It is early January, so of course we’re going to be inundated with pieces that predict, reflect, introspect and forecast. Thankfully, we will soon move on to forecasting the announcements in the budget and then rating the budget, so we’re almost through with “In 2024…” pieces. And for those of us not inclined to peruse budget documents (I would really like to be a part of this team this year), CES will provide its fair share of shiny new gadgets to distract us with. Regardless of the kind of nerdery we indulge in, in other words, we’re almost through with the “Here is what will happen this year” phase of the year.
But if you will allow me one last indulgence on this theme, I would like to talk about an excellent post by Packy McCormick. It is called Pace Yourself, and it is brilliant. But in order to talk about it, I must first talk about chautauquas, and corridors in engineering buildings in Manipal.
Chautauquas first.
What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua—that’s the only name I can think of for it—like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. “What’s new?” is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?,” a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and “best” was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.
Pirsig, Robert M.. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (pp. 7-8). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
If you’ve read enough posts on EFE, you will know that sooner or later, I will return to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But that’s a story for another day. For now, focus on a simple question mentioned in this excerpt.
“What’s new?”
Do you realize how often we ask this question? I don’t mean that we ask it literally, and that we spend our days (online and offline) asking each other this question ad infinitum. But on the other hand, we do ask this question ad infinitum! Every time you refresh your inbox, refresh Twitter, check the notifications on our phone and see if anybody has responded to our latest status update, we are asking ourselves “what’s new?”.
And I wouldn’t disagree if you were to tell me that this has resulted in “an endless parade of trivia and fashion”.
Imagine it this way: think of the earth, spinning around its own axis. The outer layers move the fastest, but the innermost layers – the deepest layers – barely move at all. (Fans of geology, we are not supposed to take this literally. Illustrative purposes only!).
And Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, would rather not move as fast on the top. He would rather cut deep.
But cut deep into what, exactly?
Corridors in Manipal’s engineering buildings next.
Navin Kabra, indefatigable sharer of awesome ideas, met me in one such corridor this past summer. Both he and I were teaching courses to school kids in one of these buildings, and we had a scheduled break in our respective courses. And over a cup of coffee, we ended up talking about pace layers.
What are pace layers? Think about a system, any system. Consider a college, if you like. Or a country. Or a civilization. Or a tree. We’ll be using this last example in the next paragraph, but for now, think about the fact that any system has components. These components have “different change-rates and different scales of size”. Some components are more responsive, while others are much more resistant to change. When change is inflicted on system, the responsive parts are the first to respond quickly to this change.
Now let’s talk about trees:
Take a coniferous forest. The hierarchy in scale of pine needle, tree crown, patch, stand, whole forest, and biome is also a time hierarchy. The needle changes within a year, the crown over several years, the patch over many decades, the stand over a couple of centuries, the forest over a thousand years, and the biome over ten thousand years. The range of what the needle may do is constrained by the crown, which is constrained by the patch and stand, which are controlled by the forest, which is controlled by the biome. Nevertheless, innovation percolates throughout the system via evolutionary competition among lineages of individual trees dealing with the stresses of crowding, parasites, predation, and weather. Occasionally, large shocks such as fire or disease or human predation can suddenly upset the whole system, sometimes all the way down to the biome level
https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2
See if you can build an analogy for a building instead of a tree. Try educational systems next. Realize that any system is amenable to this analysis, including our own species itself!
The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation. On a time scale of millennia, the unit is the culture. On a time scale of tens of millennia, the unit is the species. On a time scale of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our planet. Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales. That is why conflicting loyalties are deep in our nature. In order to survive, we have needed to be loyal to ourselves, to our families, to our tribes, to our cultures, to our species, to our planet. If our psychological impulses are complicated, it is because they were shaped by complicated and conflicting demands.
https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2
But TMKK?
It is one thing to say that we have this framework for analyzing systems. But what do we do with it? Of what practical use is this way of thinking?
Well, for one thing, causal explanations become way easier with thinking about layers within systems. People get married because it is the best way we know to raise a family. Families are important because we want to raise civilized children. Civilized children are important because the world would otherwise be a brutal, uncivilized place. Why? Because brutal, uncivilized people can’t build cities and universities. And why not? Because they don’t care about anything larger than themselves. (That’s not a direct lift from the essay I’ve been excerpting from, but close enough. I wrote it out, almost verbatim, because I wanted to remember the argument better.)
And that brings us to six words that I’ve been trying to tattoo on my brain since today morning:
Nature | Culture | Governance | Infrastructure | Commerce | Fashion
If you think of civilization as a system, then Stewart Brand says that these six words are the components of civilization.
But it works much better as a diagram:
This framework helps us understand that saying that a civilization is “under threat” needs, at the very least, to be better defined. The point of fashion, for example, is to be “frothy”. It is expected to change rapidly, and often. Nature, on the other hand, is expected to be mostly invariant. Ephemeral fashion is a tautological phrase, while ephemeral nature is a disastrous one.
Fashion impacting commerce is desirable, fine and to be expected. Commerce impacting nature, not so much. Culture doesn’t gel well with the latest fashions, as any teenager and their grandparent will tell you. In other words, thinking of civilization as an unvarying thing over millennia is the wrong way to think about it. And equally, it is wrong to think that civilization needs to change throughout in order to keep up with the time. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.
There is a healthy tension between the two defining features of each layer in this system. The two defining features are the ability to change rapidly, and the ability to influence the whole system. Fashion ranks very highly on the first of these, and comes in dead last on the other. Nature, on the other hand, comes in dead last on the first, but ranks very highly on the latter. You don’t want fashion to be influential on the whole system (spend less time on Instagram!) and you don’t want nature to change very rapidly (worry about climate change!).
As the last sentence of the essay says, “it is precisely in the apparent contradictions between the pace laters that civilization finds its surest health”.
And that at long, long last, Brings us to Packy McCormick’s essay, called Pace Yourself:
For one, there’s this thing I’ve noticed among a few people whose minds I really respect, that I’ve been trying to put into words.
They’ve built a solid frame of knowledge and beliefs about the things that change more slowly on which they hang newer, faster-moving information in its proper place. The new thing that most people see as the main thing, they treat like a small thing in the context of a much longer, larger thing. Maybe it will impact the longer, larger thing – that’s where the action is! – but maybe it won’t.
They don’t get swept up in the new thing, but they don’t dismiss it, either, and they certainly aren’t scared by it. By building a firm base of old ideas, they seem to enjoy new things and ideas even more, because they see where they fit in the bigger picture and realize how hard it is for a new thing to shake the old things up.
Whether or not they’d call it this, I think they’re thinking in pace layers.
https://www.notboring.co/p/pace-yourself
In the essay, he speaks about trying to have a strong enough base so that he’s able to identify whether the truly wild ideas have a shot at influencing nature, culture and governance, leave alone infrastructure and commerce.
I envy him his goal for two reasons. One, a very good goal to have. Two, he seems to have clarity about what topics he should be reading about in order to understand better the innermost layers.
The good news for me is that I am more than willing to copy his goal, but as of now, don’t have the faintest idea about how to get started.
Suggestions welcome!
EconForEverybody 