Hail Caesar!

Philosophy, region, and the philosophy of religion can appear in the most unexpected places. Why just the other week, I was watching the movie Hail Caesar!, when a insight hit me. The movie features both priests discussing the Trinity and communists, led by Herbert Marcuse, discussing the dialectic, which is itself unusual for a movie. The latter made me nostalgic for graduate school. However, the nature of both concepts -- the Trinity and Hegelian dialectic -- are complex, which means "hard to explain." In both cases people -- both Christians and communists -- argue hilariously. The sum total of both debates can be summed up by the Rabbi: "These men are screwballs!" 

But the key insight is that, viewed from a certain perspective, neither the Christians nor the communists are screwballs. Instead, both are using the ill-suited but until recently the only tools available -- propositional logic and prose -- are inadequate for the task. Instead there are what are called feedback relationships that pervade, comprise, and control social systems including political systems. These relationships, being complex and essentially mathematical (actually differential equations), are pervasive in electrical engineering but not so much in religion, politics, philosophy, or economics (PPE).

The question then becomes, how best to bring this insight into PPE? There are several insights that bear mentioning. First, the temporal and causal perspective is increased beyond what science traditionally can handle. Successful science experiments usually are rigorously controlled so that their causal factors and results can be clearly identified. While a useful enterprise when skillfully executed, such experiments are of limited utility for complex social systems that evolve over extended, multi-generation time periods.  Recent results on wicked problems have begun to characterize how to think about complex, temporally extended policy problems. Narrative techniques are especially helpful to think about social structuring and policy problems, as with the Bible, but more about that later. 

 

Dogmatic Complexity

I've been reading Francis Hall's 10-part Dogmatic Theology -- though certainly not all of it -- and Ian Barbour's Religion and Science. As I read these two books, I find them, in some sense, fundamentally unsatisfying because they're primarily descriptive. That is, they decompose or split the problem into lots of separate parts and offer lots of definitions, but while useful, it doesn't really address the problem. It doesn't get at the underlying pattern, connections, or reality that underlies religious thought. These different pieces must instead be lumped together. Now critics will say it's impossible, and I get that, but I have an intuition that we know enough about complexity, complex system, and complex social systems that we can say something innovative and useful about both religion and policy.

They key to this project is lumping instead of splitting, but how does one do that? One must first identify a "way in," and that's provided through philosophy. There are a number of words that for me provide a way in though:

• Teleology, which has been criticized as confusing causes and effects
• Trinitarianism, the concept of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost which postdates the Bible
• Dialecticalism, Hegel's concept of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis

The way through to think clearly about these abstruse terms is through complexity, which is in turn defined as nonlinear, stock-flow (integrative), and feedback causal relationships as tell as network relationships. Complexity is used dogmatically here in that the underlying mathematics and physical patterns associated with complexity are assumed to be true and applicable. The modern thinkers who for me underpin these thoughts are Jay Forrester (system dynamics), Norbert Wiener (cybernetics), Friedrich Von Hayek (economic control), and Herbert Simon (bounded rationality) though there are many who have contributed to this literature.

Negative, balancing feedback relationships result from an odd number of negative, which means change in the opposite direction, causal relationships. For example, the more people, the more deaths, but the more deaths, the fewer people. Marxists tend to say such relationships are "internally inconsistent," though a proper understanding of feedback relationships shows that they are both ubiquitous and confusing. Hence the lack of clarity that surrounds religion, policy, and the social sciences. These fields are all doubtlessly complex, but only recently, with the advent of powerful computing, are the tools available to address and account for this complexity. One limitation is that those who study social science usually have little expertise in the computational and mathematical techniques that underlie complexity. How far the complexity sciences can uncover, reveal, and inform social systems remains to be seen, but it is an endeavor that will certainly be worth the effort.