ABSTRACT
In the early stages we considered minimising this chapter because our response to various kinds of linear determinism was so relentlessly negative. We were wrong. That may come as a surprise. The reasons for our revised opinion come in two forms, which might be provisionally described as the negative and the positive. We shall shortly revise that as well. It is impossible to treat linear determinism minimally because it is so pervasive in its social effects. Taking that view, as all complexity theorists must do, explicitly or not, puts one in a camp of the ‘wise’ (so to speak) with the ‘less wise’ on the other side. This is yet another example of the old ‘cultural dope’ argument. Since the gathering of dopes so defined by the complexity turn itself includes a vast number of humans, an entire tradition of explanation, not to mention one Isaac Newton, and a host of eminent scientists and thinkers from other critical disciplines, the wicket begins to look decidedly sticky. Remember how we handled ‘stickiness’ in Part I? Would it not be more prudent, and certainly more consistent, to insist that linear determinism is a powerful attractor in human thought, and often for sound practical reasons? This is the positive formulation. We belong to the same camp (the dopes if you insist) and only move out when the setting gets unbearably uncomfortable. A more formal way to say this is to concede that the linear attractor is ecologically viable, an instance of what Tooby and Cosmides would call ‘adaptation enaction’. Only where its viability is physically, i.e. existentially, compromised does the notion of complexity arise as an emergent re-adaptation. The rational point of complexity theory is to discover patterned or self-organising structures. We are not operating with Lyotard’s old theology of the celebration of the ‘incommensurate’, otherwise known as ‘chaos’; this is not post-modernism revisited. Post-modernism? Determinism? We must avoid complexity-ism. The problem is not the viability of the various theoretic stances as conceptual strategies but as ideological prescriptions. This, like Kant’s criterion, is misplaced universality. More ominously, it is an attempt to coerce the character of understanding as a whole. But prescription can only be viable in the face of invariance. It is not then wrong but limited.
