The future of social change - tendencies and traps: British Telecom Conference 2006

\lectures\BT (Lecture to BT ‘The Future of Things!’ seminar on 16th May, 2006)

The future of social change.

The impossibility of predicting the future – of social change or anything else.

We know that any prediction about anything in the future relating to events further away than a few months or years is pretty unlikely to be accurate. Among other reasons this is because of:

Karl Popper’s Law – we can not now know what we shall know in a few months or years; for example predictions about global warming or energy shortages may be completely altered by developments by superconductivity, fusion technologies, hydrogen fuel developments etc.

Chaos theory and events – e.g. a small incident in North Korea, Taiwan or Iran could send the world in a new direction. Very small events have huge unintended consequences.

Yet we still need to make guesses and anticipate things. So what contribution can a social scientist and historian like me make?

Two pretty obvious likely changes which are and will affect us all over the next fifty years.

On the basis of travel, participation and observation, two of the greatest trends with immense implications would appear to be:

The return of Asia to its usual position as the economic and cultural centre of the world. The process which began with the rise of Japan in the 1960’s, then the four little tigers, is now developing.

India and particularly CHINA dominated the world until about 1820. A brief 200 years saw the shift to the west. By 2020 the centre of gravity will have swung back.

Five visits I have made recently to many parts of China, lecturing, travelling through huge cities and remote rural areas with Chinese friends, have shown me an astonishing picture.

China is like Japan in the 1970’s except that the population is ten times the size, and the speed of change, because particularly of telecommunications and computing developments, is perhaps five times as fast. So it is roughly 50 times Japan. There are simultaneously cultural, political, social, communications and other revolutions occurring.

It is the biggest change that has ever happened on earth, and can ever happen. If we place alongside this the recovered strength of Japan, the rapid growth of the Indian, Vietnamese etc. economy and other things, it is clear that the whole globe is tilting eastwards.

The second, connected, change of which all of you are aware is the IT revolution.

In 1974 I was involved at the start of this and helped to develop early database systems, and later innovations in multi-media, in Cambridge. So I guessed that something like this might happen and developed systems with a hope that our wired world might emerge. But only in the last three or so years has broadband etc. made this world emerge. Again this is powering ahead fastest in Asia, as in the vast communications infrastructure in China on which my student Xiaoxiao Yan and others are working. It seems unlikely that this will be halted by “events” and that Moore’s law on the doubling of computing capacity every 18 months will apply more widely.

So any future planning should take account of these two great tendencies. But you know this, so what extra can social science provide?

The absence of laws, but the presence of tendencies.

Anyone who has studied the history of civilizations over the last five thousand years, or considered the multiple societies which exist over the surface of the earth will know that we cannot find any certain laws of development.

Yet we also know that there are tendencies, likelihoods, probabilities, some kinds of pattern.

My attention to this way of thinking was attracted initially, I think, by Lord Acton’s famous dictum that ‘Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely’. If Acton had said ‘Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely’, he would patently be wrong. Power does not always corrupt, but usually does. And in this phrase we have the difference between a tendency and a law. Once power is absolute, that is to say there is no counter-veiling force, no other conditions operating on it, we do have a law.’ It is similar to saying ‘Bubonic plague tends to kill people, people dead of bubonic plague do not come alive again’. There is a tendency and a law. In other words we can put forward statements of the kind usually made by economists and others which have the, often unstated, ‘ceteris paribus’ (all other things being equal) clause in them.

Note here Mill and Acton’s belief in the possibility of looking at personal experience and historical events to establish ‘the tendencies of things’. There are tendencies, if not laws. So what are these tendencies and is it helpful to establish what they are? There are several valuable passages in Mill’s The Logic of the Moral Sciences which expanded this idea. Writing about a new science of ethology, Mill suggested:

‘But we must remember that a degree of knowledge far short of the power of actual prediction is often of much practical value. There may be great power of influencing phenomena, with a very imperfect knowledge of the causes by which they are in any given instance determined. It is enough that we know that certain means have a certain tendency (italics in original, AM) to produce a given effect, and that others have a tendency to frustrate it. When the circumstances of an individual or of a nation are in any considerable degree under our control, we may, by our knowledge of tendencies, be enabled to shape those circumstances in a manner much more favourable to the ends we desire than the shape which they would of themselves assume. This is the limit of our power, but within this limit the power is a most important one.’

Mill then goes on to give further precision to the idea of tendencies and to provide some illustrations of what he means.

‘It is however, (as in all cases of complex phenomena,) necessary to the exactness of the propositions that they should be hypothetical only, and affirm tendencies, not facts. They must not assert that something will always or certainly happen, but only that such and such will be the effect of a given cause, so far as it operates uncounteracted. It is a scientific proposition that bodily strength tends to make men courageous; not that it always makes them so; that an interest on one side of a question tends to bias the judgement; not that it invariably does so; that experience tends to give wisdom; not that such is always its effect. These propositions being assertive only of tendencies, are not the less universally true because the tendencies may be frustrated.’ (Mill, Logic, p.55)

Mill then goes on to agree with the philosopher Francis Bacon that these middle level patterns, which lie between universal laws of deep physics and the non-generalizable randomness of events are the most useful of all. The only way to discover them is to make more studies of the past and present of as many societies and peoples around the world as possible, alongside examining our own personal experience as human beings to work out what patterns we can establish.

So Mill and Acton have suggested that there are tendencies which we can establish and although they do not always happen, they can provide guidance for present and future action. They are different from laws, teleological and determining structures which will predestine our future. They lie between absolute free will and absolute predestination, giving room for chance and randomness, but also for the establishment of limited generalizations about patterns.

The contrast between a law and a tendency is excellently illustrated by the work of Thomas Malthus, another source for my realization that this may be the way out of the dilemma. In the first edition of the Principles of Population in 1798, Malthus wrote a very short book in which he tried to establish the laws of population. These laws were inexorable, unchangeable, bound to operate into the future. They are famous. That the biological urge to procreate will inevitably lead to population doubling every generation. That food supplies cannot double at that rate. That populations will rapidly outstrip resources. That they will in due course be cut back by the deaths caused by war, famine and disease.

Further thought and further facts made him aware that there were exceptions to these laws, for example in Norway, Switzerland or England. In other ways the laws did not always operate. So in the revised and greatly expanded edition of 1803 he changed his model to talk of tendencies rather than laws. All else being equal, population would rise very rapidly, but occasionally there were exceptions, for example people might control their fertility by late or selective marriage. The language changes from a deterministic, this or that will happen, this is the law, to one which speaks of ‘normally’, ‘usually’, ‘probably’, there are ‘trends’ and ‘tendencies’.

His device was to show that one can establish a powerful predictive pattern, say the ‘law of population’ or the ‘law of diminishing marginal returns’ which he also helped to establish. And then you show that this is what usually happens, all else being equal. But sometimes things are not equal. Since the events are so complex, something may well intervene to break the tendency.

Some tendencies which will affect future social change

I have spent much of my life investigating these tendencies by trying to survey the whole of recorded history and all civilizations. Clearly the linguistic and factual thickets would defeat any single investigator, so I have tried to stand on the shoulders of many giants. I summarized what I found from the thinking of a number of giants such as Montesquieu, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Alexis de Tocqueville, Sir Henry Maine, F.W.Maitland, and more recent thinkers such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim and others in three books –

Savage Wars of Peace, Riddle of the Modern World, Making of the Modern World, The Glass Bathyscaphe: Economy and Population; Political and Social; Science and Technology.

I can only very briefly summarize a few of the tendencies which usually work to constrain human beings.

The underlying tendency towards growth: Gerry Martin’s triangle.

investigation lies in the possibilities of rapidly cumulative knowledge through the embedding of earlier knowledge in artefacts. This can be represented in Gerry Martin’s triangle.







This triangular movement can lead to very rapid growth if the cycle occurs a number of times. It can also be affected by another property of knowledge, namely the meccano effect (Martin). This means that each new artefact opens up many new possibilities. This is a feature of macro-inventions. For example, the development of the wheel, the clock or glass is not just a matter of adding one more item of material culture. It has a multiplier effect. So the growth of knowledge occurs in a way similar to a possible population curve, in the order 1,2,4,8,16 (a possible exponential or non-linear growth).

(See Howard and Christopher Dawes, Making Things from New Ideas. 2005)

What stops this happening: the inhibiting traps or tendencies.

Level one: Biological, ecological, economic, demographic traps

Behind many of the traps at this level lies the law of diminishing marginal returns, what we might call the ‘Exhaustion Trap’. The following is an application of this law to the field of agricultural production. (from Elvin, Patterns of the Chinese Past, p.313) This applies to many other areas as well, in particular in relation to energy and ecological degradation.






THE EXHAUSTION TRAP




In fact, in many cases, the ‘Potential Output’ (OT) does not just level off as in the diagram above. Because of other laws (e.g. resource exhaustion, external negative effects of human activity), the curve not only flattens out but usually starts to go down, as in the ‘normal curve of development’ diagram above.

This law of diminishing returns is one side of what is well known as the ‘Malthusian trap’. The other part is the natural fecundity of humans which would tend to double the population in each generation. Thus, at the best in traditional agricultural systems depending on the current energy of the sun, agricultural resources might increase at the rate 1,2,3,4,5 while population could increase at the rate 1,2,4,8,16. This produced the following biological and resource law.


See next page









THE MALTHUSIAN TRAP





War, famine and disease are the controls on population growth in this model. The long-term history of Egyptian population is one example of such a pattern. (from Hollingsworth, Historical Demography, p.311)





It will be seen from this history that the majority of the crises were caused by the effects of war and conquest. This is why Malthus put war first as the chief threat to human populations, bringing in its train famine and disease.
One particularly interesting feature of Malthus’ model was that in the Second Edition of the famous essay, in the light of exceptions to the laws, he built a more sophisticated, probabilistic, model based on tendencies and possibilities of escape, as follows.



MALTHUSIAN TENDENCIES





Thus there were tendencies which very often led into the trap of a crisis. But they were tendencies, not laws, so they could be avoided if human foresight could be applied. It was very difficult to escape the trap, however, because the biological and economic tendencies were often re-enforced by social and political tendencies which made the escape from the trap more difficult.

Level two: social and political traps [Letters 9-13]

There are numerous social and political traps, which are inter-linked with the biological and ecological ones. Two major ones, an example of each type, will be sufficient for the moment.

As wealth accumulates in civilizations, social inequality almost always grows and the separation between what become, in effect, castes (birth and blood given orders), becomes accentuated. This we may call the ‘Caste Trap’. The major change in the distribution of social power which has almost always happened as civilizations and societies grew in technological sophistication can be represented as follows.



THE CASTE TRAP





In the earlier stage, the wealth and power hierarchy was less steep and people could move up and down with relative ease. In the later stage, the system has become rigid and divided into almost entirely separate strata.

A parallel tendency almost always occurs with political power. Whereas power is usually divided and scattered in the early period, it becomes consolidated and centralized over time as follows. This we may term, in reference to its greatest advocate, the ‘Leviathan Trap’.

See next page.









THE LEVIATHAN TRAP






Two parallel tendencies are shown here. Firstly, more and more administrative, military and political power is gathered into the centre. Secondly the inequalities in power are ever greater.

Of course, the social and political tendencies feed into each other. They also deeply influence the last of the levels, that of the mental and moral sphere.


Level three: mental and moral tendencies [Letters 14-17]

The nature of reliable knowledge, its acquisition, preservation and transmission, tends to create not only potentials but difficulties. One of these difficulties is the tendency for a slowing down to occur because the tools and expertise needed to discover new knowledge become more complex. Furthermore, the weight of old knowledge that has to be preserved becomes ever heavier. This, in modern jargon, can be termed the ‘Intellectual Baggage Trap’.

See next page:












THE INTELLECTUAL BAGGAGE TRAP




A second difficulty is that civilizations, societies and individuals usually become locked into a rich area of knowledge, yet all around them there is little obvious to be gained. In which direction should they move to find something new? This is what David Perkins calls the ‘Oasis Trap’. The long-term history of both Japan and China give us good examples of this difficulty.

THE OASIS TRAP

A third problem is the fact that often while one can see in the distance some promising new reliable knowledge, in order to reach it one has to go downhill, so to speak (for example investing a great deal in abstract, apparently materially unrewarding research). In order to go forwards, one has to go back, or so it seems. Columbus, for example, set out to sail for China westwards – in hope of going the long way to the golden land. We may call this the ‘Mountain Trap’, since many who have spent time climbing and resenting going down before going up will recognize it.



THE MOUNTAIN TRAP





As well as the set of tendencies and traps internal to the gaining of new knowledge itself , there a number of areas where the fact that knowledge is embedded in the wider society, polity and culture has major effects.

One concerns the social constraints on knowledge. As a civilization or society becomes wealthier, there is almost always a movement from production to predation. We might call this the ‘Chinese Fingernail Guard Trap’ (referring to the long guards which Mandarins wore to protect their nails as a sign of distance from involvement with manual labour). Originally, in most societies, there is no hard division between practical, material, productive activity and intellectual, theoretical and reflective. Later, the thinkers, service providers and major consumers of wealth are distinguished from the practical producers. (This clearly links to the ‘Caste Trap’ above.)

See next page.









THE CHINESE FINGERNAIL GUARD TRAP



This tends to break the innovation triangle because the links between knowledge, innovation and mass production of artefacts operates, if at all, much more weakly. The corners of the triangle are isolated; knowledge becomes increasingly ‘pure’ and delights in its uselessness. Practical problems no longer interest the literati and the best minds are increasingly engaged in how best to predate (through law, management skills, art, academia) on those who are still producing.

Another tendency concerns the fact that knowledge is always embedded in a moral world. Basically, as wealth and organization increases, paradoxically the realm of risk and ignorance increases. This might be termed the ‘balloon trap’. The surface area of a balloon increases the more we puff into it, so the surface of our ignorance and the areas of risk increase the more we know and try to control our lives. In such a situation, magical beliefs help to fill the growing gaps in technique and give us short-cuts to risk avoidance and in order to gain control of the world.

At the same time witchcraft and religious beliefs help to fill the growing vacuum caused by the increasing uncertainties about what causes the apparently ever-growing impediments to human happiness.

See next page










THE BALLOON TRAP


Finally, since knowledge is power, there is also the political context. There is a tendency for censorship and the desire to control knowledge to increase in step with the growth of religious and political hierarchies. This might be termed the ‘Inquisition Trap’, since the Catholic Inquisition is its most famous example. It is usually embodied in legal systems, which tend towards an inquisitorial form of process and the erosion of civil liberties.

THE INQUISITION TRAP

There are very many instances of this Inquisition trap, more recent ones being the various fascist and communist regimes of the twentieth century and recently the so-called ‘War on Terrorism’. There are very few examples of an escape from this trap.

Conclusion: the difficulty of the escape, the Chinese juggler. [Letter 18]

In order for a major break-through to occur all the forces and tendencies have to be held in the right balance, to have the right qualities and be moving in the right direction. The metaphor of a Chinese plate juggler helps us to see the difficulty.

Three sets of tendencies have to be held in dynamic balance. In the description above we have included only some of these, and in several others will be added to each set. If a society or civilization ‘drops’ or is forced to drop, one plate, for instance it suffers a great famine, a destructive invasion, a serious epidemic, the growth of an Inquisition, the growth of Leviathan, the dominance of magical thought, then the whole lot may crash to the ground. It is no wonder that periods of rapid growth are so infrequent. The situation can be visualized as follows.

THE CHINESE PLATE JUGGLER



Despite the enormous difficulty, there have been successes. The Greek golden age, Arabic experimentation from the ninth to twelfth centuries, Sung China, the Renaissance, the British scientific and industrial revolution are famous juggling acts. Characteristically, however, they do not last for more than a century or two before plates start falling. In due course, however, another juggler arises elsewhere and carries on the art.

Appropriately enough the next juggler may well be Chinese.


Conclusion

The deepest thinkers from the Greeks through the Enlightenment and up to the present give us clues as to the deeper tides which rule our lives. It is a mighty maze, but not without some kind of pattern.

Exploring history, anthropology and philosophy enables us, I believe, to understand some of the forces which govern our world, some of the rules of the game if you like.

Anyone trying to plan for their private lives, their families, their companies or their nations may be helped by knowing about what is likely, probable, tends to happen.

As we grope into the fog, this is the best we can provide. Without learning from introspection and history, as JSMill noted, we are completely lost. We must cling on to what we can – not certainties, but likelihoods.

I am well aware that having synthesized out many of these tendencies, leaving them in an academic shell of detailed books with thousands of footnotes, as in the four books above, will keep it from being of use to many people who do not have the month or more available to work their way through the corpus.

So I decided to digest these tendencies and laws into thirty letters to my grand-daughter Lily, imagined to be between 15-20 years old, or anyone interested in ‘How the World Works’. There I explain why power tends to corrupt, population tends to grow, humans tend to fight, ideas tend to run out – and the exceptions which have occasionally occurred long enough to create our amazing world.

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