An emergent phenomenon in a complex system is a large scale, group behavior that cannot be predicted by an understanding of workings of the individual components of the system. There’s a word used to describe the condition under which such phenomena emerge–synergy–and a description: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Quite a few of the things that are absolutely the most important to us are emergent phenomena: life, consciousness, history, the Market (Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand), and the workings of a free and democratic society are all emergent phenomena and, as such, are highly distasteful to those who look for a simple, tidy, elegant, and orderly universe. And that group, in turn, includes a truly remarkable group of unlikely allies including both Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, Marxists, and bureaucrats of every religion, philosophy, and political party.
In his recent post Inelegance, Steven Den Beste re-visits a subject he’s touched on before: the idea that the conflict we’re involved in is a three-way conflict.
“One of the three sides is identified mostly with radical Muslims, who are engaged in Jihad to try to fulfill a perceived religious mandate to dominate the world. But some who have been part of that side have had other motivations, such as Saddam’s pan-Arabism (which was essentially agnostic). Of the three, this force is also the most well organized and structured, and the only one which exists because of a deliberate campaign.
At one point I referred to this side as “Arab Traditionalism”, but that was never a very satisfactory label. Some have called it “Islamofascism”, but these days the term I’m most comfortable with (which is to say, not very) is “Islamism”. One of the reasons I’m uncomfortable even with that label is that Islamism is not congruent to Islam. There are millions of Muslims who are not part of it. There are many Muslims who are strong supporters of one of the other sides, and some of those who do support it are not devout Muslims. Even so, of the three sides this one is easiest to perceive and characterize; they’re all cloudy and indistinct, but this is the least indistinct.
Of the three sides, Islamism as a political force appeared the most recently, within the last 150 years.
The other two sides are derived from Western philosophical roots. For them I’ve had to invent my own names: “p-idealism” and “empiricism”.”
Read the whole thing.
As in so much else I think that Den Beste is really onto something here but, perhaps, not in the way he thinks.
Den Beste’s “Islamists” and “p-idealists” share a common belief: that a successful society can be built exclusively on the basis of a rule book, an ennumerable set of rules. For “Islamists” this rule book is the Qu’ran. For fundamentalist Christians it’s the Bible. For Marxists the book may be the works of Karl Marx and Lenin or Mao Tse Tung. Or, apparently, for bureaucrats of the European Union, the new EU constitution.
However, I’d like to suggest to Steve that his “empiricists” rely on emergent phenomena. There is no rule book. The rule book is being written continuously by the workings of the system itself. Since emergent phenomena are not predictable from knowledge of the workings of the individual components, it takes an enormous amount of faith to rely on things like the Market and democracy as the basis of a society.
And that position may be the most mystical of all.
