Complex Society - In the Middle of a Middle World

I. SHORT PRESENTATION OF A BOOK

Since the turn of the millennium, uncertainty has become the only constant of the now irrevocably complex era. Recurring shocks, from terrorism and financial market collapses, to mass migrations of the impoverished and the novel Coronavirus pandemic, world changing events are occurring at an ever-increasing pace of transformational metacrisis. They are leaving behind the foundations of the old order and normalcy in ruins. We find ourselves helpless between two epochs, in the twilight of transformation. It is getting harder to understand what is going on, while the image of the future is already completely blurred. In the storm of centuries, have we suddenly been left to wander blindly among the swirls of our own delusions? In fundamental uncertainty, can we still keep the reins of the future in hand and hope for a favourable resolution of the metacrisis in the unforeseeable future?

The question is complex and so should be the answer. The key problem of the present generation is not yet the metacrisis itself but the inability, or at least the unwillingness to comprehend and deal with complex phenomena in a complex way. Complexity is conventionally identified as a serious threat to social stability that is nevertheless manageable by improving standard routines.

The science of complexity does not present itself in very favourable light either. How the study is organised today, with sharp division between opposing approaches, already says a lot about the inadequacy of the current organisational approach to the study of complexity. The main schools, general and special, have authors who publish in separate journals and do not even meet at conferences. Each school often ignores the other or treats it antagonistically. This is particularly disturbing since the prime mission of complexity is precisely to bridge contradictions.

The predominant interpretations of the concept of social complexity are firmly anchored in the old ways of understanding the world, which see everything as polar: micro or macro, linear or nonlinear, systemic or random, binary or relativistic, etc. When dealing with complex phenomena, binary approaches remain binary, and relativistic ones relativistic. Antagonistic approaches do not speak the mother tongue of complexity, which is the language of the middle between opposites, and so they cannot penetrate into its core. In turn, one must carefully distinguish between the dominant interpretations of complexity that reproduce existing philosophical and scientific divisions from new explanations that aim to bridge them from the middle.

In order to understand the concept of complexity as a hybrid construct, one needs to start with a polar opposition, for instance between the economic (competitive) and social (egalitarian) development of society. Bridging is made possible by the introduction of a third, hybrid category in the middle, such as socio-economic development or social entrepreneurship. A hybrid contains part of each polarity so it can translate between them and harmonise between order and disorder. This is particularly helpful for governing societies that are ruled by uncertainty.

In the famous matrix diagram, professor Stacey accordingly placed the concept of complexity in the middle between complete certainty and complete uncertainty. Simplicity and chaos are opposite theories in his matrix, but similar in one important detail: they are conceptually pure, either linear or nonlinear. Complexity, however, is a hybrid concept. Complete dependence between components would turn a complex situation back into order, and complete independence into chaos (Heylighen).

To remain complex, components must be both separate and connected, on the one hand autonomous, on the other dependent, behaving rationally as much as irrationally, both in the same moment. The example illustrates how this is possible and indeed very common. Regardless of the fact that it will never be possible to grow an orange tree from an apple seed, a cocktail of the two juices can achieve harmony. On the periphery one can add apples and oranges, even though they are incompatible at the core. The idea of simultaneous connection and separation of things is not meaningless but irrationally-rational: no longer logical in a scientific manner but evaluatively, by intersecting facts and values or the visible and invisible in comprehension of complex situations.

The issue can be illustrated with another example by inverting the teachings of an ancient Sufi legend about blind men and an elephant. When after heated debate, the subjects could not agree on some important common cause, the king stepped in. He invited six blind men who had never met an elephant to reveal what he had placed in front of them just by touching its different parts. The first blind man described the trunk as a snake, the second explained ears as a carpet, a tusk as a spear, and a leg as a tree trunk. In the end, the king sums up the moral: people translate their direct but only partial experience into the only valid truth, which plunges them into insurmountable contradictions and prohibits them from seeing the kingdom’s concerns holistically.

The wise king is of course deceitful. He always finds ways to show how indispensable he is in deciding what is best for all. In this case by demanding a holistic answer from the fatally constrained on an indefinable matter. Their handicap is not blindness, for in fundamental uncertainty, no one can be omniscient and impartial. In complex conditions blindness, as an acknowledgement of one’s own ignorance, can become an advantage. The fatal lack lies in the indeterminacy of the situation, which is precisely that you cannot know the unknown from its parts. The King deliberately directed the holistic aspirations of many against each other, with certainty against uncertainty, instead of helping each other to see in the darkness.

If any of the blind men were to think evaluatively, he would approach the recognition of the elephant differently. The evaluator would take the empirical observations of the blind with extreme caution. He would have been aware that they were dealing with a complex challenge, so no one could recognise the essence of things empirically. The meaning of what is objectively known by touching and measuring can, in a fundamentally uncertain situation, only serve as an approximate description. Every empirical observation may be entirely correct but its meaning will nevertheless completely change with better understanding of the whole.

The evaluator would not look as the king wanted, by assembling partial direct observations like the shards of an old vase, something one already knows. The blind can further their understanding of the unknowable only by organising similarities and differences between one another as partial and entirely provisional answers. The evaluator would no longer seek the answer as blinded, but as evaluatively blind, in line with the radical uncertainty of the challenge. Even with the evaluator’s assistance, blind men will never be able to get to know the elephant as it is ‘really’. Nevertheless, they can quite quickly locate similarities and differences and connect their findings into a solid description that would not be too far from the truth, at least for immediate practical purposes – proving to the king that even blind men can think holistically about the unknown if only allowed to think as blind.

In the absence of certainty, the mesoscopic evaluation must remain blind to one-sided descriptions of truth. Like a bat that sees through the darkness with ears, not eyes, the evaluator learns about complex matters through facts about existing things but also through what is missing.

The evaluative view from the middle decisively expands the understanding of complex social issues. The arguments for this are supported by three case studies. They test the ability of mesoscopic thinking to solve three eminent problems of contemporary societies, aggregation, integration and organisation that have been brought to the fore by complex conditions.

The aggregation problem (Scriven) is introduced by comparing different ways of synthesising detailed assessments of the public investments’ effects to the solution of a certain social problem. Effects assessed in different units of measure are of course not cumulative but incommensurable. Leopold properly recognised this so he left assessment results in a disaggregated form. However, he failed to notice that cross-sectional effects as hybrids are only weakly incommensurable, so they are to some extent aggregatable. Ekins and Medhurst have acknowledged this but did not implement the finding consistently in both dimensions of their assessment matrix. When the inconsistency is removed, fragmented assessment results first partly aggregate into a square input-output matrix of effects on the meso level and then synthesise correlatively (A to B vs B to A, …). Finally, their results are evaluatively interpreted. The three step methodology of synthesis is circular. It can produce only provisional holistic results so they can never assert themselves as totalising and dogmatic.

Mesoscopic methodology discovers the origin of the standard (vertical) aggregation problem in exclusion of radical difference (horizontality). Mesoscopic synthesis does not dismantle qualitative difference in forming broader understanding, so its holistic aspirations are considerably less exclusive. It is less determinate in terms of universality but nevertheless more connective and explanatorily rich. The mesoscopic methodology is evaluative: not aiming to enhance truth but to orient one in indeterminate conditions. Evaluation is obviously a constructive enterprise but also deconstructive since it routinely purges old knowledge as a prerequisite for the emergence of more insightful understandings.

The second case study starts with recognising social disintegration as one among the most urgent problems in postmodern societies. Durkheim showed that integration is either ‘organic’ pursued from below, from individuals to the whole system, micro to macro, or ‘mechanical’, imposed from above (macro to micro). However, practicing divisive strategies of integration in complex conditions is among the main drivers of further social disintegration.

Giddens dismantles the divisiveness of the classical formula by approaching integration with his circular structuration theory, which relates the macro system as a whole to the microscopic level of individuals, and its parts to the whole. The theory explains integration with a chaotic principle where micro and macro spontaneously accommodate one another, similarly as to how demand and supply spontaneously balance in a free market. Theoretical models of integrating polar oppositions are useful only in perfect conditions; in a vacuum with no friction or resistance, such as in an ideal democracy or a perfectly free market. Otherwise theoretical models produce highly skewed outcomes in the favour of more powerful agents. One way or the other, there is an integration problem: efforts at the micro level, at the macro level or between micro and macro levels often produce perverse results.

The Case Study instead approaches integration at the meso level of complexity. It proposes three measures of integration. The first is ‘strong balance’, which measures mechanic integration between domains of integration (territorial, in this case) – Physical, Social, and Economic. The second is ‘cohesion’ as a correlatively obtained measure, which expresses the strength of peripheral overlaps between integration domains. The last is the newly introduced ‘weak balance’, which measures the mutuality of relations – if cohesive ties are woven in an emancipatory way for all included. This is a hybrid category: it is obtained correlatively (organic aspect), but it nonetheless measures how balanced the connections are (mechanical aspect). Weak balance differs between two types of cohesion: the first is one-sided and asymmetrical, as in a globalised market, imposed on everybody leaving all without workable alternatives, the other is symmetrical and mutual between essentially diverse but equally valued domains, as between trusted partners, friends or lovers.

The Case Study concludes that mechanical and organic integrations can become effective only to the extent that they in parallel enhance the weak balance. Vertical integration needs to become less exclusive for radical difference horizontally and enrich the range and multitude of social possibilities for all. Analogously, the most valuable horizontal integration must in parallel reaffirm the core concerns of vertical integration, for instance that people voluntarily adopt in their free interactions a more responsible attitude to the commons, to public goods and to the legitimate expectations of others (intra and inter)generationally.

The first two case studies relate to the complexity of systems (institutions) and their rather primitive holistic strategies, aggregation and integration, aimed at connecting similar or synergetic phenomena. Yet, the book’s purpose is to explain social complexity, not complex systems. Social complexity as a hybrid formation is a systemic as well as an antisystemic phenomenon. The latter applies an alternative holistic approach that does not enhance the inclusion of the excluded but exclusion of the excluders.

The most vocal representatives of the antisystem are the social movements (reformist, revolutionary, or autonomist; RRA). They are protagonists of the third case study. These movements want to change, transform or even abolish the official system. This is not an easy task, especially since antisystemic social movements suffer from a severe organisational problem. On the one side, they refuse vertical organisation, as their exclusion is precisely the enforced result of over structured society. On the other side, their preferred organisational approaches, horizontal networks, are incapable of structuring large-scale actions to ignite meaningful social change.

The Case Study first postulates that to resolve the problem, these movements need to abandon programmatic similarity as a connective principle and instead institute their obvious inconsistencies as the common denominator. Social movements are usually more radical in program than in action or vice versa. Their program-action footprints are inconsistent unless they enter into coalition with movements that have symmetrical opposite footprints. Coalition reconstructs their internal consistency but only in a hybrid manner, in this way maintaining their principal distinctions. Three coalitions arise among RRA: quasi-, semi- and orto-antisystemic. They complement one another in the mobilisation of followers, the production of alternatives to the system, and in their capacity to defend the boundaries of achieved autonomy.

The organisation problem eventually resolves with the establishment of the Antisystem structure between antisystem coalitions. The Antisystem structure exists temporarily, as a fluid, often as a latent setup that emerges only when necessary and dissolves afterward to reappear in a modified setup somewhere else. The structure is not always visible but it must always be accounted for by the System as very much alive and operational.

Emergence of the Antisystem structure decomposes the initial antisystem conflict between society and the system (institutions), between freedom and order or ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ (Pasquino). Initial antisystem conflict decomposes into two separate confrontations: first, a conflict between two competing structures (system vs. antisystem, as order vs. order, bad against bad) and second, between competing social concerns (good against good, freedom vs. freedom). Deantagonisation of social relations will free enormous co-operative potential among members searching for a middle-ground between different manifestations of the good instead of against the bad.

After radical rearrangement, complex society obtains the freedom to oscillate between different structural orderings (systemic, antisystemic) and between different exclusion principles according to the specific needs of the narrower communities and their members for freedom or order.

Antipostmodern society must remain emptied in the centre. The centre is inhabited only by service personnel, by agents of the middle or mesoscopic agents, who develop the safe space where binary opposites can meet and translate into mesoscopic ones. The agent of the middle cannot find a solution to the contradictions in the world, but only create conditions for the protagonists to achieve partial bridging between themselves when identifying the vagueness, bias, and even partial overlap of their opposing views on the margin. What was previously ignored as absent and void, mesoscopic framing transforms into building blocks of coherence.

Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology wrote that self-reflexive identification of one’s own bias is the best approach to discovering the bias of others. In radical uncertainty the middle agent strives to become aware of their own biased convictions and imperfect knowledge. An agent aims ‘to see itself seeing’ (Ankersmit) paying attention to the effects of its own predispositions and set of internalised structures, and how likely these are to distort judgment (Bourdieu). A self-reflexive person runs themselves through their own logic to advance insights after recognising their own limitations and bias without eliminating them simply by deantagonisation and decentering their positions.

To comprehend socially complex situations, the agent must develop knowledge about the world but also self-knowledge. Mesoscopic comprehension leads the seeker of truth to self-recognition (James) as a subject who is being self-transformed by enhancing self-aware intelligence (Kierkegaard). The agent develops knowledge about the world through self-knowledge, and self-knowledge through knowledge. Knowledge and self-knowledge must co-evolve because the reality is only one, in which ‘we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve’ (Max Planck). In this perspective a mesoscopic agent is most appropriately seen as a self-transforming agency of complex world (trans)formation.

Yet, there should be no doubt that the mesoscopic concept of complexity leads society nowhere. It does not forward any concrete solution of the metacrisis. The present generation has found itself blind in an epochal uncertainty with a variety of options opened, including some really bad ones. However, our blindness is not a fatal constraint as long as the present generation can establish mesoscopic coalitions between radically different answers to nascent transformative challenges. This would already provide a solid guarantee that the future, whatever it may be, will witness strong alliances between radically diverse positive social visions.

II. LONG PRESENTATION

1. What problems this book is setting out to solve?

The present generation finds itself caught in many valid but incommensurable explanations of reality, which gives rise to perceiving society as complex, essentially indeterminate, where the rational clashes with the irrational. Caught between different modes of reasoning, a whole generation loses power to understand itself (Geertz). We are like the short-sighted faced with far- reaching challenges, like a traveller who explores new lands equipped with old maps (Benhabib). Increasingly complex conditions call for a new kind of social thought specifically developed for a blinded generation that must be as different from modern and postmodern thoughts, as they were different from their precedents (Wallerstein).

The book first develops an evaluative methodology for studying complex social matters as semi- ordered from a mesoscopic point of view and then tests methodology with three case studies. The case studies reflect some of the most pressing problems in contemporary societies resulting from their increasing complexity: aggregation problem, integration problem, and organization problem. The obtained findings give grounds for the depiction of an outline for the ‘anti-postmodern’ (Badiou, ?i?ek) comprehension and ordering of contemporary societies.

The mesoscopic description of social complexity is not rationally scientific but evaluative and so irrationally rational. The description builds understanding on facts and on values, assuring that bias, asymmetry, and incompatibility, not order and certainty is the framework for rational inquiry. The irrational component arises in methodology through recognizing the void (Derrida) in every rational claim (Bourdieu) that results from its indeterminacy (Heisenberg) and incompleteness (G?del). At the heart of existence and meaning then is not essence but difference, absence not substance.

As the complex world is essentially uncertain, its understanding is not possible without bias and ignorance. To comprehend a complex matter, one needs ‘to sail the void’ (Kepler) between Scylla and Charybdis of ignorance and the unknown, between what is misunderstood and what is not understood at all. In complex conditions the evaluator needs to recognize their own blindness about ultimate truth as a prerequisite for staying in the middle between competing assertions about truth, justice or good. Like Odysseus, the evaluator is a sailor with prejudice who can save the boat only by setting it on the middle path between the most varied biases involved in competing assertions.

Blindness about ultimate truth is for an evaluator not a handicap but original adaptation to darkness in which search for essentially indeterminate and uncertain truth can only take place Just like a bat who navigates through the darkness with ears, the evaluator does not see reality through facts, but through the void, by dividing what is claimed to be known by zero. This is by connecting competing truth claims at the middle where their inconsistencies meet, through what was previously ignored and excluded as irrational.

The book concludes that this blind generation can proceed on its uncertain path toward some better future only through darkness, from nothing to nothing. This means in absence of absolute essence, except in absence of nothingness (Nagarjuna). Since nothingness is the single absolute that cannot produce void and exclude difference so it has exquisitely liberating, creative and integrative potentials that are indispensable for developing strong mesoscopic agency in transformative complex conditions.

2. What confusions does this book wish to clarify?

a.  About complexity as a mesoscopic, not micro or macro concept. At present, the science of complexity taken as a whole is still little more than a collection of exemplars, methods, and metaphors (Heylighen). The majority of approaches study complexity in a disorganized state as it appears microscopically with random behaviour of the individual parts in a larger system (Bar-Yam). Disorganised complexity found its place in theories of informational entropy, stochastic, hierarchical, dynamic, or computational complexity and a quantitative approach. Weaver, on the other hand, developed the concept of organized social complexity. It is an object of study in the philosophy and sociology of science, in the post-positivist tradition and in pragmatism, in addition to critical realism, systems theory, social constructivism, post-structuralism, and the qualitative method.

The two prevailing concepts of complexity seem to overlook the central importance of mesoscopic complexity as a semi-ordered concept, especially relevant in studying of society as a partly ordered and partly disordered entity. Social processes are developing in the middle where their formative contradictions meet, struggle and provisionally resolve in concrete situations. The meso level is located precisely where the substrate of sociality is generated (Goldspink) so it can present society in its natural, essentially inconsistent and irrational, yet more integrative perspective than micro or macro as mere theoretical perspectives.

The concept of complexity should not be stripped of its complexity by presenting it uni- dimensionally, as only a micro or only a macro concept. Complexity is essentially a hybrid concept between order and disorder (Stacey) so it is essentially a mesoscopic category, which intermediates between contradictions. The word complexity comes from Latin ‘plexus’ means ‘braided’, from which is derived ‘complexus’, meaning ‘braided together’.

The book finds Simon’s concept of ‘double complexity’ especially valuable. Double (or dualistic) complexity is a result of the fundamental principle of uncertainty, as well as of the observer’s bias. Bias is a result of his irrational interface with the rational objectification process. One needs to understand both sides of complexity, due to indeterminacy and due to bias, which asks to distinguish irrationality in its objective and in subjective induction. In consequence, complex social reality exists, so to say, twice, in things and in minds, outside and inside of agents (Wacquant), both directly and indirectly (Peirce), vertically as well as horizontally. The two sides of complexity can make sense to one another only from the middle ground that arises in the intersection between them at the meso level.

b. About aggregation in absence of a uniform common denominator. An explanation of the laws that link the individual to the collective level is of the least developed aspects of the social sciences (Coleman). All sciences reveal a micro-macro divide, and even the most advanced have not reconciled the two levels theoretically (Turner). Collective choice theory in economics actually exhibited, that it is impossible to reconcile the gap with an aggregation procedure that is both rational and democratic (Arrow).

The most important obstacle to the standard aggregation approach is that it will usually be impossible to settle on which core value and which specific observed characteristic of reality should apply as the common denominator that unifies the diversity of social reality. The methodology of social research has offered a range of alternative strategies of aggregation in situations when facts are not fully commensurate: the non-aggregative (descriptive), the fully aggregative (compensatory approaches, social weights, maximizing utility) and the intermediate (multi-criteria) approaches. The possibility of synthesis is sometimes ‘recovered’ by exploring contradictory claims in inputs to syntheses, or by comparative understanding. Besides, various procedures were proposed for ‘qualitative synthesis’, such as meta-narrative, textual narrative synthesis, and framework synthesis.

Alternative approaches narrow the aggregation problem by adopting various strategies of avoidance (Barnett). Sometimes no specific value prevails in aggregation simply by treating all involved values as equally relative. In other cases, the substantive concerns are replaced with concerns on how to collect ideally fitting data and how to calculate the most appropriate version of trade-off coefficients between incommensurable concerns. Some methods do not have a conclusive or unique solution or they aim to understand only limited topics. Others reinvent commensurability by introducing various substitute overarching meta-categories.

The aggregation problem remains unresolved as long as alternative approaches fail to explain how to aggregate findings with dissimilar common denominators without wasting their qualitative difference. Incommensurable valuations impose a mesoscopic approach to synthesis, which introduces horizontal diversity into a vertical algorithm of aggregation to account appropriately for the radical diversity of complex wholes.

c.  About social integration as mesoscopic, neither divisive nor totalizing. Even though social integration is a core concept of the social sciences, there is a greater consensus among scholars about what threatens it – increasing social complexity is among the most prominent causes – than about what promotes it. Scholars more actively criticize existing operating principles and methods of social integration than they contribute to the organization of social conflicts (Touraine). One of the reasons for the failure of ruling integration models is an overly simplified comprehension of integration logic. Classical theories offer explanations with two interrogating mechanisms of integration, such as between mechanical (from above) and organic (from below; Durkheim), between centrality and marginality (Comtois), or between institutions and agents (Marx). When simultaneously unfolding integrative mechanisms act against one another, they distort integrative endeavours into battles for status and prestige. Practicing divisive strategies is among the main drivers of further social disintegration.

As a response to the antagonistic approach, Giddens proposed the structuration theory of social integration. In his model, integration is a result of cohesive connections resulting from an agency (concrete relations and cooperation), but also from structure – the rules, and resources that give similar social practices an ordered form. In his model, organic integration is a framework for mechanical integration, which is itself a framework for organic integration. Micro and macro as opposites accommodate one another spontaneously in a two-sided connectedness, ‘double hermeneutics of structure and agency’.

This is sociology’s version of the invisible hand. Direct micro to macro hermeneutics aim to rationalize processes that are not fully explainable since they are emergent, they in a way arise from nothing, without previous plan or specific scope. This does not permit one to force explanations of the unexplainable through black box methodologies. Gould could find no excuse for referring to miracles and magic in science when we fail to find any natural explanation. The book proposes instead a methodology that overcomes the black box with a mesoscopic explanation, in which magic is replaced with irrationality as a driver of integration.

3. What previously unknown or unfortunately neglected story is this book planning to tell?

In socially complex conditions, practically everything is to a certain extent neglected and excluded from the centre. The indeterminacy and incompleteness of truth enforce on us rational bias, void, exclusion of difference, blindness, and vagueness. In these circumstances, exclusion of difference is not the result of error. From the irrational aspect of the excluded, exclusion, rises a new ‘standard of normality’ in turbulent times of social transformation. The book shows that ignorance in contemporary societies can essentially diminish only by establishing broad and equally effective exclusion at the meso level of complex society between its contradictory incommensurable domains. Freedom to exclude is a precondition for impartially revealing society’s exclusion-inclusion map. The pattern of society’s structural unconscious (Derrida) becomes visible only on the frontiers of exclusion where ignorance meets ignorance. The void arising from my ignorance is invisible only to me, but it is highly visible from the perspective of many others with an entirely different bias. Ignorance then disappears only when different biases agonize one another as equals, between protagonists that relate to one another as the excluded to the excluded.

What is necessary for the social entity to emerge always produces exclusion (Lorey) – both externally by prohibiting entry to outsiders but also internally by institutionally ignoring the aspirations of included but unfitting members (Hayden), such as opponents, minorities, and subcultures. The formative basis of every social whole is discriminative inclusion or ‘inclusive exclusion’ (Carbado) when members are included only as ignored and forgotten. Membership in a formal system is then as much about inclusion on the grounds of similarity as it is, albeit less visibly, about the exclusion of incompatibility as something irrational.

Yet, acts of exclusion clearly precede acts of inclusion. Inclusion can arise only on the rubbles of previous exclusion. It then seems reasonable to insist that exclusion of the irrational is more fundamental for the understanding and ordering of complex matters than the inclusion of compatible contents.

4. How is this book different from all other books?

It is different due to the open and thus resolutely non-disciplinary and intermediating character of its challenge. The book does not contribute scientific understanding but is evaluative. It is not asking about truth but about overcoming divisiveness invoked by pursuing incommensurable claims about truth.

The book develops a concept of evaluation with mesoscopic ‘irrational rationality’ that is rational on irrational grounds. Evaluation balances between the rational and irrational. First to open the rational for the irrational, and science for evaluation, by asking about the irrational foundations of truth claims. Second, to assure that irrationality remains rationally bounded since it deals with the irrationality of the rational, not with the irrationality of the irrational, which belongs to art.

Evaluation does not interfere with what rational method explains. Its task is not to supervise analytical thinking but to deal with the consequences of its exclusivism, by connecting related contradictions on irrational foundations of their bias. Evaluation is intermediary between contradictions only because it remains blind about ultimate truth. Blindness is the evaluator’s natural adaptation to darkness, in which the search for truth and order can only take place in complex conditions.

5. Why does that matter? To whom?

A profound transformation from modern and postmodern to complex societies has been underway since the 1990s (Wallerstein). Contradictory forces drive transformation that brings about irrational situations with perverse outcomes. In an increasingly complex world, it is unclear which among competing theoretical models gives the most appropriate approximation of reality. Making statements about collective challenges like those arising from unsustainable development, social disintegration or safety, invokes incommensurable choices. Governmental interventions in complex situations trigger tragedies (Hsieh): no matter which collective optimum is emphasised, it always imposes exclusion with involuntary and illegitimate trade-offs that are progressively disruptive to social stability. As social complexity grows, both the sources and severity of possible ability to respond to transformational challenges is decisively declining precisely when far- reaching decisions are most needed. Inability to cope with new complex challenges has left the present generation incapable of anything but impotent inspection of cumulative disaster (Fromm).

The decreasing capacity to govern complex social processes results in negative trends, which breach system thresholds in all main social domains due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity of ecosystems and structural inflexibility of political institutions with extreme economic stratification of society into rich and poor. If the present trends continue, it is difficult to imagine any scenario that does not involve catastrophic social disintegration (Coffman). Independent studies steadily report that a strong majority of the world’s population, between 60% and 80%, already feels excluded because it does not feel represented by their governments anymore (United Nations; Eurobarometer; Henning; Halpin, Summer).

This book is addressing concerns of the excluded majority by explaining how present complex social conditions work in favour of generational aspirations to achieve a more positive future.

6. A narrative description of the book’s themes, arguments, goals, place in the literature, and expected audience.

Contemporary societies are becoming increasingly irrational. In the civilizational march to the rational heavens finite beings aim to conquer the infinite with a constrained framework and then subjugate it to their small world. Increasing irrationality arises as a side effect of exercising rationality too far, beyond what can be explained rationally, such as when searching simple answers on complex questions.

Then irrationality can never disappear, as a sort of impurity, from rational enterprise. Just the opposite! It increasingly reveals itself as its very essence (Derrida). That part of reality, which is contradiction and internal opposition. This suggests we need a more coherent model for comprehending social reality, which could be rational in the irrational frame, by a rationally consistent elaboration of the irrational (Sedlá?ek).

This book develops a mesoscopic understanding of social complexity. Giddens identified a social field of the radical middle. It is radical because it involves incommensurable oppositions, and it is middle because it is non-exclusionary in relation to exclusionary domains of complexity. Radical middle imposes no dogmas or doctrines. In the first place, paraphrasing James, it is just a method, only a corridor in a hotel lobby, which leads to many different rooms or theories, each branching away from it into their incommensurable niches. Each niche obtains its distinctive place in a matrix of relations between contradictions of social complexity at meso level. Meso-matrical resolution of contradictions, even though only evaluative, enables holistic representation of socially complex matters.

The complex society in its natural condition exists as a matrix of matrices. There is no doubt! We do indeed live in the Matrix where clear distinction between rational and irrational blurs. Yet this is not a binary type of matrix but the matrix of the middle world. The meso-matrix does not reduce our options to either accepting or rejecting illusions. The choice is not between reality and illusion, between the red pill and the blue pill. We need to take part of both! We can only live in illusions of the matrix because there is no total understanding beyond any constraint, doubt, and vagueness. However, a person can also choose to become a self-aware mesoscopic agent. He or she applies the mesoscopic reasoning as a deconstructively constructive mechanism to dissolve ignorance and invoke synthesis, by intermediating between indeterminacy of the known through ignorance of the knower, this is between different instances of void through the void.

7. An annotated table of contents, with a brief description of the contents of each chapter.

Foreword

Chapter I. Social Complexity

-   Complexity is dangerous

-   Stuck between simplicity and chaos

-   Conformity of evolution

-   Mesoscopic social complexity

Chapter II. Aggregation Problem

-   Aggregation Problem

-   Core concepts

-   Micro vs Macro

-   Resolution in the Middle

o   Horizontal Extension

-  Evaluative basis of synthesis

Chapter III. Integration problem

-  Integration Problem

-  Core concepts

-  Design of Experiment

-  Results

-  Implications

Chapter IV. The Organization Problem

-  System and Antisystem

-  Organization Problem

-  Complementary Inconsistencies

-  Antisystem structure

-  Oscillating Society

Chapter V. Complex Society

-  Simple in complex way

-  Governed from the middle

o   Between groups

o   Between capitals

-  Sail the void

Afterword

Chapter I (‘Social Complexity’). The concept of social complexity rests on the incommensurability of its multiple constitutive domains in vertical (micro, meso, macro) and in horizontal explanatory axes containing (at least) three distinctive domains at the meso level, such as the economic, social and environmental domain of sustainable development. Vertical and horizontal axes orthogonally intersect to create a coordinate plane in the middle, which enables the mesoscopic description of a given complex social matter.

To comprehend a concept of meso, one first needs to acknowledge two opposite poles of existence. One can explain opposites integrally only by adding a third, intermediate category that stays between opposites so it can involve part of both, as bi-modal and hybrid in character. Socio- economic development is, for instance, a hybrid category that connects between economic and social development despite their incommensurability.

The meso level is integrative because its categories apply the ‘doctrine of the middle’ (Malthus). The doctrine discloses no generality about inquired issues and lays no principal claims to any reality beyond itself (Olshewsky). It is only a bridging principle. An intermediate category translates between opposites only peripherally, without questioning core oppositions. Oppositions resolve neither with a compromise on principal concerns nor with the exclusion of non-fitting elements. Core disagreements resolve through their peripheral overlaps between domains in hybrid and non-principal (irrational) contents and thus in an inverted and inconsistent way, in what they essentially are not.

In the geometry of thinking, a complex whole is not comprehensible directly in terms of its constitutive domains, but only by evaluation of marginal overlaps, a cyclical, partly deconstructive (void) and partly by constructive synthesis of multifaceted meanings in the overlap between their inconsistencies. Circular methodology deconstructs insights obtained from the previous step of synthesis as incomplete. This calls for another step in synthesis, which is complete in the specific respect, but not in some other respect, which calls for another cycle of destruction and creation (Boyd)… Incompleteness is then a prominent driver of synthesis when dealt with in a circular way and mesoscopically where inconsistency meets inconsistency. In cyclical procedure, synthesis opens to the irrational, without rejecting the rational. Synthesis from the meso level does not aim to institute irrationality in place of rationality but to negotiate their passage through the middle world, simply in a complex way, by opening the black box of the canon and replacing it with mesoscopic reasoning.

Three Case Studies test the mesoscopic methodology of social complexity. The first two studies are evaluative in methodology as well as in the object of their concern.

Chapter II (‘Aggregation Problem’). An aggregation problem (Scriven) is apparent in the impact evaluation of private or public investment that produce non-cumulative outcomes. Leopold properly recognised the incommensurability of impacts so he left assessment results in a disaggregated form. However, he failed to observe that cross-sectional impacts as hybrids are only weakly incommensurable, so they are aggregatable to some extent. Ekins and Medhurst have acknowledged this but did not implement the finding consistently, only horizontally, not also vertically. When we remove the inconsistency, fragmented assessment results first partly aggregate into a square input-output matrix of impacts on the meso level, then they synthesise correlatively and interpret evaluatively. This methodology is circular. It can produce holistic results only provisionally so they can never assert themselves as totalizing structures of dominance.

Mesoscopic methodology locates the origin of the aggregation problem in exclusion of horizontal difference. The Study suggests that assumption of incommensurability of social facts at the meso level has superior synthesising potential compared to the assumption of commensurability at the micro level precisely because mesoscopic aggregation is evaluative not mechanical. It does not dismantle qualitative difference in forming a more complete understanding, so its holistic aspirations are considerably less exclusive. The mesoscopic aggregation is less determinate in terms of universality but nevertheless more connective and explanatorily rich. It is not less ignorant because of abolishing exclusion, but because of incorporating the excluded remainder to synthesis methodology in its natural, irrational manner. In this way, mesoscopic synthesis is a constructive enterprise as much as it is deconstructive to itself, by becoming less exclusive to complex contradictions and more evaluative.

Chapter III (‘Integration Problem’). Social disintegration is among the most urgent problems in postmodern societies. It is not that social sciences and politics do not recognise its importance, especially in the EU. Durkheim showed that integration is either ‘organic’ pursued from below, micro to macro, or ‘mechanical’, imposed from above (macro to micro). However, practicing divisive strategies of integration in complex conditions is among the main drivers of further social disintegration.

Giddens dismantles divisiveness of the classical formula by approaching integration with his circular structuration theory, which relates the macro system as a whole to its microscopic parts, and its parts to the whole. The theory explains integration with a chaotic principle that mystifies the meso level of integration by locking explanation into a black box where micro and macro can somehow spontaneously accommodate one another directly and neutrally, similarly as demand and supply spontaneously balance on a free market.

The Case Study instead approaches integration as a mesoscopic process consisting of three measurable categories. The first is ‘strong balance’; it measures mechanic integration between domains of (territorial) integration – Physical, Social, and Economic. Second is ‘cohesion’ as a correlatively obtained measure of organic integration; it measures the strength of peripheral overlaps between integration domains. The last is the newly introduced ‘weak balance’ that measures mutuality if cohesive ties are weaved in an emancipatory way for all included. This is a hybrid category, embedded in the previous two measures: it is obtained correlatively (organic aspect), but it nonetheless measures how balanced connections are (mechanical aspect). Weak balance identifies the distinction between cohesion, which is one-sided and asymmetrical, as on a globalised market, imposed on everybody leaving all without workable alternatives, from cohesion that is symmetrical and mutual between essentially diverse but equally valued domains, as between trusted partners, friends or lovers.

The Case Study suggests that mechanical and organic integration can become effective in complex conditions only to the extent that they enhance the weak balance between integration domains. Vertical integration needs to become less exclusive for unfitting members so that it can also enhance overlaps horizontally, such as by increasing the multitude of social possibilities. Analogously, the most valuable horizontal integration must in parallel reaffirm core concerns of vertical integration, by securing that people adopt a more socially responsible attitude to legitimate integrative aspirations of others in their free interactions. Freedom and order do not relate directly micro to macro but through the meso level, where they first discover less exclusive strategies for integrating incommensurable concerns.

Chapter IV (‘Organization Problem’). The first two cases relate to the complexity of systems (institutions) by example of their rather primitive holistic strategies, aggregation and integration. They are primitive because they impose exclusion, even though decreasingly, on diversity at a micro and meso level. Yet, the book aims to explain social complexity, not complex systems. It is dealing with the complexity of society, not of institutions. Social complexity is comprehensible in its natural condition only from an antisystemic point of view. Antisystem applies an alternative holistic approach that is not based on the inclusion of (weakly) compatible contents but on the exclusion of exclusion of difference.

Observing the problem, Agamben asked how to create a community with ‘the inclusion of the excluded as excluded’. The most vocal representatives of the excluded parts of society are antisystem social movements (reformist, revolutionary, or autonomist; RRA). They are protagonists of the third case study. Movements want to change, transform or even abolish the official system but they suffer from a severe organisational problem. On the one side, they refuse vertical organization, as their exclusion is precisely the result of uniformity of over structured society. On the other side, their preferred horizontal organization is incapable of shaping large- scale actions with wide-ranging social impacts.

The Case Study first observes that to resolve organization problem, movements need to abandon programmatic similarity as their core connective principle and institute in this role their inconsistency. Movements are usually more radical in program than in action or vice versa. Their program-action footprints are inconsistent unless they enter into coalition with movements that have symmetrical opposite footprints. This organization strategy reconstructs their internal consistency but only in a heterogeneous way so that it does not imperil their principal distinctions. Three coalitions arise among RRA: quasi-, semi- and orto-antisystemic. They complement one another in mobilisation of followers, production of alternatives to the system, and in capacity to defend the boundaries of their autonomy.

The organization problem resolves with the establishment of the Antisystem structure between three antisystem coalitions. This hierarchy is a fluid, temporary, often a latent setup that activates only when necessary and dissolves afterward to reappear in a modified set-up somewhere else. The structure may not always be present but it must be accounted for by the System as very much alive.

Emergence of the antisystem structure decomposes the initial antisystem conflict between society and the system (state), between freedom and order, between ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ (Pasquino). Initial antisystem conflict decomposes into two separate confrontations: first, a conflict between competing structures (system’s vs. antisystem’s as bad against bad, order vs order) and second, between competing agents and between interest groups (good against good, freedom vs freedom). Deantagonisation of social relations will free enormous potential for cooperative undertakings among members searching for a middle-ground between different manifestations of the good instead of against the bad.

In semi-ordered complex presentation, society is free from any structure. It can oscillate between opposite structural orderings (systemic, antisystemic) and so between radically different exclusion principles. The precondition for attaining this freedom is that a right of exclusion (ostrakismos) against ignorance is available to every legitimate political subject assuring that the power of krátos in demokratia (Rossiter) is allocated among them in a balanced way. Political subjects can face one another as excluded now, no more as excluded against included. They are related in an increasingly evaluative manner, through the void of illusion, of nothing, instead of through the essence of something.

Chapter V (‘Sail the Void’). A concept of semi-ordered complex society infers that we live ‘in the middle of a world which is a middle world’ (Smith). The key to the explanation of complex social matters is mesoscopic thinking, which belongs to an ontological formation of anti- postmodernity that is a middle-ground synthesis between its antagonist precedents, ordered modernity and chaotic postmodernity. Anti-postmodernity wants to recover things like objectivity and concepts about the whole, but simultaneously accept the criticisms of postmodernity about the primacy of freedom, incoherence, and vagueness in relation to the ordering of macroscopic structures.

Mesoscopic thinking is characteristic of a mesoscopic agent. This is a self-reflexive person who is active in discovering their own irrationality by enlightening themselves about the particular ways in which he or she is (self)blinded as an ignorant knower.. Mesoscopic agency is contingent on how much an agent knows not only about the features of an inquired complex social issue, which is always incomplete, but also about themselves as constrained knower who is developing self- knowledge (Kadushin). When reflexive in this sense, an agent can step outside, or beyond itself to observe its own observations, or ‘see itself seeing’ (Ankersmit). The mesoscopic agent uses self- knowledge to learn seeing complexity through the agency, or indeterminacy through inconsistency, which essentially means seeing the void through a void.

Knowing your own void, by making the unconscious conscious, is the best method for dealing with the void of other people (Jung). Even though unable to find a solution for complex contradictions, the mesoscopic agent at least discovers a middle-ground where bridging can take place in a non-exclusive way by opponents themselves. The mesoscopic agent helps opponents to see their void by illuminating that their concerns are of course legitimate but also incomplete and even marginally overlapping so their disagreements can provisionally resolve in a concrete situation. The mesoscopic agent is reminiscent of the ancient Greek character of the stranger guest-friend, Xenos, who comes from the land between established worlds so it can intermediate between them. Xenos as an intermediator invokes a less exclusive situation for all, in which he or she will gain, in fact, the most, without ever asking for reward, simply by becoming less a stranger and more a friend to hosts.

Yet there can be no happy end of the story about social complexity since complexity is only a transitory stage in a life cycle of every society, merely bridging between old and new normality. The present generation cannot know how present complex conditions will resolve. This is nevertheless not fatal as long as we can assure mesoscopic handling of contradictions between the alternative futures, which we aim to achieve. This would assure that our future is far less ignorant, considerably more connected and more considerate, of non-conforming aspirations of many (others) for a better life for all. The concrete shape of our future is then less important. What is nevertheless quite certain is that our future depends on which set of exclusion-inclusion principles will decide it. Yet, the concrete shape of the exclusion map is an emergent result of political processes, formal and informal, in which citizens have a decisive role. The only recipe this book can give is that people need to take responsibility for shaping the positive future they wish to live in, and then take part in communal prefigurative actions at the meso level in peripheral overlap with many radically different aspirations of others.

Bojan Radej, Mojca Golobi?, 2020 (published by Vernon press)

French translation of book presentation (Google Translate?): "Au crépuscule de la transformation sociale", https://ichi.pro/fr/au-crepuscule-de-la-transformation-sociale-186153370282962

Book Reviews:

• Publisher: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/book-review-complex-society-middle-world-b-radej-m-golobi%C4%8D-radej/
• ?This book is addressing concerns of the excluded majority by explaining how present complex social conditions work in favour of generational aspirations to achieve a more positive future. As an experienced policy maker I see a real value in the author’s advice how to free enormous potential for cooperative undertakings among members of society at a middle-ground between different manifestations of the good instead of against the bad.? Janez Poto?nik, dr., Club of Rome, member; Co-Chair of the International resource Panel (UNEP); former EU Commissioner for science (2004-10) and for environment (2010-14). New book: ‘Complex Society: In the Middle of a Middle Word’ (Vernon Press, 2021).
• Review on Amazon.uk by Leandro Herrero CEO of the consulting firm The Chalfont Project Ltd, a global firm of organizational architects, and Managing Partner of Viral Change? Global LLP. https://lnkd.in/d4yxrHa

Publisher: https://vernonpress.com/book/1083

Further reading (not all texts are language edited):

• Order or Chaos: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/order-chaos-evaluation-needs-both-bojan-radej/
• Corona forever: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/corona-forever-bojan-radej/
• Evaluation and Science, https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/evaluation-science-bojan-radej-1e/
• Little misunderstanding: Concept of 'the middle ground': https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/little-misunderstanding-concept-middle-ground-bojan-radej/
• Something from nothing: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/something-from-nothing-bojan-radej/