My diary entry just ended in capitals, a 'FUTURE WITH LESS SPECIALISATION'. It stemmed from thinking about all of the channels of lost potential i have witnessed in my various guises and the working life i've tried to mould around the things that i've really found most important. I think of the channels of communication between agencies and funders, governments and organisations vying for the cash pot while trying to do their specialist thing as well as possible within constraints. Specifically I saw public sector money in abundance in the early 2000s, funnelled towards groups with quantifiable character (and abstract in that classification). 'Black and Minority Ethic' (BME, BaME) was the buzz word for deprivation for some time, and this specialisation allowed new organisations to prosper, though often entirely independently from existing services. The result was an improvement in standards of specific services for specific groups of people, which was great. The sadness was that no great system of intelligent making seemed to pool what was really working already, and incorporate, feedback, re-affirm, improve and carry on growing like a snowball of good practice and use. I am not up to speed with the statutory and public sector now (and certainly wasn't ever expert), but i gather the term BME was left behind, and more likely now is a scenario where an individual will have an 'individual budget' to pick out the best of what they can find for their particular need. This is of course a watercolour brush over a huge area, but I am just thinking.

I've also seen government contracts waiver the need to provide a holistic service somewhere in a persons life, in favour of providing several concurrent areas of support for that person that may and do directly interfere with each other on occasions. One support for 'housing', one for 'employment', maybe one for 'skills', one for 'young people'. I've spent some time in classrooms, in both roles, and wondered, in both roles, what on earth is the function of the education that is happening there. The most enthused I got, in both roles, was in coaching sports, their techniques, ways of thinking, ways of communicating. In the classroom, it was listening to a proposed iGCSE outline for a new subject called 'India Studies' while i was teaching at a school in Mumbai that got me most enthused; 'take source material from everywhere' it was saying, 'and learn for yourself how to amalgamate it, criticise it and make arguments from it'. 

Systems, in other words, good working systems, are vitally important. Cybernetics, the kind of system that is put in place, but not forced through every loophole to a stationary end point, is the most relevant science of the modern age, arguably. Ever more humans, ever more needs, ever larger communities, ever greater pressures. Identifying where the majority of energy in the system is lost and trying to feed it back rather than let it explode... To borrow from Arundhati Roy, when talking about that most abstract of all concepts 'national identity',

'The fissures, if you look for them, run vertically, horizontally, and are layered, whorled, circular, spiral, inside out and outside in. Fires, when they are lit, race along any one of these schisms, and in the process, release tremendous bursts of political energy. Not unlike what happens when you split an atom.'

The same useful conceit can be used to represent the seeping energy that is lost in the malappropriation of 'systems' behaviour across life, where there is just a running of 'energy' from a decision maker down. Roy is talking about the masses of energy that can undermine an over simplified or corrupted model for in this case a country (something that may sound very familiar to Londoners). The problem with this model, of Roy's 'India', is that the great energy in its mass of different identities, cannot be served by the current system that rules it, namely a 'democracy' vying for powerful position in the world order (based on business, playing hard-ball, conquest and control). That mass of energy in Roy's argument is forced towards 'nuclear superpower' as its only focus for a unified identify. It is what puffs the chests of those in positions of society to chase or oppose it, while it is imposed as a milky notion of 'national interest' for those masses with no stake in it whatsoever, but pushed to aspire to 'it' anyway. 

Similar 'top down' systems thinking blights our broken multiculture currently. Good citizens are called upon to work five days a week doing one main job and pay taxes. Aspiration is to afford somewhere to live and stash some cash. Categorisation akin to a Linnaean Taxonomy sees humans as animal, mammal class, primate order, genus Homo, species Sapiens, then what? Does the classification system within us continue to differentiate? by race? by job or function? I think it does, and I don't think it fosters thinking that can lead us to a better future in which we all try to pull in the same direction.

Before this wanders too far from the point, the conceit was used here to identify the important challenge of developing new models of thinking that fly in the face of the classifying, power based models that exist. The internet is in the news for evoking civil movement on hitherto unimagined scales. I am not just talking about this networking as means of revolution, what do i know about that, but i am imagining what comes after the overthrow of established 'power'. Do the people already exist to base societies on more interdiscipliniary and fluidly intelligent models; perhaps systems that allow more localised governance in an ideal world, where seeds are sown like Stafford Beer's seeds of system, and left to flourish and inform and develop. Or does this kind of thinking need training, the same as the training that is needed to grasp the financial models and complicated political sub-texts of the world as it is~? Is education helping to form brains capable of this, or even aware of what education is actually useful for?

Is there a future apologetic bureaucrat who can actually proudly call himself 'an interdisciplinarian'?