Complexity Science and World Affairs

Chapter Eleven: Challenges to Complexity Science

2 0 1 Complexity science hearkens to Albert Einstein’s advice: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” In 1952, while still in college studying applied mathematics, Peter G. Neumann talked with Einstein for two hours over breakfast—a meeting that filliped a lifelong romance with both the beauty and perils of complexity. “What do you think of Johannes Brahms?” Neumann asked. “I have never understood Brahms,” Einstein replied. “I believe Brahms was burning the midnight oil trying to be complicated.” A computer scientist with a guiding concern for security, Neumann in the twenty-first century called for redesigning systems starting from a “clean slate” (Markoff 2012)—in effect, a paradigm shift. Beyond Description Can students of world affairs find a useful “clean slate”? Having looked at perennial and contemporary issues, this book argues that a paradigm based on interdependence and complexity offers a broad and insightful framework for analyzing the past and present of global politics. To what extent do any of the existing approaches to international studies help us anticipate alternative futures or prescribe policy? chapter eleven Challenges to Complexity Science 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 18 19 20 2 0 2 C O M P L E X I T Y S C I E N C E A N D W OR L D A F FA I R S Forecasting From Machiavelli to Hans J. Morgenthau and John J. Mearsheimer, realists posited that global actors will continue, as in the past, to struggle for power. Led by Kenneth W. Waltz, neorealists add that—responding to the shifts in the structure of power—weaker states will balance against or align with stronger ones. Idealists in the tradition of Kant and Woodrow Wilson predict that democracy will conduce to peace. If democracy is imperfect, however, all bets are off—due to “poor implementation” or “path-dependency” (Mansfield and Snyder 2005). Another set of idealists, Iran’s theocrats, blame their country’s woes not on themselves but on the Great Satan (Bellaigue 2005). Our knowledge of world affairs will not be advanced by dogmatic assumptions about the inexorable quest for power or the need to establish democracy or some other ideal. Forecasts based on such assumptions sometimes seem to explain important phenomena, at least in some respects, but sometimes not. Most such forecasts are hard to confirm or falsify. If they prove wrong just once, followers of Karl Popper will say that they have been falsified. Nothing is predetermined. Sound analysis must take account of trends while trying to think of all the contingencies that can stop, reroute, or supersede them. The Global Trends 2030 analysis by the National Intelligence Council (2012) is a model of such analysis. The study stresses that the future “is malleable” and lists important “game changers” that will most influence the global scene through 2030. The list includes a crisis-prone world economy, shortcomings in governance, conflicts within states and between them, the impact of new technologies, and whether the United States can “work with new partners to reinvent the international system.” Failing to flesh out some of the darkest and most preferable scenarios possible, however, the analysis is somewhat abstract and may not spur policymakers to take and implement unpalatable but needed decisions. The NIC conceded that its earlier reports sometimes underestimated the speed at which changes arrive on the global scene. Mindful of complexity and contingency, complexity science offers no flat-out predictions. Still, the hypothesis advanced in chapter 2 is supported by experience. Complexity science contends that top-down rule is inimical to human development and that self-organization is the key to societal fitness. High levels of fitness and human development are most likely to be found in communities that practice self-organization while avoiding the polar opposites of anarchy and despotism. As outlined in Table 2.1, this diagnosis describes and explains the main obstacles to development and to world peace. Still, an understanding of each actor’s fitness and the global fitness landscape permits some “if, then” exploration of alternative futures. If a political-social-economic system loses fitness, it will wither unless negative trends are reversed. Thus, the growing shortfalls in Soviet fitness were evident C H A L L E N G E S TO C O M P L E X I T Y S C I...