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Ethics, morality and system management
Ethics, Morality,
and System Management
ETHICS,
MORALITY,
SYSTEM
MANAGEMENT
An evolutionary
459
AND
perspective
Erich Jantsch
A process (rather than a structural) viewpoint emphasises the evolution of a system. This evolution follows the same basic dynamics at all levels. Ethics provides an explicit framework for the advancement of evolution, and morality arises from tuning should thus be conin to evolutionary dynamics. Management cerned with the management of change rather than with the maintenance ofexisting structures. In society, evolution is mediated by the creative individual. The alternative to the furthering of creative fluctuations is equilibrium-the equilibrium of spiritual, social, and cultural death. When all the world recognises beauty as beauty, this in itself is ugliness. When all the world recognises good as good, this in itself is evil. Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching
IN A structure-oriented view, ethics is often understood as a metaphysical category, as a set of rules of behaviour which is valid in an absolute sense or at least given as a logical a priori. This view is further enhanced by the claim to absolute validity raised by religions and ideologies which incorporate ethics as their pragmatic aspect. The only legitimate attitude, in such a view, is then adaptation. Multilevel
ethics
In a process-orientated view, which emphasises the evolution of systems, self-determination is the focus of interest. Ethics here refers to the dynamics of systems. But the self-organisation dynamics at different levels of evolution follow different optimisation criteria. At the level of chemical dissipative structures, Erich Jantsch is with the Center for Research in Management Science, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA. For a further description of the ideas introduced in this article see E. Jantsch, The Self-organising Uniuerse: ScientiJFc and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution (Oxford, Pergamon, forthcoming).
FUTURES 31
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$02.00
0
1978
IPC Business
Press
460
Ethics, Morality, and System Management
the core criterion is the ensurance of energy throughput; at the level of the complex, sexually reproducing cell, it is variety; at the level of the organism it is flexibility and the ability to cope with the unexpected; and so forth. Quite generally, we can define ethical behaviour as that kind of behaviour which enhances evolution. But this implies that ethics is not given a priori, but emerges with evolution and follows a development, which, in principle, is wide open. With each new level of evolution, a new ethics comes into play and also a new mechanism through which this ethics acts as a regulatory device. In so-called sociobiology, this mechanism is primarily chemical. In the human world it consists chiefly of laws, rules of behaviour, and taboos-but also of morality as a direct inner experience. As an integral aspect of evolution, ethics is not subject to revelation, as is the ethics of religions with a personal god. Rather, it may be experienced directly by way of the dynamics of self-organisation and creative process. I should like to call this experiential aspect of ethics morality. As a dynamic principle, morality is a manifestation of the mind-of metabolic mind at its characteristic levels as well as of neural mind at the evolutionary levels which include central nervous systems. The direct living experience of morality becomes expressed in the form of ethics-it becomes form in the same way in which biological experience becomes form in the genetic code. The stored ethical information is then selectively retrieved and applied in the moral process in real-life situations. The interaction between ethics and morality is comparable to the epigenetic process in which genetically stored information is retrieved and applied to life situations. In such processes, complexity is made available to life. It is nonsense to claim that animals lack morality: their morality simply belongs to another level of consciousness. Re-ligio, the linking backward to the origin, not only provides a possibility to feel the dynamics of evolution at its origin, but also makes morality effective. Quite generally, the moral experience increases with increasing time and space. Thereby, it gradually replaces the genetically determined instinct as a regulator of behaviour. In the human realm, where possibilities for action are available in such a wide spectrum, it is primarily the mental structures-our intentions, desires, and preferences -which are guided by morality and determine our overall behaviour. At the higher levels of human consciousness, which include self-reflection, the enhancement of evolution implies more than simple self-preservation and self-presentation which are modes of behaviour characteristic already of early steps in evolution and even of chemical dissipative structures. It also implies more than simple self-reproduction and evolution of a species-which already characterises organisms that appeared early in evolution. And it certainly transcends the survival of the species which expresses a dull equilibrium principle. In the wake of a fashionable reductionist sociogenetics, which is misleadingly called sociobiology, there also appear attempts to explain the origin of human values on a purely genetic basis. For example, George Edgin Pugh, in a voluminous book, discusses primary values which are genetically fixed and regulate the behaviour by means of pleasure and pain.l These primary values are food and sexuality, a modern reductionism which reminds one of the old reductionism of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx who emphasised the proper functioning of humans in work and sex only. Pugh’s secondary values-morality,
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ethics, and so forth-are then supposed to be established by the primary values with a view to their usefulness in problem solving! Human ethics, more than any other ethics, is a multilevel ethics. Our consciousness includes transpersonal dimensions. By means of our mental constructs we design social and cultural systems. Therefore, human ethics includes the ethics of whote systems demanded by West Churchman.* But ultimately we are called upon to develop an ethics which I should like to call an evolutionary ethics. It would not only transcend the individual but all of mankind, and explicitly include the main principles of evolution, such as openness, nonequilibrium, and the positive role of ~uctuations, engagement, and nonattachment. At the start of a worldwide creative crisis, putting the traditional ways of our life in question at all levels, we are still far from formulating and implementing such an evolutionary ethics. What, in the Western world, we call ethics is a behavioural code at the social level which is primarily geared to ensure the free unfoldment of the individual. This is the reason why there is so much talk of rights; of basic human rights as well as of rights of particular groups, minorities, privileged, and underprivileged people-but almost never of responsibility. Sir Geoffrey Vickers has pointed out that rights constitute a static and defensive, struc~re-oriented concept, whereas the acceptance of responsibility implies creative participation in the design of the human world,3 The ethics which dominates in the Western world, is therefore an individualistic ethics in the disguise of a socially committing behavioural code. It is not a multilevel ethics in the true sense. Morality, in contrast, is the direct experience of an ethics inherent in the dynamics of evolution. Morality too uses form, a specific epistemology, a basic attitude toward the world which corresponds to a specific structure of our consciousness. The higher the number of levels and the intensity at which we live, the higher also become the number of levels and the intensity at which our morality becomes effective as an aspect of our complex consciousness. The resulting tension between ethics and morality is one of the core elements of the ancient Greek tragedy. In conflict with the law, Sophocles’s Antigone buries her brother Polyneikes who had rebelled against the king and whose body was therefore left to the wild animals outside the city walls. Her morality bids her to put the divine law of love above the law of the state. But the law of the state, too, is an expression of the divine order. Out of her own free will and with great inner strength, Antigone accepts her death. She is not crushed by a blind fate, as modern interpretations would have it. She is living out her destiny without escaping its consequences. In the tragic turn of her life she gains the ultimate freedom. Morality is a manifestation of consciousness. A major aim in the design of the human world by humans themselves must be the increasingly improved match between ethics and the levels of a multilevel consciousness. The same holds for those mental structures with the help of which we plan our future. At each level they have to satisfy the ethics which we ourselves have established there as guardian of our actions. Time and space in planaing
Since the middle of the 196Os, the increasing interest in medium- and long-range planning has thrown the theory and practice of planning into a creative crisis,
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resulting in profound change. It was not possible to simply apply the older concepts of short-range planning to a lengthened time horizon. The objective of short-range planning is the efficient and economic realisation of a specific idea within a rigid structure of planning and action, But it is impossible to aim for a long-range future along a rigid yardstick. Planning thus became a multilevel concept. Above the level of tactical or operational planning in the short range there is now the strategic level at which a variety of options are imagined, tested, and prepared for realisation. Strategic planning creates a mental nonequilibrium structure with fluctuations fed into it deliberately to trigger further evolution in one direction or the other. And above the strategic level, there is the policy level at which the dynamics of the system in question (eg an industrial corporation) is viewed in the context of an all-embracing sociocultural dynamics. And higher still comes the level of values which is no more subject to rational elaboration but always plays a decisive and guiding role, whether implicitly or explicitly. Open planning, therefore, is never a purely rational process. Elsewhere, I have described in detail how the social dimension enters already at the strategic level. 4,5 The focus is on a particular social function, eg transport, communication, or energy generation and distribution-and technological options are examined with a view to the consequences they would have for human systems. The systems approach has been developed for this task. In such a perspective, short-range profit maximisation can no longer be the decisive criterion. Additional considerations come to the fore which deal primarily with the continuity of the corporation or the organisation in an environment of technological and social change. Sociocultural responsibility comes into even sharper focus at the policy level. This is the stage for the evolution of institutional guiding images. The guiding image of the industrial corporation, for example, has undergone significant change over the past 20 years. From the image of a money-producing machine it has first evolved to the still-dominant image of an organism, the survival of which is to be secured by diversification and other measures. But also this organismal image is about to change. It is, after all, not of decisive importance that a particular organisation survives, but that the continuity of social processes be maintained (eg the production and distribution of goods and services), even if that means a switch to new structures which may replace the present mixed economies of the Western world. Multilevel planning not only links the perspectives of different time horizons, but also different basic attitudes and logics. Elsewhere I have described these basic attitudes or world views with the help of a metaphor, namely, a stream.5 Standing on dry land on one bank and watching the stream go by corresponds to a rational attitude. If we try to steer our canoe in the stream, in direct interaction with its forces and keeping a proper distance from both banks, we are taking a mythological attitude: we enter into a direct relationship with the life forces around us, we deal with them at their proper level, we become involved and try to influence the overall process. But if we imagine that we are the stream, just as a group of water molecules is the stream and at the same time an evolutionary attitude. In the only one of its aspects, we are experiencing West, such an evolutionary world view is realised only with great difficulties,
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but it has given rise in the East to the elaborate pure-process philosophy of Buddhism and Taoism. Table 1 sketches the relations between levels of planning, world view, guiding images, and systems approaches. It gives an idea of how planning may be organised as an evolutionary process. TABLE
1. MULTILEVEL
PLANNING
IN RELATION
TO A MULTILEVEL
Guidma~_~ imaae . Level of planning
Level of reality Values
Time horizon
Tactical targets (products, services)
I
Basic attitude
organisation
manager
Long range
Evolutionary (what system dynamics in context of overall dynamics?)
Management (catalysis) of social processes
Catalyst
Evolutionary (being the stream)
Medium range
Survival Mutual causal (how of an to structure organism relations in a system so as to keep it viable?)
Coordinator
Mythological (steering in the stream)
Short range
ProfitLinear producing causal (how to reach mechanism a recognised target)
Receiver of information and giver of orders
Rational $,“,‘a”Gd; the
Policy
II
for
Logic
Policy (system dynamics)
Social functions
REALITYa
Strategy
Tactics l
problem solving
Resources
(people,
knowledge)
Multilevel management is resisted by many people. Generally, we prefer to think either in concrete short-range terms, or in general long-range terms. But the higher art of the manager lies precisely in his capability to think, feel, and act at several levels at the same time. It is of crucial importance in evolution that the top levels are kept open for the entry and absorption of novelty. In contrast to a widely held belief, planning in an evolutionary spirit therefore does not result in the reduction of uncertainty and complexity, but in their increase. Uncertainty increases because the spectrum of options is deliberately widened; imagination comes into play. Instead of always doing the obvious, the not-so-obvious is deliberately sought out and also taken into consideration. Complexity increases because the immediate domain of the organisation, or individual, is transcended and relations within the larger system of society, culture, or the world-at-large move into the foreground. Reality is complex, and evolution manifests itself in the increase of this complexity. Greater complexity (which is not the same as greater complicatedness) therefore means a more realistic attitude taken by planning. Opening
up ‘at the top’
With this approach,
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the managers
of the higher conceptual
levels (which are
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Ethics, Morality, and System Management
not necessarily the higher power levels) become the managers of change, whereas the lower conceptual levels need administrators, the dependable operators of established and only slowly changing processes. Many people prefer the static security promised by specialisation and an unchanging working environment. In contrast, others prefer a dynamic security which may be compared to riding a bicycle, and which promises ever-renewed creative challenge and ever-changing tasks and rewards. It is this dynamic type ofmanager who belongs at the top of a management system, in the private as well as in the public domain. This already works well in the most advanced-thinking enterprises in the private domain, but not so well in social management systems, such as government at all jurisdictional levels, labour unions, or universities. There, it is precisely the higher levels which are closed toward novelty and geared to confirmation. This even holds where the ‘sovereign’, as the people are called in democracies, has a wide opportunity to participate, as is the case in direct democracies such as Switzerland. Every Swiss citizen votes several times a year on issues at the federal, cantonal and community level. To be precise, not every citizen votes, despite the penalty of 2 SwF. A study carried out for the Swiss government, and published in 1977, concluded that only 28% of the people representing a ‘lower socioeconomic level’ (defined by income as well as education) actually vote, compared with 68% of people at a ‘higher socioeconomic level’. If income is ‘higher’ than education, participation in voting is high, and vice versa. But in the type of questions put to the voters, the direct democracy does not show very high consciousness. A few years ago, the city of Zurich voted on a new urban transportation system. The strategic decision (for a subterranean streetcar system) and also the tactical decision (a specific track pattern) was made by the city council before the vote and elaborated in the form of a single, expensive detailed plan. The question was then put to the people: “Do you want a subterranean streetcar system with this particular track pattern and at this specific cost ?” They could answer yes or no. The answer was no. What precisely was wrong with the plan remained unclear. The city council started into the blue again by ordering the next arbitrary plan to be elaborated. The dialogue with the people can only be held at the highest level of values. And there is no tested, effective mechanism for such a dialogue. Television appearances of politicians are monologues, and the New England style ‘town meetings’ in which President Carter likes to appear occasionally, are at this stage no more than symbolic gestures. A citizen affected by decisions should be given the chance to discuss the impact these decisions will have on the values shaping his future living environment. Strategic decisions depend on complex technical evaluations and should be left to the parliament or the city council; they require full-time professional managers. The tactical and operational decisions are best made by specialists, experts, or administrators. But at the top, openness toward innovation is of crucial importance. Heads of governments, city mayors, labour union leaders, and university presidents should not simply be administrators, but the major agents and managers of openness and change. It is clear that reality is far from such a desirable image. But the discussion around nuclear power plants has at least made it abundantly clear that technical
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experts have nothing more to contribute at the level of values than any other citizen. The State Senate of California has stated this explicitly after hearing a dozen Nobel Laureates, half of whom were as furiously against nuclear power as the other half were for it. Evolution questions the principle of democracy in a very profound way. A democracy can be creative only if it admits and even furthers fluctuations. But this requires a new attitude toward the majority principle which basically is on the side of confirmation and meets novelty at best with distrust or even open hostility. Evolutionary creativity always renders invalid the ‘law of large numbers’ and acts in an elitist way. Wherever democracy has functioned well, the role of individual imagination has been tacitly tolerated or even supported. But it is time now to realise in explicit terms that the unqualified belief in the majority principle-or, in other words, in the rule of the average-can only serve to transfer the motor function of sociocultural dynamics from the creative individual to an impersonal system. “You believe in pushing and it’s you who is pushed”, Mephistopheles exclaims mockingly. Perhaps the most profound political paradox of our time lies in the need for elitist fluctuations to turn self-determination into evolutionary, creative self-transcendence. The only alternative is equilibrium-the equilibrium of spiritual, social, and cultural death. Process planning,
not structural
planning
Planning in an evolutionary spirit-which, at the same time, implies an ethical spirit-also faces further difficulties. Anticipation, that important faculty of the self-reflective mind, permits the selection of a specific goal. But this goal is often taken as a fixed structure, and alternatives become excluded from the further planning process. The extrapolative type of planning, in which econometricians indulge, follows a given process into the future under the tacit assumption that the underlying structure will not change. Over longer periods of time this is unrealistic. Normative planning stipulates good scenarios for a particular time horizon and attempts to align action in the present towards the realisation of the scenario. A naive teleology-aiming straight at a recognised goal-is sometimes now replaced by a more sophisticated teleonomy which realises that some goals may only be reached by taking detours and by following possible networks of processes. But in either case, the values of the future are stipulated in the present, although they inherently defy rational prediction. Each structure implies a particular system of values which often is hardly visible in the present. Therefore, Edgar S. Dunn is right in speaking in a somewhat derogatory way of ‘utopian engineering’. 6 These structural approaches did, indeed, originate in the area of technological planning and engineering. In an evolutionary spirit, creative processes ought to be permitted to interact freely and to find their own evolving structures. Dunn calls this approach ‘evolutionary experimentation’. Its original image is the movement of bacteria in which running phases in one direction alternate with tumbling phases. This is due to the flagella which rotate like turbines, alternately joining together
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in one direction and flinging loose in all directions. The direction taken by the bacterium in the running phase is arbitrary yet a net movement is made in the direction of food. While in a running phase, the bacterium measures food concentration around its body. If food concentration remains the same or decreases, the running phase is of normal duration, about one second. However, if the concentration increases, the running phase lasts a little longer. Eventually, such a random biased walk leads unerringly to the highest food concentration. In process-oriented management, the role of the manager would resemble that of a catalyst. His task would be primarily the prolongation of those processes which seem to run in a creative direction, the curtailment of those which appear unpromising and the elimination of those which he deems uncreative. At the same time, it would be his task to stimulate and further the interaction between creative processes. I once worked as a physicist and engineer for a multinational electrical engineering company. Three engineers had worked for a number of years on the technical realisation of a new principle, but had no results to show. The department head ordered their work stopped. But the three engineers, greatly alarmed, asked for and were granted an interview with the president. They talked to him in great excitement for half an hour, until the president interrupted them. He had not really understood their technical arguments for an imminent breakthrough in their work, he told them, but he had understood something else : that they were three people full of enthusiasm and confidence in the ultimate success of their work. That was all he needed to know in order to let them continue. Modern corporate long-range planning, as I have sketched it, helped indeed to introduce the flexibility which is also a characteristic of open evolution. Punctual and structural goals are not always taken to be literal and absolute, but are used as an indication where to start. As experience accumulates in pursuing such goals, they become modified, they change almost beyond recognition, and sometimes they are totally abandoned.’ In this kind of open-ended planning, as in all open evolution, the purpose is not waiting at the end of our path into the future, but is immanent in the process itself. Knowing is ultimately possible only by means of doing. The oscillation in the evolution of the sociocultural dynamics enhanced by planning rhythms of organisms. is then comparable to the endogenous, free-running Planning, in this view, is a characteristic oscillation of a sociocultural system, partly free-running, partly coupled with other oscillations. And the systems approach to planning which continuously tries to match the direction taken with the environmental conditions, would be the sociocultural equivalent of the epigenetic process-the process which selectively and in a synchronised way retrieves and utilises conservatively stored information in relation to the needs of the system in coping with an ever-changing environment which itself is evolving. Process planning in an evolutionary spirit ends the dualism between the planner and the planned, the organisation and the environment, the corporation and the society, culture and nature. We have not fallen from grace by developing the capability for rational thought-as long as we use it in its proper context. On the contrary, we are called upon to enhance the evolutionary process
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within and around ourselves by assuming responsibility for it at our appropriate level of evolution, the sociocultural level. Planning becomes an instrument, not just of our technological environment but of our own evolution. The complementarity
of values
Multilevel management and multilevel ethics imply another difficulty for Western ways of thinking and feeling. We are used to distinguishing unambiguously between opposites, especially between good and evil. In such a view, to act ethically means simply to further the good and to suppress the evil. But in a multilevel ethics, values may become reversed from level to level. The reduction to a single semantic level is responsible for the confusion reigning in the implementation of minority rights in the USA. In order to increase minority participation in academic professions, admission standards are lowered for minority students. In order to restore or achieve equality in the long run, equality is violated in the short run. But instead of making this two-level policy explicit in the law, the sloppy fiction of equality as an absolute, constitutional right is upheld. No wonder, that the recent US Supreme Court decision (Alan Bakke versus Regents of the University of California) met with such a confused reaction-while both sides claimed victory, others became deeply concerned about the future of minority participation. What is technologically good, may be socially evil. What the individual desires (eg unlimited petrol for his car) may appear undesirable at the level of the national economy. Viewed microscopically, war is always evil, and yet I feel that the World War 2 brought something very good to my generation-the alternative to living in a Thousand Year’s Empire. The bubonic plague diminished the world population by one-third and caused more personal suffering than we can imagine today; but evolution was not thrown back by it. The life processes, including the population growth of mankind, continued. In evolution, homeorhesis is generally a very important and significant phenomenon. This is the term which Conrad Waddington applied to the tendency of processes to continue in their original patterns, even if temporarily disturbed. Homeorhesis is probably more important in evolution than homeostasis, the tendency of spatial structures to remain the same. Perhaps evolution will not be too deeply disturbed by any turbulent developments in the near future which result in the loss (or rather the premature loss) of many lives. An organism which has reproduced itself, may be spared by evolution. Perhaps the major catastrophes on the planet Earth mean not much more to evolution than the weeding out of a garden which permits more beautiful flowers to grow. If, as Bertrand de Jouvenel holds, we are gardeners of the planet Earth,s we ought to understand this ambition of evolution. Problem solving presupposes the existence of an unambiguous answer in the quest for the good and the right. But such an answer is possible only at one specific level of a multilevel reality. A technological problem may be solved; the solution (eg a new material) remains valid and applicable. It can be shelved for later use. In the dynamics of dissipative biological, sociobiological and sociocultural processes, however, there are no problems which may be solved once and for all. There is only a dynamic, evolving ~rob~~mat~~~~,as Ozbekhan has called it, which appears at many levels in different and changing aspects.9
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There is no ‘solution’ to poverty or injustice. A dynamics which gives rise to such a probleinatique, is open to some regulation. A valid approach to understand this is to pose questions at as many levels as possible. An answer is not an end, it does not terminate anything. To pose questions at ever-new levels of discourse corresponds to an opening up of consciousness towards a multilevel reality. A dynamic ethics of becoming, in contrast to a static ethics of being, does not know possession. The inhabitants of the Indonesian island of Bali do not view themselves as possessors of the island, but as guests on the island of the gods: guests who have to work hard every day for their living. And yet, this spirited feeling of being the guests of the gods never fades. It is the never-depleted source of a happiness which manifests itself in continuous gratitude, in sacrifices to all gifts of life-water, fire, food, everything. In the Western world, we do not live much longer than the Balinese do; our possessions vanish no less. But the Western proprietary ethics suggests that the meaning life is not in the process of living to the fullest extent, but in the accumulation of money and goods, knowledge, and influence. In a multilevel, evolving reality, opposites ultimately vanish. There is no good and evil. I recently heard a Nobel Laureate profess with much empathy to feel ashamed of evolution. This is utterly childish. With the partial exception of photosynthesising plants, all life lives off other life-we humans included, even if we no longer devour our prey in open fields, but use slaughterhouses. Process thinking does not know any sharp separation between opposite aspects of reality. It also transcends a dialectic synthesis of opposites, that clumsy Western attempt at making a rigid structure of notions move and overcome its dualism. In process thinking, there is only complementarity in which the opposites include each other. Friedrich Holderlin, in his Sophocles distich, has given this thought perhaps the most profound expression:
of
Many seek vainly, joyously to express joy. Finally I apprehend it, here in my sorrow.
Notes
and references
1. George Edgin Pugh, The Biological Origin of Human Values (New York, Basic Books, 1977). 2. C. West Churchman, Challenge to Reason (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1968). 3. Geoffrey Vickers, Making Institutions Work (London, Associated Business Programmes, 1973). 4. Erich Jantsch, Te~hna~a~.ca~ Plating and So&t Futures (London, Associated Business Programmes, 1974; New York, HaIsted Press, 1974). 5. Erich Jantsch, Design for Evolution: Self-organisation and Planning in the Life of Human Systems (New York, Braziller, 1975). 6. Edgar S. Dunn, Jr, Economic and Social Developntmt: A Process of Social Learning (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 197 1). 7. “Aborting the corporate plan” was the title of Stafford Beer’s contribution to a planning symposium which I organised in Bellagio ten years ago. See Erich Jantsch, ed, Perspectives of Planning: Proceedings of the OECD Bellagio Symposium on Long Range Forecasting and Planning, 1968 (Paris, OECD, 1969). 8. Bertrand de Jouvenel, Arcadie, essais sur Le mieux vivre (Paris, SEDEIS, 1968). 9. Hasan Ozbekhan, “The predicament of mankind”, in C. West Churchman and Richard 0. Mason, eds, World Mode~~ing: A Diabgue (Amsterdam and Oxford, Norm-Holl~d, 1976; New York, American Elsevier, 1976).
FUTURES
December
IS78
and System Management
ETHICS,
MORALITY,
SYSTEM
MANAGEMENT
An evolutionary
459
AND
perspective
Erich Jantsch
A process (rather than a structural) viewpoint emphasises the evolution of a system. This evolution follows the same basic dynamics at all levels. Ethics provides an explicit framework for the advancement of evolution, and morality arises from tuning should thus be conin to evolutionary dynamics. Management cerned with the management of change rather than with the maintenance ofexisting structures. In society, evolution is mediated by the creative individual. The alternative to the furthering of creative fluctuations is equilibrium-the equilibrium of spiritual, social, and cultural death. When all the world recognises beauty as beauty, this in itself is ugliness. When all the world recognises good as good, this in itself is evil. Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching
IN A structure-oriented view, ethics is often understood as a metaphysical category, as a set of rules of behaviour which is valid in an absolute sense or at least given as a logical a priori. This view is further enhanced by the claim to absolute validity raised by religions and ideologies which incorporate ethics as their pragmatic aspect. The only legitimate attitude, in such a view, is then adaptation. Multilevel
ethics
In a process-orientated view, which emphasises the evolution of systems, self-determination is the focus of interest. Ethics here refers to the dynamics of systems. But the self-organisation dynamics at different levels of evolution follow different optimisation criteria. At the level of chemical dissipative structures, Erich Jantsch is with the Center for Research in Management Science, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA. For a further description of the ideas introduced in this article see E. Jantsch, The Self-organising Uniuerse: ScientiJFc and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution (Oxford, Pergamon, forthcoming).
FUTURES 31
December
1978
0016-3287/78/06045!%10
$02.00
0
1978
IPC Business
Press
460
Ethics, Morality, and System Management
the core criterion is the ensurance of energy throughput; at the level of the complex, sexually reproducing cell, it is variety; at the level of the organism it is flexibility and the ability to cope with the unexpected; and so forth. Quite generally, we can define ethical behaviour as that kind of behaviour which enhances evolution. But this implies that ethics is not given a priori, but emerges with evolution and follows a development, which, in principle, is wide open. With each new level of evolution, a new ethics comes into play and also a new mechanism through which this ethics acts as a regulatory device. In so-called sociobiology, this mechanism is primarily chemical. In the human world it consists chiefly of laws, rules of behaviour, and taboos-but also of morality as a direct inner experience. As an integral aspect of evolution, ethics is not subject to revelation, as is the ethics of religions with a personal god. Rather, it may be experienced directly by way of the dynamics of self-organisation and creative process. I should like to call this experiential aspect of ethics morality. As a dynamic principle, morality is a manifestation of the mind-of metabolic mind at its characteristic levels as well as of neural mind at the evolutionary levels which include central nervous systems. The direct living experience of morality becomes expressed in the form of ethics-it becomes form in the same way in which biological experience becomes form in the genetic code. The stored ethical information is then selectively retrieved and applied in the moral process in real-life situations. The interaction between ethics and morality is comparable to the epigenetic process in which genetically stored information is retrieved and applied to life situations. In such processes, complexity is made available to life. It is nonsense to claim that animals lack morality: their morality simply belongs to another level of consciousness. Re-ligio, the linking backward to the origin, not only provides a possibility to feel the dynamics of evolution at its origin, but also makes morality effective. Quite generally, the moral experience increases with increasing time and space. Thereby, it gradually replaces the genetically determined instinct as a regulator of behaviour. In the human realm, where possibilities for action are available in such a wide spectrum, it is primarily the mental structures-our intentions, desires, and preferences -which are guided by morality and determine our overall behaviour. At the higher levels of human consciousness, which include self-reflection, the enhancement of evolution implies more than simple self-preservation and self-presentation which are modes of behaviour characteristic already of early steps in evolution and even of chemical dissipative structures. It also implies more than simple self-reproduction and evolution of a species-which already characterises organisms that appeared early in evolution. And it certainly transcends the survival of the species which expresses a dull equilibrium principle. In the wake of a fashionable reductionist sociogenetics, which is misleadingly called sociobiology, there also appear attempts to explain the origin of human values on a purely genetic basis. For example, George Edgin Pugh, in a voluminous book, discusses primary values which are genetically fixed and regulate the behaviour by means of pleasure and pain.l These primary values are food and sexuality, a modern reductionism which reminds one of the old reductionism of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx who emphasised the proper functioning of humans in work and sex only. Pugh’s secondary values-morality,
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1978
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ethics, and so forth-are then supposed to be established by the primary values with a view to their usefulness in problem solving! Human ethics, more than any other ethics, is a multilevel ethics. Our consciousness includes transpersonal dimensions. By means of our mental constructs we design social and cultural systems. Therefore, human ethics includes the ethics of whote systems demanded by West Churchman.* But ultimately we are called upon to develop an ethics which I should like to call an evolutionary ethics. It would not only transcend the individual but all of mankind, and explicitly include the main principles of evolution, such as openness, nonequilibrium, and the positive role of ~uctuations, engagement, and nonattachment. At the start of a worldwide creative crisis, putting the traditional ways of our life in question at all levels, we are still far from formulating and implementing such an evolutionary ethics. What, in the Western world, we call ethics is a behavioural code at the social level which is primarily geared to ensure the free unfoldment of the individual. This is the reason why there is so much talk of rights; of basic human rights as well as of rights of particular groups, minorities, privileged, and underprivileged people-but almost never of responsibility. Sir Geoffrey Vickers has pointed out that rights constitute a static and defensive, struc~re-oriented concept, whereas the acceptance of responsibility implies creative participation in the design of the human world,3 The ethics which dominates in the Western world, is therefore an individualistic ethics in the disguise of a socially committing behavioural code. It is not a multilevel ethics in the true sense. Morality, in contrast, is the direct experience of an ethics inherent in the dynamics of evolution. Morality too uses form, a specific epistemology, a basic attitude toward the world which corresponds to a specific structure of our consciousness. The higher the number of levels and the intensity at which we live, the higher also become the number of levels and the intensity at which our morality becomes effective as an aspect of our complex consciousness. The resulting tension between ethics and morality is one of the core elements of the ancient Greek tragedy. In conflict with the law, Sophocles’s Antigone buries her brother Polyneikes who had rebelled against the king and whose body was therefore left to the wild animals outside the city walls. Her morality bids her to put the divine law of love above the law of the state. But the law of the state, too, is an expression of the divine order. Out of her own free will and with great inner strength, Antigone accepts her death. She is not crushed by a blind fate, as modern interpretations would have it. She is living out her destiny without escaping its consequences. In the tragic turn of her life she gains the ultimate freedom. Morality is a manifestation of consciousness. A major aim in the design of the human world by humans themselves must be the increasingly improved match between ethics and the levels of a multilevel consciousness. The same holds for those mental structures with the help of which we plan our future. At each level they have to satisfy the ethics which we ourselves have established there as guardian of our actions. Time and space in planaing
Since the middle of the 196Os, the increasing interest in medium- and long-range planning has thrown the theory and practice of planning into a creative crisis,
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resulting in profound change. It was not possible to simply apply the older concepts of short-range planning to a lengthened time horizon. The objective of short-range planning is the efficient and economic realisation of a specific idea within a rigid structure of planning and action, But it is impossible to aim for a long-range future along a rigid yardstick. Planning thus became a multilevel concept. Above the level of tactical or operational planning in the short range there is now the strategic level at which a variety of options are imagined, tested, and prepared for realisation. Strategic planning creates a mental nonequilibrium structure with fluctuations fed into it deliberately to trigger further evolution in one direction or the other. And above the strategic level, there is the policy level at which the dynamics of the system in question (eg an industrial corporation) is viewed in the context of an all-embracing sociocultural dynamics. And higher still comes the level of values which is no more subject to rational elaboration but always plays a decisive and guiding role, whether implicitly or explicitly. Open planning, therefore, is never a purely rational process. Elsewhere, I have described in detail how the social dimension enters already at the strategic level. 4,5 The focus is on a particular social function, eg transport, communication, or energy generation and distribution-and technological options are examined with a view to the consequences they would have for human systems. The systems approach has been developed for this task. In such a perspective, short-range profit maximisation can no longer be the decisive criterion. Additional considerations come to the fore which deal primarily with the continuity of the corporation or the organisation in an environment of technological and social change. Sociocultural responsibility comes into even sharper focus at the policy level. This is the stage for the evolution of institutional guiding images. The guiding image of the industrial corporation, for example, has undergone significant change over the past 20 years. From the image of a money-producing machine it has first evolved to the still-dominant image of an organism, the survival of which is to be secured by diversification and other measures. But also this organismal image is about to change. It is, after all, not of decisive importance that a particular organisation survives, but that the continuity of social processes be maintained (eg the production and distribution of goods and services), even if that means a switch to new structures which may replace the present mixed economies of the Western world. Multilevel planning not only links the perspectives of different time horizons, but also different basic attitudes and logics. Elsewhere I have described these basic attitudes or world views with the help of a metaphor, namely, a stream.5 Standing on dry land on one bank and watching the stream go by corresponds to a rational attitude. If we try to steer our canoe in the stream, in direct interaction with its forces and keeping a proper distance from both banks, we are taking a mythological attitude: we enter into a direct relationship with the life forces around us, we deal with them at their proper level, we become involved and try to influence the overall process. But if we imagine that we are the stream, just as a group of water molecules is the stream and at the same time an evolutionary attitude. In the only one of its aspects, we are experiencing West, such an evolutionary world view is realised only with great difficulties,
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but it has given rise in the East to the elaborate pure-process philosophy of Buddhism and Taoism. Table 1 sketches the relations between levels of planning, world view, guiding images, and systems approaches. It gives an idea of how planning may be organised as an evolutionary process. TABLE
1. MULTILEVEL
PLANNING
IN RELATION
TO A MULTILEVEL
Guidma~_~ imaae . Level of planning
Level of reality Values
Time horizon
Tactical targets (products, services)
I
Basic attitude
organisation
manager
Long range
Evolutionary (what system dynamics in context of overall dynamics?)
Management (catalysis) of social processes
Catalyst
Evolutionary (being the stream)
Medium range
Survival Mutual causal (how of an to structure organism relations in a system so as to keep it viable?)
Coordinator
Mythological (steering in the stream)
Short range
ProfitLinear producing causal (how to reach mechanism a recognised target)
Receiver of information and giver of orders
Rational $,“,‘a”Gd; the
Policy
II
for
Logic
Policy (system dynamics)
Social functions
REALITYa
Strategy
Tactics l
problem solving
Resources
(people,
knowledge)
Multilevel management is resisted by many people. Generally, we prefer to think either in concrete short-range terms, or in general long-range terms. But the higher art of the manager lies precisely in his capability to think, feel, and act at several levels at the same time. It is of crucial importance in evolution that the top levels are kept open for the entry and absorption of novelty. In contrast to a widely held belief, planning in an evolutionary spirit therefore does not result in the reduction of uncertainty and complexity, but in their increase. Uncertainty increases because the spectrum of options is deliberately widened; imagination comes into play. Instead of always doing the obvious, the not-so-obvious is deliberately sought out and also taken into consideration. Complexity increases because the immediate domain of the organisation, or individual, is transcended and relations within the larger system of society, culture, or the world-at-large move into the foreground. Reality is complex, and evolution manifests itself in the increase of this complexity. Greater complexity (which is not the same as greater complicatedness) therefore means a more realistic attitude taken by planning. Opening
up ‘at the top’
With this approach,
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the managers
of the higher conceptual
levels (which are
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not necessarily the higher power levels) become the managers of change, whereas the lower conceptual levels need administrators, the dependable operators of established and only slowly changing processes. Many people prefer the static security promised by specialisation and an unchanging working environment. In contrast, others prefer a dynamic security which may be compared to riding a bicycle, and which promises ever-renewed creative challenge and ever-changing tasks and rewards. It is this dynamic type ofmanager who belongs at the top of a management system, in the private as well as in the public domain. This already works well in the most advanced-thinking enterprises in the private domain, but not so well in social management systems, such as government at all jurisdictional levels, labour unions, or universities. There, it is precisely the higher levels which are closed toward novelty and geared to confirmation. This even holds where the ‘sovereign’, as the people are called in democracies, has a wide opportunity to participate, as is the case in direct democracies such as Switzerland. Every Swiss citizen votes several times a year on issues at the federal, cantonal and community level. To be precise, not every citizen votes, despite the penalty of 2 SwF. A study carried out for the Swiss government, and published in 1977, concluded that only 28% of the people representing a ‘lower socioeconomic level’ (defined by income as well as education) actually vote, compared with 68% of people at a ‘higher socioeconomic level’. If income is ‘higher’ than education, participation in voting is high, and vice versa. But in the type of questions put to the voters, the direct democracy does not show very high consciousness. A few years ago, the city of Zurich voted on a new urban transportation system. The strategic decision (for a subterranean streetcar system) and also the tactical decision (a specific track pattern) was made by the city council before the vote and elaborated in the form of a single, expensive detailed plan. The question was then put to the people: “Do you want a subterranean streetcar system with this particular track pattern and at this specific cost ?” They could answer yes or no. The answer was no. What precisely was wrong with the plan remained unclear. The city council started into the blue again by ordering the next arbitrary plan to be elaborated. The dialogue with the people can only be held at the highest level of values. And there is no tested, effective mechanism for such a dialogue. Television appearances of politicians are monologues, and the New England style ‘town meetings’ in which President Carter likes to appear occasionally, are at this stage no more than symbolic gestures. A citizen affected by decisions should be given the chance to discuss the impact these decisions will have on the values shaping his future living environment. Strategic decisions depend on complex technical evaluations and should be left to the parliament or the city council; they require full-time professional managers. The tactical and operational decisions are best made by specialists, experts, or administrators. But at the top, openness toward innovation is of crucial importance. Heads of governments, city mayors, labour union leaders, and university presidents should not simply be administrators, but the major agents and managers of openness and change. It is clear that reality is far from such a desirable image. But the discussion around nuclear power plants has at least made it abundantly clear that technical
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experts have nothing more to contribute at the level of values than any other citizen. The State Senate of California has stated this explicitly after hearing a dozen Nobel Laureates, half of whom were as furiously against nuclear power as the other half were for it. Evolution questions the principle of democracy in a very profound way. A democracy can be creative only if it admits and even furthers fluctuations. But this requires a new attitude toward the majority principle which basically is on the side of confirmation and meets novelty at best with distrust or even open hostility. Evolutionary creativity always renders invalid the ‘law of large numbers’ and acts in an elitist way. Wherever democracy has functioned well, the role of individual imagination has been tacitly tolerated or even supported. But it is time now to realise in explicit terms that the unqualified belief in the majority principle-or, in other words, in the rule of the average-can only serve to transfer the motor function of sociocultural dynamics from the creative individual to an impersonal system. “You believe in pushing and it’s you who is pushed”, Mephistopheles exclaims mockingly. Perhaps the most profound political paradox of our time lies in the need for elitist fluctuations to turn self-determination into evolutionary, creative self-transcendence. The only alternative is equilibrium-the equilibrium of spiritual, social, and cultural death. Process planning,
not structural
planning
Planning in an evolutionary spirit-which, at the same time, implies an ethical spirit-also faces further difficulties. Anticipation, that important faculty of the self-reflective mind, permits the selection of a specific goal. But this goal is often taken as a fixed structure, and alternatives become excluded from the further planning process. The extrapolative type of planning, in which econometricians indulge, follows a given process into the future under the tacit assumption that the underlying structure will not change. Over longer periods of time this is unrealistic. Normative planning stipulates good scenarios for a particular time horizon and attempts to align action in the present towards the realisation of the scenario. A naive teleology-aiming straight at a recognised goal-is sometimes now replaced by a more sophisticated teleonomy which realises that some goals may only be reached by taking detours and by following possible networks of processes. But in either case, the values of the future are stipulated in the present, although they inherently defy rational prediction. Each structure implies a particular system of values which often is hardly visible in the present. Therefore, Edgar S. Dunn is right in speaking in a somewhat derogatory way of ‘utopian engineering’. 6 These structural approaches did, indeed, originate in the area of technological planning and engineering. In an evolutionary spirit, creative processes ought to be permitted to interact freely and to find their own evolving structures. Dunn calls this approach ‘evolutionary experimentation’. Its original image is the movement of bacteria in which running phases in one direction alternate with tumbling phases. This is due to the flagella which rotate like turbines, alternately joining together
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in one direction and flinging loose in all directions. The direction taken by the bacterium in the running phase is arbitrary yet a net movement is made in the direction of food. While in a running phase, the bacterium measures food concentration around its body. If food concentration remains the same or decreases, the running phase is of normal duration, about one second. However, if the concentration increases, the running phase lasts a little longer. Eventually, such a random biased walk leads unerringly to the highest food concentration. In process-oriented management, the role of the manager would resemble that of a catalyst. His task would be primarily the prolongation of those processes which seem to run in a creative direction, the curtailment of those which appear unpromising and the elimination of those which he deems uncreative. At the same time, it would be his task to stimulate and further the interaction between creative processes. I once worked as a physicist and engineer for a multinational electrical engineering company. Three engineers had worked for a number of years on the technical realisation of a new principle, but had no results to show. The department head ordered their work stopped. But the three engineers, greatly alarmed, asked for and were granted an interview with the president. They talked to him in great excitement for half an hour, until the president interrupted them. He had not really understood their technical arguments for an imminent breakthrough in their work, he told them, but he had understood something else : that they were three people full of enthusiasm and confidence in the ultimate success of their work. That was all he needed to know in order to let them continue. Modern corporate long-range planning, as I have sketched it, helped indeed to introduce the flexibility which is also a characteristic of open evolution. Punctual and structural goals are not always taken to be literal and absolute, but are used as an indication where to start. As experience accumulates in pursuing such goals, they become modified, they change almost beyond recognition, and sometimes they are totally abandoned.’ In this kind of open-ended planning, as in all open evolution, the purpose is not waiting at the end of our path into the future, but is immanent in the process itself. Knowing is ultimately possible only by means of doing. The oscillation in the evolution of the sociocultural dynamics enhanced by planning rhythms of organisms. is then comparable to the endogenous, free-running Planning, in this view, is a characteristic oscillation of a sociocultural system, partly free-running, partly coupled with other oscillations. And the systems approach to planning which continuously tries to match the direction taken with the environmental conditions, would be the sociocultural equivalent of the epigenetic process-the process which selectively and in a synchronised way retrieves and utilises conservatively stored information in relation to the needs of the system in coping with an ever-changing environment which itself is evolving. Process planning in an evolutionary spirit ends the dualism between the planner and the planned, the organisation and the environment, the corporation and the society, culture and nature. We have not fallen from grace by developing the capability for rational thought-as long as we use it in its proper context. On the contrary, we are called upon to enhance the evolutionary process
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within and around ourselves by assuming responsibility for it at our appropriate level of evolution, the sociocultural level. Planning becomes an instrument, not just of our technological environment but of our own evolution. The complementarity
of values
Multilevel management and multilevel ethics imply another difficulty for Western ways of thinking and feeling. We are used to distinguishing unambiguously between opposites, especially between good and evil. In such a view, to act ethically means simply to further the good and to suppress the evil. But in a multilevel ethics, values may become reversed from level to level. The reduction to a single semantic level is responsible for the confusion reigning in the implementation of minority rights in the USA. In order to increase minority participation in academic professions, admission standards are lowered for minority students. In order to restore or achieve equality in the long run, equality is violated in the short run. But instead of making this two-level policy explicit in the law, the sloppy fiction of equality as an absolute, constitutional right is upheld. No wonder, that the recent US Supreme Court decision (Alan Bakke versus Regents of the University of California) met with such a confused reaction-while both sides claimed victory, others became deeply concerned about the future of minority participation. What is technologically good, may be socially evil. What the individual desires (eg unlimited petrol for his car) may appear undesirable at the level of the national economy. Viewed microscopically, war is always evil, and yet I feel that the World War 2 brought something very good to my generation-the alternative to living in a Thousand Year’s Empire. The bubonic plague diminished the world population by one-third and caused more personal suffering than we can imagine today; but evolution was not thrown back by it. The life processes, including the population growth of mankind, continued. In evolution, homeorhesis is generally a very important and significant phenomenon. This is the term which Conrad Waddington applied to the tendency of processes to continue in their original patterns, even if temporarily disturbed. Homeorhesis is probably more important in evolution than homeostasis, the tendency of spatial structures to remain the same. Perhaps evolution will not be too deeply disturbed by any turbulent developments in the near future which result in the loss (or rather the premature loss) of many lives. An organism which has reproduced itself, may be spared by evolution. Perhaps the major catastrophes on the planet Earth mean not much more to evolution than the weeding out of a garden which permits more beautiful flowers to grow. If, as Bertrand de Jouvenel holds, we are gardeners of the planet Earth,s we ought to understand this ambition of evolution. Problem solving presupposes the existence of an unambiguous answer in the quest for the good and the right. But such an answer is possible only at one specific level of a multilevel reality. A technological problem may be solved; the solution (eg a new material) remains valid and applicable. It can be shelved for later use. In the dynamics of dissipative biological, sociobiological and sociocultural processes, however, there are no problems which may be solved once and for all. There is only a dynamic, evolving ~rob~~mat~~~~,as Ozbekhan has called it, which appears at many levels in different and changing aspects.9
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There is no ‘solution’ to poverty or injustice. A dynamics which gives rise to such a probleinatique, is open to some regulation. A valid approach to understand this is to pose questions at as many levels as possible. An answer is not an end, it does not terminate anything. To pose questions at ever-new levels of discourse corresponds to an opening up of consciousness towards a multilevel reality. A dynamic ethics of becoming, in contrast to a static ethics of being, does not know possession. The inhabitants of the Indonesian island of Bali do not view themselves as possessors of the island, but as guests on the island of the gods: guests who have to work hard every day for their living. And yet, this spirited feeling of being the guests of the gods never fades. It is the never-depleted source of a happiness which manifests itself in continuous gratitude, in sacrifices to all gifts of life-water, fire, food, everything. In the Western world, we do not live much longer than the Balinese do; our possessions vanish no less. But the Western proprietary ethics suggests that the meaning life is not in the process of living to the fullest extent, but in the accumulation of money and goods, knowledge, and influence. In a multilevel, evolving reality, opposites ultimately vanish. There is no good and evil. I recently heard a Nobel Laureate profess with much empathy to feel ashamed of evolution. This is utterly childish. With the partial exception of photosynthesising plants, all life lives off other life-we humans included, even if we no longer devour our prey in open fields, but use slaughterhouses. Process thinking does not know any sharp separation between opposite aspects of reality. It also transcends a dialectic synthesis of opposites, that clumsy Western attempt at making a rigid structure of notions move and overcome its dualism. In process thinking, there is only complementarity in which the opposites include each other. Friedrich Holderlin, in his Sophocles distich, has given this thought perhaps the most profound expression:
of
Many seek vainly, joyously to express joy. Finally I apprehend it, here in my sorrow.
Notes
and references
1. George Edgin Pugh, The Biological Origin of Human Values (New York, Basic Books, 1977). 2. C. West Churchman, Challenge to Reason (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1968). 3. Geoffrey Vickers, Making Institutions Work (London, Associated Business Programmes, 1973). 4. Erich Jantsch, Te~hna~a~.ca~ Plating and So&t Futures (London, Associated Business Programmes, 1974; New York, HaIsted Press, 1974). 5. Erich Jantsch, Design for Evolution: Self-organisation and Planning in the Life of Human Systems (New York, Braziller, 1975). 6. Edgar S. Dunn, Jr, Economic and Social Developntmt: A Process of Social Learning (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 197 1). 7. “Aborting the corporate plan” was the title of Stafford Beer’s contribution to a planning symposium which I organised in Bellagio ten years ago. See Erich Jantsch, ed, Perspectives of Planning: Proceedings of the OECD Bellagio Symposium on Long Range Forecasting and Planning, 1968 (Paris, OECD, 1969). 8. Bertrand de Jouvenel, Arcadie, essais sur Le mieux vivre (Paris, SEDEIS, 1968). 9. Hasan Ozbekhan, “The predicament of mankind”, in C. West Churchman and Richard 0. Mason, eds, World Mode~~ing: A Diabgue (Amsterdam and Oxford, Norm-Holl~d, 1976; New York, American Elsevier, 1976).
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