Dysfunctionalism - Quareness Series 199th "Lecture".
Dysfunctionalism (a psychological disorder?) nowadays appears to manifest more and more in our societal and political institutions and in the increasingly complicated ways we are required to perform everyday tasks...feeding a growing and desperate sense of chaos in many (all?) areas of our lives. Political actors incessantly ranting away in strained over-the-top tones appear to be constantly auditioning for roles far above their competency levels...creating more dysfunctionalism in an already dysfunctional world. For many other fields of endeavour with relatively little bureaucracy in former times, there's now so much bureaucracy as to make it increasingly difficult to efficiently or effectively perform the core tasks involved. It hardly matters whether the sources of all this "paper shuffling" are self-imposed or introduced by (even well intentioned) outside agencies, when they make the core aims more difficult to attain. There's also now a constant urging of us all to avail of many allegedly time-saving gadgets (brought to us courtesy of big tech) to simplify mundane tasks but which nevertheless tend to complicate our daily lives to the point where we must devote more and more of our time to learning and relearning new systems and apps. Indeed the growing problem of fragmented attention (courtesy of the widespread use of cell phones and other tecno gizmos) seems to be heading rapidly towards ensuring that our attention henceforth can never be truly ours. We may well wonder why we shouldn't expect an increase in dysfunctionalism in any society promoting the very technologies that create attention deficit disorders on a massive scale. And why in the search for simplicity do we inevitably seem to create more complexity? Is there something in human nature that precludes us from accepting that we may have reached the apex of technological intrusions and other distractions in our lives?
Here's a couple of very obvious examples of this dysfunctional complicating trend:
- Our customer service structures (ostensibly created to expedite customer complaints/
concerns) more often than not now feature unnavigable computer-driven voices answering the phone where being dealt with more often than not consists of an endless loop of transfers to different departments, often with long waiting times, until a real human voice is available...and that person may simply reroute the caller back to a computer search.
- Navigable and self-driving functions in cars (presumably made to create simpler and safer modes of transportation) have in fact tended to make on-the-road behaviour less safe as drivers' attention is distracted from the actual driving by their use of smart phones and other gizmo "add-ons".
Again it can seem like we are creating more complexity in all things until everything becomes dysfunctional. Indeed the more we push for formal inclusiveness with regard to more complex conditions for people and societies, the more "on-the-ground" exclusion we appear to be generating. Maybe more of us now need to start wondering whether it's well past time for us to take a closer look at who we are and why we exist here in the first place?
The American naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) in his book Walden Pond extolled the virtues of living simply so as not to skip over the surface of life. He saw a need to look carefully at the societies we have created and try to return to more simple solutions to problems. Of course nothing can be perfect in an imperfect world but what happens when we're past the point of progressive productivity and enter into a world of regressive dysfunctionalism? Is that how great civilisations throughout time rise and fall? Another American writer and historian Henry Adams (1838-1918) described what he termed a "Dynamic Theory of History" in which he was deeply concerned that science tended to promote change for its own sake without carefully considering the consequences for the human race. He speculated that what we refer to as human progress might be an accelerating pattern of change that increases exponentially and dangerously. Eventually, he thought, the changes might occur so rapidly that they couldn't be controlled...perhaps threatening the very existence of the human race by the very technologies created to simplify our lives. Or as the great Mark Twain put it...we may all be on a train approaching an especially dangerous curve, and the engineer at the controls is shouting "full speed ahead." Looking back from today we can perhaps discern here a potential point of common agreement as to the real underlying cause of those interim global cooling and global warming scares...a lack of adequate and patient consideration of the multi-faceted nature of our situation in the grand scheme of things.
As for my own view...I'm generally inclined to think of Mother Nature as operating in grand cycles somewhat in the manner of a great pendulum whereby any big or small swing in one direction will inevitably be countered over time with a similar swing to its opposite. Her tendency always is towards restoring balance...a good pointer for ourselves in handling dysfunctionalism?
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
January, 2024.