Motus Mentis

As a staunch subsidiarianist, I’ve been pointing out for a while now the perils of centralization and interdependency in global and regional affairs. Just over two years ago I wrote:

It is well-known in the engineering disciplines that too-tight “coupling” is at the root of many, if not most, failures of complex systems. Far more robust are loosely coupled systems, in which components interact with, and depend on, each other no more than is necessary; in which the actions of each component affect the actions of others only so far as is essential for the operation of the system as a whole; in which friction between components is minimized; and in which the failure of a single component does not unnecessarily cause the failure of others. This is precisely the opposite of the systems that govern us today, at both the national and global level.

Richard Fernandez has written a couple of good articles recently that touch on the same idea. (A hat-tip to my e-pal Bill Keezer for bringing them to my attention.)

In the first, Mr. Fernandez looks at the difficulties facing globalism, and asks:

But suppose we have only been offered a fake globalization so far? One way to get understand what real globalization looks like is to examine the global schemes that actually work. A familiar example is your computer or phone. They’re studded with icons each represents different programs all of which can run simultaneously because of walls. It wasn’t always this way. When PCs first came out they could only do one thing at a time. You loaded up a floppy and ran Visicalc. To run Wordstar you exited Visicalc and loaded another floppy. When programs tried to coexist in the same space they initially ran into problems. Program A interfered with the resources of Program B and you got — the older people will remember — the Blue Screen of Death.

Then we learned that walls can make them work together. This is called componentization and clearly described by Leo Linbeck in his article at AEI.

The first strategy is to break a big, complex system into smaller, simpler subsystems and carefully define the way those subsystems interact. Even after such a breakdown, if a system continues to grow, the subsystems themselves will become too large and must be broken down further into smaller sub-subsystems. Through this subdivision process, we not only reduce the complexity of the subsystems but also increase the number of people who can deal with the problem. …

Yet creating a hierarchy of subsystems is not enough. There must be a commitment to subsidiarity — that is, pushing control as low in the hierarchy as possible. We do not reduce complexity if we create additional subsystems but still control everything from the center. In fact, it makes the complexity problem worse. In programming, interaction between components is managed through an interface. Higher-order components, for instance, cannot directly access and modify the properties of lower-order components — they must access those properties through the interface of that lower-order component. This rule — which, perhaps counterintuitively, limits the power of the higher-order component — is a way to keep complexity under control.

That should be our model for the world. In our haste to dismantle walls we have made local conflicts international: witness the refugees streaming out of Venezuela, Syria and Central America toward their neighbors. We have made the international local. That’s why we have ‘collusion’. The implication is clear. You create a working global world by building down and hooking the components together not by creating ever more complex Rube Goldberg multilateral institutions. It also aligns nicely with Yoram Hazony’s concept of a community of nations.

The building of national identity based on a shared culture, language or identity enables globalism — without abolishing the nations.

This is exactly right. Quite apart from the natural human impulse to live amongst people who share our own language, traditions, folklore, rituals, idioms, and everything else that binds people together and allows the private and public to coexist with minimal friction, the blessing of subsidiarity — of administering everything as locally as possible — is that it decouples communities into loosely connected modules that solve social, administrative and economic problems, even those problems that affect every community, in whatever way is best suited to local particularities.

This has many advantages over centralization and imposed homogeneity. One is that it makes government directly accountable to the people it serves: the people responsible for creating and administering policy are often known personally to their constituents. Another is that localities can become incubators for new approaches to old problems; when they solve them in new and effective ways, they can become examples for other communities. Another is that the effects of crisis and failure are far less likely to ripple through the global system (a cautionary example of too-tight coupling is the effect that the financial crisis in Greece had on the global economy a little while back). Another is that local systems can be “swapped out” when they fail with minimal disruption of the rest of the global network.

In another recent essay, Mr. Fernandez points out that this problem is hardly a new one; it not only contributed to the fall of Rome, but also was a likely factor in the Bronze Age Collapse, more than a thousand years earlier.

These regularities (perhaps we might even say “laws”) of human nature and of complex systems are real, and permanent — and human history is little more than a catalogue of their truth and persistence. The resurgence of nationalist sentiment both in Europe and elsewhere, and the growing political tension in the United States, are only the latest examples. Yet those of us who understand that some “decoupling” is long overdue, and will happen either peaceably or catastrophically, are shunned and reviled in the harshest moral terms.

It would have been a tremendous blessing for humanity if we had understood these principles well enough to have preserved some of the looser coupling and local particularities of the past, but we have relentlessly and unwittingly broken them down for a century and more, abetted by astonishing advances in communication and transportation — while at the same time the horrors of the twentieth century cast grave moral doubt on the very idea of national and ethnic identity. It is in the nature of history for the great pendulum of human affairs, once given a vigorous push, to swing far beyond equilibrium — and it is also in the nature of pendulums to conserve momentum, and to swing in reverse with equal force.