I came into General System Theory (or better perhaps System’s Theory in General) through advanced studies in Anthropology. That was now more than thirty years ago. Systems Theory has much to offer to us, even if many scientists tend to look at it all askance down their long noses. I don’t think I could have approached the complexities of anthropological or human-type systems theory in any other manner except through General System Models, of which there is a standard model proposed and developed by Ludwig von Bertalanffy (who was primarily a biologist), as well as many other basic, natural and applied models functioning at different levels, contexts and types of systems explanation. The real paradox today, in our “post-modern” and very global era, is that systems thinking and theory tends still to be eschewed by many informed professionals of the global knowledge community even when and if our contemporary civilization is and has always been constructed and operated by numerous and various kinds of systems. The paradox is even greater if we realize that just a semester or two of basic and advanced systems theory and method would be for most all that would be required to reconcile sciences and systems approaches and to form the foundation for building a healthy and respectable “science of general systems.”
In this regard I could not possibly underestimate the importance of a systems-based worldview, not in replacement of general scientific worldview, but complementary to and in support of scientific perspectives. The main reason I make this argument is the observation that the human pursuit of development has always been systems-based development, but mostly people have made discoveries and inventions and extended streamlining applications and innovations, not because of systems direct insight or intelligence, but often serendipitously in spite of systems awareness and understanding or not. It has been our myopic and short-sighted pursuit of systems largely on an ad hoc basis that now will lead us down a blind alley toward global climax and an unlimited plethora of possible post-climax global scenarios.
I began my blogging at a time when I thought what we needed most in the world was a system of systems, that if well organized and used in a scientifically informed manner, could provide much of the context and insight we need to generate long-term and sustainable solutions in an inherently super-complex world. I thought to myself what better system framework than the Internet to create a foundation for global integration and organization and mobilization of humankind above and beyond the ethno-linguistic and ethno-national horizons within which most people still dwell. Needless to comment, I never got past the first level of producing a few dozen manuscripts about general systems, and ultimately, in desperation of existential failure, abandoning and giving up almost everything I had been working on and for.
That was twenty years ago and both the world and I have moved on since then. Today, with global climate change and global circumscription of living systems and natural resource reservoirs, we perhaps need a bona fide systems framework more desperately than ever before, and I am still writing upon and even now on the verge of publishing on general systems thinking and theory. Our primary strategic national adversaries, the Chinese, appear to culturally take more to systems and systems type thinking than their American or perhaps European counterparts, who are more culturally oriented to causal models of direct linear actions and reactions. But in truth there is not an area of broader science today in the contemporary global era that does not adopt and depend upon many systems models and perspectives even in their analytical methodologies and applied procedures, even if discussion of the systems-based aspects of much of this work may seem implicitly somewhat verboten if not downright taboo as a professional career killer.
I have died many cowardly social deaths and have been resurrected from a professional death more than once, and I am still around and going strong even in my senior years. I can call myself an anthropologist with some serious intent behind that title, even if most others at best use it tongue in cheek when either addressing or ignoring me. My work is my own, I do not depend upon graduate students for my ego or for my professional development, and I have carried a human systems framework effectively into important applied areas. We all face a central challenge in the contemporary and future world. Earth remains our’s, humankind’s, to steward, protect and preserve (or, failing, not), and general systems theory and its consistent, broad-based, informed scientific application is the best way of accomplishing that through human civilization. Of all things possible between heaven and earth, this truth I do not doubt one dot or iota.