Social Science – Singular or Plural?
Social science is, at present, divided into a bunch of different disciplines, all pretending their particular branch of human behaviour can be understood quite apart from everything else. (Well, some of them *cough*economics*cough* seem to think everything else is just a variant of their own, but that’s a different story.) This is the model for academia at the moment. Economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, psychology (to an extent). Then you have historians raiding the whole lot to build their funny little narratives about the past.
I don’t think that’s workable in the long run. What’ll happen instead I have no idea … but it’ll hopefully be interesting. And it’ll hopefully be built on well-grounded and empirically defensible theories.
The other sort aren’t really worth thinking about.
Intelligence Organisations
About a year ago, I planned a sequence of blog posts on the subject of intelligence organisations. Not in the usual “that’s the CIA and that’s the NSA and that’s GCHQ and over there you have ГРУ” way. (Although, admittedly, ГРУ tends to be scary enough that people avoid mentioning it at all.) No; my plan was more ambitious: A theoretical look at the work an intelligence organisation did, the different parts such an organisation needed to function properly, and what the operational requirements were. I never did get the posts written, but I did give the matter a fair bit of thought. I viewed it as part of my wider exercise in a theory of state: Significant intelligence organisations have, historically, been closely interlinked with the State, sometimes becoming its most powerful force: Reinhard Heydrich was quite possibly the most feared man in the NSDAP’s upper ranks; Lavrenty Beria may well have been responsible for Stalin’s death. It is no secret that the Soviet Union was more or less run by the КГБ for a substantial period. The customary secrecy of such organisations usually renders them capable of doing things that other arms of the state apparatus would not dare, and lends an additional layer of glamour to the whole affair. Who wouldn’t want to live in the world inhabited by James Bond, with high action and intrigue at every step?
This is where it gets surreal. Ian Fleming, the author of the original James Bond novels, was not making it up. He was close to the centre of intelligence operations during the second world war, directed an assault unit dedicated to the physical recovery of intelligence information and participated in the planning of a (scrapped) operation to obtain Enigma codebooks. The failure to launch this operation is said to have greatly annoyed Alan Turing, a mathematician working at Bletchley Park during the war. Turing’s job, you see, was to read Enigma.
Turing has become the best-known of a number of mathematicians involved in cryptology during the second world war. Another name familiar to information theorists is Claude Shannon. Both men developed mathematical theories to quantify the amount of information contained in a message as a result of their cryptography work; Shannon’s work was published and now essentially forms the basis of modern telecommunications. But the excessive focus on these individuals is distracting. They may have done much of the thinking, but all that thinking would have been useless without a massive staff and computation engines the likes of which had never been seen before. Digital computer technology was essentially the product of WWII codebreaking, a fact that would not be acknowledged for decades afterwards. Am I far enough off track by now?
Two main points so far: First, the drama and intrigue do exist, contrary to what some people will tell you; second, they are confined to operations directorates, which rather resemble the tip of an iceberg. The vast majority of the organisation is dedicated to other tasks, and an operations directorate is really rather an optional extra. An expensive one, even. (Well, unless you’re doing operational intelligence for a military operation. It’s expensive, but not too optional.) But what’s the rest of the iceberg?
“Murky” is probably the best single word to describe it. Analysis, routine information gathering, source cultivation, presentation and archival. Drudge work, mostly, and complicated drudge work at that. Source cultivation is at the border with operations, and probably gets interesting every now and then, but on the other side of the equation you have signals intelligence, which is kind of like searching for a needle in a haystack at the bottom of the sea. Although you can use magnets (or automatic filters), non-metallic needles (or dangerous activities outside of your profile) cause problems – and can still leave you with huge amounts of material to sift through. All of this is also highly dependent on the interests of the recipient – and intelligence organisations always have recipients, even if it’s only their own secretariat. The recipients – or audience, as some intelligence organisations prefer to call them – have a set of interests that shapes the possible output of the organisation. The secretariat of the organisation may have a distinct set of interests that shifts the output within that possible range. The combination of these interests creates a structural bias, both in terms of the information sources sought and the possible interpretations of known facts chosen for presentation. These dynamics are, as far as I can see, inevitable in any intelligence organisation.
Which leads directly on to the next point. This is a surprisingly general model. The specifics of the methods used differ, and the level of secrecy afforded differs, but it can be applied to any intelligence-gathering organisation. Including the newsmedia. Including policy thinktanks. Including, often, marketing departments at large companies.
We will treat an intelligence organisation as an information processing system. From this perspective, it has an input and an output. The input is information it obtains from the environment, either through actively seeking it out or through passively receiving it from collaborating entities. This information can be either secret, semi-public or common knowledge. The output is the analysis of that information; more information, but usually either at a higher level or passed through some filtering to find out what is credible and what isn’t. The exact nature of the output is extremely dependent on the needs of the specific organisation’s recipients. In addition to the input, the output of an intelligence organisation is influenced by structural characteristics of the organisation itself. Means of financing, the editorial apparatus and the significance of an operations directorate (if it exists) are the key here. Particularly important is the fact that the operations directorate has the potential to be intertwined with other organisations and objectives, rupturing our nice clean distinction between intelligence organisation and environment.
We don’t need to treat the intelligence organisation as a black box, however. Specifically, we can distinguish analytically (though usually not in practice – think of Montesquieu’s branches of government) between a number of major components. The first step is acquisition; the component handling the input of new information. Once acquired, information is archived; this archival unit is in some important ways the core of the organisation, as all activity within the system either draws on the information store or feeds into it. Incoming information then feeds into the similar-but-not-identical procedures of validation and analysis. Validation involves attempting to verify (or debunk) the accuracy of incoming (raw) data; analysis involves making use of existing data to extrapolate meaning or further data. Both of these processes feed into publication, which then feeds back into the archival unit. Publication also serves as the output of the organisation as a whole; filtering the information to be released to the organisation’s recipients.
The operations directorate is something of a black sheep here. It is probably most reasonable to consider it receiving information and instructions from analysis and feeding whatever information it obtains into the acquisition directorate. This depends on how strict a conceptual distinction you wish to keep; by relaxing those standards you can find the operations directorate interacting with (and thus influencing) pretty much every other part of the system. This implies than an intelligence organisation with an operations directorate is likely to be controlled by it to a substantial degree.
The big question is this: Does it really make sense to use this approach on all the different groups previously mentioned? In particular, does it make any sense to use the same tools to analyse both the New York Times and the Central Intelligence Agency? How about The Nation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation? Mother Jones and the National Security Agency? Новая газета and Служба Внешней Разведки?
I can see why some people would disagree, but I think so. From an organisational point of view, all of these groups are doing fundamentally the same thing. The chief difference between them lies in the constraints effectively placed upon them, and these can differ almost as much (if not more) within the different groups of intelligence organisations as they do between the groups. These constraints are largely external to the intelligence operations as such: Fiscal, political, legal. For fairly obvious reasons, they are much more effectively applied to non-state, commercial actors working in public than to state actors with secret budgets. The really interesting question is this: How do you enforce constraints effectively on the whole lot?
I’ve come to the conclusion that this is best done by helping intelligence organisations currently under severe constraints to escape them. At first glance, this may seem counterintuitive. The logic is roughly as follows: In order to effectively place constraints on an intelligence organisation, you need to have sufficient information about its activity to know what constraints are required. This, in turn, requires you to have an effective intelligence organisation that is capable of keeping track of the organisation to be constrained – and to be effective, it must not be overly constrained.
This, however, raises questions: How can we escape the constraints currently in place? What are the constraints currently in place? Which organisations should we help avoid them? Do we need to set up new ones?
Oh, hey, look. The post is getting way too long. Seems I’ll need to do that series after all…
A Couple of Thoughts
First thought: Probably best I stop thinking of this as a place to get more-or-less well-formed ideas into the open. It’s not like anyone reads it, so I should be safe throwing out half-formed nonsense. I think. The real problem is a psychological block I need to deal with.
Second thought: “International Relations” as a distinct discipline makes so little sense it’s not even funny. Or maybe that’s not entirely accurate. Let’s branch it out a bit: The study of international relations as a distinct subject affiliated with political science doesn’t really work. The chief reason is probably that the central dogma of political science is imported and laid down as the cornerstone of more or less all thinking on the subject: The State is assumed to be legitimate and placed at the centre of analysis. As a result, all you’re really allowed to think about is how multiple state entities interact. The significance of intra-state dynamics is almost completely denied, even in theories that don’t take the Hobbesian lie as their starting point. (There are some Marxists using class-based analysis, rather than state-based, but they usually wind up constructing a model of a class-divided society of states. An interesting model, but still not quite what I’m looking for.) It also means you’re somewhat stuck to analysing the current states system; in particular, states justifying themselves in terms of national self-determination are all but required. And those only developed somewhat gradually through the nineteenth century. Suzereinty, a basic feature of countless historical regimes, is not possible. And strangest of all, this inability to comprehend what existed before is claimed as a strength of contemporary theories. WTF?
I’m a historian, somewhat influenced by early sociological theories. The grand sweep of those theories is impressive, not least because they’re usually not left without a linkage between individual and social effects. They are, in essence, theories about emergent phenomena, long before that concept had developed. They also tend to integrate fields often treated as distinct. In particular, the basic structures of the economic and political systems are tightly intertwined with causal links in Oppenheimer’s account of The State. The issue, of course, is the question of empirical validity. How do you check whether a model like that conforms with either history or the present? How do you use it to make specific and falsifiable predictions? For most non-trivial models of society, these problems appear to be analytically intractable; that is, impossible to solve for general cases. Although the physical sciences learned a while ago that analytical solutions are not always possible, and have found alternative ways to solve many of those problems in the time since, that message seems to have passed most social scientists by. Instead, social science largely abandoned the analytically intractable models and replaced them with others that were easier to deal with.
I’d like to participate in reversing that trend…
Drafts of a Theory of State
The origin, structure and development of the institution typically known as “the state” is my chief interest. This is not because I consider the state to be a particularly worthy institution; quite the contrary. Every indication is that the state arose from violence and represents nothing whatever except the efficient organisation of exploitation. It is not necessary, and its abolition is vital for the progress of humanity. This is not a view shared by the mainstream of academics, whether their discipline of choice is history, sociology, economics (although they will claim otherwise, the bastards), or something else relating to studying the social structure we live in. Political science is perhaps the worst of the lot: Although questions regarding the nature of the state should be at that discipline’s foundational base, they are conventionally just assumed in favour of the state. I’d like to construct an alternative theory that I believe to be rather more in keeping with the empirical evidence than standard accounts of the origin of the state.
A related concept is that of nation; a construct that became the gold standard for the validity of states following the first world war; just over a hundred years after the first states claiming to represent nations came into existence. Nations have been described as Imagined Communities by political scientist Benedict Anderson; a description that I feel can barely be improved on. The current states system, predicated as it is on the nation-state, cannot be understood without also understanding what the nation is or can be — another question of origin.
In addition to the origin of the state, it’s pretty important to understand the dynamics driving its development. The unfolding of those dynamics is extremely complex in each individual case, but complex behaviours can arise from simple rules. Can we map the structure of society and state and find a way to explain how the state comes to dominate so utterly over alternative forms of organisation? Can the same dynamics perhaps even explain the transition from state-less to state-dominated societies, turning our origin theory into simply a special case of the more general theory of state dynamics?
This is an ambitious project, but I believe many, if not most, of the components are in place, needing mostly to be assembled. Fundamentally, there is nothing conceptually new involved, but perhaps some work in welding together structures and ideas from different backgrounds, that haven’t shared a language before. And some of those ideas may need a bit of dusting off; their obstinate failure to be of use to capitalism and non-threatening dissent has in some cases relegated them to the shelves, overlooked by most. Others have perhaps been rather too esoteric to be taken up by academics from distant fields — let alone non-academics devoting their free time to trying to understand what’s going on.
What’s the point of it, you ask?
Firstly, I suppose it’s a morbid fascination with the tools used to subject us all. (Also known as “academic curiosity”.) Secondly, the conviction that a solid understanding of the issues involved will have political implications; implications that will strengthen the hand of those arguing in favour of radical change — and make it clear what pitfalls to avoid in that change.
So here’s a basic sketch.
The ways of obtaining the requirements of life can be divided into two spheres, the political and economic. The economic means consist of resource gathering, production and uncoerced equal exchange. The political means consist of appropriation by force, direct or indirect, of the products of the economic means. The political means cannot be used before the economic means have developed to an extent where there is a surplus of goods beyond subsistence. Once such a surplus exists, however, the political means become a viable way of obtaining goods. At this point, the capital base of society can be divided into two rough categories: Economic assets, used for production and distribution; and political assets, used to coerce others to act in accord with the holder’s requirements. Society is a network of individuals sitting atop these capital assets. This network contains control mechanisms elaborating who has access to the economic and political assets, and who directs the use that is made of them.
But what is the state? We can adopt the definition proposed by Max Weber: The State is an institution that successfully claims monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within a bounded geographical region. Although not perfect, it has the dual advantages of not presupposing any specific institutional structure and not specifying a purpose for the uses made of this monopoly. An equivalent statement, using terminology consistent with that introduced above, is that the state holds a monopoly on the permissible use of the political assets over a specific area. The question of the origin of the state then resolves into the question of how political assets come to exist, and then become monopolised by a single institution.
The dynamics of the state’s development are also bound up with the social network and its structure. The driver here is the interest of actors within the control mechanism of the political assets; those tasked with maintaining and controlling the state. This group is in a unique position within the system, in that its control over the political assets makes it able, to the extent that control is real and the political assets sufficient to the purpose, to enforce adherence to its views. Historically, this group appears initially to have developed through gradual differentiation from a similar group in control of the economic assets; that is, the state seems to have originated as a mechanism to protect the interests of the wealthy.
As stated, this is just a rough initial sketch. Certain aspects need to be filled out; in particular, the interaction between multiple state structures (and associated economic elites) becomes more complicated on this explanation than most theories in international relations today would contend. The theory also depends implicitly on an understanding of the political utility of violence that is significantly broader than is usual today; on the score of this understanding of state, it is little other than the effective organisation of political violence, and the groupings we more traditionally associate with political violence are not fundamentally different from the state, but are instead simply its less successful cousins.
I think it’s a model worth pursuing and elaborating. Missing from this sketch are two significant segments; nationality and the economic control mechanism. They are related to the scheme in a slightly non-obvious way, and will be elaborated on alongside later clarifications of this model. I welcome any comment or question regarding the subject, whether through this site or any other way of contacting me you may find.
On Irreducible Complexity
Class.
Hooo-boy. There’s a term that gets the blood boiling in most cases. Who’s rich and who’s poor; aren’t we all middle-class? Isn’t the industrialised west as a whole the global rich, while the south of the globe gets the short end of the stick? Can we talk about a class-divided society without invoking the spectre of class warfare?
One interesting thing about class is that people tend to claim, today, that it doesn’t matter in western societies. This denial has two main forms:
- The contention that the industrialised countries have become so predominantly middle-class that there is effectively no significant working class or ruling class
- The contention that the western countries as a whole so completely dominate the rest of the world that populations in the rich countries are all actively complicit in exploitation
Neither is a particularly useful way to look at things. Both paper over very real tensions in global society and create an overly simplistic vision. The first pretends that “we’re all in it together” whereas the second pretends that the interests of everyone in the developed countries aligns against the interests of those in the less developed countries. The most sophisticated advocates of class irrelevance combine both. But ultimately, neither position is tenable. Why?
Because of irreducible complexity. Bear with me for a moment; that’s not as preposterous as it may seem at first. At base lies the question of how you model society: My model of choice is a network with extremely complicated interconnections. (Graph with many and varied edges. Individuals are vertices; their relationships are edges.) You should immediately take note of one important factor: The base unit is the individual. Those individuals are positioned inside a structure (the graph) which they have only very limited control over. So far, so good. This model is relatively non-controversial; we can build pretty much any sort of social structure on top of this grid. What causes tension is the empirical question of how the network is structured.
Obviously, the network is far too complex for anyone to map it out in full. (Not that that has stopped facebook from trying.) But we can discern features in it. The first, and most important feature, is simply the realisation that it is a network. It’s a massive network, and one that scales enormously. That means it should be possible to identify subnets; systems that are internally very tightly interconnected but have looser connections to the larger network. Within those subnets, we should also be able to detect segments. Viewed as a communications network, there are very likely to be trunk lines, of a sort, between various subnets. Picking away the pieces, these subnets are liable to be highly interdependent, but in a limited way. We’re fond of saying “everyone is connected” and that is true in the abstract. But when it comes to concrete analysis, it’s not. Understanding the specifics of social structure means reconstructing pieces of an inordinately complex system.
And that’s the snag. A full representation of this highly complex system must be at least as complex as the system itself. This is a fundamental limit that cannot be overcome; it lies in the nature of information. Only if we imagine that the extremely complex system can be generated from a simpler description — not impossible, but unlikely given the role of chance in relationship formation.
“Uh-oh”, says the typical proponent of class-based analysis at this point. “Doesn’t this also mean that the contention of primacy of class is untenable?” Well, yes, it does. What it means is that no single way of dividing up the world is going to give you an accurate picture of human society. It means we have to take a multitude of factors into account and restrict our models appropriately. It means we have to take into consideration the edges of what we’re investigating; the fact that, for instance, the social elites are international and usually more tightly interconnected with each other than they are with the general population of their origin or residence. The fact that, although on a global scale the west is built on exploitation of vastly larger areas (and populations), the spoils go almost exclusively to small groups within those societies who also exploit the vast majority of their own populations. The fact that “middle-class“ has no meaningful definition and instead masks very real differences between a number of social groupings — some of which are surprisingly powerful, and others of which are surprisingly powerless.
As for the spectre of class warfare: Perhaps the spectre needs to be raised again, because if there’s anything we need to be mindful of on this earth, it is the fact that not everyone’s interests are harmoniously aligned.
