The new book by John Brodie Donald “Disorders of Magnitude” is now available
Apple Books here
Amazon paperback here
Kindle ebook here
What is the book about ?
When things get bigger its not just the scale that changes. Many other relationships, both overt and implied, are thrown out of whack. Once something increases in size by a few orders of magnitude, you will then discover the disorders of magnitude. It’s why communes work and communism does not. Many of today’s most contentious topics have a disorder of magnitude at their heart – a conflict between a small scale individual perspective and the collective imperative. Examples range from identity politics, global warming, cyber security, income inequality
Ranging across many different academic disciplines, including politics, economics, sociology, history, biology and physics, John Brodie Donald distils these disorders of magnitude into four key maxims. If you find yourself enraged by the headlines you read in an increasingly polarised society, you may find some solace in pondering how the underlying conflict is related to one of these four points.
SAMPLE FIRST CHAPTER :
“We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man Yes, but the bank is only made of men [said the tenants]
“No, you’re wrong there. Quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it”.
John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
“Your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops”
David Mitchell Cloud Atlas
Introduction
“It is what it is”
When was the last time someone said that to you? It was probably at work. Nothing is more irritating at work than hearing your boss say that phrase. There is a finality to it, like a door being shut in your face. After all, those words are self-evidently true, so how can you argue with that. You may have complained that your bonus was too low, you may have pointed out that the corporate strategy makes no sense, but your protests will be met with the same response: it is what it is.
So it is with some delight that I write this book, in which I try to show that …sometimes… it isn’t what it is. The main thrust of the argument is that when things get bigger it’s not just the size that changes. Going up a few orders of magnitude, introduces disorders of magnitude. Often when things scale up their nature changes, and they are no longer the same as the smaller version of themselves. Expansion means it isn’t what it is, or more correctly it isn’t what it was.
This metamorphosis due to scale is central to many of the issues in the modern world. We could cast it as the inherent tension between the individual and the collective. The quote above from The Grapes of Wrath makes this point. The collective is made up of individuals but often acts in a way that is detrimental to the individuals that comprise it.
One example would be the first agricultural revolution in 10,000 BC: the prehistoric transition from hunter gathering to settled agriculture. It was great for the species. It created food surpluses which caused rapid population expansion and enabled humans to invest in activities other than foraging for food. This drove the development of civilisation and more advanced administrative structures. At the species level, this was a good thing but it was the opposite at the individual level. Life expectancy fell dramatically as diets became nutritionally deficient with less food diversity, and densely populated settlements encouraged the spread of disease. The collective benefited, the individuals didn’t.
The theme of the individual versus the collective is still pertinent today. If you scan the headlines of a newspaper, you will find that same conflict at the heart of most debates, whether it be identity politics, immigration, free trade, dictatorship vs democracy, the evils of social media, geopolitical rivalries, terrorism, income inequality, cyber attacks, global warming, overfishing or pollution. Conventionally these issues are put in separate buckets; politics, economics, sociology, history, psychology and geography maybe. But the purpose of this book is to point out that they all have an underlying feature in common. They are all examples of disorders of magnitude. They all arise from disproportionate scaling. Beneath the surface you will find a discord between the collective and the individual.
The quote at the beginning from the book Cloud Atlas asks “What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?”. The answer is that an ocean is more than the sum of its parts. It has attributes that a droplets do not. It has waves, tides and currents. To translate this into human terms, think of a large stadium full of spectators doing a Mexican wave. You will probably have experienced this yourself – that transcendent moment when the ‘me’ becomes the ‘we’. The spectators in the stadium are moving up and down in their seats, standing and sitting rhythmically to produce a wave that travels left to right. Notice that the collective identity is expressing itself in the opposite plane. The vertical motion of the individuals causes a horizontal travelling effect. In what realm can we say this wave exists? It is ‘made’ of people but also ‘other’ from them. It supervenes them. It manifests only at scale.
Social sciences such as politics, economics, psychology and sociology lean heavily on statistics. I was surprised to discover that when my niece went to university to read Psychology one of the books on her required reading list was called “Discovering statistics using SPSS”. It’s a monster tome of over 800 pages filled with maths. There are chapters on multivariate analysis of statistical variance, the chi-square test with standardised residuals and a section on factor extraction with eigenvalues… No? Me neither!
“SPSS” stands for Statistical Package for Social Sciences. The book first appeared in 1968 and has been much updated since. The SPSS manual has been described as one of sociology’s most influential books. It allowed sociologists to plunder the wardrobe of physics and dress up in their clothes, making their discipline look more like a hard science and less of a touchy feely one. Most of the statistical methods in the book were invented by physicists two centuries ago.
Statistics is the science of the aggregate. It is an advanced form of arithmetic which tends to be very linear in its approach, and often assumes that scale is a neutral factor. When we do sums, we can ignore scale. Two plus two is four, and two million plus two million is four million. The rules stay the same regardless of size. But in the real world scale is very important factor. When something gets a million times bigger, it’s nature also changes. Increasing by orders of magnitude introduces disorders of magnitude.
A change in scale shifts the focus from the single entity to the unity. We need to consider the collective rather than the individual, and in doing so observe the discord between the two. I should warn you in advance that this book does not offer any radical solutions that will change the way that you live your life. It is an attempt to reframe current political, social and economic topics, pointing out that the common cause of many of the most pressing issues of our time are scale related. Think of it as a Shakespearean play in modern dress. Does it say anything new? The text is the same and poses the same questions, but the setting draws out resonances and insights that are new. The siloed nature of modern discourse means there’s little reason for a student of politics to talk to a biologist, or sociologist to a physicist. This is a shame. For once you cross the boundaries of different disciplines you may well find that somebody, somewhere else, has already solved your problem.
Let’s take a quick canter through the headline issues of our times and show how they can all be distilled to a disorder of magnitude: a conflict between the individual and the collective. We start with identity politics which views human interactions through the prism of group identities such as ethnicity, religion, gender and sexual orientation. The group is seen as a homogeneous unit, ignoring their individual differences and reducing people to a unidimensional label. On the left, this surfaces as ‘woke’ culture and debates about transgenderism, on the right it fuels nationalism and concerns about immigration and ethnic ‘others’.
In politics, sometimes the addition of a single word can flip the focus from individual to group. For example, consider the words ‘justice’ and ‘social justice’. The first is based on individual rights defined by law, the second on the fair distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges between groups. The essence of the conflict is in engrained right at the heart of the famous cry of the French Revolution “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”. All three of these are noble ideals, and who could really challenge the righteousness of any of them? But you will notice that liberty is an individual concept while the other two are collective in nature. So, the inherent tension is exhibited right there. If liberty means the freedom to choose, then that freedom will lead to different outcomes and so on to inequality, as those who made good choices do better than others. If equality is the goal, then that would involve some suppression of individual freedoms in the interests of the collective good. You can cast the history of the last few centuries as the attempt to resolve the inherent conflict between these two ideals.
At a geopolitical level, we seem to be returning to a new Cold War of rivalries between superpowers – in particular, the USA and China. The ideological conflict can be distilled into a fundamental difference of the relative importance of the individual versus the group. In the USA, individual freedom is the paramount ideal, while in China the prime importance is placed upon the collective good. Some have tried to explain this in very simplistic terms.
In the USA, pioneers crafted their own future from the open prairies through individualistic acts of bravery and the spirit of adventure. In China, communal irrigation required for the cultivation of rice meant collective action and the primacy of the group. You can see this reflected in popular culture too. In Star Trek, the ultimate, implacable enemy is known as the Borg – an enormous, menacing hive mind that assimilates individuals into the collective. This is an embodiment of the deepest fears of many Americans. Conversely, in the movie “Hero”, the first Chinese-language movie to top the American box office in 2002, the theme is self-sacrifice to achieve national peace and order. It was nominated for an Oscar despite promoting a message that was the opposite of a traditional Western Hero, namely that individuals should give up fighting for their beliefs and support a tyrant for the sake of collective harmony. Broad brush characterisations like this gloss over the underlying complexity of these different cultures, but (if only superficially) do illustrate how the tension between the individual and the collective is reflected in the geopolitical sphere.
Terrorism is a form of asymmetric warfare, an individual attacking the state rather than two states declaring war on each other. Although we view terrorism as a modern phenomenon, this type of asymmetric mismatch in scale between attackers and defenders, goes back centuries. Hadrian, with the full might of the Roman Empire behind him, was unable to defeat the fragmented Scots tribes in the north of Britain, which is why he built his famous wall. If we fast forward to the modern era, it is possible to view the 911 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the subsequent War on Terror, as symptomatic of a disorder of magnitude. The terrorist versus the state is the individual versus the collective. Cyber crime can also be described as a type of asymmetric warfare: the hacker versus the establishment.
Economists frame this conflict between the individual and the collective as a ‘tragedy of the commons’. The term originates from the Enclosure Acts; a series of laws passed in 18th Century England that established legal property rights to land that was previously held in common. It addresses the economic concept of marginal utility. Picture a piece of common land – maybe an idyllic green in a hamlet – upon which villagers have the right to graze their livestock.
Over time, the number of cattle increases beyond the amount that the pasture can support. So, it is probable that, sooner or later, all the grass will disappear through over grazing. The villagers are now faced with a choice: should they continue to let their cows graze there? Thinking in terms of the individual, a villager has a selfish incentive to continue to do so. This is because the benefits accrue to him individually while the negative effects are shared across the whole group. He gets all the upside, while the others share the downside. So, the logical choice is for him to keep putting cows on the pasture until it is all destroyed. This is the ‘tragedy of the commons’ – the eradication of a common resource in which individual property rights have not been established.
There are many examples of tragedies of the commons which we read about in newspaper headlines regularly. Advice to the broken hearted who have just been dumped that there are ‘plenty more fish in the sea’ is no longer an apt metaphor. Sadly, there are no longer ‘plenty more fish in the sea’ due to overfishing by industrialised trawler fleets operating in international waters. This is a classic tragedy of the commons. The trawler captain benefits and the rest of us all suffer. The same applies to issues such as pollution with micro plastics, destruction of the rainforests, urban traffic congestion, ground water shortages through the draining of aquifers, and, overarching all of this, the phenomenon of climate change.
Indeed, I urge you to try this intellectual challenge. Pick up a newspaper or watch the news on TV and see if you can find an issue that is not related to a mismatch between the individual and the collective – to a disorder of magnitude. A school shooting in the Midwest? That’s all about an individual’s right to bear arms and the collective danger to society. Congestion charging in New York City? Individual car owners abusing a collective good – the public road space.
So far, we have been posing the individual versus the collective as a Manichaean duality, but there are of course many layers in this cake. As the collectives get larger and larger, they give rise in turn to different layers of conflict, as we go up in scale. So consider this nested set of layers of increasing size: individual, community, region, nation, supranational entity. There are disorders of magnitude at each of these boundaries, as you step up from one category to the next largest one on the the ladder.
For the individual versus community, the fight over ‘free speech’ and ‘hate speech’ is a good example. Does the individual have the right to offend the community? For community versus region, consider the Romani travellers, native American Indian tribes or the Amish. These communities often find themselves at odds with their surrounding neighbours in the region. More generally, underprivileged minorities often self organise, finding strength in numbers to express their collective concerns. This then creates friction in the larger body politic. Regional versus national disputes exist in the north-south divide in Britain or in States rights versus Federal authority in the USA. For friction between nations and supranational entities, look no further than the EU and Brexit, or the squabbles in the United Nations. So you can see that disorders of magnitude express themselves all the way up at the different layer boundaries between the smaller grouping and the larger.
In this book, we will explore the nature of this friction between these different hierarchical levels, something which I previously called ‘catataxis’ in an earlier book. In the following chapters, we will unpack the concept of catataxis through four paradoxical axioms:
1. More of the same is different
A change in scale implies a change in nature. When a collective gets larger, it’s not just the size that changes.
2. Categorisation destroys information
Intellectual analysis requires grouping data into categories, in an attempt to draw useful conclusions. In the process, information is both created and destroyed, often producing erroneous results.
3. As above, not so below
The whole is not just different from the sum of its parts; it often represents its opposite. ‘Top down’ thinking is fundamentally incompatible with ‘bottom up’ approaches.
4. Complexity requires simplicity
This is a special case of axiom three, where complexity at a higher level requires simplicity at the lower one.
These, then, are the disorders of magnitude. A change in scale causes a change in relationships. Different properties scale at different rates. When you inflate a balloon, the volume increases far more than the surface area. When it comes to relationships between human beings, trust does not increase proportionately with the size of the group. In large groups, trust breaks down and factions form.
Humans also struggle to process vast quantities of raw data and require it to be grouped and classified to comprehend it. This categorisation process is fraught with danger. Once categorised, the collective becomes the key identity, leading to a conflict of interest between the individual and the group. What is good for the group may be bad for the individual – the whole being the opposite of the sum of its parts. What is more, complexity at the group level requires a simplification at the individual level. Scaling changes roles.
We can sum them all up in the observation that the macro view is inherently different from the micro view. This is something that is readily acknowledged in many disciplines – such as physics, economics, and computer science – but rarely applied in a broader sense. Different levels have different rules. In physics, this is most apparent in the different disciplines of quantum physics and Einstein’s relativity; one examines the very small, the other operates at a cosmic level. To date, despite a century of effort, physics has yet to combine the micro and the macro view into a single grand unifying theory.
Stepping back, and looking at the whole spectrum of scientific disciplines, we can organise them into a hierarchical stack, based on the scale of the observation. So physics is the science of particles, chemistry of compounds, biology of organisms, and social sciences of human interactions. Each layer is composed of the matter beneath it – compounds are made from atoms, creatures arise from organic chemistry and complex molecules such as DNA, social sciences observe the interactions between intelligent creatures. But much as John Steinbeck’s bank is made from men but different from them, each layer in this scientific stack is a separate discipline – different levels require different paradigms and rules.
Physics is the most fundamental science. We are all made from stardust – from elements that were forged in the Big Bang. Psychiatry, analysing the complexities of the human brain, is very far removed from this and many rungs up on the hierarchical ladder. Brains are made from subatomic particles, but you would not expect your therapist to consult a textbook on quantum mechanics (unless he was a very alternative therapist!).
In economics, there is a clear distinction between the disciplines of microeconomics and macroeconomics, one looking at transactions between individuals, the other at the economy as a whole. Likewise, in computer science there is a huge hierarchy of relevant levels in what we might turn the ‘technology stack’. At the very bottom, there are the interactions between electrons at the p/n junction in the transistor circuits of the silicon chips. Then, rising up the stack, we have the microprocessor architecture, the motherboard layout, the peripherals and extension busses. Moving on up from the hardware, we get to operating systems and application software.
Software and hardware are seen as two separate domains in computer sciences – hardware engineers and software engineers are two different species. Even within software engineers., there is a distinction between ‘front end’ and ‘back end’ expertise. The words here seem to imply a lateral relationship, the front end being user facing, the back end focusing on the web server and the operating system. But it is equally valid to categorise this as a vertical relationship in the hierarchy of the technology stack. The web browser that the user interacts with is sitting ‘above’ the operating system. Software resides upon hardware or, more correctly, supervenes on hardware. Supervenience is a philosophical term which describes a relationship between two hierarchical entities where a change in one is only possible through a change in the one beneath. When you are writing text on your computer, you are causing a fundamental change at the very bottom of the stack, at an electronic level. But it would be impossible to understand one from looking at the other.
As we noted earlier, cybercrime is akin to terrorism in that it is asymmetrical. The exploits that cyber criminals use often reside one layer below in the technology stack – for example, an operating system back door providing access to some application software functions, or a memory function overflow at the hardware level. Terrorism is essentially conflict across a hierarchical boundary – the individual against the state. Cybercrime is also conflict across a hierarchical boundary – exploiting weaknesses very deep in the technology stack.
To conclude, the macro view is inherently different from the micro view. As systems increase in scale, it’s not just the size that changes. A change in philosophical approach, employing different concepts in a distinctly separate knowledge framework is required. Which leads us to our first catataxic axiom – more of the same is different.
