanistic image of the universe. If the world was a big machine, the thermos-dynamicists declared, it was running down, its useful energy leaking out. It could not go on forever, and time, therefore, took on a new meaning. 

-       Darwin's followers soon introduced a contradictory thought: The world-machine might be running down, losing energy and organization, but biological systems, at least, were running up, becoming more, not less, organized.

-       By the early twentieth century, Einstein had come along to put the observer back into the system: The machine looked different-indeed, for all practical purposes it was different depending upon where you stood within it. But it was still a deterministic machine, and God did not throw dice.

-       Next, the quantum people and the uncertainty folks attacked the model with pickaxes, sledgehammers, and sticks of dynamite. 

Nevertheless, despite all the ifs, ands, and buts, it remains fair to say, as Prigogine and Stengers do, that the machine paradigm is still the "reference point" for physics and the core model of science in general. Indeed, so powerful is its continuing influence that much of social science, and especially economics, remains under its spell.

The importance of this book is not simply that it uses original arguments to challenge the Newtonian model, but also that it shows how the still valid, though much limited, claims of Newtonianism might fit compatibly into a larger scientific image of reality. It argues that the old "universal laws" are not universal at all, but apply only to local regions of reality. And these happen to be the regions to which science has devoted the most effort. 

Thus, in broad-stroke terms, Prigogine and Stengers argue that traditional science in the Age of the Machine tended to emphasize stability, order, uniformity, and equilibrium. It concerned itself mostly with closed systems and linear relationships in which small inputs uniformly yield small results. With the transition from an industrial society based on heavy inputs of energy, capital, and labor to a high-technology society in which information and innovation are the critical resources, it is not surprising that new scientific world models should appear.

What makes the Prigoginian paradigm especially interesting is that it shifts attention to those aspects of reality that characterize today's accelerated social change: disorder, instability, diversity, disequilibrium, nonlinear relationships (in which small inputs can trigger massive consequences), and temporality-a heightened sensitivity to the flows of time. The work of Ilya Prigogine and his colleagues in the socalled " Brussels school" may well represent the next revolution in science as it enters into a new dialogue not merely with nature, but with society itself.

……. Words like "revolution," "economic crash," "technological upheaval ," and "paradigm shift" all take on new shades of meaning when we begin thinking of them in terms of fluctuations, feedback amplification, dissipative structures, bifurcations, and the rest of the Prigoginian conceptual vocabulary.) It is these panoramic vistas that are opened to us by “Order Out of Chaos”.