Systems
So, I received an email response to my April 27th post, an email voicing doubt that a change in one fundamental variable like the concentration of marriages in the US can account for all the disturbances now roiling the fluid inside the US melting pot:
“You have an interesting take on a topical and consequential issue, but given the complexity of the social, psychological, cultural, ethnic, religious, political, environmental and economic issues at play in our country I'm not convinced that support for marriage would be much of a panacea.”
That was precisely the point of my April 27th posting, however. I was hypothesizing that the single factor of the 1960s breakdown in the formation, and longevity of marriages in the US is, in fact, responsible for all that disturbed social, psychological, cultural, ethnic, religious, political, environmental and economic complexity that now characterizes the US. (Who bothers to pay attention to such “issues” complexity if it isn’t already causing problems?) I described the micro-scale maturation mechanism that psychology says takes place at the married couple level in human societies, and then indicated how disturbance in the operation of this basic mechanism could ramify out into a society at large to account for current, general unease of American human life.
For those who didn’t recognize the sort of scientific thing that was being discussed in the April 27th posting, the introductory material about how homo sapiens uniquely operates to combine natural capital with cultural capital (“nature x nurture”) was a description of a system. In systems a disturbance of any one of its parts causes disequilibrium and changes everywhere else in the system. Although the general idea has been around for thousands of years in the minds of homo sapiens, systems theory is a big deal in modern day science (including even in the oft-maligned science of economics). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory for an overview of the idea, but keep in mind that most sciences arrived at this general viewpoint only after a long period of independently working out the micro-scale mechanisms and processes in their field of study. Eventually it became apparent that everything being studied by the individual sciences was a part of a number of nested systems (https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319275482) — just like the marriage formed by a human couple is a nested system within a nation and the human species.[1]
Want to see some much older old human writing that indicates a systems perspective really isn’t that modern a development at all? This passage by Cheng Yi, a 11th century Song Dynasty governmental theoretician, shows homo sapiens was savvy about such things (and even embodied ‘progressive’ tendencies!) long before Wikipeda raised its digital head:[2]
“When leaders follow the pattern [model] indicated by the meaning of the gelded boar, they realize that the evils in the world cannot be repressed by force. So they watch for the opportunity to get a grip on the mainspring and dam the source. Thus evils will stop of themselves, without the use of severe punishments and laws.”
[1] For a concisely written, short narrative history of this sort of progression to a useful systems model in one very important modern day science, take a look at Enzymes: A Very Short Introduction, by Paul Engel (2020): Oxford Press.
[2] Page 81, 6th paragraph, Cheng Yi, 11th century, The Tao of Organization, 1988 Thomas Cleary translation: Shambhala Press, Boston.