Of all the "what's wrong with conservatism" articles we've read lately, the best is the one brought to our attention by the exceedingly gentle reader JB in CA, a reflection by Creighton University theology professor R. R. Reno posted at First Things, of which Reno is also features editor.
Reno tags conservatism as a movement that embraces change and the present move to liberalism as retrenchment on the part of those for whom recent change has been mostly positive. Call it selling to consolidate gains. We find his analysis trenchant.
And we still prefer the flux to the siren song of faux stability.
4 comments:
You keep putting up these posts expecting your readers to read more stuff. What's that all about? I read your blog so that I don't have to read that stuff.
And Happy Belated Birthday!
To quote the article "All this creative destruction has produced extraordinary new opportunities and huge piles of wealth."
Ironically, I am currently finishing my master’s thesis this week on the concept of creative destruction, organizational failure and complex adaptive systems theory.
Creative destruction only happens when a system is disturbed and is moved to “the edge of chaos” or “region of complexity.” The edge of chaos is essentially where the system is poised between extinction or adaptation (emergence). The choice is up to the system which path it chooses depending on the feedback (information) it receives.
The author does a good job of pointing out that our society (system) must go through periodic "regions of chaos" in order to adapt and move to the next level of complexity. The more complex a system is the more likely it is to survive (law of requisite variety).
The problem is that when a system is moved into the region of chaos, extinction is also a possibility. Extinction usually occurs as the result of the system’s desire to return to equilibrium or in this case "re-entrenchment."
A system that chooses equilibrium will eventually die.
Aaron: Thanks for the (very) brief summary of your thesis. I'm intrigued. Your last sentence above sounds like a direct corollary of the second law of thermodynamics. Are you arguing that social systems obey that same physical law?
JB. You are right on. I am essentially arguing for a change in mental models.
Organizations (social systems) should be viewed as "organisms" rather than machines. The language of biology is better suited than the language of mechanics to describe them.
Most management theory is built upon the language of linear Newtonian mechanics. This makes our organizations machine like, rigid and ultimately non-adaptive.
But as our social systems (economic system) quickly move to greater complexity (greater order) organizations (nested sytems within the greater system) which are Newtonian will move closer to extinction unable to keep up with the complexity.
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