Feedback and Convergence

E.F. Schumacher, in A Guide for the Perplexed, contrasts two kinds of problems: convergent and divergent. The first category includes those where people find it easy to solve a problem because they are agreed upon the goal. Technological problems are of this nature; it is the better mousetrap problem. There is no disagreement on the values involved: no part of the team working on the project represents mice or holds that a household filled with them is better.

Divergent problems are those where at least two camps are present and the problem concerns values. Divergent problems are ideological in character. To solve them requires not to find a better mechanism, physical or social, but transcending the conflict by appeal to a value higher than each side holds. Finding those transcending values is very difficult. Hence divergent problems are always with us.

One difference between these two is that convergent problems lend themselves more easily to isolation in experimental settings—and to experimentation. Therefore feedback can be rapid and its results can be recursively introduced into a modified draft solution. If the man leaping from the top floor of a 30-story building dies, maybe his arms—or maybe his wings—weren’t strong enough. Back to the drawing board—after the funeral. Experimenting with value systems is much, much more difficult. Entire communities must be isolated, its members cooperating willingly. And how do we know that the experimental community was large enough to be representative? Did it have an urban as well as a rural component? Did it have industry as well as agriculture? And did it have enough of each currently valued ethnicity? And what about the duration of the experiment? And how do we measure its success? By economics? Reproduction? Education? Crime rates? Some want more, some less of any or all of these. And is there a single matrix measuring happiness that could be applied, a matrix each side would accept?

Testing value systems by feedback throws some light on the problem I touched upon in my recent post on “Virtue and Time”—and on my stoic comment about the slow grind of God’s mills. Virtue is an assertion of value by action. But it is a value—finding its expression to a large extent in a society. Its long-term consequences are almost infinitely complex—whereas Boeing 787’s electrical system problems will be nailed quite soon. If virtue or lack of it could be measured rapidly—never mind its legal expressions, which never capture the whole phenomenon—we would rapidly begin to converge on that seemingly unreachable Good Society. 

The Early Grades

It’s sort of obvious, when I think about it: culture is formed in grade- and middle-school. The logic for that runs as follows. The values we form in childhood, the values we feel, later, as virtual instincts, later shape the collective. Their first experience, of course, is in the home. But their socialization takes place in schooling. The child encounters the social collective in grade school for the first time. There the three Rs are, you might say, almost incidental. It is the Big V that really counts.

If the home has effectively formed the child—the values gained there may be weakened, diluted, and eroded if the child’s first contact with society does not at once confirm them. And parents, time and again, stare in hopeless impotence at this process of erosion aided, as it is, by social consensus.

High school? Too late. Or perhaps irrelevant. My own memories tell me that it is the worst stage of education as ordinarily encountered. Puberty: humanity’s most biologically-imprinted age. Wise woman Montessori understood that; in that age, in her design, the abstract gives way to the tasks of social integration.

And by the time we reach college, the hope is that the individual’s values have reached a certain crystallization.

The difficult aspect here is that values have a holistic character. They can be said to represent a fusion of morality, empathy, cosmology, and intellect—but that comes later on. The child simply absorbs a kind of something: life itself. And as it ages, its powers of absorption, in that sense,  grow weaker. Montessori, again, spoke of the early “Absorbent Mind” present in children. Later that something may indeed  be parsed into components; as an adult, the child may modify this or that part of the whole. But something crucial in the whole remains, and it is that remainder that really forms culture. And that’s what we call values.

If we seek to diagnose the ills of our culture, we ought really to concentrated on the level that really matters: the home and the early grades. The ills of vast collective structures like politics, finance, media, entertainment, business, etc., are all of them traceable to failures in the home, where ambitious parents try to “realize” themselves and struggle to advance careers, and to schools that dare not teach values—indeed cannot—because they fear to overstep the line arbitrarily drawn between religion and the state. And you cannot teach values, as such, unless the cosmological component is a part of them.

Savonarola’s Ghost

When one’s time horizons are restored—even if only temporarily (the workmen are gone, but they’ll be back)—then the ordinary daily trials resume. But better ordinary woes than strangers underfoot. The first of these is waking up to find myself (disgusting!) still here. The longer I sleep the longer I stay captured by what I think of as the physical—unless the papers trigger one of my routines. Then, with adrenaline flowing, I tend to go off on crusades.

That, of course, still leaves me in the world; not quite the physical, but certainly half-submerged. I’d rather be in some ideal setting where order reigns and everything, looked at closely, retains its sanity. So why bother looking out? Why look at the great social-collective? What draws me, I think, is its seemingly greater scope—something lacking (but also only seemingly) in my concrete drive, my scraggly grass, and the familiar glories of our plants and flowers. The mind’s tempted by the too-rich information that lets one (once more seemingly) encompass the whole globe. But what mirrors back from that is disorderly enough to signal just how bad things are—even if, reason tells me, the “bad” out there is no worse in proportion to mundane daily life than it is right here in my own backyard.

Behind this lies a reflexive identification with community—including my ancestors who tried to pass their values on to me. It grieves me how little they actually managed to pass on. But at least they tried. Occurs to me that there is an archetype in here, in me, called Savonarola, close kin to an actual person by that name. And from it rises—before my mind’s completely awake—a harangue to the wicked. If Brigitte is awake, she gets to hear it. If I’m really captured, it goes out silent as a blog-post. But sometimes I manage to wake up enough to remember to look within. Then, finally, I feel energized and cheerfully go to make that second cup of the morning quite relaxed.

Mother’s Milk

Our sense of the greater world reaches us, as it were, through our mother’s milk—because the world’s so vast. A visceral sense of this rose up in me thanks to the confluence of some personal associations and some dark news events. The personal aspect came when I found an old book on Mallarmé no doubt part of my Mother’s library—and the memory of a memoir of World War I which probably reached me through her as well. My sense of culture was heavily influenced by literature and humanistic values, and all else I saw through my mother’s interpretation of them as influenced by such values. At the same time came news yesterday of African atrocities, first a video of Ugandan horrors, then interviews of George Clooney, the actor, making a brave attempt to draw attention to the suffering of Sudanese living on the new borders between Sudan and South Sudan. The thought came: what sort of culture reaches the children of those regions through their mother’s milk—if they are fortunate enough to survive? Our earliest memories are privileged. Only with great reluctance do we yield to the successive onslaughts of wider and wider experience. What I still powerfully feel as real culture—at least European culture—was barely alive when I imbibed it—but, of course, my dear Mother didn’t know that either. She carried a treasure and passed it on—and she was so young then. Mothers are, aren’t they. The actual reality of the world? Ultimately it is an incoherence. Fortunate those of us who carry a little light forward from childhood. However dim it seems, it continues to guide.

Natural and Ritual

My earliest encounter with culture was learning manners, how to behave at the table, what implement to use and how, what I could reach for, what I must ask for, what word to use, the tone, its volume, its timing. You did not interrupt others’ speech. I had to look at people when I spoke to them. I did not shout at the ceiling. It was complex, all of this. I learned to modulate my voice, learned to append such sounds as “please,” “may I,” and “thank you” to various actions. Manners involved keeping my spine oriented in certain ways. Thus I could not just disappear under the table cloth and crawl among the legs down there—however attractive that often seemed. I had to clear my plate, avoid throwing bits of bread at my sister, keep both hands visible but my knees hidden—volumes of manners, but not a single line to be read. All this took place long before school began.

To learn this behavior and all that ultimately flowed from it—because the rituals of eating expanded to the whole domain of human interactions in my childhood and, in process of being mastered, taught us all about relationships to old, young, ladies, gentlemen, teachers, siblings, other children, etc.—other structures had to be in place as well. We ate meals at certain times. We ate communally—after washing hands. And after washing hands, the towel had to be hung in certain ritual and proper ways. The table was set. It had a table cloth (the white purity of which must be protected). We had our places. So in turn all else was also regulated. To do all this required a certain attentiveness, concentration. Life acquired an invisible and also hierarchically layered structure of dos and don’ts and be-alerts. Amazingly that great facility, habituation, enabled whole cultures to acquire and practice these strange arts of unnatural, ritual behaviors that, in the aggregate, held value systems. The values, when you wished to concentrate enough to dig them out, revealed themselves quite clearly.

Watching a film about Taiwan the other day—it was not about manners—reminded me of cultural rituals—and that they remain active elsewhere. Reminded me of my one and only trip to Japan where, moments after my arrival, I felt glad that I too had been brought up in a culture quite like that one. It thus took me but moments to adapt my own behavior to theirs. Reminded me that effort is required to manifest value at this ritualized level of ordinary behavior—and because it’s present there, also manifesting at higher levels. Effort and time. So many changes. Women in the workforce. The erosion of domestic habits as the house is robbed of labor. Grab a pizza on the way home. And find the kids at home on the couch with bags of chips and cans of pop staring at the TV screen. Pop goes the weasel.