A Break in the System

As I suppose is true for many of you, I find it hard not to be mesmerized by the Trump phenomenon.  This is a “reality show” like no other, and we are part of it.  We see unfolding before our eyes and ears our national id breaking free of the constraints imposed by our superego.  Penis size has become a political issue.  The leading Republican candidate says, “My daughter Invanka is so hot, if she weren’t my daughter I’d be dating her.” And of course, these days, we understand that “dating” = coitus.  Someone said that Trump is holding up a mirror to the Republican Establishment, and they don’t like what they see.  He renders into plain English all those dog-whistle-coded messages they have been sending since Nixon’s “southern strategy,” messages that have infected the body politic and that have been metastasizing, just waiting for an opportunity to break out.  OK, this is pretty clear.

So here’s a perspective I think worth considering.  Let’s look at this phenomenon, this set of appearances, as part of a system, as of course it is; as of course everything is.  A system is an organization of parts that function together as a whole. Three types of system are: natural, social, and artificial.  There is one natural system, and it is studied by the “hard” sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, geology, etc.  There are many social systems, and they are studied by the social sciences, which are “softer” than the natural sciences because they focus on the human world, which has introduced Mind into the natural world, and thus the human world, having the freedom to transcend the system of Nature, is less “determined” than the natural system, thus less predictable.  (Of course this assertion is vigorously contested, but I am here assuming it as true.)  Artificial systems are solely the creation of the human Mind, and are purposive and intentional.

“Man proposes, God disposes” is one way of putting the notion that purposive human systems–such as politics in general, democratic politics in particular, American democratic politics more particularly, and so on–may become counter-productive (counter-purposive) by generating unintended consequences, such consequences resulting from imperfect input into the system, the result of ignorance, folly, or just bad luck.  Human systems tend to be built synchronically, whereas humans live diachronically, in time, and time inevitably introduces random variables that can be toxic to any system.

The notion of “a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation” is a repeated trope throughout the Bible, and can be applied as an insight about human systems in general.  The word “jealous” is itself a trope, an application of a human emotion to an anthropomorphic principle called “God,” which is one way of naming the System of All Systems, the unified field theory of Everything.  Other ways of expressing “God’s jealousy” is the Greek image of dike, the image of justice as a double-edged sword; or karma, the Hindu notion of moral cause and effect.  In brief, human actions are subject to “cosmic justice,” the self-balancing mechanism immanent in all systems.  Self-correction is immanent because a system, to remain a system, must remain organized, or it ceases to be a system.  A break-down of any system is itself part of the system, or rather, part of a larger system of which the broken system is a subset.  The broken system signals to the larger system the need for repair.  A good example is “the curse on the house of Atreus” as described in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.  The horrific cycle of revenge and counter-revenge can only be stopped by an agent outside the cycle-system–namely, Athena, who renames the system’s principle source of energy, the Furies, and calls them the Semnai (“venerable ones”), later called the Eumenides (“kindly ones”) by Euripides.  The new name gives them a new twist on an old function, from promoting revenge justice to protecting rational justice.  It is most interesting to note that Athena is able to achieve this feat by skillfully manipulating the Furies’ emotions.  Her rhetoric of persuasion is much more important than the logic of her arguments, for reason is impotent in the face of desire.

The Trump phenomenon reveals the system built up by the Republican Party to be broken. The party’s leaders are scrambling to find materials to repair it.  But the system of the party is part of a larger system of American politics, which itself is part of a larger system of democratic politics that is increasingly being constructed in other parts of the world, each nation-state having its own version of the larger system of democratic politics, which is itself part of a yet larger system called “Politics,” or the organization of social power to the end of the survival and prosperity of a human community, or the human community. Systems within systems within systems . . . within the System.

How we conceive and understand the System of systems is pretty, pretty important.  I refer the reader to a speech given by Gregory Bateson in 1966 titled “From Versailles to Cybernetics” and reprinted in his classic, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972; 2000).

Author: jrholt1236

Retired professor of English. B.A., Bates College, 1964; M.A., English, University of Kansas, 1966; Ph.D, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, 1980. Married twice. Four children, four grandchildren. View all posts by jrholt1236