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  • Scottish Enlightenment Histories of Social Organization
  • Michael C. Amrozowicz (bio)

Arecent report in the journal Science observes that bees "possess complex navigational skills, rudimentary culture, and emotions. They can even use tools: scientists have shown that the insects can learn to pull a string—and so get a sugary reward—by watching another bee perform the task."1 The bees participating in the study were trained to move a ball to a target by watching previously-trained sister bees or by watching a bee-shaped magnet move the ball, which shows that they adapt their behavior by collectively learning from each other. But scientists still don't understand the communicative mechanisms bees use to coordinate individual actions into the collective behavior of the swarm. This coordination problem is also seen in other natural processes like the synchronized flashing of firefly populations, the harmonization of heart cells, or the phase transitions of water molecules turning to ice, or atoms magnetizing in a bar of iron.2 One way modern scientists have approached the problem of incommensurability between the actions of atomistic parts and the larger systems into which those actions cohere—a bee and its swarm, for instance—is to analyze swarming, schooling, flocking, and other self-coordinating natural populations for local rules of behavior to which all the parts adhere. The recent coordination of 100 autonomous mechanical drones that emergently self-organize without any direction from remote operators was achieved by using mathematical models that establish local rules of behavior for each individual drone [End Page 161] that only take into account the individual's locational relationship to other individuals in close proximity.3 Their organization, just like natural swarms of bees and starlings, is not coordinated using a top-down model but instead allows for mutual adjustments at the local level.4 Yet the inherent problem of studying the coordination of natural populations is that populations of bees, birds, fish, and wildebeests are not managed by one individual or small group that directs where the swarm will go next or which task it will collectively undertake.

Coordination problems have been central to the fields of sociology, mathematics, physics, engineering, and the natural sciences for much of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, but principles of self-organization and spontaneous order—two twentieth-century terms that conceptualize mechanisms responsible for coordination in complex systems—underwrote theories of natural philosophy, theology, astronomy, and microscopy throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.5 From bees to beavers, fish to flocks, polyps to people, natural philosophers were obsessed with selforganization in the natural world. That obsession entailed the application of patterns observed in nature to the analysis of human behavior as individuals in society. Eighteenth-century scientific enquiry did not begin or end with the study of complex dynamic behavior in natural populations, but it extended to the known limits of the physical universe; from atomic motion in fluid dynamics to non-linear planetary ellipses, the European Enlightenment posited a physical world in which matter was always in flux. A significant challenge faced by the scientific Enlightenment was the modeling of dynamic physical processes by finding tangible patterns amongst the messiness and noise of nature's operations.6 A picture of the natural world as complex, chaotic, and erratic emerged alongside descriptions of the universe as ordered, mechanistic, predictable, and exhibiting equilibrium amongst its systems.

Scottish Enlightenment historiographers were fascinated with human systems of social organization and looked to the workings of the natural world for analogous patterns that would help them describe the social emergences they were seeing in their own times. The empirical method—the observation of mechanisms that lay behind natural processes—allowed them to gather data and separate patterns from the noise. Many saw the human species as a self-organizing system, and the self-organization operated according to unobservable principles that were often likened to hidden springs, the internal workings of clocks and machines, and insensible operations. These analogies are often concerned with the manifestation of social order and the mechanisms by which the natural patterns that indicate order emerge out of the seeming discord and chaos of human social life. And the larger and [End Page 162] more...

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