Forces, Not Systems

We have become a technological people and like to think in terms of systems. Early in my social work career the idea of Family Systems Theory was fashionable and lots of therapy was geared around looking at families that way.  The idea that if Dad changed his behavior it would change everyone else’s had appeal. It’s not crazy.  How Mom and Dad treat each other has an effect on how Junior and Sissy act. Yet there is a problem with the theory, in that sometimes it doesn’t work, which is a bad thing in a theory.  In extreme circumstances there would usually be some change, as in “when Dad stopped beating everyone else the whole place calmed down.” But lots of times change in one person or one set of interactions didn’t seem to have much effect on anyone else.  Mom would stop her secret drinking but everyone was still arguing and unhappy as before.

It also rapidly lost usefulness when one tried to extend it out further in the family. An adult daughter would be brought into the mix and everyone would talk about what had happened growing up and something or other might be changed about how they were going to interact now that she was out of the house, or the oppressive influence of some tyrannical grandparents might be mitigated by a decision supported by the nuclear family to not visit anymore or someone standing up to them – but then nothing.  Sometimes you’d get a little bit of effect, and once in great while there would be a big effect, just like in the movies, but more usually it was nothing.  Most of the system turned out to be just the individual actions of one person on another with some spillover effect, often unpredictable.

But we love thinking in terms of systems, so anytime there is any cause-and-effect we start seeing a whole system in place there. We can talk about a circulatory system, because events in one place in the system do have effects, often predictable, in other parts of the system.  But when we talk about an educational system this is much less true.  When a locality opts for mandatory kindergarten, it does so with the idea that this is going to have positive effects throughout the system.  Yet this does not prove to be the case.  There may or may not be positive effects on the individual (separate topic – remember selection bias), but we can barely see downstream advantages in first grade, let alone highschool. People try to make the argument that “system-wide” interventions such as teaching to the tests or changing the discipline policies have far-reaching effects, but those are not system  interventions simply because they are universal.  They are just top-down rules, and the dynamic effects are limited.  Discipline policy affects the amount of classroom disruption, and that has some effect on some students. Nothing else is affected.  Colleges do what they do in response to forces, largely financial ones, not as a result of what teachers teach in fifth grade or whether your high school at a good band or a bad one. It’s not a system.

There is not a capitalist system in America. There is the force of the free market, which operates everywhere on earth, like gravity.  Governments interfere with that force in varying ways and degrees.  Socialist and communist economies are more like systems, but even they can only defy gravity by focused application of other forces like taxation and redistribution.  So too we can defy gravity by building engines and airplanes, and we might decide those are very good things, but they come at a cost. In America we modify the force of the free market by focused intervention, largely in a redistributive direction. (Redistribution and socialism are not synonymous, though they overlap, and that is a whole different discussion.) Monarchies and tyrannies are systems of government, but they are not especially economic systems. Feudalism is more like socialism, mercantilism, or communism in that it is partially an economic system.  America has a system of government to redistribute power and to mitigate abuses of such, and this does bleed over into economic power.  But that system is largely in place to limit the power of the strong over the weak for moral reasons.

What happens in government provides us with evidence for my point that what happens in America is not “the system,” requiring some sort of systemic intervention.  John McCain and others wanted to limit the power of lobbyists over legislation and so passed a bill limiting the ways they could act and do business.  That was an attempt to change the system.  Everyone just got good lawyers and developed workarounds and “the system” remained largely unchanged, because the force of money overwhelmed it. Individual industries were affected, so that how money was lent or how goods were moved about the country was modified, but like Mom’s stopping secret drinking, the further effects were usually negligible.

Historians and social scientists, both professional and amateur, like to identify those small changes that actually did have large effects throughout a society.  It’s load of fun, and it’s like the butterfly effect, creating the illusion that some small thing we do will have cascading effects through the centuries. It’s part of our myth that we live in a system, but it’s mostly crap.  Sometimes you kick out the Tsar and get communists, and when you finally kick them out you just get Vlad Putin. Forces overwhelmed whatever the systems tried to do.  To be fair, professional historians are also interested in continuities, which is useful, and there are sometimes spiritual effects from our small actions that have downstream practical effects.  I will address the latter eventually, God knows when, as this already has too many threads.

So forces are more important than systems, which are at best overvalued and sometimes almost illusory. I have some notes as to why we still love thinking about systems and why that doesn’t work for nearly everything we apply it to.  It’s not quite clear to me yet.  I can only keep so many plates spinning at a time, and fewer than when I was young.   (Fluid vs crystallised intelligence. I browsed this link and it looks fine.)