A general outline of humanity as a system

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A general outline of humanity as a system (2/19/06)

It certainly seemed like an odd place to find it, but one of the greatest mysteries in my life was finally revealed and given a voice in a book called Mapping Mars, by Oliver Morton. Morton was discussing the selection of landing sites on Mars when he said:

In his classic study Place and Placelessness, the Canadian geographer Edward Relph explains how much more there is to a place than the objective facts of its spatial coordinates. "In our everyday lives places are not experienced as independent, clearly defined entities that can be described simply in terms of their location or appearance. Rather [they] are sensed in a chiaroscuro of setting, landscape, ritual, routine, other people, personal experiences, care and concern for home, and in the context of other places."

Morton cited Relph in talking about how landing places transition from places on a map to actual places we know and love once a lander has set down and started it's activities. The act of being there changes the nature of a place, in our minds at least. These words have taken on a deeper meaning since the departure of Sprit and Opportunity. Roving across Mars they have not only let us see places but also given us a window into the history of the places we see, and the open nature of their planning teams has lent us the personal stories to associate with those places.

As a government/military brat roaming Earth often felt a lot like roving Mars. It didn't matter much where I was, in the US at least, the whole place just seemed the same. A McDonalds was a McDonalds. Malls all looked the same. There just isn't a lot of variation in the look and activities going on all over the country. It made the whole place seem rather stagnant and depressing. When the globalization protestors gained media favor I wondered if this was what they meant.

Relph would have had a field day with me. We traveled so much that the places I began to identify with were the places we spent the most time. To this day I know the streets of Washington D.C. better than any city I've ever lived in, even though I've never actually lived there. There is a Comfort Inn in Hartford, CT that I still consider to be akin to home because that was our halfway point, and hence where we stayed on our way down to DC. I even find myself categorizing people into the 14 or so facial archetypes I noticed when younger.

In time it became obvious that it was the people and their activities that made these places unique, but I didn't quite understand how overriding this was until I read Relph's words in Morton's book. Finally, I had a way of dealing with the disconnect I felt with, well, everything. The fallout from this major theme in my life is that I see everything in just about these terms. To be fair, home was home and no place could replace it. In these travels I also found a multitude of unique things that were endlessly fascinating. While I hope it doesn't need to be said... if I could do it over, I wouldn't change a thing.

Having said that, we can talk a bit about "Humanity as a system" because Relph's words provide a really great starting point for all of that. One can almost picture people, as we live our lives and slowly expand throughout the earth, going through our day-to-day lives and watching the trends, commenting on them, and celebrating them. Places take on meaning because of these actions and so they mean something to us, if we know all of that. What that means is that for new people, by birth or travel, need to know these things in order to fit into the society in which they find themselves. Trifle words for such an important need.

So for systemizers such as Aspies, if we can't find the system we have trouble understanding things. And growing up in any sort of society presents no greater a challenge than understanding quantum mechanics, because the elements of the system of humanity are dependant on a great number of variables which aren't written about and aren't easily predictable. But Relph provides a basis for it all. Every event, every action, every character, every mannerism goes into the whole and is eventually expressed in the habits, stories, and bonding factors that unit a people. How?

Well, the most immediately observable methods are the news media and the grapevine. Both convey all of that information to a lot of people very quickly. We also do a fair amount of it simply by walking around, participating with other members of society, and in general, living. Every interaction conveys this information, whether it be the quick "hello" to a person we see often but don't really know, or the seemingly random deeper connections which develop between people.

Of course, children don't set out to learn about all of this before opening their mouths and saying something. There is a built-in behavior to go through life with an image in our heads of all of this, which we slowly revise as we go forward. Shaped by religion, stories, school and such this system seems to work pretty well, and my scientific readers are probably starting to think of the picture I'm drawing here - by default we use models of this complex system to understand and live within it. In the same way that scientists use models to explain and understand highly complex systems such as the weather, we instinctively use a model to understand and explain the highly complex system of humanity, society, and everything else really.

That is, we instinctively do that unless we are systemizers, in which case we instinctively try to understand a system before interacting with it, get paralyzed when we don't, and then wonder what to do about it all. I took a gamble and tried to build a model in my head of how it all worked, which at this points seems to have been a pretty good idea so I'm telling others about it. Even if your model is built on something as simple as a TV character that you know very well, it is a starting point and one well worth it. Just use your imagination and run some simulations to develop it before you try it out. It'll be worth it. Really.

Anyway, I think this can hold some lessons for how we go about business as well, especially within government and politics. We want people who have a good model in their heads and can keep that model to be in power, and if they lose it we'd rather they leave. I don't think many folks think of things in quite this way. It is just, do we like them or do we not? Taking a more literal understanding of this could lead us to refining the system of selecting these people, or how to treat them once things go astray.