Preface To Systems Essays, Vol. I

by Hugh M. Lewis

These essays represent the on-going weekly writing for the Lewis Works Newsletter that was begun as a on-line periodical in January, 2004, and continues until today. I have striven each week to present one or more brief essays concerning what I take to be central topics relevant in applied general systems. These essays will continue to be published, and will be added to this volume I as they become available. This first volume will be completed after June, 2004, and the next is planned to begin starting the second half of the year. Writing and editing this weekly newsletter has proven to be of value, not only as a central articulatory apparatus of my framework, but as a forum for the exploration and expression of systems ideas and systems-based thinking. Rewriting, formatting and polishing these essays for presentation in this e-publications has provided a further opportunity for refinement and development of ideas and possibilities associated with systems based thinking.

The framework that I have been articulating, pretty much from the top down, is unusual in the sense that I have deliberately tried to construct a genuinely comprehensive "meta-system" that would serve to functionally contextualize any area of interest, knowledge or potential involvement in problem-solving that occurs in the real world. The challenge and principle difficulty of articulating such a comprehensive framework is the tendency towards over-complication at every turn of the screw. A system that seems relatively simple and coherent at the upper levels, can quickly grow to overwhelming complexity in the consideration of all the details of articulation below. Discovering or inventing solutions requires a continuous exploration of the search-solution spaces that are suggested and necessitated by the different facets of meta-systems. Overall success of such a framework therefore will depend critically upon achieving the kinds of simplifying solutions that solve the problem of information explosion that comes from the elaborative articulation of the framework. This of course is far easier said than done. It has taken years to come this far, and though in hindsight clear progress has been made, there is also an ominous sense of almost overwhelming burden on the horizon of meta-systems application.

This effort really started in a deliberate and conscientious manner almost five years before, mid-way in my work in central China that had led me to adopt an more focal interest in applied problems in anthropology. Then I had no clear idea of how to proceed in this way, except in a relatively vague sense. But I see it also as the culmination of almost 25 years of interest and involvement in a central set of problems concerning human reality and, what I would now define as human development, that had begun as a young corporal and tank commander in the Marines, in reaction to the experience of the latent violence and authoritarianism that characterizes this kind of military organization, and the larger problem of militarism that continues to plague the world.

My journey has led me over the years through many unexpected twists and turns, and there were many interludes and intermissions during which I became distracted by one or other kind of issue, some trivial, some not. Over the next two decades it led me through several different programs in Anthropology across the United States, as well as a few years worth of ethnographic fieldwork, both domestically in the US and abroad. This work tended toward the direction of systems theory that I subsequently adopted, with the first hint at systems based orientations being my involvement at SUNY-Binghamton, the capital of World Systems Theory, and becoming more clearly articulated in terms of my own work around the time of my dissertation about five years later.

A systems-based framework really did not gain full expression until after my return from China and my couple of years effort in small-scale publishing, with my writing of the central work Natural Systems in the early winter of 2001. Most work subsequent to this time has been more explicit to the clarification of this meta-systems and general systems based framework. It was with increasing traffic through my web-system, that I saw grow exponentially through the past year especially (2003) that I was prompted to extend the framework as an actual working system, primarily represented on the web, but also increasingly articulated by real functional structures on the ground. This effort led, among other things, to the publication of this on-line Newsletter.

The meta-systems framework that I have articulated in the name of Lewis Works has undergone substantial modification and stream-lining over the course of the past year especially, and it has now achieved a table of organization that I consider proprietary and not openly available for publication. The Lewis Works framework that is presented formally in the first set of essays in this volume, and that is represented functionally by the design organization of the various sites of my web-system, has been altered substantially and somewhat simplified, even though I have decided to leave the presented framework as it was first published, albeit as a "formal only" approach to meta-systems organization, while the functional organization of the actual articulatory systems have been revised and has thus moved on from what it was last year at this time.

This thinking and rethinking of a meta-systems framework, and of systems-based applications and problem solving, has been one of a continuous, unending endeavor on my part, one that occupies many sleepless hours at night and many countless minutes at the drawing board or at my keyboard. It has grown increasingly explicit and elaborated over the last few years especially, and it has expanded in its range of topics to cover a fairly representative set of fields of knowledge pertinent to our sciences and understanding of reality. 

I now see no area of knowledge of reality as irrelevant to or outside of a systems-based framework. I see the application of such a systems-based framework as heuristically useful in generating new theoretical and methodological insight into what have been historically intractable problem sets. To claim for instance that the universe is a physical system, that follows systems-based principles in its on-going developmental articulation, is to impose upon the fundamental structure of reality a certain expectation of order and structural patterning that is otherwise difficult to apprehend, and probably will always remain impossible to directly observe. But we can, by force of our logic, reasonable deduce such conclusions if we accept the central tenets of a systems-based worldview, that nature has organized itself in an ordered manner that is available to our comprehension, largely because we ourselves have been organized upon similar kinds of systems-based principles.

I must also admit therefore that I do not see a systems based framework as unproblematic, unlimited nor uncontroversial. It is bound to remain controversial as long as there are competing points of view and competing agendas that give force and substance to alternative symbolic frameworks. It is bound to remain limited and problematic as long as it holds as its central goal the comprehensive understanding of objective reality in symbolic terms that remain open to demonstration and verification, and hence to improvement.

No doubt this effort on my part shall continue, somewhat obsessively, as long as I can manage to stay afloat, halfway sane, and alive. In hindsight I see the reason of my previous life-choices and decisions, however impulsively short-sighted and momentarily naive they may have seemed at the time, under however difficult of circumstances, often at significant loss to myself and my family. No doubt that the central purpose of my life are defined best  in terms of these kinds of essays outlining a broader systems based perspective, and in terms of the actions which will hopefully soon follow that provide articulatory frameworks for alternative systems that help to promote constructive and creative human development on earth.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I