Just been reading a comment piece by Martin Jacques in the Guardian, about the demise of the Doha round - the 'development round' that's been dragging on for years, as developing countries rather unsportingly refuse to sign up to whatever they're offered.

Putting aside for the moment the fact that developing countries have already been asked to concede more just to get what they agreed in previous rounds, there's some, um, issues here when it comes to the work I'm going to be doing.

Market order - the very thing the various trade rounds were making the framework for, in theory - is spontaneous order. Or at least, that's Hayek's take, and the views of a few others who get round to thinking about why markets are so 'now' and hip and the in thing. Havel's quote turns up in various places - the free market is:

the only natural economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead to prosperity, because it is the only one that reflect the nature of life itself. The essence of life is infinitely and mysteriously multiform, and therefore it cannot be contained or planned for, in its fullness and variability, by any central intelligence.

(I love the internet! Couldn't find the quote in my stuff - found it at top link here).

Havel emphasises the free economy's role as defender against tyranny; shades of 'road to serfdom' there too.

But, I mean - really? I'm supposed to be spending four years looking at this thing called spontaneous order. Its supposed to be the thing that globalisation's for. But Martin Jacques' story reminded me: hang on - there's power going on here. Good old fashioned realist state power. As he says,

The US some time ago switched its attention from multilateral to bilateral deals and has, over the past decade, concluded a battery of them. The reason is not difficult to fathom. When negotiating bilaterally, the US can use its economic power to impose far more unfavourable terms on its negotiating partner, which is what it has done.

(Equally, one might speculate that the US will continue to support the internet, right up until the point where its stop benefiting it. US attempts to get ISPs to register all users with them would be a case.)

So it makes me think: what exactly am I trying to achieve? I've paid plenty of lip-service to the notion that political ideas (like spontaneous order or emergence in politics) are always used to serve political ends - fig-leafs for power is the metaphor that usually crops up. Or Strauss' 'mysterious pre-established harmorny with liberal democracy'.

But its all very well to say 'yes, I'm terribly self-aware about the whole venture, you know.' But what does that mean?

Stuart Kauffman does the same thing in At Home in the Universe - noting that while he will indeed go on to make huge claims about parallels between complexity in autocatalytic loops and democracies, that's OK because he's being terribly self-aware about it. He speaks about:

... the profound naturalness of life and its myriad patterns of unfolding... The emerging sciences of complexity offer fresh support for the idea of a pluralistic democratic society, providing evidence that it is not merely a human creation but part of the natural order of things.

Eek. But! Its OK!

One is always wary of deducing from first principles the political order of one's own society. The nineteenth century philosopher James Mill once succeeded in deducing from first principles that a constitutional monarchy, remarkably like that in England early in the last century, was the highest form of governance. But, as I hope to show, the very laws of complexity my colleagues and I are seeking suggest that democracy has evolved as perhaps the optimal mechanism to achieve the best attainable compromises among conflicting practical, political and moral interests.

Oh, so that's OK then. I've signed a disclaimer - now on to the tenuous political science.

Capra does the same thing precisely - looking for a synthesis between the physical and social order. But it ends up being bland, because the conclusions are simply that 'everything is one inter-connected, embodied system'. Perhaps I under-rate that achievement, because I'm used to thinking in those terms now. Maybe it really does represent a move away from a Cartesian split that will help save the world. But I'm not so sure.

For example: the idea of emergence really doesn't offer very much in the way of analytical grip any more. Computers can be said to have emerged from the interaction of humans - but that says nothing about the phenomena that then open up in the space thus created.

If I wanted to learn about computers, in fact, there would be some point in studying its underpinnings in humans, certainly - but no overwhelming reason to do so. I could quite happily get along just learning to program. Or studying the social effects of the internet.

The same thing could perhaps be said about political power in human systems - I don't know, that's just to speculate. But the pitfalls in trying to look for an holistic picture of human life - as Capra does - are all over the place.

Emergence past a certain point can look a lot like whole new universes opening up through a small hole in the old one. (I have a vague memory of thinking the same thing when I read Symbolic Species - language is definitely another example.)

So - Doha. Yes. Where my thinking is currently heading is that, yup, you can find spontaneous order in human societies everywhere. But they evolve where they are, and states have generally torn them up to serve their own ends. To suggest that states can actually act as impartial arbiters of that order...

Oh no, I think I'm talking like an anarchist. I'm sure I don't actually believe that...!