Arthur Cordell wrote:
> This is important. One aspect of development is credentials, codes,
> standards, etc. So either it is done the "right" way or it is not
> done. So there is little buffer room for truly self-help projects,
> unless of course, the individual moves way out in the country, "off
> the grid" in more ways than one.
>
> Maybe we either have a developed society which delivers in good
> times but is brittle when times are tough.
We've had something you might call "developed society" since the late
industrial revolution or even much longer, depending on how you
account it. But today's level of "developed society" is complex in
the mathematical sense. That is, it has a very large number of
variables and all of those variables evolve with time as nonlinear
functions of a large number of the other variables. Modern telecom
allows many of those variables to update with unprecedented speed.
Two notable features of a complex system are stability and
catastrophe.
Such a system responds favorably to perturbations. The "strange
attractor" that it follows in the phase space of its variables may
change a bit but it remains in the same region of phase space.
Locally, things may change but overall, the system continues to be
recognizable as more or less doing the same thing.
But when perturbations -- possibly very large ones or just ones that
happen to affect the right constellation of variables -- when such
perturbations occur, the system passes through a major transition,
possibly descending permanently into chaos and "death" or
re-stabilizing in a different region of phase space. Nearly
everything is different, all of the former dependencies between
variables change, different nonlinear functions determine the
time-evolution of the system.
The only such system that we all deal with is the human body. We have
accumulated millennia of metaphor, myth, intuition and, recently,
bio-science to describe health, illness, insanity, and other states.
Most people don't generalize thinking about the body to the
abstraction of complex systems. But one sees in medical practice
remarkable recoveries from trauma and disease as the system
restabilizes in the same region of phase space, changed but clearly
the same person. We also see chaotic departures from stability such
as electrolyte imbalance, the dread "total body shutdown" or (so far)
largely inexplicable cognitive states we call insanity.
The body as metahor for the global or national soicioeconomic system
is extremely limited, of course. The players in the body are cells
that do not themselves posess intent or desire or will. But the
socioeconomic system *is* subject to potential catastrophic shifts
characteristic of other complex systems. One imagines that in the
most extreme case, reversion to an "under-developed" or even primitive
state would be the new stable state. But now that we have the ability
to make global changes in the physical world -- nuclear contamination
or winter, petroleum and other resource depletion, deforestation,
climate change, global chemical pollution, even genetic pollution such
as terminator or other engineered seeds -- the sequellae to a sudden
systemic catastrophe may well have givens that are onerous in the
extreme or even fatal.
> In our society, individuals have come to rely on the system for
> jobs, etc., and when the jobs aren't there there is no history, no
> culture and little possibility of doing things for themselves....
I think this has been intentionally engendered, not by well-meaning
people bringing "development" to the poverty-stricken but by marketers
of stuff and employers of interchangeable units of labor.
I've been shocked and appalled (!) by "development" projects when it
appears that they *intentionally* subverted or destroyed the existing
system of relationships and subsistence in un[der]developed countries.
Do I infer correcty from the tone of your comments, Arthur, that such
subversion and destruction is, in fact, intentional and that
(possibly) everybody in the field of international development work
knows this?
If that's the case, (getting back to the original topic in this
thread) then when a ripple or shift in the global system happens and
the already-poor at the bottom of the scale just fall off the ladder
into utter destitution or worse, this is an intentional and
predictable outcome of development strategies. I hope that's not
correct.
- Mike
+ Best thing since sliced bread!
= So, what's so great about sliced bread?
+ It made the replace-every-two-years toaster industry possible.
= My electric toaster is 97 years old.
+ You're a pervert and a criminal!
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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