[clear - refresh] ---THE ETCH-A-SKETCH BLOG--- [created by may]


05/09/2007
On Committees

The marks of selfness are laid out in our behaviour irreversibly, unequivocally, whether we are assembled in groups or off on a stroll alone. Nobody can be aware of the unique immunologic labels of anyone else, outside a laboratory, nor can we smell with any reliability the pheromonal differences among ourselves. So, all we have to go by is how we walk, sound, write letters, turn our heads. We are infallible at this. Nobody is really quite like anyone else; there are reminders here and there, but no exact duplicates; we are four billion unique individuals.

Thus when committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity. This takes quite a lot of time and energy, and while it is going on there is little chance of anything else getting done. Many committees have been appointed in one year and gone on working well into the next decade, with nothing much happening beyond these extended, uninterruptible displays by each member of his special behavioural marks.

If it were not for such compulsive behaviour by the individuals, committees would be a marvellous invention for getting collective thinking done. But there it is. We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever the cost, even if it means disability for the group.

This is surely the driving idea behind democracy, and it is astonishing that the system works at all, let alone well. The individual is the real human treasure, and only when he has been cultivated to full expression of his selfness can he become of full value to society. Like many attractive social ideas, it is authentic, ancient Chinese. Integrity is the most personal of qualities; groups and societies cannot possess it until single mortals have it in hand. It is hard work for civilization.

But individuality can be carried too far, and you can see it happening almost all the time in committees. there are some very old words for criticising the display of too much individuality. When someone becomes too separate, too removed, out of communication, his behaviour is called egregious. This was once a nice word, meaning 'out of the herd,' signifying distinction and accomplishment, but by the linguistic process of pejoration the word took on an antisocial significance. Overindividuals are called peculiar, strange, eccentric. The worst sort are idiots, from idios, originally meaning personal and private.

These days, with increasing complexity of the organisations in which we live and the great numbers of us becoming more densely packed together, the work of committees can be a deadly serious business. This is especially so when there is need to forecast the future. By instinct, each of us knows that this is a responsibility not to be trusted to any single person; we have to do it together.

Because of the urgency of the problems ahead, various modifications of the old standard committee have been devised in recent years, in efforts to achieve better grades of collective thought. There are the think tanks, hybrids between committee and factory, little corporations for thinking. There are governmental commissions and panels, made up of people brought to Washington and told to sit down together and think out collective thoughts. Industries have organised their own encounter groups, in which executives stride around crowded rooms bumping and shouting at each other in hopes of prodding out new ideas. But the old trouble persists: people assembled it for group thought are still, first of all, individuals in need of expressing selfness.

The latest invention for getting round this is the Delphi technique. This was an invention of the 1960s, worked out by some RAND corporation people dissatisfied with the way committees laid plans for the future. The method has a simple, almost silly sound. Instead of having meetings, questionnaires are circulated to the members of a group, and each person writes his answers out and sends them back in silence. Then the answers are circulated to all members and they are asked to reconsider and fill out the questionnaires again, after paying attention to the other views. And so forth. Three cycles are usually enough. By that time as much of a consensus has been reached as can be reached, and the final answers are said to be substantially more reliable, and often more interesting, than first time around. In some versions, new questions can be introduced by the participants at the same time that they are providing answers.

It is almost humiliating to be told that Delphi works, sometimes wonderfully well. One's first reaction is resentment at still another example of social manipulation, social-science trickery, behaviour control.

But, then, confronted by the considerable evidence that technique really does work - at least for future-forecasting in industry and government - one is bound to look for the possibly good things about it.

Maybe, after all, this is a way of preserving the individual and all his selfness, and at the same time linking minds together so that a group can do collective figuring. The best of both worlds, in short.

What Delphi is, is a really quiet, thoughtful conversation, in which everyone gets a chance to listen. The background noise of small talk, and the recurrent sonic booms of vanity, are eliminated at the onset, and there is time to think. There are non voices, and therefore no rising voices. It is, when you look at it this way, a great discovery. Before Delphi, real listening in a committee meeting has always been a near impossibility. Each member's function was to talk, and while other people were talking the individual member was busy figuring out what he ought to say next in order to shore up his own original position. Debating is what committees really do, not thinking. Take away the need for winning points, leading the discussion, protecting one's face, gaining applause, shouting down opposition, scaring opponents, all that kind of noisy activity, and a group of bright people can get down to quiet thought. It is a nice idea, and I'm glad it works.

It is interesting that Delphi is the name chosen, obviously to suggest the oracular prophetic function served. The original Delphi was Apollo's place, and Apollo was the god of prophecy, but more than that. He was also the source of some of the best Greek values: moderation, sanity, care, attention to the rules, deliberation. Etymologically, in fact, Apollo may have had his start as a committee. The word apollo (and perhaps the related word apello) originally meant a political gathering. The importance of public meetings for figuring out what to do next must have been perceived very early as fundamental to human society, therefore needing incorporation into myth and the creation of an administrative deity; hence Apollo, the Dorian god of prophecy.

The Pythain prophetess of Delphi was not really supposed to enunciate clear answers to questions about the future. On the contrary, her pronouncements often contained as much vagueness as the I Ching, and were similarly designed to provide options among which choice was possible. She symbolised something more like the committee's agenda. When she collapsed in ecstasy on the tripod, murmuring ambiguities, she became today's questionnaire. The working out of the details involved a meticulous exegesis of the oracle's statements, and this was the task of the exegetai, a committee of citizens, partly elected by the citizens of Athens and partly appointed by the Delphi oracle. The system seems to have worked well enough for a long time, constructing the statutory and legal basis for Greek religion.

Today's Delphi thus represents a refinement of an ancient social device, with a novel modification of committee procedure constraining groups of people to think more quietly, and to listen. The method seems new, as a formal procedure, but it is really very old, perhaps as old as human society itself. For in real life, this is the way we've always arrived at decisions, even though it has always been done in a disorganised way. We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people; we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual beings to comprehend each other.

~Lewis Thomas~

wizzing away on 11:33 PM

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