It seemed like a good idea at the time....

Just watched a very interesting programme that was pretty critical of a number of my one-time sacred cows, namely self-organizing systems, Utopian anarchism and Bucky Fuller. 'All watched over by machines of loving grace' is a three-part series on BBC2 about how computers, and attached ideologies, have changed society in the last half-century. It's also about some of the fall-out of those ideas.

Programme 2, 'The use and abuse of vegetational concepts,' concerned the rise of the science of ecology in twentieth century, and about how the idea of a balanced system, based upon the operation of machines, came to be inappropriately imposed upon nature. The idea of the 'balance of nature,' or nature as a self-regulating machine, also fed back into ideas about organizing society. For example, in his 1968 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Bucky Fuller suggested that politics was obsolete and that the global society could run itself as a self-organized system. This sort of idea inspired a number of hippie communes that were set up in the 1970s, where people lived in non-hierarchical, unstructured communes. This sort of egalitarian, Utopian vision also inspired the founders of the Internet.

The trouble was (1) the vision of nature as a balanced, self-regulating machine was simply wrong, as was confirmed by data coming back from the field. Ecosystems turned out to be chaotic and not balanced at all and (2) the Utopian communities also didn't work, because the unstructured community allowed certain personalities to dominate and/or bully others.

I was less troubled by these revelations than I would once have been. The idea of nature as chaotic and unbalanced is, for me, relatively old news, and in the course of writing my book, I've actually explored several ways in which organisms are not like machines.

What really got me thinking was the critique of the ideology of self-organization and politics. I suspect that some of the ideas expressed in this programme would be unwelcome to my anarchist friends, whose ideologies at least tacitly seem to assume that a non-hierarchical, self-organized society is possible if only we can get rid of capitalism. It's something I've believed -- or wanted to believe -- myself. However, I'm not sure that it can really work because I think it relies upon an unrealistic view of human beings.

Now, I'm not one who insists that 'human nature' is fixed, or immutable, or even definable, but I have noticed that persistent patterns arise in human groups and that quite often Utopian visions depend upon erasing -- or assuming the non-existence of -- certain traits held to be undesirable by the given Utopia. In this case, the idea is that humans can somehow discard any feature of themselves that leads to an imbalance of power, to hierarchical groups, to domination. I do not think that it's possible to do this, and the failure of the hippie communes may constitute empirical evidence of this.

I'm far from saying that such ideals are worthless, that we should simply accept negative human traits, or that changing society for the better is a waste of time. However, what these programmes highlighted for me was how easy it is for ideologies to come to dominate one's thought to the point that one doesn't consider them ideologies at all. For example, in the 1990s, I accepted the ideologies of Bucky Fuller and self-organization without a second thought. Further, I never saw how much they relied upon a basically mechanistic view of human beings.

Of course, it's very easy to be wise in hindsight, or if one isn't in the thrall of a particular ideology. But is one fated to move from one ideology to another, or can one live without ideologies at all? My own thoughts on this are moving in a post-modern direction, where one finds an ideology or ideologies that suits the challenges of one's own life, whilst remaining aware of its limits. But maybe -- somehow -- it's also possible to live without an ideology at all....