SO. I'm in a slightly better mood today. Partly I just had greater and longer contact with a number of people going through acute crises rather than The Awfulness we're all going through.
Partly it was my decision to apply to seminary. To get everything in by the Feb 1 deadline might be...optimistic. I have to see if I can get a transcript from my grad school, create a CV (it's been years), and ask folk if they could write me letters of recommendation...
I suppose I also made the choice NOT to apply to our fall conference, at least not a plenary session. I actually had a half-formed idea that I think I could whip into shape if I tried... It's based on John Gall's Systemantics (the antics of systems) about how complex systems tend to produce novel and unexpected problems borne out of their very complexity. The go-to example involves how the massive housing unit built to protect the US space shuttle from weather proved to be so tall and large that the interior generated its own micro-climate, which in turn required a fix.
I've been thinking about how so many of our complex systems--legal systems and health care systems most, but also universities--manifest such antics. Watching from afar as my brother-in-law spent the last few weeks in a hospital, it reminded me so much of my time overnight in a jail (long story). I remember having the same thought on those occasions I accompanied my best friend through long ER ordeals as he suffered a kidney stone.
In those systems, you're going through one of the most intense and unpleasant experiences of your life. But for everyone surrounding you, the professionals charged with your supervision and care and (most importantly) release, it's another dreary, underpaid/overworked day on an exhausting job full of whining and recalcitrant humans like you. Everything gets slower. Processes that could happen in ten minutes take hours, in part because they're dispersed over multiple agents and mediators and departments and couriers, all with hundreds of other things to process on their plate. And these systems feature unique bottlenecks--irreplaceable experts like surgeons or radiologists or specialists--whose time is limited. An item to be processed can land in someone's in box and sit there until next week, when the expert again rotates into the system.
It's miserable. You want to burn it all down and start over.
I'm most apt to blame such problems on bad actors (e.g., people not doing their jobs), malicious systems (willfully underfunded or substandard pieces, as in most US prisons), and/or perverse incentives (such as the profit motives driving insurance companies). And those do exist!
But even a system that minimizes such shortcomings is bound to seem slow, uncaring, and byzantine once it grows past a certain point of necessary complexity. That's systemantics (I think--I confess I've not yet read the book).
I've thought about systemantics for a while, but I really got spurred into thinking about it thanks to a skeet (which I really need to find) that, in effect, warned left-progressives against letting their righteous frustration at malicious systems burgeon into a cynicism about all systems. Any fix for the problems we really care about, the skeet noted, will require systems even more complex, layered, and detailed than the present ones. A more just legal system is unlikely to be smaller. A more just health care system--even with for-profit insurance structures excised--would be much more complicated in order to work.
Like my friend PY has said, I believe in systems. But there's a bit of inevitable friction--and thus a necessary amount of systemantic grace--that we need to incorporate into our interaction with systems.
But I don't think I should get to that abstract this week. I could, as I told my therapist. Yes, he agreed, but it would not be reasonable to do that AND apply to seminary.
More tomorrow
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