Your Relations Are All Power
The talk that got me thinking the most at Research 2011 was by Charles Leadbeater, author of We-Think. He wasn’t talking about We-Think, though, he was talking about “intimacy at scale”, and specifically about an all-explaining DIAGRAM he had drawn on a powerpoint slide.
I am a big fan of diagrams, especially when they claim to explain everything, so as you can imagine I liked this one. I can’t find a copy of it online so I have DRAWN one here:
But did I think it worked? Well, let me try and describe it.
It was a quadrant analysis chart. On the left-right axis you had EMPATHY and on the up-down one you had SYSTEM. What did these words mean? Well, SYSTEM seemed pretty clear. You had low-system things, with low levels of formal organisation (or at least low levels of WORKING organisation), and high-system things, where people had built complex systems which basically worked.
EMPATHY was a bit trickier. It seemed to be about individual relationships, and the extent to which people cared about and could trust one another. Sometimes the meaning seemed to slip into “niceness” though, or at least a level of relational trust aimed towards doing stuff which Leadbeater and his audience approved of.
Anyway the quadrants defined by these axes were:
- Low Empathy Low System: This is where the system doesn’t work and individual relationships have broken down. It’s a bad quadrant to be in. Leadbeater’s initial examples were all fictional - from film and TV series - and his example here was The Wire.
- Low Empathy High System: This is also not a very good quadrant to be in - systems work and can be highly complex but individual relationships are low-trust or atrophied. You feel in other words like a COG IN A MACHINE. The fictional examples given included the Clooney film Up In The Air about downsizers.
- High Empathy Low System: So far so good, but here’s where things got a bit more complex. Leadbeater painted this quadrant as an idyll - an agreeable fantasy of small-scale mutual concern existing free of complex systems. For Leadbeater this section was essentially Edenic - it couldn’t actually exist in a modern, high-system world except as a bubble dependent on the operation of high system stuff. The TV show he picked as an example of this was Downton Abbey - at this point my alarm bells started to ring.
- High Empathy High System: This was the quadrant’s - and the keynote’s - MacGuffin, a quadrant of “intimacy at scale”, complex systems built on close and empathic individual relationships. A lot of the talk’s conclusion was spent trying to work out whether various feted tech companies and models - Facebook, Apple, etc. - worked like this. By that time, though, I’d gone off on a tangent, as follows.
My first problem: Like I say, I started worrying when Leadbeater mentioned Downton Abbey. If you haven’t seen it, this is a wildly successful period TV drama, set between 1912 and 1914, and dealing with an aristocratic household and their servants. My alarm bells went off because this was being characterised as low-system. But the characters in it - like any Britons in the 1910s - were in fact enmeshed in several very complex systems indeed: systems of class, race, patriarchy and Empire which indeed are the jumping-off points for many of Downton’s plots. Did these systems not count as systems in the system/empathy diagram? And if not, why not?
Some clue came when I realised Leadbeater was talking about relationships purely in terms of autonomous individuals and their attitudes to one another. Relationships in the model seemed to be created - or to break down - purely on the “empathy” axis. But what would happen if you accepted that some relationships arise from the system axis? Class, for instance, creates a ready-made set of relationships which individuals have little control over. When Leadbeater talked about highly complex systems built on networks of mutual obligation and benefit, he wanted us to think about modern micropayment systems. But relationships of mutual obligation need not imply equality! This is how the Feudal System was meant to work, after all, a complex network of individual relationships but arranged in pyramid form.
So in that case maybe Downton Abbey is the product of a similar High-System High-Empathy world. a vision of history in which people accepted their place in society and were broadly happy with it (i.e. where Empathy works in support of the System, not vice versa). But such a world is gone forever, no? Well, maybe the equivalent High-System High-Empathy worlds today are things like gated communities - more on this in the next section. In a world where relations are embedded in systems the real rarity is stuff in the bottom, low-system half in general, and the bottom-right quadrant in particular, which becomes the home of communes, temporary autonomous zones, and other utopian moments.
My Second Problem: Something else Leadbeater said really intrigued me. He posited that there’s a kind of link - a parasitic relationship, almost - between stuff which happens along one of the diagonals in the quadrant, the one between High-System Low-Empathy and Low-System High-Empathy. When he talked about things he was including in that bottom right quadrant, like farmers’ markets or backpacking, he was pointing out that they only really exist as bubbles in a high-system environment: they depend on a lot of the high-system low-empathy world to function.
Fair enough, but what interested me is whether there was a similar dependent relationship along the other diagonal - whether High-Empathy High-System stuff is linked to Low-Empathy Low-System (the really BAD quadrant) in the same kind of way? The key to understanding why this might be so, I think, is the role SCALE plays in Leadbeater’s thinking. Leadbeater talks about “intimacy at scale”, and scale might be implied on his axes, but there’s, er, scale and then there’s SCALE. You can have a high-system high-empathy area which happens on quite a big scale without it necessarily implying universality, democracy, or any kind of wider growth. A High-Empathy High-System enclave which included, say, the highest-earning 0.1% of the world’s population would still include about 7 million people. Pretty large scale!
This is why I started thinking about gated communities, public schools, the Davos conference - these are high-system environments and also within their boundaries high-empathy ones. The fact of those boundaries - which aren’t implied in the model, but aren’t prohibited by it either - is what keeps these environments relatively small.
But what might the link be to the bottom left quadrant? Well, imagine that these limited High-System High-Empathy zones are also resource hogs - that the continual increase in their levels of system and empathy results in a degradation of system (and empathy to some extent) outside them. This might involve, for instance, the very wealthy preferring to build and operate highly complex systems which exist outside the tax, health, security etc. systems that exist at the level of the nation-state. If you have a situation where people in the High-S High-E zones are starving those outside of resources, or actively transferring resources from outside the zones to within them, then you can fairly easily imagine a diagonal link.
Is this happening, though? Well, by some analyses yes - it doesn’t seem too far off the radically unequal, post-national future posited by writers like John Robb.
But it might well be that my analyses missed some pretty important nuances in Leadbeater’s thinking (he’s an ex-staffer for Marxism Today so he’s got to be used to thinking through systems and relations, right?), or that the version of the model he presented to an audience of tired researchers left a lot of stuff out, or simply that it’s my thinking that’s slippery or confused. He is a smart guy! So this isn’t really meant as a critique of what he’s saying, just as a bunch of questions and interpretations.
He’s planning a book about this stuff, so perhaps I’ll revisit all this as and when he writes it.
