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<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Logo: Capitalist Tool?</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>Logo: Capitalist Tool?</H1>
<CITE>Brian Harvey<BR>University of California, Berkeley</CITE>
<P>In 1964, John Holt wrote <CITE>How Children Fail</CITE>, based on his careful
observation of actual interactions in classrooms. He found several common
ways in which the events of classroom life led to miseducative results.
Holt's stance at that time was that once teachers understood these mistakes,
they'd be corrected, and schools would be much better places.
<P>By 1972, Holt had seen his ideas become widely accepted, at least in
the abstract, but schools were as bad as ever. In his book <CITE>Freedom and
Beyond</CITE> he asks himself why:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>In a way this book marks the end of an argument. For some time I
and others have been saying--some before I was born--that children are by
nature smart, energetic, curious, eager to learn, and good at learning;
that they do not need to be bribed and bullied to learn; that they learn
best when they are happy, active, involved, and interested in what they
are doing; that they learn least, or not at all, when they are bored,
threatened, humiliated, frightened. Only a few years ago this was
controversial, not to say radical, talk. Not any more. Almost any body
of educators, hearing such things, will yawn and say, ``So what else is
new?''
<P>This is not to say that everyone has been won over. Some may never
be. But on the whole these once radical and crazy ideas have become
part of the conventional wisdom of education. Students in most colleges
of education are regularly required to read, and I suppose take tests
on, books by people who not long ago were being called ``romantic''
critics. The unthinkable has become respectable.
<P>At any rate, what concerns me now is that so many people seem to be
saying that our schools must stay the way they are, or at any rate are
going to stay the way they are, <EM>even if</EM> it means that children will
learn less in them. Or, to put it a bit differently, our schools are
the way they are for many reasons that have nothing whatever to do with
children's learning. If so, convincing people that most of our present
schools are bad for learning is not going to do much to change them;
learning is not principally what they are for...
<P>More and more it appeared that a large part of our problem is that
few of us really believe in freedom. As a slogan, it is fine. But we
don't understand it as a process or mechanism with which or within which
people can work and live. We have had in our own lives so little
experience of freedom, except in the most trivial situations, that we
can hardly imagine how it might work, how we might use it, or how it
could possibly be of any use to us when serious work was to be done.
For our times the corporate-military model seems to be the only one we
know, trust, and believe in. Most people, even in democracies, tend to
see democracy as a complicated process for choosing bosses whom all must
then obey, with this very small difference--that every so often we get a
chance to pick a new set of bosses.
<P>Not understanding freedom, we do not understand authority. We think
in terms of organization charts, pecking orders, stars on the collar and
stripes on the sleeve. If someone is above us on the chart, then by
virtue of being there he has a right to tell us to do what he wants, and
we have a duty to do whatever he tells us, however absurd, destructive,
or cruel. Naturally enough, some people, seeing around them the
dreadful works of this kind of authority, reject it altogether. But
with it they too often reject, naturally but unwisely, all notions of
competence, inspiration, leadership. They cannot imagine that of their
own free will they might ask someone else what he thought, or agree to
do what he asked, because he clearly knew or perhaps cared much more
about what he was doing than they did. The only alternative they seem
to see to coercive authority is none at all. I have therefore tried to
explore a little further the nature of freedom, so that we may better
understand how people of varying ages and skills may live together and
be useful to each other without some of them always pushing the others
around.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>Perhaps Holt's discovery that schools are not mainly about learning
merely demonstrates a specifically American naivete. Perhaps intellectuals
in the civilized world, with a tradition of political discourse, would sum
up Holt's entire argument by saying, ``The purpose of schools is to reproduce
the class structure of society.'' Indeed, much of Holt's book is taken up
with statistics about poverty, and with a debunking of the idea that better
education would bring everyone out of poverty. (But most of the book is
filled with quite specific, practical suggestions for building alternative
institutions in which adults and children can live together in freedom.)
<P>What does this have to do with Logo? We, too, have seen our ideas
about education move from the lunatic fringe to the mainstream, with hardly
any actual change in the practice or the results of schooling. Just as John
Holt had to come to terms with this contradiction in <CITE>Freedom and Beyond</CITE>,
Seymour Papert takes up the problem in his 1993 <CITE>The Children's Machine:
Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer</CITE>. But Papert reaches his
analysis of the institution of schooling by way of a technical detour
through what he calls ``pilotage'' or ``emergent programming.'' Suppose you want
to get a Logo screen turtle to follow a specific path--for example, through a
maze drawn on the screen. You can accomplish this straightforwardly by
writing a program that embodies the exact desired path as a sequence of
precise moves and turns. But this ``dead reckoning'' approach will not work
for a physical robot turtle trying to follow the same path on the floor,
because the real-world imprecision in the robot's movements will accumulate
so that it soon ends up moving in entirely the wrong direction. Instead, a
maze program for a physical robot must use feedback--from touch sensors or
light sensors--to correct its movements dynamically. Papert's point is that
such a program does not directly embody the desired path. Rather, the
robot's motion along the path ``emerges'' from a combination of the program's
rules and the feedback from the actual situation. Central planning is bad;
reacting to the local situation is good.
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>When one is overwhelmed, as everyone must be from time to time, by a
sense that School is too firmly implanted ever to change, it is helpful
to contemplate the political changes across the globe that were until
recently considered quite impossible...
<P>Mikhail Gorbachev, whose name has deservedly become emblematic of
change, is also one of history's most interesting examples of resistance
to change. Even as he ushered in previously unthinkable reforms, he
continued to pay allegiance to the ideas on which the system was
founded, and renounced the Communist party only when he was on the verge
of being renounced himself. His slogan of perestroika (which literally
means ``restructuring'') became synonymous with a policy of struggling to
reform a system in serious crisis without calling in question the
foundations on which it was built. It should be clear by now that I see
most of those who talk loudly about ``restructuring'' in education in much
the same light--though few of them have the courage to carry the reforms
as far in their realm as Gorbachev did in his. In their case a more
appropriate phrase than ``restructuring'' might be ``jiggering the system.''
<P>The analogy between perestroika and education reform would be
instructive even if it went no further than highlighting these general
features of change and resistance to change. But there is more. Using
the language of system dynamics developed earlier, the problems of both
the old Soviet Union and School can be described in terms of a conflict
between tightly and emergently programmed systems.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>This seems to me to be an extremely simplistic analysis. The ideas
to which Gorbachev maintains his allegiance are <EM>not</EM> primarily a belief in
tightly programmed systems! Rather, they are ideas about the class nature
of society, about the fact that different societies work differently because
they are planned that way: Each society is controlled by certain people,
who set up institutions that serve their needs. A profound critique of the
Soviet Union would have to ask who controlled it, and whose interests it
served, rather than what administrative structures were used.
<P>In the United States, the current organizational wisdom tells us
that airplane travel should be run in a decentralist manner, whereas rail
travel should be centrally planned. Our telephone system, once the best in
the world, was built by central planning--but by a private company, not by
government. In the name of decentralism we have replaced that central
planning with a maze, so that ordinary people can no longer figure out which
of three companies to call for help with a telephone problem (the
manufacturer of their telephone equipment, the local operating company, or a
long distance carrier), although big business benefits from competition through
price breaks for large-volume customers. The key point about all of these
examples is that the central or decentral organization is actually not so
important; trains and planes are both run to serve the rich. The ``smart
bombs'' that Papert admires in this book[*] may work by emergent programming,
but their development was funded by a massive concentration of political and
economic power, not by market forces or individual initiative!
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>[*] (Footnote added later.) Nobody ever believes me about this, so here
is an excerpt from the relevant section, starting on page 179, the beginning
of Chapter 9, "Cybernetics":
<P>Television pictures of the war over Iraq gave millions of people their
most vivid view of cybernetic technology, in the form of the "smart" missile,
which seemed to hover like an insect before lunging into the entrance of a
hangar or other building.
<P>It is depressing to feel again that the best way to open a discussion is
with a military image, but it reflects a real fact of life that has played
a big role in the strategies that have guided my work. The people who forge
new technological ideas do not make them for children. They often make them
for war, keep them in secret places, and show them in distant views...
<P>Most people watching the missiles on TV would not have been able to give
a better explanation, if asked how they worked, than that "they are programmed
to do it." The booty I am after is a set of ideas (and technologies to allow
children to appropriate them) that would allow a more specific answer. Of
course the missiles are programmed. But they are programmed in a particular
way, using specific ideas whose development has played an important role in
the intellectual history of our century and whose implications might play an
even bigger role in the coming one. My hope is that for anyone who has
appropriated these ideas, the smart missiles will become transparent and,
with them, a whole range of technologies and areas of science...
<P>The outline of this new subject will emerge gradually, and the problem of
situating it in the context of School and the larger learning environment will
best be broached when we have it in front of us. Here I give a preliminary
definition of the subject--but only as a seed for discussion--as <em>that
kernel of knowledge needed for a child to invent (and, of course, build)
entities with the evocatively lifelike qualities of smart missiles.</em>
[Emphasis in original.]
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>Seymour Papert is not the only Logoite for whom the contemplation of
emergent programming has given rise to bad political analysis. Papert's MIT
colleague Mitchel Resnick, in his 1994 book <CITE>Turtles, Termites, and Traffic
Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds</CITE>, moves beyond Papert's
mixture of praise and criticism for Gorbachev. Resnick's political hero is
Boris Yeltsin, the new Russian tsar. Because Yeltsin dissolved the
centralist Soviet Union, Resnick takes at face value his claim to be a
democrat and a decentralist. But the people of Chechnya understand, as
Resnick does not, that Yeltsin is neither of those things. What looks like
decentralism to Resnick is mere ethnocentrism (Russian Jews, in particular,
face much worse antisemitism than they did even in the Soviet Union days),
and what looks like democracy is opportunism.
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>The spread of decentralized ideas can be seen in organizations of
all sizes and types--countries, companies, schools, clubs. Although
details are different in each case, the basic idea is always the same:
pushing authority and power down from the top, distributing rights and
responsibilities more widely. For some countries (such as the Soviet
Union) decentralization has meant breaking apart into separate pieces.
But changes in national boundaries are not nearly as important as
changes in political and economic structures. Politically, countries
throughout the world are shifting away from totalitarianism toward
democracy. Economically, countries are shifting away from centrally
controlled economies toward market-oriented economies. As a result,
decision making (both political and economic) is becoming more
decentralized than ever before. Of course, there are exceptions to the
trend. In China, the government reasserted its centralized power with
the brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square. And on many of the former
Soviet republics, democracy is very fragile. But the overall trend is
clear. Between 1989 and 1991, countries with a combined population of
1.5 billion people, more than one-quarter of the world's population,
moved away from autocratic toward more democratic forms of government,
according to Freedom House, an American human-rights group. Now, for
the first time ever, more than half of all countries are democracies.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
What's wrong with this passage is that Freedom House is <EM>not</EM> a ``human rights
group.'' Rather, Freedom House is a well-funded cold war propaganda mill.
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>Both the Freedom House survey and the State Department reports seem
to have a clear bias reflecting American foreign policy interests and/or
reflecting an undifferentiated, visceral anticommunism. Thus, the Freedom
House reports during the 1980s consistently rated El Salvador and
Guatemala, two countries allied with the United States that have been
notorious for government-allied ``death squads,'' which murdered thousands
of their citizens, as having a comparable or (usually) more favorable
human rights climate than Hungary or Yugoslavia, two one-party Communist
regimes which were not engaged in the slaughter of their citizens.
[Robert Justin Goldstein, ``The Limitations of Using Quantitative Data in
Studying Human Rights Abuses,'' in <CITE>Human Rights and Statistics: Getting
the Record Straight</CITE>, edited by Thomas B. Jabine and Richard P. Claude,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.]
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>In describing the behavior of ants, termites, robot turtles, and
other mindless agents, the idea of decentral control, of emergent
programming, truly does capture all of the important aspects of the
mechanism by which such simple devices can give rise to seemingly complex
behaviors. Emergent programming may even turn out to explain how human
intelligence itself arises from the simple behavior of neurons. But once we
set out to describe a system in which the ``elements'' are intelligent human
beings, there is much more to be said. Papert and Resnick both fall victim
to technocentrism; having discovered the power of central vs. decentral
control as an explanation, they take on such questions as autocratic vs.
democratic, governmental vs. private, and led vs. leaderless as if all of
those were merely central vs. decentral in different words.
<H2>Autocratic / Democratic Is Not Central / Decentral</H2>
<P>Mitchel Resnick's anticommunist friends at Freedom House use
``autocratic'' to mean communist and ``democratic'' to mean capitalist. This
use of language confusingly blends several distinct questions:
<UL>
<LI>Are there elections?
<LI>Are the means of production privately or publicly owned?
<LI>Is planning done centrally or decentrally?
<LI>Who holds power?
</UL>
So, for example, the current movement in the United States to eliminate
federally funded programs in favor of state funded programs is a move toward
decentralist planning, but it is not a move toward democracy; the state
governments are no more and no less under popular control than the federal
government.
<P>The history of the Soviet Union, following the abandonment of
communism by Lenin and Stalin, makes it easy to blend all these questions.
It may be helpful, therefore, to review the nature of the only government
ever blessed by Marx himself as authentically communist: the short-lived
Paris Commune of 1870-71. The following is from Engels' introduction to
Marx's <CITE>The Civil War in France</CITE>. (I quote Engels because Marx writes at
much greater length, but it's worth reading the third part of Marx's book, in
which he describes the Commune; the other parts are about the external
political and military events that led to its formation and then its
defeat.) In brackets I'll point out how this passage is relevant to the
issues under consideration here.
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>The members of the Commune were divided into a majority, the
Blanquists... and a minority, members of the International Working Men's
Association, chiefly consisting of adherents of the Proudhon school of
socialism. [That is, the Commune was multi-party.] ... Naturally, the
Proudhonists were chiefly responsible for the economic decrees of the
Commune, both for their praiseworthy and their unpraiseworthy aspects; as
the Blanquists were for its political commissions and omissions. And in
both cases the irony of history willed--as is usual when doctrinaires
come to the helm--that both did the opposite of what the doctrines of
their school prescribed.
<P>Proudhon, the Socialist of the small peasant and master-craftsman,
regarded association with positive hatred. [He was a decentralist, like
Papert and Resnick.] He said of it that there was more bad than good in
it; that it was by nature sterile, even harmful, because it was a fetter
on the freedom of the worker; that it was a pure dogma, unproductive and
burdensome... that, as compared with it, competition, division of labor,
and private property were economic [i.e., good] forces. Only in the
exceptional cases--as Proudhon called them--of large-scale industry and
large establishments, such as railways, was the association of workers
in place.
<P>By 1871, large-scale industry had already so much ceased to be an
exceptional case even in Paris, the centre of artistic handicrafts, that
by far the most important decree of the Commune instituted an
organization of large-scale industry and even of manufacture which was
not only to be based on the association of the workers in each factory,
but also to combine all these associations in one great union...
[Economic planning was done centrally, but bottom-up. The workers of a
particular factory were the experts on how that factory could best
contribute.]
<P>The Blanquists fared no better. Brought up in the school of
conspiracy, and held together by the strict discipline which went with
it, they started out from the viewpoint that a relatively small number of
resolute, well-organized men would be able, at a given favourable moment,
not only to seize the helm of state, but also, by a display of great,
ruthless energy, to maintain power until they succeeded in sweeping the
mass of the people into the revolution and ranging them round the small
band of leaders. This involved, above all, the strictest, dictatorial
centralization of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary
government. [These ideas of the Blanquists were reinvented barely a
dozen years later by Lenin. Too bad he didn't appreciate Engels'
critique! In Lenin's defense, the conditions in which he worked, under
the brutal oppression of Tsarist Russia, were different from the
relatively free conditions in Paris.] And what did the Commune, with
its majority of these same Blanquists, actually do? In all its
proclamations to the French in the provinces, it appealed to them to
form a free federation of all French Communes with Paris, a national
organization which for the first time was really to be created by the
nation itself. It was precisely the oppressing power of the former
centralized government, army, political police, bureaucracy, which
Napoleon had created in 1798 and which since then had been taken over by
every new government as a welcome instrument and used against its
opponents--it was precisely this power which was to fall everywhere,
just as it had already fallen in Paris.
<P>From the very outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the
working class, once come to power, could not go on managing with the old
state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered
supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the
old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the
other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by
declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.
What had been the characteristic attribute of the former state? Society
had created its own organs to look after its common interests,
originally through simple division of labour. But these organs, at
whose head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance
of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants
of society into the masters of society. [The government is ``at the
head'' of social institutions, but fundamentally no different from any
other. The sort of ``decentralization'' that transfers control from a
government agency to a private company is irrelevant to democracy vs.
autocracy.] This can be seen, for example, not only in the hereditary
monarchy, but equally so in the democratic republic. Nowhere do
``politicians'' form a more separate and powerful section of the nation
than precisely in North America. There, each of the two major parties
which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn
controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on
seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the
separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their
party and on its victory are rewarded with positions. It is well known
how the Americans have been trying for thirty years to shake off this
yoke, which has become intolerable, and how in spite of it all they
continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption... [If the
part about shaking off the yoke seems less familiar and truthful to the
modern American reader than the part about professional politicians,
remember that Engels wrote this passage in 1891, at the height of the
activities of the Knights of Labor, and just five years after the
Haymarket massacre and rebellion in Chicago that are still remembered
worldwide as the workers' holiday, May 1.]
<P>Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the state
from servants of society into masters of society--an inevitable
transformation in all previous states--the Commune made use of two
infallible means. In the first place, it filled all
posts--administrative, judicial and educational--by election on the
basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of
recall at any time by the same electors. And, in the second place, all
officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other
workers...
<P>Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled
with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship
looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of
the Proletariat.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<H2>Governmental / Private Is Not Central / Decentral</H2>
<P>I shall have little to say about this obvious point. In the United States,
such educational initiatives as the Head Start program are federally funded,
and standards are set federally, but the programs are controlled and
administered separately by each school district. By contrast, the
assignment of telephone area codes to cities is done centrally, but by
private companies: originally by AT&T and now by a consortium of telephone
operating companies.
<P>In practice, mixed approaches are most common. Government agencies
such as the Food and Drug Administration set minimum standards that private
companies must meet, but the private companies have room for initiative
within those standards. It is worth noting that private companies sometimes
<EM>encourage</EM> government regulation, because every company in an industry may
know how to make a safe product, and may want to make a safe product, but
may be afraid that some competitor will undercut their prices by making
unsafe products.
<P>The theory of the ``free'' market is that over the long run, consumers
will reject bad ideas, and so businesses will be forced by market pressure
to provide good products without government regulation. Adam Smith wrote
about these ideas in a time of small industry and personal craftsmanship.
But in the era of monopoly capital, and of complex technology, people's
lives are strongly affected by economic decisions over which they have no
market influence. The most dramatic recent example was the Savings and Loan
catastrophe in the United States, in which deregulation paved the way not
for healthy competition but for widespread theft. (Did the United States
learn its lesson? No; right now we are having a similar scandal about
``derivatives'': a form of legalized gambling with stockbrokers as the
bookies. The news media now wish us to believe that the money lost by
cities and pension funds has just vanished, instead of finding out who has
gotten richer. Why didn't we learn? Because the deregulation enthusiasts
in the government, while they speak the language of Papert and Resnick to
``prove'' that deregulation helps the economy in general, are really promoting
their own class interests rather than those of consumers.) But even when
deliberate theft is not at issue, how can a consumer, for example,
realistically be expected to check on the safety standards of different
airline companies? We can't watch the mechanics work on the airplanes, and
most of us wouldn't know how to judge their procedures if we did see them.
But government <EM>can</EM> check.
<H2>Led / Leaderless Is Not Central / Decentral</H2>
<P>In Resnick's book, the word ``leader'' is repeatedly used to mean ``controller.''
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>Most strikingly, the students' strategies were almost always
centralized, relying on a leader to make decisions. Fadhil centralized
control at the spaceship: ``If a robot finds gold, it sends a signal to
the spaceship. Then, the spaceship sends signals back to the other
robots, telling them where to go. The spaceship would be constantly
monitoring all of the robots.'' Benjamin suggested that ``the leader robot
should send the others in all directions, like the spokes of a wheel.''
Ramesh had a similar idea: ``One robot is in charge, sending all these
robots out. Where most gold is found, it sends more in that direction.
And where the gold is not found, you eliminate that direction...''
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>As with many emergent programming ideas, this use of language is
appropriate in its original context, but not as a metaphor for human social
behavior. Robots do not form societies; they obey programs. For robots, a
``leader'' can only mean one who gives orders. But that's not true for human
beings, as John Holt reminds us in the passage I quoted near the beginning
of this paper. Here is an example of how Resnick gets in trouble by
thinking that leadership means giving orders:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>Conspiracy theories are another example of centralized thinking.
For almost every perceived problem in society, people look for a clearly
identifiable culprit to blame. Something is wrong with the world
economy? Blame the Trilateral Commission. Traditional family values
are on the decline? Blame the producers in Hollywood. In general,
people tend to focus blame on a centralized cause rather than sort
through the complex, interacting factors that underlie most social
phenomena.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>This passage is misleading in two ways. First, equating leadership,
even coercive leadership, with conspiracy is a red herring. The passage,
despite its lip service to complexity, seems to leave us with a choice of
only two extremes: Either we eliminate human agency and self-interest from
our world view or we must be paranoid conspiracy theorists. Blaming
Hollywood, at least in part, for the rise in violence in our society is <EM>not</EM>
like blaming the Trilateral Commission for the state of the economy. Paul
Goodman understood the middle ground; the second paragraph of what follows,
from <CITE>Growing Up Absurd</CITE>, makes the key point:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>In American society we have perfected a remarkable form of
censorship: to allow every one his political right to say what he
believes, but to swamp his little boat with literally thousands of
millions of newspapers, mass-circulation magazines, best-selling books,
broadcasts, and public pronouncements that disregard what he says and
give the official way of looking at things. Usually there is no
conspiracy to do this; it is simply that what he says is not what people
are talking about, it is not newsworthy.
<P>(There is no conspiracy, but it is not undeliberate. ``If you mean
to tell me,'' said an editor to me, ``that <CITE>Esquire</CITE> tries to have
articles on important issues and treats them in such a way that nothing
can come of it--who can deny it?'' Try, also, to get a letter printed in
the <CITE>New York Times</CITE> if your view on the issue calls attention to an
essential factor that is not being generally mentioned.)
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>The second flaw in Resnick's analysis is that he equates leadership
with coercive leadership. Most of the StarLogo programs in his book
demonstrate emergent techniques working out admirably for the ants,
termites, and so on that he simulates. But one of his simulations shows how
the individual actions of independent agents can combine to produce a result
that nobody desires: In a mixed community of turtles and frogs, the desire
of each individual to have at least a few same-species neighbors leads
eventually to a complete segregation of the two groups into ghettos, even
though each individual would be happy to live in a mixed community, even as
a member of the minority in that neighborhood.
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>This turtle/frog scenario was inspired by the writings of Harvard
economist Thomas Schelling. In an article titled ``On the Ecology of
Micromotives,'' Schelling (1971) notes that the ``micromotives'' of
individuals can lead to ``macro'' patterns that are not necessarily
desired by any of the individuals. At a cocktail party, for instance,
men and women might end up in single-gender conversation clusters, even
if everyone would prefer mixed-gender clusters. And a residential
neighborhood might become more segregated ethnically or racially than
any individual would find desirable.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>Resnick goes on to explain the mathematical principles that make
these undesired results emerge from the situation. But he stops there,
without suggesting a solution. That's because the obvious
solution--leadership--would work against his desire to equate human society
with ant society. In the example of unintended segregation, people who
understand how the result emerges from the individual behaviors could teach
other people to understand it also. Then, neighbors could voluntarily agree
not to behave in the way that makes the segregation emerge. At the same
time, members of a local majority who understand the risk could be led to go
out of their way to make their minority neighbors feel at home. This is not
telling people where to live by force of law, but it <EM>is</EM> leadership.
<H2>Mindful / Mindless Is Not Central / Decentral</H2>
<P>Resnick's central pedagogic point is about what he calls the ``centralized
mindset'': People expect every phenomenon to be the result of deliberate
planning. We ascribe social organization to insects, for example, when
really each insect is separately following simple, built-in rules of
behavior. Religion is the same mistake applied to the creation of the
world; according to the centralized mindset, if there is a world, there must
have been Someone who planned it. One way of expressing Resnick's point is
that people expect phenomena to be the result of mindful behavior, whereas
really many phenomena result from mindless, automatic processes.
<P>As with several of the points discussed earlier, I think that this
dichotomy between central, mindful, deliberate, conscious, planned behavior
and decentral, mindless, automatic, unconscious behavior is completely
appropriate in describing insects, traffic jams, and even neurons in the
human brain. But it is inappropriate when applied to the interactions of
human beings. One example is that Resnick gives a rather idiosyncratic
description of the history of psychoanalysis, a description that I believe
all the researchers he mentions would reject, because he equates ``Ego'' with
``conscious, central, rational'' and ``Id'' with ``unconscious, decentral,
irrational.'' It's true that in psychoanalytic theory the human consciousness
is <EM>part of</EM> the Ego, but it's a very tiny part; most of the Ego (and
certainly the part interesting to psychoanalysts) is unconscious.
<P>Neither Papert nor Resnick would say ``planning is bad'' in so many
words. Indeed, both explicitly disclaim that position. Nevertheless, their
merging of the ideas ``centralist'' and ``planned'' is what leads both Papert
and Resnick to embrace laissez-faire capitalism, deregulation, and the
exaltation (as in Adam Smith) of individual greed, as the alternative to
Soviet-style oppression.
<P>Instead, Papert and Resnick would do better to study examples of
democratic, decentral social structures that are nevertheless planned,
mindful, and humane. I've already mentioned the Paris Commune as an
example; another that I like is the Society of Friends (the Quakers). The
Friends are the group that has most carefully developed the process of
decision-making by consensus instead of by vote; <EM>everyone</EM> must agree to a
proposed change of policy. Decisions affecting the members of a particular
Meeting House are made by those members directly. Decisions for the Society
as a whole are made bottom up; after consensus is reached at each Meeting,
representatives are sent to regional and then national or international
meetings to seek a wider consensus. If there is no wider consensus, the
issue is sent back to the local Meetings for further discussion.
<P>When decisions are made by consensus and by direct participation of
all members, there are no political parties and no professional
politicians. It's hard to change a major policy if everyone must agree to
the change, but when the policy does change, the new policy is carried out
wholeheartedly by the entire membership. (This is what was wrong with
Soviet planning: not that large scale plans were made, but that those plans
were made top-down, by decree, and presented to a rank and file with no
commitment to the plans.) So, for example, in the United States before the
Civil War, the Society of Friends was very late in joining the movement for
the abolition of slavery, because for many years they had no consensus about
slavery. But once the Friends did decide to join the movement, they quickly
became a leading organization in the struggle, because all of their members
joined the fight with energy and dedication. And of course it matters that
the decisions of the Society are, because of the consensus process, always
principled decisions, in sharp contrast to the <EM>quid pro quo</EM> that is typical
of virtually all governmental processes. In the language of this paper, the
Society's decisions are democratic because they are both decentral and
profoundly mindful, not at all like the ``invisible hand'' of Adam Smith's
marketplace of individual greedy entrepreneurs.
<H2>Conclusion</H2>
<P>All of this is obvious; in some ways I'm embarrassed to be writing a paper
saying so little. But it seems not to be obvious in Massachusetts. Seymour
Papert and Mitchel Resnick will both, I think, be distressed to see
themselves presented as allies of the right wing Republican Party in the
United States. (Indeed, Papert harshly criticizes then-President George
Bush's educational plans in <CITE>The Children's Machine</CITE>.) But their arguments
support the right wing; they express themselves in the vocabulary of the
right wing; and ultimately they embrace the main economic standard of the
right wing, namely, that what matters is the efficiency of a nation's
economy on average, rather than the position of the poorest members of a
society.
<P>You see, those ants and termites achieve their successes for the
group as a whole through behaviors that sacrifice many individual members of
the group. If everyone looks for food randomly, rather than according to a
plan, some individuals will, by chance, find a new food supply that benefits
the entire group. But other individuals will, by chance, not find food at
all, and will starve. For the process of evolution, by which insect
behaviors develop, all that matters is the survival of the species; it's
perfectly okay for individuals to die needlessly. And that is precisely the
Republican position about human beings; in fact, they're happy to have a
class of poor people--what Marx called the reserve army of the unemployed--as
a weapon to use against labor unions.
<P>What makes Papert and Resnick's position both ironic and dangerous
is that their newfound political allies, the ones from whom they learned the
vocabulary of ``economic freedom'' and deregulation, are promoting freedom
<EM>only</EM> for capitalists. The same politicians, in the United States right
now, are hard at work taking away reproductive freedom from women,
establishing a state religion, chipping away at the constitutional
protections against unwarranted search and seizure, and attacking freedom of
speech. Papert and Resnick, whatever their personal beliefs, are
contributing to this attack on freedom by helping its architects pretend
that Science is on their side.
<P><ADDRESS>
<A HREF="index.html"><CODE>www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh</CODE></A>
</ADDRESS>
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