Chapter Twelve
Human Behavioral Systems
Human behavior is complex, multi-factorial patterning of human response patterning and action-initiation, due to world-openness not controlled by instinct, regulated more or less by cultural constraint and sanctioning, whether direct or indirect.
Human behavior tends to form systems that are psychologically, sociologically and anthropologically understood in terms of implicit culture. Human behavior tends to form individualistic or small group-dynamic systems relating to networking patterns, patterns of symbolic persuasion and related patterns of human response that are distinctive.
Human behavioral systems are systems of a kind, that are understandable, and even expectable, once we understand the parameters that in general control or motivate such systems, prestructured and conditioned as they are through human symbolization and the symbolic transformation of human behavior.
American behaviorist or Skinnerian models of human behavior based upon classical conditioning are largely naive in not taking into full account either the complexities of the symbolic transformation of human experience, even of human perception, nor the complexities of the process and patterns of symbolic conditioning through socio-cultural sharing and response sets.
Human Habitus & the Development of Human Meta-systems
In the 1930's Ruth Benedict issued a plea in her essay "Anthropology and the Abnormal" for greater tolerance of the range of human variation, especially set against what she interpreted correctly as the constraints and contradictions of contemporary American culture and character. That plea reverberates today on American political platforms and in court rooms adjudicating rights for homosexual unions, abortion, race-based discrimination and the mentally ill. This plea was based on the notion that human variation existed on a continuum that varied widely, not only on the basis of cultural factors, but also for psychological factors as well.
If we exam the fundamental unit of human systems, the human individual, we discover a phenomenal complexity of pattern that defies even until today tidy nomothetic systems of classifications as for instance that found in the DSMIV used by psychiatrists in the categorization of mental illness and behavioral deviance. However we may lump and classify human beings, individual's still remain unique to themselves in the synergistic patterning of their own behavior.
This phenomenal complexity is largely due to the highly developed frontal & cortical regions of the human brain, associated development of nerve & muscular structures of the hands and mouth/facial regions, and an evolution of an extremely generalized and adaptive form of behavior that is based upon the capacity to symbolically manipulate and manage the environment in fairly arbitrary and willful ways. This behavior and brain development furthermore occurred in social contexts that can be described as cultural in pattern, if we ascribe to human beings the unique condition of being cultural animals. (Culture in this case being defined technically as non-instinctive behavior that is learned or acquired post-partum within an environmental context or set and that is transmitted from one individual to another in social groups that endure successive generations. In fact forms of primitive culture and learning have been more recently described and demonstrated in a comparative manner for many different groupings of the Great Apes, as well as for other various primates)
Each individual human being, when looked at from the standpoint of being a human system, a microcosm in a larger sea of humanity, constitutes an entirely unique set of adaptive patterns that obtains, in the words of Jean Piaget, a form of equilibriation with the adaptive constraints of their environment. This overall pattern of adaptive behavioral equilibrium, somewhat loosely defined as "habitus," that is exhibited uniquely by each human being, whether we are a schizophrenic street person, a president of a large company or nation, a school teacher or a repeat criminal in a high security prison, may be said in the parlance of General Systems Theory to be a form of "emergent pattern" or set of synergistic properties that are associated with the identity and life-trajectory of any particular individual.
In my own household, there are four individuals spanning three generations, three females and myself, a male. It is observable from day to day, week to week, and month to month, that each individual has an entirely unique habitus associated with their life and behavior centered as this is on the home environment. I would even include our pet dog, a young female mixed, who also has her own more narrowly defined but no less interesting sense of habitus. For the most part, these five sets of behavioral patterns occur and coexist in a shared environment without significant disruption or significant disrepair of relations or destructive interference of behavior. There are occasions of argument in the conversational apparatus, marking some subjective psychological discrepancies of pattern due primarily to age, gender and values, and sometimes a background sense of "being too close and enclosed" too much of the time between us. But otherwise, it is evident that each individual within this common behavioral setting has carved for themselves an adaptive sense of equilibrium that requires to some extent their own contexts, possessions, daily and weekly routines and habits. Very few demands are placed between individuals in this context, except for parental demands on our daughter.
The point of this digression is simply to illustrate what can be taken as a fairly healthy, if unusual pattern of complex human habitus in a shared context. Unfortunately, not all shared contexts in the world are so blessed or fortunate, in spite of whatever circumstances. We may say that the promotion of each individuals sense of habitus in the world is appropriate, as long as this sense of habitus does not come at the expense of other individuals and their own sense of habitus. It is what we get when we have one-man dictatorships who rule by fear and a system of authoritarian violence. In such a context, of which there have been and remain many such instances in the world, one person's enlarged sense of habitus is allowed to dominate, manipulate, exploit and control the sense of habitus of entire nations of people at the same time, constraining and foreshortening those lives in every conceivable manner.
If we define the individual as a fundamental human system, and the sense of equilibrium of that system as their adaptive habitus, then we can define the larger social contexts in which this sense of habitus becomes expressed and played out in the state-path trajectories of the individual human system, as the human meta-system. There have been and are many such human meta-systems. We understand these meta-systems anthropologically as cultural patterns and systems of adaptation that tend to take on a complexity and uniqueness that is even greater than that ascribable to the individual people who are part of such systems. Sociologically we tend to look at such meta-systems from the standpoint of social institutions, functions and patterns that may be more or less formalized, and usually from the standpoint of the larger state or structural system in which social groups are embedded.
From the standpoint of the development of human meta-systems on earth, as a function of the natural history of human evolution, I will venture the following analytic stadial model:
1. A prolonged pre- or proto-cultural period of human group adaptation that was probably remarkably similar to patterns found among extant primate groups, from the earliest dawn of the hominid line, probably 6 to 4.5 million BP, down to the first rise of modern & archaic Homo sapien and Homo neanderthalensus populations approximately 2 to 100,000 BP. The transition between pre, proto- or full cultural patterns of adaptation are probably not clear and probably emerged independently in many different periods and places over a very long span of time.
2. A traditional cultural pattern of human group adaptation, based primarily upon a form of oral human information transmission, that probably arose among Archaic and Neanderthal populations, associated with group hunting/foraging patterns, language development, and related technologies, and that was obviously in full swing with the advent of modern Homo sapiens populations about 65 to 45 thousand BP, and that shows evidence of rapid development from about 30,000 BP forward.
3. A conventional cultural pattern of human group adaptation based upon written script and literacy, that arose at the latest between 4 and 5,000 BC and probably earlier, associated with the rise of patterns of domestication, state formation, centralization of governing authority, and that became full blown with the advent of alphabetic scripts and the rise of complex state civilizations.
4. A post-conventional cultural pattern of human group adaptation that is based upon new computer-automated technologies of electronic information storage and transmission. We are witness today to the emergence and transition of this fourth period of human group adaptation, and this is the basis of what we call today the Information Revolution.
We are really in the throes of the fourth Information revolution that humankind has experienced in its long evolutionary history from its first rise on the forest plains of Africa 5 million years ago. This pattern reflects directly the rise and transformation of human knowledge systems in context, that is the result of the predominant method of communication and information storage that a society depends upon.
The prediction is made that if this trend continues in an historical sense, there should emerge gradually a structural pattern of integration of human systems into a single global meta-system, and a single "meta-cultural" patterning that can be described as global in scope and orientation. This pattern should "transcend" traditional and conventional ethno-cultural patterns that tend to be localized and nationalistic in scope, and these latter orientations should become "embedded" in the background beneath an overlay produced by trends in globalization.
A key aspect of this process, and a key theoretical factor in understanding human systems as complex and unique, one of a kind in the entire universe, in fact, is what can be referred to as the symbolic transformation and resulting plasticity of human behavior in adaptation to shared environments. This is a critical component of the development of human meta-systems that most state theorists, looking to war and to materialist mechanisms of social or ecological transformation, fail to take into account, and this serves as the key point of departure for the entire human systems framework.
It may be said unequivocally that human beings, in their habitus, are symbolic creatures and rely upon their brain-behavioral-group apparatus of symbolization as the basis of their adaptive habitus in the world. Impulses, drives and needs that are in dogs rather direct, instinctively bound and in a sense, more "honest" if sometimes vulgar and violent, are in human beings transformed through the complex interplay of a variety of mechanisms, including home life, play, school, work, and social interaction in various contexts, into a large suite of possible forms of complex behaviors that can be arbitrarily manipulated, channeled, sublimated, and indirectly expressed in numerous constructive or destructive, adaptive or maladaptive ways.
To summarize an overwrought e-say, and to make a very long and old human story short, I will conclude this by stating that in the rise of a global meta-cultural system, it remains undecided how the future pattern of human development will be ultimately decided. It is possible, given recent evidence of the last Century especially, that a totalitarian regime, whether capitalist or otherwise, could arise to a position of global domination, and that the entire human meta-systems framework would come under the control and guise of a very limited number of individuals. If we observe the world system today, and patterns of global stratification, we see ultimately developed a scenario not too different from this pattern.
Returning finally to Ruth Benedict's plea for greater socio-structural tolerance for the wide-range of human variation, I would suggest that the future of the fourth Information Revolution that is resulting in the further transformation of human society and human meta-systems, can and in a sense must ultimately be founded upon a call for wide-range tolerance to the full spectrum of human behavioral adaptation similar to what Ruth Benedict stated 70 years ago. The main problem set for the rise of what can be interpreted as a fair and just global meta-system is the open meta-cultural development of individual and group patterning of habitus, i.e., the problem of human development on the individual and group levels of analysis. In other words, what is called for centrally is the promotion of strategies of human development upon multiple levels simultaneously, for the individual, the family, the local or regional community, and the larger nation or state-system, as well as globally. These encompass programs of nutrition, health, poverty-relief, infra-structural & super-structural development, rehabilitation, education, etc. The uniqueness of each individual, and their habitus, must become better realized and appreciated in a constructive and productive manner. This is as true for rich and poor alike, for the insane as for the sane. Hence modernization, development & globalization is more than just about economic development benefiting mostly an elite, it is foremost about human development in all its natural and cultural contexts.
A central part of the phenomenon of the empowerment of the Internet is that it makes these forms of development, at all levels and in all unique instances, not only possible, but truly feasible.
Human Power Motivation & the Symbolic Transformation of Human Nature
If we are seek a sense of universal motive in human behavior, whether we are referring to the behavior of people in collectives, or as lone-individuals, or as investigators or jurors in a adjudication of a crime, we must refer ultimately to the human drive for power, especially power that is expressed socially in terms of human relationships and symbolically in terms of the manipulation of the elements of one's life world.
From the standpoint of the anthropological relativity of knowledge in the understanding of human behavior, I would make a strong claim that all human purposive activity that involves even a minimal degree of intentionality and planning, is primarily and ultimately motivated by what amounts to a drive for power, whether this is expressed in social contexts or in personal ways. Therefore, almost all organized human behavior, and even much behavior that appears otherwise disorganized, is behavior that can be explained, motivationally speaking, in terms of the need for power and the sense of satisfaction that is gained from power.
This claim being made, it becomes incumbent to define "power" in a way that is relevant to our argument. In a fundamental sense, I would say that power is the ability to control change in a deterministic manner, especially as change relations to other people and to social relationships. In social terms, power translates into a sense of status and a sense of control that is gained from the ability to determine a course of events, especially as these events affect other people.
The drive for power can be largely unconscious, and yet remains a prime mover in the organization of behavior. Because the sense of status and control that is achieved from power is symbolic, it becomes a powerful psychological motivator and inducement for behavior, so powerful in fact that it may override almost any other drive or human need that may be claimed to occur. Because power is at the basis of the symbolic transformation of the human psyche, as the source of will and driver for purposive determination, and because symbolic experience allows for the flexible encoding and analogical transference of value and meaning from one form into a variety of alternate forms, the drive for power is very plastic and very malleable and itself can be sublimated and transformed in very different and often interesting if not completely frightening ways.
The drive for power has one central weakness--it is largely a vicarious and fleeting, impermanent experience. Once having achieved power through the actual determination of an outcome, the experience, status and sense of satisfaction gained quickly dissipates, lost in the stream of on-going experience, and hence, as the sense gained from the achievement of power sinks back below the surface of conscious awareness, the need to regain this sense of power arises back up in however a rationalized and convoluted a manner.
It is apparent too that the drive for power is largely an insatiable and unending need, and the achievement of power induces an even greater need for gaining more power. We can speculate therefore that at the core of the need and drive for power, especially when this appears to occur in an extreme or inordinately large degree, is a deep seated and fundamental sense of dissatisfaction and insecurity of one's own sense of ego identity in the world. This sense of deep dissatisfaction I believe comes from the experience of the loss of control, and the achievement of vicarious or displaced symbolic control, in one's early years of development, mediated as these experiences are by significant others and the often uncontrollable vicissitudes of one's effective environment. We might relate this deep need to a sense of separation, loss and rejection experienced by an immature ego, especially in relation to significant others, and the inability to effectively compensate for this sense of loss by replacement with others or displacement onto healthy forms. We may suggest a fundamental sense of discrepancy in the personality and character of an individual human being, bifurcated between a largely unconscious, libidinally driven, power hungry persona, and a weak and fragile sense of ego that is incapable of controlling the "controller."
In making these remarks I do not separate qualitatively or distinguish clearly between what I would consider to be normal cases and examples of the need for power and what can be considered clinically or criminally pathological drives for power. The differences seem to be in the degree to which this drive for power becomes the controlling factor of one's behavior, and the manner in which this drive is symbolically transformed and transferred onto a larger set of relationships in the world. In this sense, writer who lives through the characters and plot structure of a novel may be working with similar drives as a dictator who lives through the suffering and repression of an entire nation, or a sadistic sexual psycho-path who lives vicariously through the torture and cruel suffering of their victims.
What this drive for power is critically linked to, at least in terms of human systems theory, is what I have elsewhere referred to as the symbolic transformation of human nature that is most marked by the idea of world openness and the lack of instinctive or other forms of natural constraint upon human behavior. Human behavior is invariably transformed and becomes symbolically expressed and mediated. Because it is highly plastic and highly volatile, it is capable of being manipulated symbolically in a wide variety of ways, often in ways that may be considered extreme, bizarre and naturally perverse. Human behavior frequently shows signs of symbolically transformed perversity largely not encountered in the natural animal world. Our tendency towards aggressive action and violence, especially in group contexts, is therefore probably not the show of an instinct for natural aggression arising for instance from intra-specific agonism, nor can we attribute it to some genetic predisposition per se. Rather, it is evident, that human aggression in the forms it takes and in the ways we are familiar with it especially in modern social contexts, is largely the result of the lack of natural mechanisms of control over human "nature" and the consequences of the symbolic transformation of this "nature" in ways probably not intended by nature.
The plasticity by which this drive for power can be shaped in so many divergent forms, and the degree to which the symbolic displacement and transformation of human character can take, even to the point of overriding what can be considered natural sexual urges and other natural drives for food, a stable body temperature, etc., is indeed quite remarkable, and I believe a very strong case can be made for the influence of hormones and also the release of endorphines and other psycho-active agents as a by-product of the quest and actual achievement of a sense of power. These "psycho-somatic" side-effects of the drive for power may be the essential component that predisposes humanity to a chronic abuse of psycho-tropic drugs and narcotics and what is considered by some the universal need for the achievement of alternative states of consciousness. This need for periodically experiencing alternative states of consciousness, however induced, including various forms of hallucination as well as hyper-suggestive states of trance and other "out-of-body" experiences, seems to me to be a consequence of the symbolic possibilities of the active human brain that quickly finds tedious and monotonous the pace of normal experience.
If we watch animals in their sleep, we an have little doubt that they are dreaming and that the subjective experience of their dreams is very like the way in which we experience our dreams. Dreaming serves therefore a very fundamental purpose for the active mammalian brain. The functions of dreaming are not well understood, but must have a lot to do with the reorganization of the brain, the filtering and integration of new experience, and the symbolic processing of new experience in relation to old experience that is stored as forms of memory or possibly posited in the neural encoding of the brain itself. But it becomes equally evident that dreaming for human beings takes on an entirely different level and order of meaning than it does for instance in dogs, and that for human beings, states of waking consciousness can at times become confused with dream states, the two commingling at the edge of conscious awareness. Not to revisit old stereotypes, but in severe schizophrenics we find people who are awake and yet who are as if in a dream world of their own making. If schizophrenia occurs in dogs in a manner and degree we find it in human beings, it would be a surprise to me as I've not seen a dog yet I would call schizophrenic. But then we can assume that dogs are more instinctively bound to nature, to a closed Uexkullian world of "dog nature" than human beings seem to be.
It is not my intention here to rhetorically belabor a scientific argument with only anecdotal evidence and an appeal to common sense. I would say that the drive to some kind of power is resident in many forms of animals, particularly in animals we refer to as active predators. The capacity to control the outcomes of events in the world are a direct extension of the capacity to control one's own behavior in response to events in the world, however this is achieved, whether by instinct or by symbolic construction. Biological survival, and an "instinct" to live, especially for animals, is predicated on the capacity to interact with a world in terms of one's behavioral controls. This "instinct" even supercedes and hence precludes any drives toward reproductive success, which in its way can be considered an extension and further expression of the self-same set of instincts for survival. We may call it a "natural" will to live or will to survive. This drive exists within us whether we are challenged by our environments in any critical manner or otherwise. It seems often in ordinary life, many of these kinds of rudimentary challenges are removed by design, by cultural preference and by social directive, and often as not, with little to replace it in any ordinary sense of lived experience. But whether suitable contexts exist for its expression or not, the need for its expression may continue doing its own thing regardless.
There is one last point that I must question in relation to this thesis about the universality of the human drive for power and the symbolic transformation of human nature, and this has to do with what can be called a preoccupation for death and, possibly the fear or at least sense of symbolic marginalization that comes from the experience of death, the threat of death, or even just the existence of death. A perverse fascination with death, with killing and the dead, seems to psychologists to be a pathological expression of innate curiosity in life, and of a need to control one's experiences of life. The preoccupation with death and dying seems to me to be a rudimentary expression of the drive for life and survival. In living systems, and especially I think in living systems as sophisticated as human systems, there can be no greater expression of power than the control of life or death over another living being, for death is not just final, ultimate, irreversible, but, I think often overlooked, it represents in a fundamental sense a "win" in a kind of zero-sum game of living and an essential form of competition between organisms. In this sense, the taking the life of another, whether this is done on a field of battle, in a robbery, or as a consequence of a psycho-pathic perversion, represent what might be referred as a presymbolic affirmation of one's own life experiences and chances for success in life. This is by no means a justification of why it is humans so commonly and frequently take the life of other organisms, not just humans but of many forms of life, and appear often to be fascinated by this scenario in their life such that they would want to watch it over and over again played out in movies or on television or in the news media. It is rather merely an attempt to understand how it is that we can be thus fascinated by such a perverse and seemingly destructive interest on such a basic level, and an at least tentative explanation of why this just might be so.
Perhaps needless to conclude, the drive for power is in all of us and may become expressed in many different ways. Many ways are in fact constructive and healthy, and many other ways are obviously not. To become psychologically and behaviorally caught in a particular trajectory of development of this drive for power and its behavioral and social expression in the world, versus some alternative pathway, is critical to answer and yet probably so complex and multivariate that it is impossible to answer in any final way. Whatever trajectory we achieve in the course of our life, and in the course of events in our life, we get caught into what can be called a "circle of power" in which one set of events leads to another, to social consequences and reactions, that in turn drive the need for power to even greater heights, and power can become both psychologically and sociologically amplified thereby. I'm exhibiting my need for power in writing this overwrought essay, and, if you have read thus far, you are probably exhibit some will for power in reading it to the end. The proverbial slave exhibits power through the dependency of the master on the slave's powerlessness. The will to power takes many forms symbolically in human behavioral response in the world. It is shaped, harnessed and made available to the world by the society in which we are a part and in which we enact our parts.
It is something of a mistake to cast the drive for power as an abnormal or pathological characteristic of human nature, and to portray it only in terms of sociopaths and other criminals. The drive to power characterizes all human beings both equally and in uniquely individual ways. We all manifest this drive, more or less, along a multi-dimensional continuum of its expression in terms of strength, direction and transformation of affect, aggression, activity and rationalization.
I am of the opinion that human achievement motivation (McClelland et. al.) that in the modern global system is primarily expressed by means of money, that translates into resource acquisition and appropriation, is what can be called a structurally and socially normalized extension of fundamental human power motivation, and the neverending quest to make money and to get rich is merely one more culturally and socially sanctioned form of the manifestation of the drive for power.
I think, as a refrain, that it is easy to overlook the motive of power in our lives and in our world, especially if we are caught up in the grip of power and its circles in our lives. We can repress our confrontation with it, attempt to stifle, manipulate, alter or even extinguish it, not only in ourselves but in others around us. We can especially rationalize its ends and means in our life in practically any manner we choose to see it in, thereby justifying it to ourselves in a satisfactory way if not completely to others in the world. We can act out the drive and fantasies that the need for power manifests itself in, and we can vicariously displaces and project it out onto the world in all kinds of ways. I would even say, that in some social settings, the drive for power can become so manifest and so overwhelming in social life, that it must needs thereby be denied or ideologically justified in a collective manner that not only "makes sense of it" but serves to neutralize or remove any possibly negative consequences that apperceptive realization of its possibilities (and potential horrors) might bring. As it has been said recently, the fish rots from the head down. I think it is in this regard, in a sense of projective symbolic displacement, much easier to recognize the true intent and designs of power in others than to see and acknowledge how it may play out in our own lives. Our ability to symbolically manipulate and transform power is a form of power itself, uniquely human it seems.
Human Empowerment & Development
Applied systems are human systems, and in answer to the why of applied systems we may state unequivocally that they are about, first and foremost, human empowerment. I define human empowerment as ultimately an individual condition of gaining the power to control and modulate changes in one's own life, if not in a complete sense, at least in a significant and focal manner in areas that are considered important to one's identity and adjustment in life. Telephones empower people with the ability to communicate with other people remote from their own location, beyond the range of natural hearing and broadcast vocalizations. Similarly, the Internet has empowered people with nearly instantaneous, affordable, temporally unconstrained communications worldwide.
Human empowerment is ultimately and primarily about self-empowerment by the individual in relation to the social group of which that individual is a member. It is only after the fact of individual empowerment indirectly involved in empowerment of the group. But if empowerment of the group is achieved at the expense of the individual, as it so often has been in the past, then placing emphasis upon group empower mitigates in the long run against constructive structures of human development. This is why open, democratic social organization tends to be much more productive and economically vigorous than closed, authoritarian structures. This is why capitalist-based, open market economies generally out-perform closed, redistribution-style economic systems. Ideology in fact has little to do with this kind of difference, and therefore modes of production and the dialectics of materialism mean nothing if they are not truly representative of the patterning and tendencies of human systems. There has been no greater repression of the individual, and the individual sense of empowerment for the sake of the group, than in communist societies.
Human empowerment comes through providing opportunity structures for people to achieve, through education and employment, and to gain access to greater social control over resources, along with increased responsibility in the utilization of those resources. It is primarily a matter of providing people the means to empower themselves, or to realize a form of self-empowerment that is largely independent of any external structures that are coercive or obligatory in some manner that enforces conformity. Such empowerment is not achieved either by undue restriction of opportunities or resources, nor by the undue provisioning of resources in excess of what may really be need to achieve fulfillment. In this regard we should not confuse self-empowerment with social aggrandizement and status mongering.
Issues of human empowerment underlie and underscore and provide motivation and momentum to human development processes. This is as true on an individual level, as it is true on a collective or even a global level of articulation. It makes sense therefore than any program promoting human empowerment that is consonant with larger meta-systemic frameworks, will work positively toward the promotion of human and systems development in the larger meaning of the term, and that human empowerment therefore is one of the principle objectives of any proposed human development program.
Capacity building and resource development aside, human empowerment, psychologically speaking, is about self-determination and ultimately about self-motivation and independent achievement. Of course, circumstances in the environment can frustrate or facilitate individual achievement, but without the personal drive and initiative to achieve, no amount of external facilitation or cultivation of context will conduce to satisfactory returns. In general, young children, if provided the right feedback and facilitating, nurturing effective environment, will naturally strive to achieve--this is not because they are independent, but because they are dependent in their development upon the models and response patterns of their significant care-takers.
Anything that encourages dependency without self-determination debilitates against empowerment. Children learn to walk on their own, independent of the arms of their parent or caretaker who protect them from a fall. Anything that encourages independence through self-determination promotes human empowerment and in turn promotes human development. The problem of chronic, embedded poverty in the world, for instance, and the so-called "culture of poverty" and the paternalistic implications of the poor being like dependent children, are only encouraged into a form of debilitating secondary gain by the provisioning of money or resources. Provisioning jobs that are non-exploitative, that encourage learning, capacity building, development of skills and self-confidence, is a way of empowering the poor. Of course, poverty is its own vicious cycle that begets more poverty, and in time poor people can become habitually ingrained to the condition of being poor--they adapt even under extremely difficult circumstances, and though they are deemed failures by others, they must be deemed successful as people who manage to survive extremely harsh and chronic circumstances.
The Media Construction of Everyday Reality
In teaching a senior level Journalism course at a teacher's university in China, I based my instruction upon a functional definition of the media from the perspective of its role in the social construction of everyday reality. I have been of the opinion, and remain of the opinion, that communications media in general, and mass news media especially, serves an important function in the horizontal transmission, integration, organization, mobilization and reform of human systems, especially in modern state-organized contexts. This function is in part super-organic and can be seen in a cybernetic manner connecting to human behavior and worldview. Media operates upon several levels in influencing and shaping both worldview and cultural and psychological patterning of human behavioral response.
The function of the media occurs at both levels in the construction of human reality, in terms of the objectification of reality, by the reporting of "factual" details and information, and the subjectification of reality, by the persuasive use of language and information to foster and reinforce subjective states, feelings and attitudes that are desired or considered appropriate to an occasion.
We may even speak of a kind of "media dependency" of people, to regularly receive updates, to keep their own internal maps adjusted to a larger map of the world, a world that is beyond their actual lived and everyday experiences. This form of dependency I think can reach what must be called neurotic states, to say the least, and may be especially inviting to people who are predisposed for one reason or another to this form of dependency. It is noticed during stressful times, for instance during the First Gulf War, when there was a national level crises, as for instance the 9/11 event, or the flooding in China in 1998, when the media played a critical role both in fostering and precipitating what can be called "hysterical" response patterns, on one hand, and on the other hand of providing a constructive channel and mode of expression for more constructive response and "rehabilitation."
When one traverses cultures and national boundaries, the relativities of the media, and the analogies and similarities of pattern between different media, becomes more apparent. The degree to which the media is used and depended upon, by the government, and by corporations and other institutional entities, to manipulate and manage worldview as well as human behavioral response, is remarkable. Separate worldviews can be fostered and maintained indefinitely by different nations primarily by means of controlling and managing communications media in a consistent manner. Even values and worldviews can be thus manipulated, constructed and limited in deliberate ways. The media has become in fact the primary source of the transmission of information today, and is even effectively outdoing formal educational systems in the amount, quality, breadth, variety and effect of the information that is being transmitted.
One should not underestimate the importance of television and the movie industry, for instance, in the fostering and escalation of social violence, as people not only model and emulate stars as role models, but are more directly and subliminally influenced by graphic displays of repeated violence such that their threshold for the tolerance and acceptance of such violence is elevated and culturally "normalized." Social psychologists long ago recognized the strong positive correlation between media violence on one hand and the increased prevalence of actual social violence, especially among certain social groups.
But in our brief survey, we do not have to stop there. National sporting events are similar forums that have similar kinds of mass effects, as do certain anti-structural musical concerts or assemblies. Hitler was said to be a master at crowd manipulation and speech giving that resulted in the mass mesmerization of the German audience.
In modern reality, in state systems, communications media figures critically in the social construction of everyday life. If people were blocked off from the media for only a short period of time, there would soon be chaos and pandemonium as a consequence. Increasingly, we can expect that the Internet and digital information would become increasingly a central part in this process. It is beginning to have this effect as more and more people are turn to the web first and last to get the low-down on recent events in the world.
I find large forums for search, like Google, and e-marketing frameworks like E-bay and Amazon.com, but I have yet to see a site that becomes a major media player in the sense that we can ascribe to movies and to television overall.
The Message Becomes the Medium: Web Cybernetics and the Universal Digital Language of the Automation Revolution by Hugh M. Lewis
What is clearly emerging from the continuing development of Lewis Works as a systems based framework is a sense in which and how digital electronic literacy is transforming how we see, relate to and communicate in the world. This transformation of information is vital to the organization, storage and articulation of knowledge in the world and will fundamentally alter our worldview and how we go about dealing with the world.
Cybernetically integrated web-systems are rapidly emerging in many areas of knowledge in the world, and this integration has important implications, I believe, for the manner and form in which we symbolically represent and mediate reality. The very symbolic structure of our knowledge is being thus transformed, and this process has created new possibilities for knowledge and informational organization hitherto unimagined. In short, we may say that human knowledge itself is being rapidly and permanently transformed.
Though language barriers still exist, the Internet is providing a common forum and framework that is truly trans-cultural in scope and global in scale, and this has a consequence of transcending traditional linguistic and related knowledge barriers and providing a common communication platform for all people who are attached to the web.
We may say and look at this in another way, and this is that knowledge, by becoming almost completely virtual and virtually without effective limits in terms of storage capacity, informational carrying capacity or accessibility, will no longer a completely material form of embodiment, and that the symbol structure of this knowledge will become increasingly "scripted" and controlled by programming languages and hence will become increasingly dynamic in its developmental articulation.
In considering this proposition, it is important 1) to invoke a duality of structure model in symbol systems and to recognize 2) that symbol systems themselves are nothing unless human beings enact and make these systems happen. They are entirely relative therefore to the people who are engaged in their construction, articulation and reproduction.
In understanding the first point, it is important to recognize that symbol systems are usually divided between the sign as an external marker, and the meaning that is carried by the sign, or signification. The cybernetics of human symbolic meaning comes in the reading of these sign systems and their construction and utilization in everyday life. The principle function of a symbol is to represent something, to stand for something, that is not physically identical and that is remote in reference from the sign. It is the interaction between the sign and the signification, and the productive play between them, that symbol systems may be referred to as cybernetic--but they are so only from the standpoint of the human symbolizer who is capable of reading the signs and understanding the significations.
To understand the first part of this problem, the duality of structure of symbol systems, it is interesting to look briefly at the human history of the writing and literacy in human information systems and the changing symbolic units and functions these basic units took as a consequence of the progressive development of new writing systems.
If we examine the earliest icon-graphic and pictographic forms of writing, we see that the content of the sign was not necessarily independent of the form of the sign itself, and that both content and sign were relatively context dependent to the period, place and people of its articulation. One could not read a set of signs in a coherent or meaningful manner, if one were not privy to the particular contexts of its production and origination. Thus, petrified texts today that are largely pictographic, mainly as petroglyphs, are, the world over, largely mute as to their true meaning and significance, and their interpretation is largely conjectural and itself contextually relative to the point of view of the observer.
At some point, associated with the rise of early pre-state societies, recording systems that were largely rebus and memory devices arose that served to count things and to record basic events and things in the world, largely in a pictographic manner.
Eventually we have the rise of primitive syllabaries, still pictographic, in which each sign becomes associated with a particular phonemic consonant-vowel sound pattern, or alternatively, large pictographic libraries in which each pictograph is associated with a morpheme, or a sound carrying meaning.
Of course, at some point in the rise of western civilization we have the invention of true alphabets, in which the sign carries a particular phonetic sound entirely independent of meaning, and which can be arranged in an almost infinite number of possible combinations to which meaning is arbitrary and mostly independent of sound pattern.
The printing press and printing techniques was the next major revolution to occur, and the consequence of this was widespread literacy and the rise of mass communications in which information for the first time could be transmitted in a completely horizontal manner across a broad base of population.
It is my opinion at least that with each stage in the development of human writing systems, signs and their significations became increasingly detached and independent of one another, and the symbolic association between sign and signification became increasingly arbitrary and dualistic in structural patterning. Meaning at this stage became increasingly manipulatable in a manner for purposes of remote communication and transmission of information. The remote representation of meaning by unrelated and independent signs is the basis of the definition of true human symbolic systems. With the advent of print technology and alphabetic writing systems in particular, as long as we knew the structure of a language and code decode a foreign script in familiar terms, we could translate any language and text into any other language available to us, certain considerations of contextual parallax and relativity of cultural semantics notwithstanding.
We are at an interesting state now, as we have cybernetic systems in which information can be stored digitally in terms of an infinite number of sequences of ones and zeroes, and these sequences can be arranged and organized into an infinite number of alternative combinations or "strings" that can be assigned meaning in a completely arbitrary manner. In a sense, by such a system we have a universal language that can transcend the boundaries of different linguistic codes. At the same time, it will be observed that in the history of writing, larger and larger quantities of information could be collected and stored in a single location, and this information became increasingly independent of the context of its production and original articulation. Essentially, now, we can store an infinite amount of information remotely, and we have virtual access to unlimited quantities of information almost instantaneously. At the same time, we are able to access contexts for information within the system itself--information has come to completely incorporate its own context on the web.
I think perhaps that domain names have come to take on a particular significance in the modern global information economy, like "Google" or "Amazon" or "Microsoft" because symbolically they stand for something more than just successful e-commerce ventures. It is likely today that more people in the US when they casually hear "Amazon" are more likely to associate it with the ".com" than with the gigantic river in South America. These represent significant new entities in the organization of human knowledge in the world, for they are almost purely and completely symbolic in the cybernetic sense of an arbitrary sign standing for something else that is remote and otherwise physically unrelated.
What seem to be some of the significant features of the new global information ecology? I would include the following points:
When we talk about artificial intelligence, I think we are talking really about cybernetic symbolization of human knowledge. As with all symbolic systems, we bring to the computer program our intentionality structures, our sense of meaning and contextual relevance. We construct the code and run it and ultimately turn it off or on. I am not sure if automation can ever completely eliminate the ultimate human factor of control, or the basic constraint of the anthropological relativity of knowledge. In a sense, with the digital information revolution, we are coming to realize what might be called a perfect and scale-free cybernetic system of human symbolization. As with all symbolic systems, the requirement of the human cultural component, to construct and to bring meaning to such systems, remains, but his component itself is becoming rapidly transformed. As a consequence, I see knowledge systems becoming on one hand increasingly more complex, and on the other, increasingly more powerful and facile in manipulation and meaning.
Global Domestication, Cultural Selection and Unnatural Evolution
A large part of Darwin's observations upon which he based his theoretical model of natural selection was in fact taken from the context of the breeding and management of domesticated species in his native England. Many of the patterns of selection he was basing his theories upon were in fact the kinds of human selection that had resulted in the domesticating of many kinds of plants and animals, and that had a fairly well known human history behind its occurrence. Darwin was able to infer from the domestic to wild populations that a similar kind of system of selection was occurring that resulted in the on-going modification of species.
Taking our cue from Darwin's theory, I would like to revisit the idea of cultural selection that has resulted in the domestication of so many different species of floral and fauna for human cultural purposes. We are in a time now of the global human being, in which increasingly culture and human civilization is converging to a single set of implicit technological standards, and this process of human development is increasingly encapsulating the entire earth and quickly dividing up the earth's remaining natural spaces as so many sectors between the interstices of human civilization.
We may hypothesize a kind of global domestication of feral life forms occurring, that is increasingly forcing many species of life to either make a jump to a culturally adapted form or else to face the prospect of rapid extinction. A few species appear to have made the leap from feral to semi-domesticated and appear as quite successful within a human background. Other species appear to be unable to make this kind of jump and appear therefore doomed for evolutionary removal. In fact more species than not appear to be incapable of effecting this kind of evolutionary transition, and we may be in the midst of an unprecedented evolutionary epoch, that really probably started more than 10,000 years ago, that is overall witness another mass extinction event and the bottlenecking of surviving species.
Recent advances in cloning, genetic engineering and modification is adding an entirely new dimension to the age old practice of cultural selection for domestic forms of life. For the first time it appears that we have the entire mechanism of evolutionary change in our grasp, under our control, and that we can for the first time begin shaping species in a kind of designer fashion without having to wait generations of careful selective breeding and culling to see the results. We have in a sense accelerated the pace of evolution at the very moment that natural selection and the evolution of feral forms appears to be reaching a global standstill and dead end.
Natural selection in the world appears therefore to be undergoing an important revolution, or rather "evolution" of its own. Biological systems worldwide, and the global ecology in general, is becoming increasingly subject to human cultural influences whether these influences are direct or indirect in effect, and these influences are serving increasingly as basic factors of constraint, or limiting factors, that increasingly determine the outcomes of natural selection regimes and events. Many forms of life are having therefore to adapt to and survive within the context of a global human ecology, and many forms of life are failing to achieve this mode of adaptation and as a consequence are running the risk of extinction. Human culture has become the modern comet of global mass extinction. The rise of penicillin resistant strains of bacteria, many of which are almost exclusively dependent upon the human body as a host, is a clear example of the rise of new life-forms that are an unintended but expectable consequence of human cultural selection.
An expectable outcome of this is not only what we are in the midst of, which is a global mass extinction event that is playing out over thousands of years, but at an increasing rate that is positively correlated with the rate of human population growth, but that as a consequence new forms of life will continue to emerge that come attached and primarily dependent upon human cultural selection, intervention and management, either directly or indirectly. It is sort of like the Yellowstone Grizzlies at the dump site, behaving in ways that are strikingly human. I would think this kind of transformation of nature to be something of a perversion of natural design and evolutionary ecology. It is a kind of Frankenstein complex that leads to the evolution of monstrosities that merely pass as viable forms of life. This is true whether we talk about pygmy chimp populations being breed in captive experimental facilities or stock salmon that return each year to their hatcheries. We all know of proverbial story of the monster rats of Chernobyl. Fewer people hear about the pig-sized nutrias invading Louisiana.
This transformation of the natural world therefore begs certain basic questions about the future course of life on earth. I do not think, in the bigger scheme of things, that human kind will come to completely control or manage all of nature, and that nature might not in the long run succeed and rebound where human beings fail and themselves face extinction. We in fact may be much closer historically to this consequence than we realize or care to admit. I'm sure that even if we cast human civilization in the shroud of a long-term nuclear winter, and irradiate ourselves to a bizarre extinction through mass mutation, we would at the end of the day find life emerging once again with renewed vitality between the cracks of where our over-rated civilization crumbles.
Just the same, while we are around and in the driver's seat, it would behoove human beings to carefully consider where they are going and how they are going to get there. If we wish to accept the meta-ethical responsibility of our global dominance as a life-form, then perhaps we should take the proposition of the cultural selection and management of life at all levels of its occurrence more seriously and more to heart than we previously have. With great power to shape life anew comes grave responsibility to limit and constrain this power in constructive and wise ways.
By and large the main impact humanity is continuing to have upon the biosphere is destructive. The shear volume, mass and behavioral impact of very large human populations on earth seems perhaps to be more than the earth itself can bear. As with all destruction, there is the occasion for the reemergence, the rebirth, of life.
Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2009. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.
Last Updated: 09/17/09