Social Personality
67
Luhmann is suggesting that decision makers will often reproduce past strategies
simply to seek reassurance that these have been and will continue to be successful.
Equipped with evidence that their techniques actually work, and that their theoretical
constructions provide a good grasp of reality, they may then feel more confident
of their abilities and more deserving of continued trust. More fully, however, his
argument seems to echo Carl Schmitt’s (1991) critique of political romanticism, which
argued that political decision-makers are often more captivated by their subjective
inner worlds than by the objective consequences of their decisions. For Schmitt,
this was because our political thought processes are bound up with our ‘romantic
productivity’; decision-makers cannot not fully engage with reality because their
decisions provide ‘occasions for poetry’. This sets us
thinking of the ego defences
and fantasies of politicians – perhaps those with narcissistic qualities in particular.
It reminds us, just as political lampooners and satirists so often do, that politicians
may subliminally model their political careers on simple and very personal dramatic
themes such as recognition, growth, revenge, rivalry, ordeal, justice, and the like,
which can easily slant how they interpret and learn from past decisions.
From these arguments we may conclude that policy processes might easily
become retrospective and bound up with the psychic needs and biases of decision-
makers, which in turn will impede those processes of piecemeal social engineering
by trial-and-error learning advocated by Popper. The
following section will build
upon this argument by showing that cultural pessimist treatments of increasing
social complexity provide grounds for believing that the sphere of applicability for
trial-and-error learning may be
narrowing. More fully, increasing social complexity
will be regarded as a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it will be argued that it
has probably aided the emergence of democratic character during the course of the
twentieth century. On the other hand, it will be viewed
as having reduced prospects
for political prediction and intervention for reasons relating both to the complex
and shifting natures of social environments themselves and, just as importantly,
to the changing psychological constitutions of decision makers. This chapter will
then conclude that as political decision-making becomes a more uncertain business
under conditions of increasing social complexity, the potential role for the social
personalities of political parties in contributing general strategies for the management
of uncertainty can only grow.
3.6 Social
Complexity
Stewart and Cohen (1997) have used Popper’s distinction between worlds 2 and
3 to argue for a complicit co-evolution of mind and culture over the course of
generations:
We see the accumulating knowledge of generations of intelligent
beings as a thing or
process with its own characteristic structure and behaviour:
extelligence. As a result,
extelligence has become greater, more permanent, and far more capable than any
individual intelligence (Stewart and Cohen 1997: x).
The parallel between extelligence and world 3 continues as follows:
Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
68
All the extelligence in the world is useless if you lack the intelligence to use it; on the other
hand, without extelligence we humans would still be back in the caves, rather literally
reinventing the wheel in each generation. We are what we
are because of a remarkable
complicity between intelligence and extelligence. Intelligence invents but cannot reliably
and accessibly remember what it has invented; extelligence can remember but (on the
whole) not invent. Extelligence deals in information; intelligence in understanding
(Stewart and Cohen 1997, 244).
Popper’s argument for an evolution of knowledge might strengthen in view of
Stewart and Cohen’s claim that extelligence is likely to evolve at ever faster rates
as its expansion becomes driven by an increasingly effective human capacity for
rational scrutiny. This argument hinges upon the operation of a fortuitous cycle or
‘feedback loop’ whereby levels of environmental complexity determine levels of
mental stimulation which each successive generation benefits
from during early
childhood socialisation. Intelligence thus evolves in ways which boost the human
capacity to create further environmental complexity.
7
Stewart and Cohen further argue that extelligence co-evolves with intelligence
along a historical continuum moving from ‘simplexity’ to ‘complexity’ and then on to
‘multiplexity’ which has greatly picked up pace throughout the industrialised world.
Hence they envision three corresponding minds which they contrast as follows:
The test for a simplex mind is to ask what is the most important thing in the universe. If
it answers, then it is simplex. It is focused on a single, overriding goal. A complex mind
can perceive the many intertwining strands of cause and effect that combine, within some
consistent world view, to constrain and control the unfolding of a particular selection
of events. Complexity is a state that is inaccessible to the vast proportion of the human
race, but
as the global village shrinks, more of us take a complex view. Rarer still is
the multiplex mind, which can work simultaneously with several conflicting paradigms.
It sees not just one interpretation of reality, but many, yet it sees them as a seamless
whole. Such a mind is untroubled by mere inconsistency. It is comfortable with a mutable,
adaptive, loosely coherent flux [which is better able to see] the world on its own terms
(Stewart and Cohen 1997, 289).
This ‘multiplex mind’ is only able to function as such because it has been stimulated
by early exposure to an increasingly complex multi-paradigmatic extelligence
towards acceptance of inconsistent images of the world (Stewart and Cohen 1997,
289–292). The multiplex mind is therefore
a tolerant and democratic mind, able
to delay Kruglanski’s epistemic sequence and explore competing theories for their
respective kernels of truth. Stewart and Cohen’s argument implies, then, that by
stimulating the evolution of the human mind towards a growing acceptance of
difference and diversity, increasing epistemological complexity is to be thanked, in
7 This theory of mental evolution seems quite consistent with results of a variety of
studies which have shown substantial increases (of around one standard deviation) in IQ in
developed nations over the past 50 years. Some of these studies are listed by Lynn (1990)
who argues that although the precise reasons for these changes remain unclear,
increases in
nutritional intake may play a part.