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. 

Virtue and Time

There are these temporary nexus where things run together and produce a single feeling, but giving it expression is tough. I saw Barney Frank, the just retired Congressman on MSNBC’s Hardball producing in a couple of minutes all sorts of very coherent comments and prescriptions (link). Earlier, on the car radio, I’d heard a report about a woman who is literally “fixing” a series of bankrupt cities in Michigan very competently—but, of course, emergency management laws give her the necessary powers. Last night Brigitte and I watched about three minutes of two different movies on disk, jerking them out, one after the other, because of their gross implementation of stories that sounded all right on the cover. Then later came a telephone conversation; I heard a report, from the field itself, on the mad ways in which teachers are now being evaluated. That call had been triggered by my last post on “teaching to the test.” Add to these my by now stoic reactions. The right acts needed to correct, the positive unraveling, of so many different messes will not take place in what little time is left to us here. The mills of God grind slowly.

By this morning—a remarkable morning because it was raining in January, and I mean really raining—all this had distilled into a single word, Virtue—because virtue was either present or markedly absent in what I’d experienced before going to bed. It is the foundation of culture and in each one defined in identical ways. The marked feature of virtue is that it is innate and unqualified. It is to do the right thing—but never in the context of a quid pro quo. We are not virtuous in order that—but because we are or it is the right way to act. Therefore the time dimension, which is always present in quid pro quo, is absent in the practice of virtue. Interesting to ponder that vast eras of time are governed by something outside of time. This too shall pass—but virtue remains.