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"Is peace an emergent property?"
Since I'm now an expert on peace, having been volunteering in the field for five whole months, and I'm also an expert on emergence from having read one pop-science book about it, I will answer this question!
First, to define terms:
Emergence is what happens when many component members of a system each follow a basic set of simple rules, and the resulting system develops higher level order, or macro-organization.
Example: Ants. No individual ant knows how big the colony is, or how much food the colony needs, or how many marauding ants there are from another colony that need to be fended off. Yet ant colonies solve all these problems through a simple system of pheremonal communication. Each ant knows how to send and respond to the same ~10 basic signals, and if enough of them do this, the whole colony develops its own emergent identity. The above paragraph is basically a chapter summary from the book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, by Steven Berlin Johnson. Read it, it is amazing.
Peace is a general state of well-being that requires having basic needs fulfilled on individual, community and societal bases. It is the absence of conflict. But more than that, it is an equilibrium of power, an appropriate level of equality and mutual respect among participants.
Is peace an emergent property?
Peace and its opposites occur at many levels of interaction: within an individual person, between multiple people, families and towns, within nations and between nations. At the largest scale, it is hard to show that peace is emergent. Arguably, a certain set of rules, followed by all nations, could lead to world peace... but it hasn't happened yet.
At a community level, though, peace is promoted (or not) through the actions of many individuals. If the people in a town all know that the only way to gain the respect of your peers is to be respectful toward them in return, and if people assume that respect is desirable, they will behave accordingly. Mutual respect will arise. The basic rules (A. Respect begets respect between any two people and B. Respect is desirable) will lead to the emergent phenomenon of a generally mutually respectful community.
The same formula can be applied to all basic tenets of peace (equality, absence of conflict, power equilibrium etc.)
Peace is an emergent property.
So why doesn't peace actually emerge in many places?
People don't all follow the same rules. Different cultures don't have the same ideas about what respect is, or what peace is, or who needs to respect whom. Individual humans are far less interchangeable than individual ants.
Some people argue that the human brain itself is an emergent system. Individual neurons have a relatively simple language of neurotransmitters that they use to communicate to each other and to the rest of the body. Through repetitions of these interactions, neural networks are formed, and the phenomenon that emerges is human intelligence and personality. So when emergent behavior occurs in human societies (which it does, all the time), what is actually happening is that a bunch of emergent systems with their own level of higher order are interacting to produce yet another even higher level of macro-organization.
That's pretty complicated, and prone to mutation, which is why the world isn't perfect, so there.
But seriously....
It is possible to build systems with relatively predictable and desirable emergent properties. Every piece of social software on the Internet relies on the idea of emergence. It is also possible to manipulate human systems outside of technology, so that the phenomena that emerge are desirable. That's what the Peace Promotion Project that I work for nowadays is trying to do. The PPP provides training to youth group members in subjects like conflict resolution, good governance and collaborative leadership. The youth group members, now called Peer Educators, agree that they will host events (theatrical productions, social events &c.) to share the knowledge they've gained in training with their peers. The hope is that communities will benefit by having generally peace-promoting info propagated through them via social channels.
Clearly, this post contains highly simplified descriptions about both the concept of emergence, and about how peace happens. But whaddaya want, I'm a volunteer ;-)
Want to talk about peace as an emergent property more? Email or comment, I want to discuss!
Peace.
appended: My uncle made an excellent point. "Absence of conflict" is not necessarily required for peace, as I implied in this post. Absence of conflict is impossible and undesirable. Peaceful ways of addressing conflict are more realistic and desirable pursuits.
Chase:
ReplyDeleteIn my era this would have been considered fodder for a Masters Thesis in something or other. I bet it still is if someone wants it to be. I'm not saying it is desirable, just possible.