One student I know has expressed some disappointment that liberal arts education isn’t more unstructured, about diving into an interesting question or problem and following wherever that leads, without the constraints of majors and requirements. I’ve always been sympathetic to that complaint, hence my long history of grappling with the advantages and disadvantages of generalism as I understand that term.
One of the best experiences I’ve had as a professional academic in that sense was a period of time when I and some colleagues were travelling fairly often up to Bryn Mawr College to be part of an interdisciplinary group of faculty who were interested in complex and self-organizing systems, emergence and network analysis. Most of the faculty involved were in STEM disciplines or in the quantitative social sciences, but there were a few other humanists like me. What I especially loved about the group was first that no one was there because they had to be or because they were laying territorial claim to the subject matter. Second, and following on that, was that at the start the general method of operating was simply to identify important nodes of scholarly work on the overall subject and then to pick someone from the group to go read up on what was going on in that branch of inquiry and report back to the rest of us—what were the major ongoing research projects, what were some of the interesting conclusions reached so far, what were some of the key terms or ideas in that branch of work.
One of those times I was asked to look at whether people involved in responses to disasters and emergencies had thought at all about emergence, complex systems theories or networks in redesigning responses and understanding disasters. E.g., were there ways to distribute resources to affected areas that mimicked the packet-switching design of data transmission over computer networks (which was after all the original rationale of those designs, to continue transmission of data after a nuclear attack via some form of distributed communications network). One thing that really grabbed me back then (this was some time ago) were efforts to understand climate change in terms of emergence, to go beyond thinking about the obvious extrapolations to ask how thousands of simultaneous changes might create some new complex human-environmental relationships. This had the problem with a lot of attempts to apply emergence predictively: you can’t do it via the conventional style of isolating a few major variables and trying to model or look at them separately, and you can’t even approach it as a cumulation of thousands of variables in a holistic model where each is modeled separately. It’s the simultaneous interaction of those thousands of variables that could produce the core structures of some new complex equilibrium in time.
Still, the one thing that thinking this way can force you consider is to imagine that the worst problems might not be the most obvious ones. The New York Times story today on mold in flooded structures after Hurricane Ian is a good example of where that thinking might lead you.
More water in structures more often from flooding.
More humidity in warm wet environments.
Warming conditions where mold species from the tropics move north and south out of the tropics into built environments where the building materials may be more vulnerable to them.
Large populations of people living more frequently within moldy, fungal environments for longer periods of time, encouraging the possibility of adaptation by some molds to growth on or in human bodies or the bodies of other organisms. Plus some flood waters in more frequent storms or other flooding events having more sewage and thus more opportunities for novel kinds of human pathogenicity involving fungi.
Agriculturally-relevant fungal infections spreading in part because of flood waters (with various contaminants in the waters) sitting in planted fields for longer periods of time.
Mold, fungus and microorganisms from well below topsoil depths intermingling into flood waters or infiltrating basements due to erosion or earth movements resulting from more frequent floods or heavy rains and producing novel outcomes as a result.
Long-term effects from even modest increases in mold exposure, which are not well-studied, as the NYT story notes.
Then realize that our overall knowledge of fungal pathogenicity in humans and animals is not all that great right now, despite it being a significant public health issue already.
Start adding more simultaneous variables.
Global supply chains interacting with housing construction, in particular the demanding material requirements involved in repairing a structure that has been severely damaged by floodwaters and is vulnerable to mold.
At least some fungal infections are only dangerous in opportunistic contexts: e.g., a person who is immunocompromised, has an open wound, etc.; but these are all conditions that are either more prevalent in flooding situations (with some of the most vulnerable populations the least able or least willing to evacuate) or develop as a result of dangerous storms and heavy rain events.
Changing distributions of other endemic diseases that are not mold or fungus related as a result of climate change, producing new overall health vulnerabilities.
Fungal and mold infections affecting landscaping around homes, most particularly trees, which affect trees most when they’re stressed by environmental changes. At the least, that probably increases the risk of limbs or whole trees falling in storms and causing damage.
You can keep going with that kind of inventory for a long time, but the whole point to thinking through emergence conceptually is to grapple with the thought that it is the many simultaneous interactions of all these things at once that might be important and that is incredibly hard to predict or plan for. It could mean a large number of communities that become incredibly difficult to live in whose inhabitants haven’t seen themselves as vulnerable to climate change. It could mean a huge metropolitan area being nearly impossible to rebuild. It could mean the need to dramatically change construction techniques or materials in a very short time. It could be a novel pandemic or widespread health crisis where we have very poor therapeutic prospects which then intensifies other health issues as a result. It could mean that we stop having the capacity to truly destroy huge amounts of mold-contaminated property and we end up with massive dumpsites that are environmental dangers in their own right.
It could mean all those things and many things that I can’t even imagine, maybe that people who specialize in all or any of those issues can’t imagine. In fact, almost certainly that they can’t imagine. Because while all those issues are potentially interacting, there’s all the other pressures from all the other sudden changes unfolding in global environments happening simultaneously.
If you think about how specialized our construction industries are in terms of building particular structures in particular places—most houses I’ve been in around the mid-Atlantic have basements, most houses in Texas don’t—you have to acknowledge that most of that knowledge and most of the techniques following from them took decades of experience to develop. Despite the massive scale of our health care institutions, there are many issues and ailments that we don’t invest in or don’t understand, even after decades of familiarity. Despite our understanding of what happens in floods, we’re not experienced with what happens when floods happen often because warm air is warmer and moist air is carrying more water. The richest countries on the planet with the most adaptive and responsive economies aren’t ready for the scale and speed of the changes we’re already experiencing and that’s just thinking additively, one variable at a time. Think about what might emerge out of all those interactions and it’s certain that we aren’t ready and really could not become ready. Which might be the real meaning of emergence: that some resulting new complex system shaping human habitation within global environments will involve human beings being resigned to conditions, risks and forms of diminishment and suffering that we today believe are unacceptable.
Image credit: Photo by Jonas Denil on Unsplash
In your work on disasters and emergence, did you come across any of the work in (industrial) safety that's variously referred to as the New View of Safety, or Safety II, or Safety Differently? This would be people like Todd Conklin, Sidney Dekker, Erik Hollnagel. At first glance, it seems at least adjacent. I've been listening to Conklin for a while now--he frequently talks of the difference between a complicated and a complex system, about non-linearity, and how context drives behavior. As far as I know, they're not trying to actually model complex systems and there is sometimes a certain superficiality to the way they talk about ideas from other fields, but they are figuring out in actual practice how to deal with systems that are complex.
Have you read Michelle Murphy’s Sick Building Syndrome? It’s not dealing with the problem of emergence but uncertainty-the process by which threats like chemical toxins get sedimented in the built environment makes them more difficult to perceive and prove. Not dealing with temporality but her use of assemblage theory might be interesting to think with. She assumes a lot of knowledge on part of reader-she breezes through mid century design very quickly and my students were appalled when I made them Google it “why is this building on stilts?!?!” Not sure if I would teach again but I’m enjoying reading it.