I I V G P a p e r s
Veröffentlichungsreihe des Internationalen Instituts für Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin
RV/77-7
ON THE LEARNING CAPACITY OF LARGE POLITICAL SYSTEMS
by
Karl W. Deutsch
August 1977
Publication series of the International Institute for Comparative Social Research
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin
Reprinted from:
information foraction.
From Knaoledgs (a Wisdom
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ACACEMlC PRESS, IN C N aw Fork San Francisco Landa*
Chapter 6
On the Learning Capacity of Large Political Systems
KARL V/. DEUTSCH
This chapter begins with some basic definitions of systems, politics, and learning, it then lists some structural and precess aspects of dimensions of learning performance, it concludes with an overview of conflict, specialization, bureaucratization, innovations, and restructuring as alternative overall patterns of social and political learning on a large scale.
S o m e C o n c e p t s a n d D e f in it io n s
A system is a set of relatively statle and identifiable compo
nents and the relationships among them, tinned by an observa
ble higher frequency of connections or transactions with each other than with the outside world, and markedly more interde
pendent, in the sense that a change in one of the components will have a predictable effect on other components (Bertaianffy, 1369; Buckley, 1967).
A political system is characterized by processes that involve
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Karl W. Deutsch
the interplay of habitual and expected compliance with com
mands, rules, or decisions, with some probability of their bemc backed by enforcement or other negative or positive sanctions, while the main structures of this system involve such interlock
ing— and sometimes overlapping— social roles as those c*
commander, superior, rule maker, decision maker, executor, or administrator, on the one hand, and those of demander, sup
porter, enforcer, conformist, loyal citizen, or obedient subject, on the other. The political system thus includes not o n ly the machinery of the state, with its civilian and military personnel and equipment, but also the rest of the population, insofar as their compliance or noncompliance, support or nonsupport, makes a relevant difference to the outcome, and in particular to the' subsequent structure and behavior of the system (Parsons.
1951, 1969; Deutsch, 1954, 1966b, 1974a; Easton, 1953, 1965).
Learning behavior by a system consists in its giving to the same class of inputs or stimuli a new class of outputs or responses, different from the class of responses given before (Hilgard, 1964; Hebb, 1949). Learning responses may be prima
rily behavioral, consisting in directly observable changes in external output; or they may be primarily cognitive, consisting in changes in the memories stored within the system and applied to the internal steering of its externally observable behavior; or cognitive and behavioral learning may be combined in various ways. Thus a system may acquire nev/ patterns of information that enable it to perform reliable operations of discrimination or recognition, which it could not have performed before.
The learning capacity of a system could then be defined from a process point of view, as the ensemble of the potential new.
operations that a given system is capabie of learning. In fact, however, such an ensemble of operations could, in advance, at best only be estimated; it could at most be measured after the event, and even then it would not be clear whether in fact it had exhausted the entire ensemble of ail potential operations which that system would have been capabie of learning.
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Any acceptable estimate of this ensemble of potential behavior patterns, moreover, would require some demonstrable base of information, A structural definition of the learning capacity of a system offers an approach for finding such an information base.
From a structural point of view, the learning capacity of a system can be defined as the subset of those among its structures and resources that are available for recommitment to new patterns of behavior in response to a given class of stimuli. In an army, these troops not pinned down in forward positions but held back as an operational reserve by the high command for possible commit
ment to exploit some breakthrough, or to stem some possible emergency, are such a recommitable resource. The proportion of such troops and equipment, capable of relatively rapid redeployment and recommitment, then may serve as an indicator of the potential "learning capacity" of that army. The liquid resources of a business corporation, available' for rapid transfer and possible reinvestment, and those executives and personnel of an organization— public or private— who are available for the rapid formation of new task forces, are other examples of such recommittable resources on which the learning capacities of their respective systems in large part will be based (Deutsch, 1966b, 1974a).
From the foregoing it should be clear that the learning capacity of a system is not identical with its total performance.
From a process point of view, the latter includes many items of behavior that are either unchanging and repetitive, or more or less random, or drifting with the system's environment and thus without significant learning in any of these cases.
In terms of structure, the performance of a self-steering system— which is the type of system of most interest to us here— also depends on the configuration and capacities of its communication channels, as well as those of its technological and human equipment for information intake, memory, and recall, filtering and selection of messages, control over effectors, and overall monitoring and coordination. Oniy a part of the
On the Learning Capacity of Large Political Systems
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Karl W. Deutsch
information channel's, storage facilities, and feedback loops corresponding to these functions belongs to the structural learning capacity of the system— nameiy that part of each of them that can be discommitted from its current structural contexts and recommitted to new patterns of structure and function. By comparing earlier and later patterns and processes of this kind, the learning performance of the system can then be investigated.
The notion of structure applies not only to the tangible markers or carriers of information, which make up the communi
cation channels of a self-steering system. It also applies to the information carried or stored in these facilities and to the codes in terms of which this information is organized and in which it can be encoded or decoded. In all these patterns of information and coding, some elements are likely to be more stable than others, longer lasting, more difficult and costly to change, and so asymmetrically coupled with the rest that smaller changes in any such structural element will be apt to be followed by larger changes in the other relatively nonstructural or less structural parts.
If the structural elements are, individually, thus relatively resistant to change, their relations to one another, as well as to the nonstructural elements, tend to be more easily changeable;
and this fact, wherever it exists, creates a possibility of some combinatorial richness and some structural transformation, that is, of some new configuration including the same structural ele
ments but now with some of their mutual relationships altered.
The ensemble of all such rearrangements that are possible for a set of structural elements (including those of their relations that are unlikely to change) is called a transformation group; and in thinking of a structure in the sense of the psychologist Jean Piaget’s interpretation of the "structuralist” viewpoint of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the concept of any structure always should also include the entire set of transformation groups that could be farmed from it (Piaget, 1972).
On the Learning Capacity oi Large Political Systems
Learning at the Level of Large Systems:
S o m e S o c i a l a n d P o l i t i c a l E x a m p l e s
As these theoretical considerations suggest, learning can take place at the level of the individual but also at the level of the small group, such as that of a nuclear family, and also at the level of very large systems, such as nation-states, or worldwide organizations. It may be useful to recall some concrete examples of such large-scale learning processes and their results.
During the last 50 years, many of the world’s governments and political systems have learned to perform many new operations that they did not and could not perform before, and they have recommitted some of their old structures and resources, and acquired new ones, so as to create some readily available new structural capacities that earlier they had lacked.
The government and people of the United States learned during those five decades to regulate and develop the water resources of large systems of river valleys; to create systems of social security and later for medical care for the aged; to make collective bargaining widespread in industry; to recruit and organize vast armies, fleets, and air armadas, and to land armies in Africa, Italy, Normandy, and Okinawa; to develop the use of nuclear energy for warlike and peaceful purposes; to send vessels navigating into space and to land men on the moon; to organize and support scientific and technological research on an unprecedented scale; to develop new networks of transport and mass communication, through jet aircraft and television; to utilize very large amounts of information by means of electronic data processing; to wipe out poliomyelitis as a major disease, through government-provided free mass inoculations; to make at least a beginning to reduce, through government action and mass persuasion, the centuries-old practices of race discrimina
tion and sex discrimination; and to make available some form of higher education to between one-third and one-half of ali young people of college age.
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Corresponding to these new operations, the United States ha:
developed new political, administrative, and social structure:
which had been absent or rudimentary at the start of the 1930s These structures include the Tennessee Valley Authority (TV A) the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress c Industrial Organizations) group of labor unions and the nevj national agencies to deal with labor relations; the Social Security Administration; the United States Department of Health, Educa
tion, and Welfare (HEW); a vast military establishment, headec by a single Department of Defense, and visibly symbolized by the huge building of the Pentagon; the Atomic Energy Commission and a nuclear industry; the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), the Advanced Research Projects Administration (ARPA); and a vastly expanded aerospace industry; the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a greatly expanded section of public and private research institutions and scientific personnel:
the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), the Civil Aeronau
tics Board (CAB), a large network of publicly subsidized airports and highways, and,-more recent!y,;some passenger rail transport facilities run by the Amtrak Corporation; the Federal Communi
cations Commission (FCC), several large private television net
works, and a host of local radio and television stations, with their equipment; a large new computer industry; a host of public agencies and private organizations working to reduce discrimi
nation and inequalities in regard to race and sex; and greatly expanded and diversified public and private institutions in the university sector.
Similar lists of new operations and structural facilities could be drawn up fc r the political systems of the Soviet Union, China, much of Western Europe, and many of the developing countries.
Not ail results of such social, political, and cultural learning have been good for the survival or vigor of political systems or the welfare of their peoples. The economic structures of the tobacco industry and many advertising agencies grew by teach
es
On the Learning Capacity o< Large Political Systems
ing tens of millions of men and women the habit of cigarette smoking; now, many lung cancer deaths later, millions have to try to unlearn this personal habit, and eventually the structural and institutional aspects of cigarette manufacture and advertis
ing will have to be reduced.
During that same half-century, many countries learned to develop large military establishments, standing armed forces, and accumulations of military hardware, together with the corresponding political habits and images. The economist and social scientist Joseph A. Schumpeter has argued that states and societies learn in this way to behave in a militaristic and imperialist manner, through developing social classes and insti
tutions that teach, reward, and maintain these types of behavior, directly among their members and indirectly through their influence, in the society at large in which they predominate.
Hence, in Schumpeter’s view, the strength and persistence of imperialist behavior patterns can be predicted from the strength and pervasiveness of the war-promoting social strata and institu
tions that preserve and reproduce these types of behavior within their society. From this point of view, Schumpeter saw, at the time of World War I, imperial Germany and imperial Japan, with their combination of powerful military-aristocratic-agrarian elites and strong modern industrial capabilities, as most suscep
tible to continuing imperialist behavior, while he thought that Britain, with much larger colonial possessions but much weaker m ilitary-aristccratic-agrarian interest groups, would be able to give up far more easily and quickly her colonialist and imperialist behavior (Schumpeter, 1961; Deutsch, 1956, 1974b).
L e a r n i n g P r o c e s s e s In t h e F o r m a t i o n o f S o c i a l S t r a t a a n d C l a s s e s
At the macro-level, as we have seen, societies learn through changes in the configuration of their communication channels,
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communication codes, memories, and- cultures, and througt changes in the structure of their occupational roles or job slots and their social classes and strata. Sut even without a change ir the configuration of these structures, societies may change by changing the occupants of these roles and the incumbents cl these job slots or offices.
Here again, there are two major variables. Individuals could succeed one another more or less rapidly in each job or social role, much as the guests of a hotel succeed each other in its rooms w ithout changing the configuration of these floors and rooms, and without much change in their behavior in each room, compared to the behavior of those who occupied it before them.
In this manner, members of certain minorities or income groups previously excluded from occupying certain roles, may eventu
ally be permitted to compete for them, on the tacit or explicit condition that they will meet the same tests and behave in the same manner as those who had been admitted earlier to these same jobs or opportunities. Thus an employer or a university may learn to admit black or low-income students or employees, respectively, whom it had previously excluded, while attempting to retain unchanged its earlier curriculum and examination methods, or its earlier job descriptions or methods of personnel selection and promotion to higher level jobs.
Often, however, experience will show that the society or organization must learn more. It may turn out thai the new kinds of students need a.somewhat different kind of curriculum and somewhat different educational methods, better suited to their particular needs, capabilities, and assets, and employers may have to make, mutatis mutandis, similar adjustments. Thus, earlier steps in macro-learning in terms of recruitment may then require further steps in macro-learning in terms of role structure and role content.
Sut there is also learning at the micro-level, the level of individuals and small groups, that may have macro-level conse-
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On the teaming Capacity ci targe Political Systems
quences. If people learn to behave in new ways in their old roles and jobs, a point may be reached eventually where these old roles and jobs no longer are the same, and the character of the macro-structure changes.
Finally, the character of the macro-structure may have conse
quences on the micro-levei. A social, economic, or political system may function somewhat like a huge teaching machine, teaching particular patterns of perception, memory, and behav
ior to many persons living under it, by rewarding certain attitudes and actions while not rewarding or even penalizing others.
Under such conditions, people are taught by their own experi
ences; and recent research suggests that if rewarding experi
ences for some particular kind of behavior do not occur with certainty but only with a probability that is high at the beginning but then slowly declines in frequency, they will form a probabilis
tic reinforcem ent schedule that will make it likely that the reinforced behavior will be more tenaciously retained, even if rewards for it should become extremely rare (Skinner, 1968).
One probable condition for the efficacy of such.a probabilistic- reinforcement schedule is that the conditions on which behavior is rewarded should be consonant, that is, they should be consistent or at least compatible, and that different types of rewarded behavior also should be compatible, so that the same behavior should not be sometimes rewarded and sometimes penalized, with approximately equal frequency. Where this latter condition prevails, the perceptions and learning experiences of the individual are likely to be highly dissonant. Research results suggest that high degress of cognitive dissonance tend to produce bewilderment, passivity, frustration, and anger (Fes- tinger, 1957; Lazarsfeld, 1943; Collard, Doob, & Miller, 1940).
If we extend these general principles to our analysis of large-scale processes of individual learning of perceptions, attitudes, and behavior patterns in society and politics, it seems plausible that such learning through probabilistic sequences of
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reinforcing experiences, which are both multipie and consonant, wiii teach people who undergo them the perceptions, attitudes, and behavior of social classes. In contrast, dissonant or inade
quately reinforcing sequences of experiences or both will tend to produce only the attitudes and behavior patterns of mere social strata, in terms of the incumbency of similar positions in the social status system.
Classes tend to form consistent and stable images of individ
ual and collective self-interest; strata do not, or they do so to a
much lesser extent. Classes tend to act in politics more consist
ently, frequently, and energetically than do strata whose mem
bers are held back by uncertainty, cross-pressures, frequent divisions, wavering, and occasional attitude reversals. (For upper- and upper-middle-class behavior in this respect, see Verba and Nie, 1973.)
Opinion leaders reinforce these behavior patterns. Within classes, they tend to make such behavior patterns more conso
nant and classiike. Within strata, they will tend to waver with their followers.
Intergenerational stability, keeping each generation within the same social tevel and situation as its parents, will tend to foster the forming and consolidation of classes. Social mobility up or down, across generations or within the lifetime of an individual, will tend to weaken class behavior and to favor the formation of more loosely knit and transitory strata.
In many traditional societies, most individuals and families are members of classes, and oniy a minority belong to mere strata with high vertical mobility and heterogeneous cross-class con
nections. In highly modernized and mobilized societies, a major
ity may belong to strata and only a minority to classes with consistent behavior-reinforcing patterns of experience. Even so.
however, those classes that act more frequently, steadfastly, and consistently may exercise a stronger influence in politics.
Where class patterns prevail, they may parallel one another across many localities, countries, and languages. Hence, even
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On the Learning Capacity of Large Political Systems
where the lives of most people are intensely local, as in the European Middle Ages, those few who do travel long distances may find similar social situations— lords and peasants, priests and burghers— wherever they go; and similar social themes, for example, in chivalric literature, may be perceived as meaningful across many boundaries of ethnicity and language.
Hence, some traditional societies, such as those of Medieval Europe look both localized and international, while members of strata in general, and in highly mobilized societies in particular, are highly susceptible to appeals of nationalism.
In the process of social mobilization, consonant class experi
ences and dissonant strata experiences may coexist and com
pete for long periods, and so may the competing nationalistic and class-oriented political responses (Deutsch, 1966a; lnkeles and Gordon, 1974).
Working-class-oriented responses, such as those promoted by Chartists in the England of the 1830s and 1840s and by Marxists in the late 19th century and early 20th century in Europe and in many developing countries since then, are apt to be most consonant with the life experiences of industrial workers during the intermediate stages of industrialization, when a class of wage workers already has been constituted but has not yet become internally differentiated. During this period, many work
ers already have entered industrial employment and experienced its pressures, but they have not yet experienced in any large numbers in their own families the exit opportunities into other social strata, through education, white collar careers, self-em
ployment, or the receipt of rents or pensions through social security or welfare systems.
S o m e S t r u c t u r a l C o n d i t i o n s fo r I n c r e a s e d L e a r n i n g P e r f o r m a n c e
From the theoretical considerations, sketched thus far, and from the literature referred to, one may derive a kind of checklist
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of about a dozen conditions which, if present, seem likely to enhance the learning capacity of political systems. This list is tentative and incomplete. Other conditions will probably be found, tending to work in the same direction. .
The. conditions listed remain subject to empirical testing. If they should be confirmed in their effectiveness, we yet shall have to try to measure the elasticity of the relationship of each of these conditions to some quantitative variable, measuring or indicating learning performance: How large a change in one particular condition will be associated with, or followed by, how much of a change in learning performance? And how large will be the interaction effects, if. any, of more, or less simultaneous changes in several conditions? We do not know as yet the answers to these questions, and much research will have to be done to enable us to approach them.
As an early step on this long road, here is a checklist of conditions that seem likely to be at least somewhat favorable. It has been subdivided among those aspects relating to cognition, those relating to application, and those relating to motivation.
IN REGARD TO COGNITION ---
1. Identity and Orientation. The first condition is the mainte
nance of identity and orientation functions, and of adequate operational subsystems performing them. Identity messages circulate within the system; they are based on information recalled from memory, as to what the system was like earlier, -combined with current information derived from internal seif
monitoring, or consciousness, as to how similar the present structure and state of the system are to those of its past, and hence to what extent past experiences are still likely to be applicable to the present system.
Similarly, the orientation function refers to the recall of past memories about the relations of the system to its external environment, combined with current messages from the sys
tem's external receptors about the same topic, so as to inform
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On the Learning Capacity o( Large Political Systems
the system about where it was earlier, where it is now, and, by extrapolation, where it may be moving. Such information about its orientation will then permit the system to know to what extent past information about its relations to the environment is still valid, and what changes, if any, in its position must now be taken into account.
The structural elements carrying the messages maintaining and restoring orientation and identity are those committed to information intake and to information storage or memory, and the information processing faciiities devoted to the matching or recognition by comparison with patterns stored w ith in -th e memory and recalled from it new messages coming from outside or generated by combinations within the memory. Identity and orientations are thus based on the matching of feedback processes between memory and intake facilities (including secondary or monitoring feedback of messages about these primary messages, so as to maintain awareness of these activities) and all these processes depend on the structural circuits in which they are carried., .
Without at least a minimum of identity and orientation, a system would be drifting from moment to moment. It could make little or no effective use of past experiences and of time series data, since their applicability would be unknown, and it could learn but little, if anything at ail.
As these lines have indicated, identity and orientation are never absolute. Something is likely to have changed from one moment to another within the system, and also in its environ
ment. In this sense, Heraclitus was right in saying that we cannot step twice into the same river. For practical purposes, however, proportions and operations are decisive. If so, identity can be viewed as depending on a signai-to-noise ratio. So long as messages about unchanged internal structures and processes outweigh those about internal changes by so large a margin that they are perceived as signals, and the messages about internal changes as mere noise, objective identity, as weil as its subjec-
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iive perceptions, are likely to prevail. If messages about internal changes are predominant, those dealing with change may become the signal, and those reporting persistence may come to be treated as noise. If so, individuals, and whole peoples in extreme cases, may forget their past and drift or leap into a seemingly wholly new future.
Adore frequently, significant elements of identity and orienta
tion will be retained, side by side, with major elements of change.
In such cases, individuals and whole peoples may report themselves as "converted" or "reborn,” and states and nations may be seen as having undergone major revolutions, while still retaining in each case a large part of-their original identity.
Parallel considerations apply to the orientation problem. If messages of persistence in our environment prevail, we tend to conclude that we are still in the same situation; if messages about change predominate, we may conclude that we are not.
There is one exception, though. Usually the environment of a system is so much larger than the system, and processes of change in parts of that environment are so much larger and m ore frequent, that we are likely to perceive a considerable degree of internal identity combined with a large extent of change in our environment; and perhaps this is the operational counterpart to what we refer to as our sense of time.
2. Learning opportunities are enhanced for a political system if it has a m ultiplicity and wide variety o f receptors and intake ch& ine is, with large information-processing capacities, so as to provide a broad range of information for memory storage, setective recall, and recombination. Learning may be further facilitated if the system has well developed subsystems of receptor feedback, so as to permit the initiation and mainte
nance of search behavior.-
O ther structural elements providing specific capacities favora
ble fo r the potential learning performance of a system are;
3. The possession of a powerful and diversified memory
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On fta Learning Capacity of Large Political System*
system with large and deep storage capacity and high speed and precision of recall. Consequently, the development of informa
tion systems that: have extensive data-gathering and memory capacities and are speedy in operation and powerful in analytic, combinatorial, and general information-processing capabilities on a subnational, national, and worldwide scale (Kochen, 1937, 1972);
4. Large dissociative and com binatorial capabilities, in regard to in-coming or remembered information and operating at low marginal cost, so as to offer wide ranges of potentially relevant combinations, speedily and cheaply; in this regard, communica
tions systems may have to function as generative structures (Chomsky, 1263; Chomsky and Miller, 1963; Miller and Chomsky, 1963);
5. High capacity for perceiving and defining problems, and for doing so in several alternative ways, together with a high capacity for identifying'and selecting for more sustained and intensive development promising candidate solutions from among the large ensemble of combinatorial possibilities;
6. High capacity for the reality testing of such selected candidate solutions;
7. The absence o f any major barriers to the free flow o f information throughout the political system, and hence the absence of major practices or institutions of secrecy, censor
ship, informal iaboos, or deliberate conceaiment or deception is another important element.
Some insulation around communication channels is essential if messages are not to be drowned in noise, but only insofar as the circulation of information among major channel terminals for input and output is not crippled by restrictions. In borderline cases, even lateral leaks from communication channels may do less damage to the learning capacity of the system than wouid far-reaching secrecy. If other objectives than learning capacity are given priority, of course, larger elements of secrecy can
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sometimes be tolerated within the system, but in the long run almost any political system will depend on its learning capacity for its survival.
IN REGARD TO APPLICATION
Cognitive learning will have little effect, if it is not applied eventually to action and hence usually to observable behavior.
Such application of cognitive learning to behavioral learning tends to be facilitated by the system’s possession of
8. A high degree of capacity and readiness to recommit resources to the practical applications of. what has been cogni
tively learned.
9. Hence follows the need for considerable recommittabie resources and subsystems, with a broad range of possible recommitments at low cost. Such resources, which need not be idle but must be readily available for recommitment to alternative structures and functions, include operational reserves in matters of military or manpower policy; stockpiles of materials; liquid reserves in business or financial affairs, public or private; and excess capacity in each subsystem, such as those of production, energy, land use and housing, transportation, and communica
tion.
Here is the heart of the matter of a political, social, or economic system's capacity to learn: It is the presence of such readily recommittable resources, components, and subsystems at all its system levels— from individuals to small or middle-sized communities, large regions or sectors, and the system as a whole.
There seems to be as yet no well-developed general theory for the optimal design of learning capacity for a large political, social, or economic system. There are, however, some partial theories and concepts that may be relevant. These include notions of liquidity preference in economics, of excess capacity in technology and industry, of optimum redundance in communi-
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On the Learning Capacity at Large Political Systems
cation theory and in the theory of waiting lines, and of damage control in matters of industrial safety, of military and civilian defense, and perhaps of evolutionary biology. All these more specialized notions share the characteristic of pertaining to the performance and design of relatively large systems of one kind or another. It seems possible that with the help of general systems analysis from these present elements, a more general theory of operational reserves and learning capacity can be developed.
IN REGARO TO MOTIVATION
Cognitive knowledge and tangible resources may remain unused in the absence of motivation— psychological and social in individuals, and also organizational in large bureaucracies and similar organizations, public or private. Increased learning performance will be favored, therefore, by conditions that enhance motivations to increase existing learning capacities and put them to practical use,
10. Such conditions include significant probabilistic reinforce
ment sequences, or schedules, to maintain or increase motiva
tion and readiness for cognitive learning at the level of individu
als, groups, subsystems, dr the political system as a whole. From this point of view, wide-ranging curiosity is a major virtue of individuals, organizations, and entire cultures.
- 11. The same holds for the existence of effective probabilistic reinforcement schedules that tend to maintain motivation and readiness at any or all system levels for the application of the result of cognitive learning to practical behavior.
12. And it holds for the presence within the political system of effective structural subsystems sustaining the processes of internal monitoring, decision making, and postdecision filtering of information— operationally analogous to consciousness and will— tending to enhance at any or all levels within the system the awareness of the need for learning and the will to learn.
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S o m e P r o c e s s A s p e c t s
Only two major issues in the process of learning by large political systems will be treated here. These are the speed and accuracy of learning and their respective costs, and the role of conflicts as assets or liabilities in political learning situations.
THE SPEED AND ACCURACY OF LEARNING
If a political system did not have to adapt to any external changes in its environment, nor to any internal changes among its own components, and if its own learning facilities permitted it a choice of learning speeds, then it could afford to choose the learning rate most convenient to itself or to any one of its major subsystems or components. Under these conditions, the most convenient rate might well be a very slow one. Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the French Revolution, advised the statesmen of his time to proceed slowly and “ with infinite caution” in all matters of change, reform, and innovation. (Burke, 1955).
In fact, however, this course turned out to be impractical in Burke’s time, as it has in ours. Political systems must adapt to external and internal changes which they cannot— or cannot entirely— control; and it is the speed of these changes that largely dictates the speed of the political and social learning that is required to cope with them if the costs of delay are not to become prohibitive.
Within the limits of a given capacity to learn, however, a higher speed of learning is likely to have to be paid for by an increase in the frequency or magnitude— or both— o f errors. Here, too, there are likely to be upper limits beyond which the costs of error would become intolerable.
Political and administrative systems may have to choose, therefore, in their responses to change, between costs of error and costs o f delay. In poor and primitive systems, where the resources for damage control are low and where the opportunity cost of time tends also to be low, errors may be costlier than
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On (he Learning Capacity oi Large Poiiilcai Systems
delays, and the slowness of tribal palavers and of many Medieval Western political procedures has often been remarked upon. In the modern period, ca. 1500-1941, by contrast, resources available for damage control— as well as the value of time— may have tended to increase faster than the potential damage that most errors were likely to cause. Correspondingly, speed gradu
ally became more important, as shown in such military ventures as Napoleon's campaigns and the German and Japanese tactics in the early stages of World War II, and in such political events as the rise of absolutism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu
ries and, from the 1920s and 1930s onward, by the proliferation of dictatorships and of declarations of national emergencies and prolonged grants of exceptional or emergency powers to the executive branch of government in many constitutionally gov
erned countries. This emphasis on speed then reached its peak in the nuclear strategic doctrines of the eariy 1950s, which stressed surprise, first strikes, and “ instant and massive retalia
tions,” where warning and response times supposedly were to be measured in minutes and hours, rather than in days or weeks.
From the time of the later 1950s, however, this trend may have begun to reverse itself. The destructive power of nuclear weapons had become vast— far beyond any capabilities for quick repair of the damage they could do— and with it had grown the potential costs of error in their use.
Strategic thought shifted to “ second-strike” doctrines and to concern with the risks of misjudgment, systems failure, decep
tion, overreaction, and provocation by third parties. The costs of error were coming to outv/eigh once more the costs of delay.
Something similar may have been happening in civilian affairs.
Here, too, the forces set in motion by a major political decision have vastly increased in terms of resources consumed, reallo
cated, or left unproduced, as well as of the numbers of persons and countries affected and the depth and scope of potential consequences. Here, too, major political decisions about joining a common market, submitting to majority rule among its member
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governments, or merging national armies or national currencies
— all these decisions have moved with remarkable slowness, particularly since the early 1960s. On the local level, recent trends toward stress on participation and environmental impact statements similarly have sought to reduce error at the price of increasing delay of new construction or facilities. And where decisions have tended to be slow, their full-scale administrative and financial implementation have tended to be slower still.
.Accepting the costs of delay rather than those of error may by now be in many cases a sensible strategy for the short run. For the long run, however, it will not suffice. Even slow and gradual decisions may turn cut to be erroneous and costly, as many critics of United States involvement in the Vietnam War have insisted. And the speed and pressure of external and intsrnai changes— such as decolonization in the politics of several West European states after 1945, or inflation and depression as challenges to economic policy— may force the risks of quick learning and quick action on political decision makers and the countries they govern.
In the end, only a substantial increase in the capabilities for cognitive, structural, and behavioral learning and decision mak
ing will offer the w orld’s nations and governments a chance to reduce delays and errors at one and the same time, and thus to cope with the problems of the large populations and complex and vulnerable transitional technologies they have now devel
oped.
Until such an increase in learning capacity, conflicts will continue tc mark the political learning process in most countries.
CONFLICT AS AN ASPECT OF THE LEARNING PROCESS
When a political system is passing through a learning situa
tion, internal conflicts are likely to increase. The situations, goals, and interests of the individuals and groups comoosing the system are likely to be different and at least partly conflicting.
Tha learning precess, with its usual phases of discontent,
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On öl» Learning Capacity of Large Political Systems
search, cognitive dissonance, and partial cognitive reorganiza
tion, reallocation of resources, and changes in behavior, is likely to have a very different impact on the different persons, groups, and subsystems making up a modern nation-state. Some of them will oppose all major change; some will press for a particular kind of change, while others will demand another. The larger and more urgent the im pending'change that seems likely to result from the learning process, the greater is its potential for precipitating conflicts.
Once under way, such conflicts may prove to be an asset or a liability to the process of learning. In many situations, particularly in Western culture, learning ’ occurs within the forms of an adversary process. Between them, it is assumed, the contending parties will bring together the information needed to find a cognitive solution and a behavioral response to the problem at hand. In this manner, conflict may serve as a tool for discovery.
In legal proceedings, in scientific or scholarly discussions, in the clash of opinion in the press and other media, in economic competition in the market place, in the contest among projected plans in centrally planned economies, and in the competition among political parties in pluralistic democracies, conflict often serves this problem-revealing, search-provoking, information- contributing, and sometimes even problem-solving function.
Perhaps even certain difficult problems of diagnosis and deci
sion in medicine and mental health could be managed with fewer errors if a stage of adversary proceedings between speakers for alternative diagnosis or therapies before an impartial decider or committee were made an early part of the procedure in cases where the costs of error wouid exceed those of delay. In political and in cultural and social life, forgotten and disadvantaged groups, submerged minorities, and dissenting thinkers ail use the intensification of conflict as one among their means of compelling attention by the majority, or by the established government, to their previously neglected demands and needs.
In this manner, a political system, its members and its leaders
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all may learn to learn under conditions of conflict. Eventually, where the lesson has deen learned, when new patterns of perception and behavior have been found and adopted, when the parties— like players in a "Prisoner’s Dilemma" game— have discovered or rediscovered what is common in their interests, or when the condition of one or both parties has so changed as to make their old conflict meaningless in terms of the new situation, or when relevant new information has been brought in from outside the circle of parties to the conflict— or even from outside the larger political system— then this particular conflict may abate. The system may have learned something until the rise or some new conflict will suggest that it has to learn stil! more.
Though major external or internal conflicts may exceed the capacities of the system and and up by paralyzing or disrupting it, most viable political systems can manage a considerable amount of conflict and utilize it as a resource for learning.
Some Prospects for the Future
Some thoughtful social scientists, from Max Weber to Daniel Beil, have seen the future of technologically highly developed societies as leading to ever greater specialization, differentia
tion, and complexity of functions, and to ever greater centralized bureaucratization and routine in matters of politics and power (e.g., Bell, 1973). Our considerations of the learning capacity of political systems suggest some modification of this perspective.
It seems more- realistic to expect that any highly developed society will have to adapt to external and internal changes; that it will continue to be characterized by conflicts and— what is perhaps more important— that it will have to store and process large amounts of information, and that it 'will do so in a dissociative and combinatorial manner. As a result of these processes, large-scale learning and innovation most likely wiil continue to recur.
Should the results of such learning and innovations pile up
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On the Learning Capacity ot Large Political Systems
quickly, making old habits of large numbers of people obsolete but new habits hard to learn quickly, many people may return to imitative learning by looking for some charismatic leader as a rofe model to imitate or at least to accept as a human guidepost toward their own reorientation— somewhat as many French people turned to Napoleon and more recently to Charles de Gaulle, many English people to Winston Churchill, Russians to Lenin and Staiin, Indians to Gandhi and Nehru, Chinese to Mao Tse-Tung, and Americans to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dwight 0. Eisenhower.
Such charismatic phases of political leadership and rapid large-scale habit change tend to be followed, however, by a noncharism atic stage, where routine, bureaucracy, colorless leaders, and sometimes even corruption come to predominate.
Thus we find Grant after Lincoln, Nixon after Eisenhower (albeit at some distance in time), Pompidou after de Gaulle, Shastri after Nehru. Sut these, too, merely represent stages in the process,
n o t permanent shifts to bureaucratization and routine. As the need for social learning and rapid, massive habit change increases once again, the temporary demand for charismatic leadership is likely to rise with it once more, marking another up and down wave of emotion on the surface of the social and poetical system.
The real changes will lie deeper. New pressures for change w ill generate new problems, while new intakes and recombina
tions of information will generate new candidate solutions as material for selection for intensive development and, after further testing and selection, for application to practice. In this manner, peoples and political systems will continue to learn, even in the
“ postindustriai” age— or, perhaps more appropriately, in the age o f high information. In that epoch of history, which is now opening, the capacity of each political system for learning, innovation, self-transformation, and the preservation of its own identity may weil be decisive for its survival.
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