What are we looking at?
Does technical progress automatically lift humans too? And what does systems analysis have to do with that question?
A question that comes out of the definitions
In systems analysis we usually deal with definitions, components, life cycles and technical concepts. But if we step one level up, we reach basic questions: does technical progress necessarily lead to human growth? Is the development of civilisation the same as the development of the human being? This is where a civilisational view of systems becomes important.
Spengler and “the decline of the West”
One of the figures who stood against modernity’s baseless optimism was the German philosopher and historian Oswald Spengler. In The Decline of the West he saw civilisations as living things: they are born, grow, mature, decline and die, and the West has passed its flowering and is now in decline.
In his view the signs of that decline are: the decline of religious and moral faith, excess of rationalism and technology-centredness, the forgetting of human meaning and purpose, and materialism and cultural decay. Modern man has advanced outwardly, but inwardly has been cut off from himself, from nature, from meaning and from spirit. I think this concern is exactly what gives systems analysis its philosophical and civilisational depth.
Man for civilisation, or civilisation for man?
There is a more root-level question worth pausing on: has man come to build a civilisation, or is civilisation here so that man may grow?
We usually know modernity by its institutions, networks, tools and huge structures. But if those structures don’t have human growth as their goal, don’t they become the goal themselves? We may build systems that not only fail to serve people, but swallow them.
Institutions working for the future of humankind
Against these questions, some institutions have appeared that see their mission as “saving the future”. Two examples:
The Club of Rome. An international body formed from 1968 that published The Limits to Growth in 1972, a report that used systems modelling (system dynamics) to study the relation between population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource use. Its main conclusion was that if the growth trends of that time continued, we would reach the limits to growth on Earth within a century, and a sudden decline in population and industrial capacity was possible. Interestingly, the report is itself an example of systems analysis: instead of looking at each variable separately, it modelled the feedback loops between them.
CERN. The European organisation for nuclear research, founded in 1954 to develop fundamental knowledge. Its mission is scientific, but it is also a sign that civilisation is still searching for fundamental understanding of phenomena, not content with exploiting them.
These two, one in thought and the other in science, are examples of humanity’s attempt to keep meaning inside civilisational structures.
Why should a systems analyst know this?
A systems analyst doesn’t deal only with data and charts. They must be able to see in what context of values and culture each system was formed, whether our structures help human growth or limit it, and whether the proposed solution is merely technological or rooted in a civilisational question. The question of the human being’s place within systems is, I think, among the most important questions of a systems analyst, and modernity, with all its achievements, needs an internal, civilisational critique.