Complex Human Systems, Part II
How Genes, Memes, and Schemes Can Foster Beneficial Emergence in Society.
I laid out in Part I that the science of complexity can help us understand human society. And that a complexity-informed view can guide social entrepreneurs when considering what interventions we should pursue.
While the traditional ways of thinking about complexity—focused on things and non-human agents—can get us pretty far, we need an expanded approach focused on us quirky humans, including our tendency to reflect on—and to try to alter—the systems we are in. A study of Complex Human Systems.
I argued that—when considering how humans thrive through emergence—it’s helpful to consider the given and variable aspects of humanity. The “genes” part helps us think through how mother nature has biased us to unthinkingly benefit from emergence: the “given” aspect of emergence in human society. But to understand the whole story—and why different social arrangements result in drastically different outcomes for individuals—we need to account for the “variable” aspects that can supercharge beneficial emergence. The “memes and schemes” part of the story.
Meme-mergence
Memes are ideas that arise from human brains and passed on to other human brains: units of cultural transmission generated, shared, and replicated. New ideas, words; new ways of thinking about and talking about things.
This can sound trivial, and often it is. Cat-memes, slang, and the like.
Memes affect not just how the Think about and Talk about things, but also how we Tackle things. A set of interrelated memes can form a paradigm, and—as Thomas Kuhn noted—paradigms filter how you see the world.1 And as Senge noted, within the mini society of an organization, the degree to which we share basic assumptions—the memes he calls mental models—affects the cohesion that can be achieved.2
At scale, memes can compound to create durable (but not unchangeable) patterns of interaction in the form of customs, norms, rules, and laws.
I’m risking overstretching what Dawkins meant by “meme,” so allow me to turn to a nerdier concept—a successful meme in its own right—that is more apt to our discussion about social change.
A meme so successful that it earned its creator a Nobel prize. A meme about how durable’ish patterns in human behavior emergently form, and emergently influence the life experiences of billions.
The meme is “institutions.”
The Rules of the Game
When I first heard of “institutions,” I (incorrectly) thought of Harvard.
Harvard is “an institution” in the sense we use that word in everyday language. I can go and touch the finely carved stone of its buildings. I could smell mahogony in a wood-paneled room and petition the members of the governing board. I could watch the ink sink into the paper after the president signed a new policy into action.
Harvard: a discrete, coherently organized entity directly influenced by (if not effectively controlled by) a few people with disproportionate influence.
But that’s not what “institutions” means in social science.
As Douglass North thought of institutions, he meant something more like the arenas in which we interact writ large, and the things that affect our behavior in those arenas. Or, as he famously simplified things: Institutions are “the rules of the game.”
Think of basketball: if I tomahawk-dunked over you and you turned around and punched me, that would be considered “not cool.” The formal and informal rules of that game result in very little punching, especially in comparison to a game like, say, boxing, where punching is not only A-OK but downright encouraged.
The lesson is this: rules matter.
Or, as Doug North would phrase the same idea: institutions matter.
Genes, Memes, and Schemes
North defined institutions as “the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction.”3
The formal and informal ‘rules’ that constrain our behavior matter because they influence the interactions of thousands (or millions or billions) of people each day, and hence they affect the outcomes people experience. The bottom-up accumulation of these micro interactions leads to macro outcomes that cannot be predicted or controlled.
Unlike our hardwired traits—the givens of human nature—which are effectively unchanging on human timescales, institutional traits come and go. Some are fleeting, like fads such as doffing one’s hat, while others are durable, like belief systems such as Hinduism. But all evolve over time.
Some get partially calcified into formal rules, like constitutions. That is, sometimes discrete people sit down and write out discrete policies, legislation, literal rules and the like, and come up with overt ways to force others to follow those discrete plans.
These are the variable schemes we humans use. And just like the genes of human nature and the memes of norms, culture, and custom, they shape how you and I and a few million of our friends interact, on a compounding basis.
Conditions-Focused Social Change
Admittedly, terms like “rules” and “humanly devised” risk reinforcing unhelpful, outdated paradigms around social change.
Society is not a machine that a social engineer can blueprint to the “right” equillibrium (or any equillibrium!). An institution is not something a powerful puppet master can control at their whim.
The nature of these rules of the game is that they are emergent: they arise as a “result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”4 Even the formal, planned-out schemes that come forth from a single individual—think of an executive order by a president or dresscode announced by a CEO—only happen in an emergent “Overton Window” of what’s possible at a certain time in the context of several other actors.5
North was a realist about social change. The actions of us humans are constrained in many ways: the givens of physics (like friction) mean we can’t instantaneously teleport food or energy across the world. The givens of human nature mean we can’t make everyone a perfect altruist or wish away greed or hope away violence any more than we could strive for the elimintation of gravity.
Instead of assuming a stable world of givens, constants, and equilibrium populated by rational actors—actors frictionlessly-informed with perfect knowledge of all resources—North viewed individuals and society more realistically. The norm isn’t unchanging stasis; the norm is evolution.
Unlike traditional economists, North saw society as a complex, dynamic system. He was interested in exploring why human systems change, and whether different institutional conditions lead to better or worse outcomes for individuals.
These insights are important to social entrepreneurs trying to address local and global challenges alike, because no matter how hard we try, we cannot change (or ignore) the 'given' elements of human nature, nor can we wish away the constraints of the complex reality of human systems—such as limits on knowledge and the fact of unintended consequences.
Better to focus on the “variable” aspects that we have a chance to influence.
And better yet, to do so in a way that realistically supports the conditions of a beneficial emergent order.
Because not all emergent outcomes are good. Most of human history has been marred by life-harming poverty, arbitray coercion, racism, slavery, conflict, sexism, and a slew of other things unconducive to individuals thriving (as they’d define it).
I believe that the study of complexity can help lead to a general theory of what enables beneficial emergence in human societies. This includes exploring the general institutional characteristics that lead to better outcomes, as well as exploring how those institutional characteristics can be influenced (including the limits of what can’t be).
That will be the focus of a later post.
But, until then, a few parting thoughts about how considering complexity in human systems helps us social entrepreneurs see important things.
First, there are some things we cannot change (like human nature).
—>Social entrepreneurs can get better results when anchored to a more realistic sence of what humans are capable of.
Second, there are some things that we can influence but not control (like the complex systems of humans, including economies, communities, languages, and governments).
—>Social entrepreneurs can get better results when understanding that human systems are more like unplannable ecologies and economies vs. blueprintable machines that are open to social engineering.
Third, since we can’t control specifics in complex systems, it’s better to focus on conditions.
—>Social entrepreneurs can bias toward way better in general, but we can’t orchestrate perfection in the particulars.
Fourth, there are better and worse conditions to push toward.
—>Social entrepreneurs can learn from history to distinguish between the two.
Kuhn, T. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). See chapter 10, especially: “Revolutions as Changes of World View.”
Senge, P. The Fifth Discipline (1990).
North D. Institutions. Journal of Economic Perspectives 1991;5(1):97–112.
Ferguson A. An essay on the history of civil society (1767). Oz-Salzberger F, ed. Cambridge University Press; 1996.
Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The Overton Window [Internet]. Mackinac Center. 2019. Available from: https://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow.