Unhealthy Focus on Systems

I have said “There is no system” but I believe there are systems at a smaller level.  Collections of many school systems are not necessarily an Educational System but they do qualify as systems in their own right. There is a Health Care System, because the parts interact and affect each other, but I think the systemic nature of this is overestimated. We don’t have a Religious System, but denominations have systems.

There are dangers in focusing on systems that involve human beings rather than deliveries or hydraulics. I am reminded of the first rule for graduate students in ethology: Don't use cats.  Cats mess up your data. Humans mess up system data.  I am very much at the point where I doubt many references to systemic racism, systemic oppression, systemic causes of homelessness.  Give evidence for the systemic nature of such things.  Merely being widespread doesn’t cover it.  Show me that there is something overarching, something beyond individual decisions, where we might make a change and see an effect. Even legislation affecting such things are not quite a system - though I admit that is getting us closer.

However, let me grant that some areas of human interaction may still pass that test.  I still think it a dangerous focus.  Fascination with the system takes our attention away from individuals and their decisions.  If the system gets credit or blame, then individuals are seen as having less agency.  I do not say that everyone who focuses on system necessarily neglects the individual. Yet the temptation to do so seems clear. We can only look in so many places at once.

We also become fascinated with that type of solution, looking for those elegances of a little tweak there yielding great results elsewhere.  We are forever waiting for the great cost-savings of preventive medicine for example, and sometimes we do things that seem to help, like early screenings.  Yet mostly not. We become enamored of the butterfly effect, of a swallowtail in Rio de Janeiro causing a tornado in Arkansas.  But that works both ways.  Sometimes large local effects are simply swallowed up in the whole, affecting nothing.  Sometimes setting off a bomb in Rio doesn’t even affect the rest of Rio that much.  It is a particular unreality beloved by our culture, because it gives us hope of being powerful after all. I am butterfly, hear me roar.  It is, I agree, a noble ideal to do the right thing on the slim hope it will help.  But there is a darkness underneath that.  When we have false hopes that do not come about, the temptation increases to become angry that someone, somewhere, has ruined things.

We see exactly this anger in advocacy groups today, so I don’t think calling it a temptation is merely theoretical on my part.  Governments have enforced changes that allowed us to pick the low-hanging fruit.  Hard-working black kids with IQs of 140 aren’t encountering any problems getting a college education at this point. Cities aren’t dumping raw sewage into rivers anymore. To make an analogy, if a board is lying on your lawn the grass underneath it will turn yellow and eventually die.  If you pick up the board, the grass recovers rather dramatically.  But that does not mean that all bad lawns are the result of boards, with our goal being to find more boards to pick up. Yet system-focus seems to breed this anger. Not only have many butterflies flapped, but we set off a bomb, and still –nothing.  Evil forces are interfering with the system.  They are preventing the system from changing.  Yet if it’s not a systems problem, no amount of bombs will change things.  Well, change is difficult for people.  Yes it is, and even more difficult when the changes you are insisting on won’t change the result.

System focus causes our reward and punishment to go into personal actions directed toward the system, not individuals.  We praise or excoriate people for what they have done for the system. This darling little girl raised money with her lemonade stand to give to racial justice.  How does that work, exactly? She will end up giving it to some group who believes it's all system.  Or, we consider this man dangerous because he said something bad about our group or about a program we like, not because he has done anything wrong to any person. Cancel culture does not hesitate to sacrifice individual people, formed in the image of God, in hopes of doing good for The System, and systemic problems.  How much worse when that particular system is not the cause or is not even a system.

System focus tempts us to focus on powerful people rather than the individual opportunities for cruelty and kindness that are in our everyday lives. Again, while this is not necessarily so – there are people who can keep focus on both,  but the odds go down.  We put more and more of our energy into leveraging powerful people, or the great forces of our time, or becoming a tiny piece of a great whole rather doing the truly great acts nearby. Having a platform, or getting into the news becomes the goal.  We pursue athletes and entertainers for our cause. We try to be powerful on FB or Twitter to change the world that way.

Rather than simply doing good. 

I am going to go to the practical theology of all this next, and I am betting that most of you can see the outlines of what that will be.