The Tao and governance

In this post, I look at Eastern philosophy for inspiration on ways to think about complexity and governance. This post is inspired by conversations with Roger Strand, Mario Giampietro, Silvio Funtowicz and Martin O’Connor. A starting point often used to talk about complexity is to acknowledge that any representation of the world is also a simplification. By focusing on a specific aspect, one leaves out all other aspects. Reductionism produces simplification. Opposed to simplification is complexity. If one wants to avoid simplification, which options are left? One answer may be the description of everything – but in the context of emerging properties, irreversibility, non-linearity, etc. multiple descriptions entail contradictions, inconsistencies and coming to terms with uncertainty. Complexity may be seen as the study of non-linearity, emergence and feedback loops, but that is a marginal contribution. What complexity does in this case is to enlarge the scope of what is observed, from one (set of) aspect(s) to many (sets of) aspects. This approach does not escape reductionism. It may, at best, lead to reflexive reductionism in which choices of what to observe and how are made explicit. An alternative is to focus on the process of observation, and ask: which simplifications are made? Which knowledge is lost through reductionism? Which insights are gained? I find complexity most useful as the study of the role of the observer, because it is a reminder that knowledge does not exist independently of a “knower”.

Taoism expresses similar concepts:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tao

The Tao that can be told is necessarily a simplification of the Tao, so it is not the whole, or the Truth – it is that which is observed at a specific instance and point in time. The named, that is, the representation of the Tao, is the mother of ten thousand models, descriptions, and measurements. This riddle provides the insight that contradictions and inconsistencies are created by the act of naming, and are not necessarily a property of the Tao. An example is the wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics, which does not necessarily describe ambiguity of what is observed, but rather signals the descriptive limits of the conceptual tools used to name what is observed.

What does the distinction between the Tao and the named contribute to governance? The idea of science speaking truth to power can be interpreted as governing through the named. This is the tradition of modernism described, for example, by James Scott (1998), in which the subjects of governing are made legible in order to be seen by the state. Making things legible requires simplification, and Scott describes with great detail the failures of schemes in which simplification is taken to the extreme. A different example are the Sustainable Development Goals, which have multiplied in number with respect to the Millennium Development Goals, in an attempt to name more things – and therefore govern more things.

Complexity is often invoked as a criticism of governing through reductionism. The environment, society, the economy, are not as simple as reductionist models describe them to be. Hence, governance that relies on simplification is doomed to fail. The problem is that descriptions are reified: instead of keeping in mind that a description is a partial representation of the whole, the knowledge gained through descriptions is given privilege. Sandra Mitchell (2009) explains that materialism is conflated with descriptive fundamentalism. Materialism refers to the observation that there is one kind of substance from which all things are made: atoms. Fundamentalism arises when the description of atoms is privileged, and is assumed to be a complete description of the world. I would extend this insight to the mechanist approach: the machine metaphor is given privilege and is assumed to be a complete description of all processes. Governance through reductionism becomes governance of the named. As Rayner (2012) puts it, “an object or activity, such as a computer model, designed to inform management of a real-world phenomenon actually becomes the object of management.”

Governing the Tao, on the other hand, is not possible. Complexity sheds light over the trade-offs, the feedback loops, the paradoxes that emerge from how systems as a whole adapt to changes in the parts. Complexity teaches that there are pros and cons in every action. As opposed to reductionist thinking, there is no maximisation of utility. Maximisation at one scale (for example, of efficiency) may lead to readjustments at a different scale, which offset the expected benefits. Pros and cons mean that complexity thinking does not produce clear recommendations about what to do. I have argued (Kovacic, 2018) that complexity is great at advising about what not to do.

Complexity thinking produces a wide range of insights about social, economic and ecological systems – but many of these insights regard the contradictions that emerge from non-equivalent descriptions. One example is the Jevons paradox. The Jevons paradox arose from the change in coal consumption in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1800 steam engines were one half of one percent efficient; the other 99.5% of energy released in burning went up the flu. Nobody except coal mining companies had enough coal on hand to use steam engines; steam was used principally to pump water out of mines. By 1850 the engines had become 2.5% efficient; not impressive on modern criteria but a 500% increase over 1800 (Allen and Hoekstra, 1993). There was less coal used for each turn of the engine, and suddenly weavers and spinners could afford to use steam. As a result, less consumption per turn of the drive shaft led to more consumption for more purposes. Jevons concluded that, contrary to common intuition, increases in efficiency do not necessarily reduce resource consumption because they also open up for new applications and uses and ultimately new demands. The Jevons paradox involves the non-equivalent descriptions of efficiency at the level of steam engine and of the larger context of affordability of steam engines for industrial purposes. The Jevons paradox is one of the many ways that complexity displays itself.

What is required is to shift from the governance of complexity, the doomed pretension to govern the Tao, to governance in complexity. According to Rip (2006), governance of complexity aims at governing systems “out there”. Governance in complexity means that “in its non-modernist version, the governance actor recognizes that being part of the evolving patterns, s/he can at best modulate them” (Ibid: 83). This is governance in the Tao.

Governance in complexity requires an epistemological change. It is not just about governing more things, nor about combining more representations (more names) through multi-, inter- or transdisciplinarity. Governance in complexity means studying how one’s actions and observations impact what is being observed and acted upon, and how one is changed by observing and acting.

This is where Eastern philosophy may offer some insights. A recurrent tale is that of the disciple who seeks knowledge, and is told by the master to focus on repeating a physical task over and over again. Through this exercise, the disciple (1) learns through action, rather than naming practices, (2) learns to work on small tasks, that may be irrelevant, thereby taming the ambition to “save the world” before one can save oneself, and (3) learns about how the world responds to their actions, much like Cook Ding learns about how the ox responds to the knife.  

Zhuangzi (2003) talks of cook Ding:

Cook Ding was cutting up an ox for Lord Wenhui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip, zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the Dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Jingshou Music.
     ‘Ah, this is marvelous!’ said Lord Wenhui. ‘Imagine skill reaching such heights!’
     Cook Ding laid down his knife and replied, ‘What I care about is the Way [Dao], which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now, now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.
     ‘A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.
     ‘However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.

Zhuangzi (2003 Edition)

It is governance in complexity that produces knowledge, that guides understanding, not knowledge of complexity that informs governance.

References

Allen, T.F.H., Hoekstra, T.W., 1993. Toward a definition of sustainability, in: Convington, W.W., DeBano, L.F. (Eds.), Sustainable Ecological Systems: Implementing an Ecological Approach to Land Management. USDA Forest Service, Fort Collins, pp. 98–107.

Kovacic, Z., 2018. Conceptualizing Numbers at the Science – Policy Interface. Sci. Technol. Hum. Values 43, 1039–1065. doi:10.1177/0162243918770734

Mitchell, S.D., 2009. Unsimple truths: Science, complexity and policy. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Rayner, S., 2012. Uncomfortable knowledge: the social construction of ignorance in science and environmental policy discourses. Econ. Soc. 41, 107–125. doi:10.1080/03085147.2011.637335

Rip, A., 2006. A co-evolutionary approach to reflexive governance and its ironies, in: Voss, J.P., Bauknecht, D., Kemp, R. (Eds.), Reflexive Governance for Sustainable Development. Edward Elgar.

Scott, J., 1998. Seeing like a state: How certain scheme to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Zhuangzi, Z., 2003. Basic writings. Columbia University Press, New York.