The Grassroots Society

By Sally Morem

Evolution encompasses more than mere chance. Intricate life-forming processes reshape existence over billions of years, weaving increasing complexity into the very essence of space and time. Sub-atomic particles fuse into atoms within stellar furnaces, atoms form molecules in the depths of space, molecules array themselves in double helixes directing the growth of organisms, and the flickering of billions of neurons delineates mind.

Human society is the most astonishing and perplexing of all such self-organizing systems in its ability to transform the creative and mundane acts of thinking beings into systems that span the globe and stretch out into the universe, returning to where everything began.

How can we create undirected systems that exhibit independence while retaining our own separate lives? What is a society anyway? Anthropologists define it as any group of cooperating human beings who have developed patterns of long-term relationships and have maintained common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests. Contrary to assumptions made in traditional philosophy, society is not an artifact frozen in time. It is not a structure, it is not an order, nor is it merely a human contrivance alienated from nature. In fact, society can’t realistically be described as an object at all.

Thoughtful people in the natural and social sciences have shown us that the self-organizing principles inherent in physics and biology are at work in every part of human life, weaving together this huge, sprawling, chaotic, changing, growing, vibrant, information-laden process known as society into something akin to an organism.

The Evolving Society

Ervin Laszlo, in his book, “Evolution: The Grand Synthesis,” described how human societies change, persist, and transform themselves through the interplay of individual members and systems with the environment. We participate in the evolution of the universe itself.

How can unplanned order come to be in the human world? Laszlo explains by listing six evolutionary axioms for society:

1. Society persists, develops, or decays according to processes that take place on the societal level.

2. Society occupies a cluster of organizational levels, including the physical and biological. Its environment includes the biosphere and other societies.

3. Society is the result of human action and interaction, but not of conscious human design. People are incapable of planning and building an entire society or even any of its major subsystems—language, political systems, economic systems, or moral-cultural systems.

4. Society is not reducible to the sum of its members’ behaviors and attributes; it evolves its own functions and attributes at its own level of organization. It is self-organized. It is able to repair, replicate, and renew itself without outside guidance.

5. Society’s structural complexity is less than that of its individual members. The human brain is far more complex than all contemporary societies put together.

6. Society evolves through convergence to progressively higher organizational levels. Small societies interact more and more intensely until they become one much larger and more complex society. Tribes and villages become ethnic communities, which become colonies or provinces in empires. Nation-states form regional blocs, which then form a world society. Society grows as it masters the natural flow of matter and energy in the universe.

Over millennia, we have constructed vast civilizations filled with immense amounts of knowledge dealing with a wide range of subjects. We store this backlog of information in many forms—habits, skills, prices, books, songs. As our experience grows, we, largely unconsciously, winnow out inappropriate knowledge and retain what is most useful. This process of artificial selection can be compared with the way natural selection removes and retains information in the genetic code.

In “The Selfish Gene,” Richard Dawkins explores the similarities between biological and cultural evolution. One of the most striking examples of this can be seen in the construction of information networks by organisms and societies.

Dawkins noticed that beliefs, thoughts, ideas, phrases, fashions, technologies, and language tended to replicate themselves by cultural transfer from individual to individual in social groups. He decided that these units of culture must in some sense be similar to genes. They needed a new name, so he called them “memes,” deriving the word from “mimemes,” from the Greek for imitation.

“Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitative.”

Memes spread, mutate, die out, and are replaced by new, presumably more fit, memes. The most successful memes are the ones that are most easily retained, accurately copied, and propagated to the largest number of human brains.

Since we can only think about a few things at a time, a meme must, in a sense, compete with other memes for attention. Some memes reinforce memes. Other memes degrade them. Entire arrays of nested memes form scientific, religious, and political theories. For instance, church services and political conventions rely upon a conglomeration of cooperating memes to retain effectiveness.

Society isn’t just a collection of individual human beings; it’s a complex amalgam of systems. Societal processes orchestrate the growing and shipping of food and goods, the

generation and allocation of energy, the setting of political decision-making processes into motion, the construction of intricate scientific theories out of thousands of ideas and observations, and the communication of all this and more through ever-changing networks of people. In short, society brings out the fullest expression of self-organization ever seen in nature.

The Emerging Society

The world is immensely complex. Since we can grasp only a small part of reality, we must concentrate on those things which are most important to us. Alone and together, we rationalize, simplify, and abstract, building world pictures to make sense of how things work.

Edward Harrison, in “Masks of the Universe,” makes this point vividly. “The universes are our models of the Universe. They are great schemes of intricate thought—grand cosmic pictures—that rationalize human experience; these universes harmonize and invest with meaning the rising and setting Sun, the waxing and waning Moon, the jeweled lights of the night sky, the landscape of rocks and trees and clouds. Each universe is a self-consistent system of ideas, marvelously organized, interlacing most of what is perceived and known. A universe is a mask fitted on the face of the unknown Universe.”

Society builds a model of the universe out of conflicts between our world pictures, mirroring the skills, learning, and vocation of all who make up society. As we undertake more complex tasks and grow more powerful, our universe becomes more complex and more powerful.

Early people developed languages and talked to each other about their experiences and surroundings. They imagined that everything in their world lived and thought as they did. As they became aware of each other as conscious beings, they personified everything else—the storm spirit, the tree spirit, the rock spirit. They grew. “The more the early people spiritualized the magic universe, the more humanlike they became themselves.”

They developed moral codes of behavior, discovering that untruthful, abusive, disobedient, excessively selfish, and homicidal people had about as much chance of surviving as the proverbial snowball in hell.

In “The Creative Explosion,” John Pfeiffer described how people living in southern Europe 20,000 years ago handled the stresses of belonging to hunter-gatherer societies.

Humans followed the migratory animals and learned to live off of them. Larger and larger groups of hunters assembled for mass hunts. These hunters had to devise rules for the distribution and the storing of a huge amount of meat after the kill. It’s very likely that the first large-scale social organizations in history started this way.

They learned to face “the old problem of people living continually under the tension of needing one another and at the same time keeping their distance…” in order to achieve a reasonably stable society.

Mathematicians have devised a simple algorithm to measure the potential for conflict among people. Conflict increases exponentially with the rise in the number of two-person relationships. This explains why traditional villages and tightly knit extended families, such as the Hutterites, split apart when the group’s population nears 100. At that point, the potential for conflict becomes too great for a small society to handle. But, most human societies didn’t remain small.

Bands of hunter-gatherers established their own territories while remaining in contacts with other bands in informal networks extending over large areas. Flint, jasper, amber, and seashells were carried for hundreds of miles and traded. Marriages were made. As a result, networks of bands exchanged valuable information from many sources on a regular basis. Networks of networks—supernetworks of Upper Paleolithic people—formed. At some point, the networks were forced to specialize in order to avoid excess conflict and information overload. Hierarchies evolved. The decision-makers became the priests and shamans of the new, more complex community.

Toolmaking shaped the emerging society. “Standardization seems to have been restricted to relatively limited areas. Within these areas, tools tended to be shaped according to distinctive local designs. On the other hand, definite tool-kit differences existed between areas. In other words, tool-making diversity decreased locally and increased regionally. The pattern is significant, suggesting a shift from the lifestyle of small hunter-gatherer bands to something rather more complicated.

As human societies grew, human images of the spirit world gained power. The human world and the spirit world became rigidly hierarchical. Some spirits took on the attributes and power of entire human societies. The greater spirits ran the universe, showing humans its complexity and grandeur, giving them greater control over their world through insights into the vastness of space and time, and the ability to plan and undertake great quests of discovery. Societies combined into larger societies, often through the use of force, acceding to the demands of the superior godling and its society. These became nations and empires, and their people worshipped powerful gods. The mythic society was born.

The myths tell of great battles between gods and their human followers—the stories of new cultures triumphing over the old. They tell of the creation and destruction of the world. And they tell of the human role in the universe—the kingdom founded, the war fought, the child nourished, the city raised, the tale told, the song sung—all at the behest of the gods.

Once in a while, a society appears that glorifies one god at the expense of all the others in the cosmic pantheon. The people become monotheistic. Creator, ruler of the universe, fount of goodness—the One God becomes everything to its people. The concept of “the

universe” takes on a new reality. It leads people to the universe of science. They begin by asking the question, “What hath God wrought?” Then they get answers.

Technology extends our ability to act on nature and to interact with one another by allowing us to master a wider range of energy and material resources, which can then by transformed into useful social structure. A technological innovation makes the miraculous normal. It reshapes our values and mores as it charges our imagination with the possible. Technology becomes the driver of societal change.

Laszlo shows how our needs and wants drive the development of society. “As the needs of survival become filled in society, people experience other needs, including the ‘higher’ needs for aesthetic enjoyment, intellectual satisfaction, and ultimate meaning. And as people pursue the satisfaction of these needs, society acquires a cultural superstructure, connected with, but no longer subservient to, the feedback and catalytic cycles that maintain a social system in its environment.”

Large, flexible societies adapt to change far more readily than small, rigid societies. Societies that respond positively tend to be the ones that achieve higher technologies with more structural complexity and improved access, storage, and use of free energy. The most adaptive of societies have a built-in requirement for technological change. Such societies generally come into existence during times of political and economic upheaval and seem to be constituted in such a way as to deliberately foster innovation. Their institutions are meant to be shaken from time to time. The pattern of history suggests that these societies dominate all others in their era, giving direction to the history of societal change.

The Creative Society

Originally published in the auspicious year of 1776, Adam Smith’s classic text on economics, “The Wealth of Nations,” went through five editions during Smith’s lifetime, so great was its impact on the intellectual world. In it, he intuited the existence of self-organizing economic systems some 200 years before science began to illuminate them. It’s extremely unlikely that Smith ever understood how such systems could exist. All he could do was describe the phenomenon honestly, with as much detail as possible, and hope that future generations would be able to unravel the mystery.

In the section on “Restraints on Importation of Goods,” we find Smith’s famous assertion concerning “the invisible hand.”

“As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest values; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it…”

Here, Smith is addressing the difficult subject of unintended consequences, not a theology of capitalism as is so often assumed.

“…by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cased, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention…”

The economy is an information network made up of discrete decision-making parts with the power to create a whole greater than those parts.

“…Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectively than when he really intends to promote it.”

Smith believes that economic benefits to society as a whole arise systematically out of the interactions of the marketplace spurred on by competition and incentives. Motives are not the same as consequences. No matter what intentions people have, the results will be slightly or quite a bit different than those envisioned.

No one, no matter how powerful, can run an economic system. The ordering intelligence we seek lies not in political rulers or captains of industry, but within the system itself. Think of the economy as a vast computer. It consists of “decision gates,” better known as individual buyers and sellers. It compiles vast amounts of data and saves it in “memory” in the form of prices. It processes changes in supply and demand in its “CPU”—the market. Here, self interest codes as data input. The economy is given systematic access to accurate information on the economic state of all its members by the members themselves.

In order for this to work, the area of leeway left to the individual economic actor must remain large while incentives for long-term cooperation between economic actors are strengthened. Only when we can trust others to deliver on promises, trust the government to not change the economic rules in the middle of the game, and assume that society will remain stable, can we give of ourselves in reasonable expectation of a return on our investment.

We can go further than Adam Smith. Let us consider the pursuit of self interest to be a genuine good in of itself, and not just a failing of humanity that has to be tolerated for efficiency’s sake. When we are most honest with ourselves, we help others. When we learn something, we put it to use. When we act, other people learn something about us. Slowly, painfully, we learn about the world from one another. We learn from our mistakes as well as from our best acts. The economy learns, also.

Two centuries ago, the West was the first civilization in history to learn how to produce sustained economic growth. But, the West wasn’t always rich. Michael Novak, author of “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,” begins his book with a graphic description of the world of 1800, a human culture seemingly frozen in time. Famines ravaged whole

populations every generation. Larger portions of the French population—a society presumed to be wealthy at the time—subsisted ONLY on bread, and enjoyed (?) a life expectancy of 25 years. In today’s economic terms, the continent of Europe was moribund. In the year 1800, the infant United States with only four million people had more business corporations than all of Europe combined.

Europe enjoyed but one dubious consolation. Things were much worse in the rest of the world. People suffered from virtual universal illiteracy and a total lack of elementary hygiene. Human cultures were nearly all presided over by absolute rulers, leaving no room for the self-organizing systems so crucial to the creation of new wealth and freedom.

To be able to produce more wealth each and every year means being able to produce truly NEW wealth. Over time, new wealth compounds, transforming the society that creates it. Smith’s dream of abundance must have seemed like science fiction to the people of his time—even though it was dead-on accurate.

How did they do it? How did they break out of those ancient bonds of ignorance and servitude? According to Novak, they did it by building up these parts of a self-organizing economy over time:

1. Free Labor. Work and choice of work must not be coerced. When workers have “multiple possibilities of employment and reward, under conditions of mobility,” they transmit vital information on the state of the economy every time they make a choice—to which others must respond.

2. Reason. An economic system must organize practical details in a reasonable manner. “It promotes invention and fresh ideas. It strives constantly for better forms of organization, more efficient production, and greater satisfaction. It plans for the long run as well as the short. It orders materials, machines, producers, salesmen, and consumers. It organizes means and ends. It constantly studies itself for improvement.”

3. Continuity. It is continuously calculating profit and loss, starting new enterprises, abandoning others, changing and growing. It is a system in flux. It exists in time. It is not an immobilized structure.

4. Impersonality. Market exchanges are impersonal. A business executive does not need to know the life history of another executive in order to transact business—only the things necessary to promote a successful deal. Likewise, money is totally impersonal. It acts as a medium of exchange, a store of value, a coding mechanism for the innumerable financial transactions which make up a nation’s information processing system—its economy. All coding systems for information transmissions must be, by their very nature, cold and impersonal, otherwise they would be too cumbersome to use.

5. Stable Networks of Law. These are the rules by which a system operates. They include rules for making rules. Without them there is chaos. With them a system has time to anticipate and account for necessary changes within itself. For example, corporate law permits more complex economic associations of

individuals to exist over a longer period of time. It allows for the development of “small economies” within the larger economy, encouraging the growth of those associations that multiply the economic effectiveness of each participant.

6. Cities and Towns. By providing physical proximity, these permit the development of dense networks of cooperation by thousands, and then millions of people. Cities and towns assist economic systems in their efforts to revitalize themselves. Students are further educated, technologies are invented and developed, markets are creates, corporations are restructured, and management styles are updated. A system that is able to monitor subsystems, absorb the results, and then act accordingly, must change itself in ways that would shatter more traditional social systems.

Jane Jacobs examines the economic power of cities in “Cities and the Wealth of Nations.” Economic expansion needs an absolute minimum of widely diverse people who trade goods and services, exchange information and ideas, and stimulate one another’s creativity in a core area. In cities, networks of exchange grow in size and become thick with tangled interconnections. As a result, individuals and small firms develop their productive capabilities and link together to form economies of great wealth and power.

“Cities that replace imports significantly replace not only finished goods but, concurrently, many, many items of producers’ goods and services. They do it in swiftly emerging, logical chains. For example, first comes the local processing of fruit preserves that were formerly imported for which there was no local market of producers until the first step had been taken. Or first comes the assembly of formerly imported pumps for which, once the assembly step has been taken, parts of imported; then the making of parts for which metal is imported; then possibly even the smelting of metal for these and other import replacements. The process pays for itself as it goes along.”

Once the core group is established, the number of people, businesses, and jobs explodes. The city rapidly expands the production and export of its own manufactured goods while importing new goods from the region and elsewhere.

Why explosive growth? “In real life, whenever import-replacing occurs significantly at all, it occurs in explosive episodes because it works as a chain reaction. The process feeds itself, and once well under way, does not die down in a given city until all the imports that are economically feasible to replace at that time and in that place have been replaced.”

City imports must be earned because the earning process itself teaches suppliers what they need to know in order to create new wealth. “Development cannot be given. It has to be DONE. It is a process, not a collection of capital goods.” As suppliers respond to cues from the economy, feedback loops of extraordinary power form.

Feedback, in economics or biology, always governs a specific responding mechanism. There is nothing discretionary or flexible about it. If one thing happens, another very

specific thing must then happen. Feedback systems can be found at work in respiration, thermostats, prices, and traffic patterns. Where feedback is blocked or distorted, the responding mechanism will fail. A whole chain reaction of inappropriate changes will result.

Lima, Peru is an important real-world experiment in the destructive power of ill-conceived government regulations versus the creative power of self-organization. Could people, neglected or deliberately excluded from a legal economic system, arrange their own affairs unguided and unorganized by government, labor unions, large corporations, or any other central authority? Hernando de Soto discovered that the answer is an unqualified yes, and explains why in his book, “The Other Path.”

Discriminatory and arbitrary government rules and regulations destroy wealth-building processes precisely because they are enforced so capriciously and unequally. The would-be economic actor has no idea where he stands, gets no feedback and is sabotaged in his efforts time and time again. It’s as if the government took a growing sugar crystal, smashed it, then complained because it stopped growing.

In 1983, de Soto tried to get official permission to open a clothing factory, the kind that Americans would set up in an unused room in the basement. It took his group 289 days of full-time work to complete the forms, lobby the bureaucrats, and cough up the bribes (24 solicited, two paid). They incurred $1,231 in expenses (the Peruvian equivalent of 32 minimum monthly wages back then).

He also discovered that if a private group wished to build low-income housing legally, they would have to work their way through six years and eleven months of bureaucratic mazes and spend $2,156 per person—if no bribes were paid.

Barred from legally taking residence and setting up shop in Lima, the people from the countryside created their own legal, economic, and social system—the informal society. The informals began typically with a few farmers’ huts. New people—friends or relatives of the original settlers—built next to the old huts. Finally, the new settlement took over the whole area.

“Wherever there was a group of farmworkers’ huts, a roadside inn, or an old mining camp, people and dwellings began to proliferate as if by spontaneous reproduction. The hills close to the center of Lima, old orchards, the edges of irrigation ditches—even garbage dumps—were gradually settled.”

When a critical mass was achieved, the settlers negotiated with the original owners of the land and dissuaded them from reclaiming it. Settlers also organized to invade state-owned land. They held meetings and persuaded others to join them. They distributed lots and got engineers to design homes and public buildings. They delegated responsibility for law and order. They then invaded the land at a pre-arranged time with all they needed to start construction.

They built not only buildings, but extra-legal systems that lent increasing stability to their activities on the expropriated land. Informal organizations provided security, infrastructure—roads, sewers, and water—lot registration, and an extra-legal justice system for disputes and criminal offenses. Networks of cooperation grew between the informal system and legal property owners, vendors, construction companies, etc., which easily subverted government regulations and laws.

A system that does not permit the lawful development of land is vulnerable to the actions of the informals. Informal commerce began with vendors marking off sections of streets for a place to sell their wares. Street markets were born. They then took over whole streets and eventually built their own shopping centers. Privately run transportation systems began with the purchases of trucks, and then added minibuses and whole fleets of full-sized buses. Routes were developed ad hoc as the informals created new neighborhoods. These routes became well established, signs were put up, and streets were paved.

The informals have recently made major inroads on the legal economy. They’ve produced a huge amount of wealth, including 95% of Lima’s transportation, 80% of its clothing, and 60% of its furniture. 439,000 people are employed in the informal economy. They spend 47 times more than the state on housing. They operate 83% of the markets, and spend more than $1 billion on vehicles and maintenance.

The informals are reshaping Peru in an unpremeditated, unplanned way, just as earlier “informals” reshaped feudal Europe centuries ago. They’ve rediscovered the value of spontaneous cooperation, more commonly known as freedom.

The Organized Society

How can we, with our differing views on what ought to be, agree on what will be? We build up processes that, as Novak put it, “…preserve the sphere of the person inviolable,” while permitting the process of debate and consensus necessary for change to take place. In a word: politics.

James Madison explores aspects of self-organization in political systems in the essays he contributed to “The Federalist Papers.” Writing as “Publius” in 1787 and 1788, along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, he tried to convince Americans to support the ratification of the proposed Constitution. But his essays transcended that task. They include some of the most carefully reasoned arguments for a democratic society ever written.

Madison argued that the Constitution would allow Americans to build the world’s first large republic. The republic’s very size would provide shelter for human liberty. As the republic gains population and territory, factions proliferate and check one another. Minorities diversify. Majorities become unstable. Tyranny is avoided.

The large republic becomes a society filled with free-flowing factions that communicate readily with one another. Coalitions shift periodically, allowing earlier political judgments to be reviewed. The system becomes self-correcting and self-regulating, and achieves a certain measure of insulation from disruption as it learns to anticipate and forestall trouble.

But, there are difficulties inherent in large republics. The government is remote; the bureaucracy is unwieldy. So, the framers of the Constitution sought to transcend the problems of earlier forms of government by providing America with a new structure, a confederate republic, known today as federalism. A federal republic is not a centralized nation-state, nor is it a decentralized confederacy. It is something in between. It maintains a system of dual sovereignty for the states and the nation.

Federalism established the world’s first non-colonial expansion policy by instituting procedures for the addition of new states, equal to the old, not subservient colonies. The large republic positioned itself to become much larger.

To further weaken any tendency toward tyranny, the framers provided the Constitution with checks and balances between and within the three branches of government, effectively spreading out the political decision-making process. This forced America to create a much more widespread communications network in order to allow the political process to work.

Political conventions and parties grew, interest groups formed, the press grew phenomenally as it reported on and questioned many activities in the young Republic. As new methods of transportation and communications were invented, Americans put them to work, and again the political process expanded. Today, we enjoy unparalleled freedom as we participate in dense networks of relationships and build mediating institutions that change at the speed of light.

But even with our fantastic technology, the potential and limitations of the people who painted the cave walls at Lascaux remain with us. Michael Novak insists that the most profound meaning of a free and open society lies in this most basic of biological facts: Human beings, even when we are closest to one another, are alone. Each brain, each mind, is walled off from all others by its physical separateness. We have but one recourse: We must accept one another as “originating agencies of insight and choice” whose decisions must be taken seriously. We must value our lives, honor our differences, and try to shape our society so that it reflects these values at its very core.

We are all part of societal processes whether we will it or not. Our choice lies between allowing these processes to work freely, or to stifle them and reap the bitter consequences.

Human society is a new kind of self-organized system. It is the first one we know of formed by intelligent beings. This gives society as a whole the kind of power no other complex chemical or biological system has. Perhaps we are at the very beginning of a

new kind of evolutionary development. Perhaps we are the precursors of a future world society, or a solar system society, or even a galactic society.

What would such a thing be, this future society, this super-organism made up of our descendants? Perhaps it wouldn’t even be aware of human existence, just as we were not aware of our neurons until fairly recently. But then perhaps it would learn to look deeply within itself and see the small creatures who busy themselves by sending messages to each other, messages that build in power until they shape the thoughts of a living creature. If so, then that being would embody the hopes and dreams of us all, and become the soul of The Grassroots Society.

Bibliography

Dawkins, Richard, “The Selfish Gene.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

De Soto, Hernando, “The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World.” New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison and John Jay, “The Federalist Papers.” New York: New American Library, 1961.

Harrison, Edward, “Masks of the Universe.” New York: Macmillan, 1985.

Jacobs, Jane, “Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life.” New York: Random House, 1984.

Laszlo, Ervin, “Evolution: The Grand Synthesis.” Boston: New Science Library, 1987.

Novak, Michael, “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.” New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

Pfeiffer, John E., “The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry into the Origins of Art and Religion.” New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

Smith, Adam, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.” Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Great Books, 1952.