Interview with Douglass Carmichael

Welcome to our interview with Dr Douglass Carmichael, consultant, psychotherapist, teacher, speaker, and writer. Douglass has a background in physics and psychoanalysis, and has combined an interest in technology, the humanities, and social issues. He works as psychotherapist, teacher, executive coach and consultant on strategic organization, scenarios, and the implications of informatics for organizational strategy and structure. He is active in the design of Internet spaces for the infrastructure to support virtual teams.

To set the stage, Douglass has been invited to discuss the subject of history with us, not in a static or general sense, but rather with an eye toward increasing our powers of discrimination in order to better interpret history as an ongoing, dynamic interaction with the present. So, welcome Doug, we are pleased to have you with us and look forward to an engaging interview.

As the editor of the ILF Digest I’ll presume the privilege to open the interview by asking:

Doug, is social history and the social present structurally similar to individual history and the individual present? Can we make the same kinds of behavior predictions for society based on the past that we can for the individual based on his or her past? Are we looking at dynamics that are roughly similar or very different?

Your question, for me, relies too heavily on two words, "prediction" and "similar". Prediction is too strong, and similarity too weak. We are not dealing with a science of strictly repeatable events. people are born and die, as do societies. But since most of life, the important parts, are in between, and that is what we want to understand, the relatively mechanical repeatable birth and death don't tell us enough.

But then it gets interesting. Erikson had the eight stages of life, and I think they hold up quite well, a repeatable story with interesting variations. Spengler said that all empires must turn authoritarian because any sign of weakness and they will be torn apart (arbitraged) from within and without. Seems right. These are stories with structure that comes with the territory. But the story can always be improved, which means events are more similar and more predictable. But never, individual or society, completely similar (identical) nor completely predictable (mechanical). That is why individuals and history are so interesting, as well as always crying out for more understanding.

As a method, individual lives and social histories, are stories, and we look for deeper resonance as we tell them, always trying to improve, never getting it completely "right", which is impossible since what is most salient now might have been a butterfly wing in the not too distant past.

Telling scenarios - alternative future possibilities - helps get us in tune with potential so that, when interesting things happen, we say ah ha rather than go to sleep.

For example, I am impressed with how much people think politics and economics are cyclical, the stock market being the most obvious pale where people believe that what goes down must come up. The long term trends are anything but cyclical, yet the very long term returns again to cyclical, repeatable birth and death stories.

Now what counts is, who we are, how we go this way, and what we should do next?

So, method. How to start? in psychoanalysis as I learned it, one simply begins the story and watches for emerging anxiety, and takes the time to explore why.

In politics, getting the frame is important. Are we still in the period of the third wave, agriculture, industrial and information: or in the period of tribes leading through property to empire? (These two are really different, one focus is on tech, the other on power). Or more cultural, in a West over-determined by religious categories after the failure of the Roman state?

Or maybe we start with technology - why did a common good such as the technologies of clothing, cooking, house building, weapons - become a mere mechanism of wealth transfer as it is with so much technology today? This inclines us to look at the relation of tech to the rise of the nation state, and, related, the rise of the corporations (impossible concept, the fake legal body of the "corporation" without the previous categories of the people in Christ and later the state in the body of the King?)

So this was the method question....

I like what I think Nietzsche said, "history is not predictable, but it is the menu for the future". I like this scenario approach better than the standard "He who does not understand history is destined to repeat it." Was that Santayana?

Interviewer
Whether we look at social or individual history it’s difficult to ferret out which particular aspects of that history are key to understanding the present. With respect to social history are there any broad general guidelines to making such a determination? Can we, or should we look at historical events as singularities or do we need to track the pattern?

Douglass Carmichael
The easy response is that what is left out is the why, why we care, why do want to investigate at all? the "should" and the "need" must be related to the answers to those kinds of questions.

Kip, I think the 'ferret out" model implies that there are small tasty morsels that can give great confidence, when found, in understanding the future. The problem is much more severe. And Interesting, however frustrating it might seem.

Take the issue of conservative vs progressives in the US today. Note that the Republicans have been trying to change things (get rid of the New Deal and its institutions) whereas the Democrats are trying to preserve the Roosevelt - Kennedy - Clinton traditions. The key is to take what is conventional wisdom and ask - does this still hold? Not quite ferret strength.

One small piece of great significance was my realizing that the early colonials to America, came because of religious persecution and modernization. They wanted more control and less change. The next generation, that of the founding fathers, came for opportunity and economics. These two never really melded, and the undigested difference is with us today. In a way, that is a huge deal, yet could be seen as a small detail. Which is it?

The problem is made more complicated because history is not homogeneous. If the top of a society wants to go in one direction, the next level down will be in part seeking alignment and in part looking for an alternative direction. If we imagine a society say five levels deep, the bottom layers are hardly aligned with the top, but doing their own thing. What is the "history" of?

What of Darwin, Toynbee, Jarred Diamond? "After working for many years Darwin was finally able to discover in nature the English social class dynamic."

History, concerned with culture, economics, war, power and technology, sets the stage for the individual or small group responding to conditions from the point of view of loves, alignments, belief about what creates satisfaction. The historical and individual are highly enmeshed, but not easily analyzable. The circus acrobat walking on top of a great ball… the path the ball takes? Predictable? Only in that the acrobat will not take it past the edge of the agreed upon space. The physics is well understood, but the resultant path is not derivable. The path doesn't violate physics, it just can't be derived.

The reason history is so hard is that it is determined both by large events - constant cycle of seasons, geography and climate, population size - and the fact that human character (our basic emotional/action approach to the world) changes very slowly. Whereas small events - who falls in love with whom, who hires whom, who gets published, have huge effects rather quickly. Remember that large scale events, about which we can be fairly smart, are not so important to people actually in the middle of their lives trying things out now.

Let's agree that "history" requires constant dialog, reading, experience, exposure - and hard thinking.

Take the war in Iraq. Why are we there? Ok, now of that answer, ask again, why? And of that again, why? Very few people have asked a three level "why question. It s very hard work. Most people assume that having an opinion is "thinking." No analysis whatsoever. If you think we should get out of Iraq, then comes the hard question, who will fill the vacuum? China and India and Russia? Etc….

History makes progress by comparing stories and integrating new discoveries. It is a highly dialogical story telling activity. We humans are good at it, but don't practice enough. I wish we lived in a society where every person felt a personal responsibility to have a story -one they are willing to modify - about where we are and how we got here, and what we should do. Then we could have really good conversations.

Interviewer
Which history is most likely to be useful? Should we as descendants of "Western Civilization" focus primarily on that history or should we include the history of other civilizations such as China and India? This seems to me to be of particular concern because, as Americans, we don't share much of a 'common history'. Quite a lot of what goes on in America is the result of various cultural histories that have to interact with each other. How, then, do we determine what to look at?

Douglass Carmichael
Well, first you need to declare some interest, some reason to want to know what others might do.

If the question is, would AL Gore make a better candidate than Hillary, the focus can at least start fairly narrowly.

But even here the question broadens out if what is at stake is the future of the US as a social invention (as in Gary Wills' great book, Inventing America.), as an economy under stress, as an empire that overreached. The "we" might be advised to look at the conditions under which the country was invented, what it was invented for, and how it has come along towards meeting the goals of that invention. And of course the issue is, what is good to do now? That means looking at the histories of relevant dance partners. Including the realization that the nation state idea if fairly new and is itself an instrument of control, with a developmental logic.

So we might look at Iran, the ancient Persia, and realize that the battle of Salamis still is held as defeat in the Persian heart. Rereading Aeschylus's The Persians might help, along with histories of the Ottoman empire and the Arab world and to understand why Mohammed was so successful, and why the west had its crusades. Early Christianity was successful among the down trodden of the ME. When Constantine co-opted Christianity as the new ideology of a failed Rome, those in the ME were once again marginalized. Ever since, Islam has appealed to those without hope, feeling lack of justice, and contempt, towards them. Since this is still a rapidly growing group at the margins of "globalization" we can expect more Islamic converts.

China is the boldest and with a deep culture. The Tao says a great empire must be like the ocean: let the rivers come to it. If it goes to the rivers, chaos ensues. We could learn from that, and from people who think that way.

George Bush is playing at best checkers and at worst solitaire in a game of chess masters from traditional civilizations.

India by contrast is much more fragmented, polytheistic in the extreme, and neither so much a target nor a threat (except to the extent that it is "westernized" and develops a state apparatus and private ambitions around money. Most educated Indians are afraid of the nuclear move there, but the ambitious love it.)

So, you need some urgency to start the inquiry, then what history is relevant emerges. Including recognizing that history has a history, primarily in the west, and is not a normal framework of human thinking.

I highly recommend the article in the may 22 New Yorker (not on line) about Patric Fermor, and his presence in Greece in the 20th century. Great history.

Interviewer
More than 30 years ago Alvin Toffler, in his book, Future Shock referred to the phenomenon as a personal perception of "too much change in too short a period of time." When coupled with the incredible proliferation of information now available, is history as useful now as it was 300 years ago? Are we simply too overwhelmed with the immediacy of the present to be able to rely on history?

Douglass Carmichael
Being overwhelmed is itself an event in history. How did it come about? What interaction with tech, human nature, social organization, core beliefs? Much can be said about all these.

Too much change in a short time? From Hamlet to Milton's early work is thirty years. Nothing we are going through is that fast.

I would be very skeptical of using the word "information". Is Hamlet "information?" Is Gore's skit on Saturday night live "information?"

Interviewer
Historically there seems to be a cycle of expansion, and contraction, of growth and decay throughout all parts of a society. Joseph Tainter, writing in "The Collapse of Complex Societies" says it is critical that we be able to identify where we are in the cycle. What is the standard against which we measure? Is it found in historical similarities of a particular society simply because it is similar or does it need to be measured against a broader scope? There is, for example, no history of a country that closely matches the USA.

Douglass Carmichael
Tainter proposes research. If we look at the costs of patents - increasing exponentially, the cost of medical research, increasing exponentially. the cost of national security, energy... the effect is cumulative across these efforts. he doesn't say for sure, but that the available data suggests trouble, and we should look for more data. He talks about the fudge factors that may help us, technology, management culture, and the complexities of finance. Again, he says, lets investigate.

Seems to me good advice.

For a society the "cycle" is only going to last one up and one down. Here is an interesting view: that the "cycles of reform" in us politics swing through a range that is never sufficient to actually deal with our major problems: the rich getting richer for example. Hence, politics may not yield up a solution to prevent system breakdown. Discouraging, and motivating.

This is what the founding fathers wanted: stability through thwarting change, but most of them never expected the country to last more than a hundred years. Most were skeptical about the future of the country, and most wanted empire in the future, following Hamilton. And even the rural republican Jefferson is the one who did the Louisiana purchase.

Why do you say no history closely matches the USA? For example, all great empires collapse when ownership moves in to hands so narrow that the bulk of the people walk out and develop alternative economies, refuse to pay taxes, ignore the ever weaker center. Are we not on track?

Interviewer
Is the primary value of history to help us to understand the present better, or is it to empower us to better predict the future? Understanding the present presumes a certain compassion on the part of the beholder, while predicting the future suggests a need to control. Is there a balance between those which should serve as a guide to interpreting history?

Douglass Carmichael
That is a very intriguing question. Can I imagine the present without imagining the future? I remember in the early days of WBSI we had the idea of the "rolling present", the amount of time in a conference when responses felt "alive", not stale. It was maybe a day or two. I think in the larger frame it is the same. the present is never a knife edge clock moment, but a flow, one feels it, and looking out to see where one is in the current, separated from the past, the "present" or the future, is impossible.

But that leaves us with the motive question: to understand or to control? Piaget wrote an elegant little book, "To Understand is to Invent." Maybe again, they don't separate easily, or purposefully. Even understanding alone implies doing so to, what, get out of the way? Turn perceptions into art? To just appreciate? But then the art, the perception, alters the way we interact with the surrounding scene of our life. Trying to control without understanding leads to Bushco.

Now compassion, isn't that the key to good action? (control?) Confucius uses the story of the man seeing a child teetering on the edge of a well. Compassion is so important to action.

What you have led me to in this interview is a renewed understanding of the inseparability of stuff from stuff in the flow. We can better hold on to the multiplicity of organic events and realize that dicing things up does not yield as interesting and fruitful a bunch of entities.

Interviewer
Making decisions based on history we are inexorably tempted to adhere to tradition. Making decisions that are simply in defiance of history we are easily seduced into terrible mistakes of judgement. What does history itself teach us about this?

Douglass Carmichael
History teaches us to avoid extremes made by dichotomies ("don't get caught on the horns of a dilemma").

Why does looking at history make us want to hold on to the past? Quite the contrary, it motivates us to want to avoid the mistakes and do better. Take this quote I read this morning..

"We will avoid another century of conflict only if we understand the forces that caused the last one - the dark forces that conjure up ethnic conflict and imperial rivalry out of economic crisis, and in doing so negate our common humanity. They are forces that stir within us still."

see the review at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/05/21/svniall21.xml

Remember in "The Leopard" (Lampedusa book and movie), The old sicilian says "Things will have to change in order to remain the same."

Ah the beauty, the mystery, the urgency...

Balance, a certain humility. Rabelais taught us (sic) that humanism means man at the center, but not in control, humor but with responsibility.

Richard Farson
Doug, avoiding extremes is really difficult for me as I look at the current state of affairs. It seems my positions on almost every issue are extreme. I would do away with big prisons entirely, and return all convicts to rehabilitation, and almost every convict except perhaps 10% to a community program of rehab. I would do away with almost every security measure I know about with respect to the war on terror. I would go to a single payer health system, emphasizing prevention. I would do away with all evaluation in education, and encourage lots of risk taking and failure. I would get out of Iraq. Etc., etc.

Is your argument that such measures simply cannot be inacted? Or that we should, indeed, be more centrist in our decisions?

Douglass Carmichael
I’m not talking so much about extremes as actions, but as categories of analysis. But the analysis does carry forward into action. For example "all prisoners" includes the criminally insane. I'd want to think that through. Then I probably come to the same ten percent you do. So you are willing to admit mixed or vaguely bounded categories. That is all I ask. I like "almost" "emphasize" "encourage". Get out of Iraq but the details count. I would also argue for rethinking the presidency, a congress where we started with 60,000 per congressman and it is now ten times that number of people each congressperson represents, I would do away with open ended corporate chartering, plea bargaining, entrapment, and maybe even banks as we know them. Not centrist in the Normal sense but I think appealing.

Interviewer
Doug, the week has gone by too quickly. I would like to have more time to explore several of the points you raised, but I know you're busy. My sincere thanks for your participation.

Douglass Carmichael
Very welcome. I was pushed to learn.