Have you heard?
A prospective AP course on African-American studies tried to feature a controversial adjective whose mere use helped spark a conspicuously American cultural conflagration:
The word? Systemic.
As one outlet reported, the extreme political sensitivity to this word reflects “the extraordinary political friction that often shadows efforts in the nation’s schools to teach about history, culture and race.”
The problem is, there may be no more appropriate one-word description for not just American history, but all of life on earth.
“We are all ecosystems,” writes the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, “composed of -- and decomposed by -- an ecology of microbes, the significance of which is only now coming to light. Symbiosis is a ubiquitous feature of life, one in which our selves emerge from a complex tangle of relationships only now becoming known.”
Are you listening, Tucker Carlson?
Probably not. But for those who are listening, the question is not whether things are systemic or not, but how we can get better at impacting the systems that literally surround (and include) us?
To that end, since then start of the year I’ve shared three in a series of seven articles that are designed to answer that question -- based on the seven design principles of living systems.
The first principle is IDENTITY. The second is INFORMATION. The third is RELATIONSHIPS. And this week, it’s EMERGENCE -- the very essence of a living system, and how that system changes (because it will change) in order to become something new.
Principle Four: Emergence (See the Systems)
THE CHALLENGE
Your fourth challenge is to try and identify all the different systems that are at least partially dependent on you for survival. Write them down, look at them, consider them. Of the ones you’ve listed, which would you describe as high-functioning? Which are actively dysfunctional? And in either case, what are the primary characteristics that make each system so, and what is it that you contribute to make each system particularly (dys)functional?
THE CONTEXT
It has always been in our nature to gravitate toward the well-worn path.
How, then, do we summon the courage to choose the road we can only make by walking?
That is no small task, since part of the reason homo sapiens have made it this far is because we’ve learned how to stay safe.
As neuroscientist Beau Lotto puts it, “the brain does not search to live, but to not die.” And part of what keeps us from dying is making the world predictable.
Stay the course.
Be seen and not heard.
Go for what you know.
The state of the world, however, demands we pursue a different path from here — one which requires upending many of our most timeworn habits and assumptions along the way.
In short, we must learn to think -- and act -- emergently.
Emergence is not a word many of us hear or use often, yet it is the dynamic origin of development, learning and evolution, and we see evidence of its existence in everything from our cells to our cities.
Better yet, we have all experienced the uplifting feeling of emergence throughout our lives -- the moment of epiphany, the thrill of spontaneity, the sense of connection we feel between mood and place -- just as we have experienced its capacity for devastation, from riots and revolutions to natural disasters.
In either case, the conditions for emergence flow from the reciprocal relationship that exists between any living form and its environment.
A single ant, following the chemical trail of its neighbors to carve out a vital, completely decentralized role in a teeming colony.
An adaptive software system, seeking patterns in individual behavior that shape which banner ad you see.
Or a celebrity’s use of a decade-old phrase in a social media post that sets off a global reckoning with sexual violence against women.
As Steven Johnson writes in his book on the subject, the capacity for emergent systems to learn and grow “derives from their adherence to low-level rules. . . Emergent behaviors are all about living within the boundaries defined by rules, but also using that space to create something greater than the sum of its parts.”
In that sense, the central features of emergent systems outline a set of rules from the natural world that are both timeless and timely:
Give and receive feedback.
Pay attention to your closest neighbors.
Seek order, not control.
And follow the meaning.
It’s the songline of life itself -- the deeply resonant story that flows through all living systems, including our own. And at a moment in history when the promise and peril of artificial intelligence is becoming more than just a sci-fi script, our ability to shift to a more emergent way of thinking may just be the difference between survival and extinction.
As Johnson puts it, “our ability to capture the power of emergence will be closer to the revolution unleashed when we figured out how to distribute electricity a century ago. Almost every region of our cultural life was transformed by the power grid; the power of self-organization -- coupled with the connective technology of the Internet -- will usher in a revolution every bit as significant.”
Indeed, this is the nature of open, living systems whether they’re multicellular or multicultural: to develop and evolve, regardless of how much we might want things to stay the same.
Life constantly reaches out into novelty.
The whole is always more than the sum of its parts.
And the extent to which we develop the ability to become more adaptive and relational will directly impact our capacity to embody the more just and liberated world(s) we long to co-create.
Like the natural systems that surround us, the human systems we inhabit are in a state of continuous dynamic balance. These systems are not done to us -- we are the ones who create and perpetuate them, despite our protestations of innocence.
As the cognitive theorist David Bohm put it, “Thought makes the world and then says, ‘I didn’t do it.’”
And so we cannot underestimate our individual and collective power to consciously create the conditions that make our system’s transformation in the direction we desire more likely.
It is literally that simple -- and that complicated.
Change in living systems occurs from the inside out. And everything alive is free to choose.
Applying these principles to the way we organize ourselves will change the way we feel and act. It may even change the way we dream.
“My dream is a movement with such deep trust that we move as a murmuration,” says author and activist adrienne maree brown. “The way groups of starlings billow, dive, spin, and dance collectively through the air. Each creature tuned in to its neighbors. There is a right relationship, a right distance between them -- too close and they crash, too far away and they can’t feel the micro-adaptations of the other bodies. Each creature is shifting direction, speed and proximity based on the information of the other creatures’ bodies.
“Imagine our movements cultivating this type of trust and depth with each other, having strategic flocking in our playbooks.”
We can imagine -- if we are willing to take the road less traveled. But first we must be courageous enough to use the word -- systemic (there! I said it!).
We must confront what it reveals to us about the true nature of our common public world.
And we must start to live in right-relationship with all other living things.
There is, in the end, no other (sustainable) way to be.