The Ghost in the Machine (9 page)

'Janus effect'
is a fundamental characteristic of sub-wholes in all types of hierarchies.

 

 

But there is no satisfactory word in our vocabulary to refer to these
Janus-faced entities: to talk of sub-wholes (or sub-assemblies,
sub-structures, sub-skills, sub-systems) is awkward and tedious. It seems
preferable to coin a new term to designate these nodes on the hierarchic
tree which behave partly as wholes or wholly as parts, according to the
way you look at them. The term I would propose is 'holon', from the Greek
holos
= whole, with the suffix
on
which, as in proton or neutron,
suggests a particle or part.

 

 

'A man', wrote Ben Jonson, 'coins not a new word without some peril;
for if it happens to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused,
the scorn is assured.' Yet I think the holon is worth the risk, because
it fills a genuine need. It also symbolises the missing link -- or rather
series of links between the atomistic approach of the Behaviourist and
the holistic approach of the Gestalt psychologist.

 

 

The Gestalt school has considerably enriched our knowledge of visual
perception, and succeeded in softening up the rigid attitude of its
opponents to some extent. But in spite of its lasting merits, 'holism'
as a general attitude to psychology turned out to be as one-sided as
atomism was, because both treated 'whole' and 'part' as absolutes, both
failed to take into account the hierarchic scaffolding of intermediate
structures of sub-wholes. If we replace for a moment the image of the
inverted tree by that of a pyramid, we can say that the Behaviourist
never gets higher up than the bottom layer of stones, and the holist
never gets down from the apex. In fact, the concept of the 'whole'
proved just as elusive as that of the elementary part, and when he
discusses language, the Gestaltist finds himself in the same quandary as
the Behaviourist. To quote James Jenkins again: 'There is an infinite set
of sentences in English whose production and understanding is part of the
daily commerce with language, and it is clear that neither the S-R nor the
Gestalt approach is capable of coping with the problems involved in the
generation and understanding of these sentences. . . . We can't regard
a sentence as a holistic, unanalysable unit, as the Gestaltists might
maintain one should. One cannot suppose that the sentence is regarded as
a perceptual unity which has welded its elements together in some unique
pattern, as is the usual Gestalt analysis of perceptual phenomena.' [5]
Nor do we find wholes on levels lower than the sentence -- phrases,
words, syllables, and phonemes are not parts, and not wholes, but holons.

 

 

The two-term part-whole paradigm is deeply engrained in our unconscious
habits of thought. It will make a great difference to our mental outlook
when we succeed in breaking away from it.

 

 

 

Social Holons

 

 

In
Chapter II
I discussed the hierarchic structure
of language. Let us now briefly turn to a quite different kind of
hierarchy: social organisation.

 

 

The individual, qua biological organism, constitutes a nicely integrated
hierarchy of molecules, cells, organs, and organ systems. Looking inward
into the space enclosed by the boundaries of his skin, he can rightly
assert that he is something complete and unique, a whole. But facing
outward, he is constantly -- sometimes pleasantly, sometimes painfully --
reminded that he is a part, an elementary unit in one or several social
hierarchies.

 

 

The reason why any relatively stable society -- whether of animals or
humans -- must be hierarchically structured, can again be illustrated
by the watchmakers' parable: without stable subassemblies -- social
groupings and subgroupings -- the whole simply could not hold together.

 

 

In a military hierarchy the holons are companies, battalions, regiments,
etc., and the branches of the tree stand for lines of communication and
command. The number of levels which a hierarchy comprises (in this case
from commanding general to individual soldier) determines whether it is
'shallow' or 'deep'; and the number of holons on any given level we shall
call (after Simon) its 'span'. A primitive horde of tribesmen is a very
shallow hierarchy with perhaps two or three levels (chieftain and lesser
chieftains), and a large span to each. Conversely, some Latin-American
armies of the past are said to have numbered one general to each private
soldier -- which would be the limit case of a hierarchy turning into
a ladder (
page 24
). The efficient working of a
complex hierarchy must obviously depend, among other things, on the proper
ratio of depth to span -- something analogous to the Greek sculptor's
golden section, or rather to Le Corbusier's hierarchic 'modulator' theory.

 

 

A society without hierarchic structurings would be as chaotic as the
random motions of gas molecules flying, colliding, and rebounding in all
directions. But the structuring is obscured by the fact that no advanced
human society -- not even the totalitarian state -- is a monolithic
structure, patterned into one single hierarchy. This may be the case
in some very 'unspoilt' tribal societies, where the exigencies of the
family-kinship-clan-tribe hierarchy completely control the individual's
existence. The medieval church and modern totalitarian nations have
tried to establish equally effective monolithic hierarchies, with only
limited success. Complex societies are structured by several types of
interlocking hierarchies, and control by higher authority is only one
among them. I shall call these authority-fielding hierarchies 'control
hierarchies'. Obvious examples are government administrations, military,
ecclesiastic, academic, professional and business hierarchies. Control
may be vested in individuals or in institutions -- 'bosses' or anonymous
treasury departments; it may be rigid or elastic; it may be guided to a
greater or lesser extent by feedback from the lower echelons: electorate,
employees, student-bodies; but each hierarchy must nevertheless display
a well-articulated tree-structure, without which anarchy would result --
as it does when some social upheaval puts an axe to the trunk of the tree.

 

 

Entwined with these control hierarchies are others, based on social
cohesion, geographical distribution, etc. There are the family -- clan --
sub-caste -- caste hierarchies, and their modern versions. Interlocking
with them are the hierarchies based on geographical neighbourhood. Old
towns like Paris, Vienna or London have their quartiers, each of them
relatively self-sufficient, with its local shops, familiar cafés,
pubs, milkmen and sweeps. Each is a kind of local village, a social holon,
which again is part of a larger division -- Left Bank and Right Bank,
City and West End, amusement centre and civic centre, parks, suburbs. Old
towns, notwithstanding their architectural diversity, seem to have grown
like organisms, and to have an individual life of their own. Towns which
have mushroomed up too fast have a depressing amorphousness because they
lack the hierarchic structure of organic development. They seem to have
been built not by Bios but by Mekhos.

 

 

Thus the complex fabric of social life can be dissected into a variety
of hierarchic scaffoldings, as anatomists dissect muscles, nerves and
other correlated structures from the pulpy mess. Without this attribute
of
dissectibility
*, the concept of the hierarchy would have a degree
ofarbitrariness. We are only justified to talk of trees if we are able to
identify their nodes and branches. In the case of a government department
or a business concern, dissection is easy: the branching tree-chart may
actually hang on the office wall. The simplest type of chart (without
cross-connections) will usually look something like this:

 

* Simon (op. dr.) speaks of 'decomposable' hierarchies, but
'dissectibility' seems preferable.

 

 

 

Let this represent a government department, such as the Home Office: then
each holon -- each box -- in the second row will represent a branch of
it: Immigration -- Scotland Yard -- Prison Commission, etc., and each box
in the third row a subdepartment, etc. Now which are the criteria which
justify 'dissecting' the Home Office in this and no other way? Or, to
put it differently, how did the maker of the chart define his holons? He
may have been shown a town map indicating Home Office buildings, and
plans of each building; but that would not be enough, and sometimes even
misleading, because some department may be housed in several buildings
in different parts of the town, and several departments may share the
same building. What defines each box as an entity is the
function
or
task assigned to it -- the nature of the work which the people in each
department do. There is, of course, in any efficient hierarchy a tendency
to keep people working on the same task in the same room or building,
and to that extent spatial distribution enters into the picture, but
only to that extent. Office boys and telephones bridge the distances
between functionally related desks -- as nerves and hormones do in the
control hierarchies of the living organism.

 

 

There is not only
cohesion
within each holon, but also
separation
between different holons to lend precision to the
chart. The people who work within a given department transact much more
business with each other than with people in other departments. Moreover,
when one department requests information or action from another
department, this is not as a rule done by direct person-to-person
contact, but through official channels, involving the heads of each
department. In other words, the lines of control run along the branches
of the tree up and down; there are no horizontal short cuts in an ideal
control-hierarchy.

 

 

In other types of hierarchies the holons cannot be so easily defined by
their 'function' or 'task'. We cannot define the 'function' of a family,
clan or tribe. Nevertheless, as in the previous example, the members
of each of these holons function together, cohere, interact, much more
with each other than with members of other holons. And if business is
to be transacted between two clans or tribes, it is again done via the
chieftains or elders.* These ties of cohesion and boundaries of separation
are both the result of shared traditions, such as the laws of kinship
and the resulting codes of behaviour. In their ensemble they form a
pattern of
rule-governed behaviour
. It is this pattern which lends the
group stability and cohesion, and which defines it as a social holon,
with an individuality of its own.

 

* Once these ties of cohesion begin to weaken and the boundaries
of separation become blurred, the tribal hierarchy is decaying. The
Indian frontier provinces provide a sad illustration of the
consequences of a rash policy of 'de-tribalisation' without offering
a substitute structure of values. Mutatis mutandis, the emotional
instability of Western society and particularly of its youth,
is obviously a consequence of the breakdown of the traditional
hierarchic structures without as yet any alternative in sight. But
the discussion of social pathology must be postponed to Part Three
of this book.

 

We must distinguish, however, between the rules which govern
individual behaviour and those which guide the activities of the
group as a whole. The individual may even be unaware of the fact
that his behaviour is rule-governed, and no more able to name the
rules which guide his conduct than he is able to name those which
guide his speech. The activities of the social holon, on the other
hand, depend not only on the complex interactions between its parts,
but also on its interaction as a whole with other holons on its own,
higher level of the hierarchy; and these cannot be inferred from the
lower level any more than the function of the nervous system can be
inferred from the level of individual nerve cells, or the rules of
syntax can be inferred from the rules of phonology. We can 'dissect'
a complex whole into its composite holons of the second and third order,
and so on, but we cannot 'reduce' it to a sum of its parts, nor predict
its properties from those of its parts. The hierarchy concept of 'levels
of organisation' in itself implies a rejection of the reductionist view
that all phenomena of life (consciousness included) can be reduced to
and explained by physico-chemical laws.

 

 

Thus a stable social holon has an individuality or 'profile' -- whether
it is a Papuan tribe or a Treasury department. Every closely knit social
body sharing a common territory and/or a code of explicit and implicit
laws, customs and beliefs tends to preserve and assert its pattern -- or
else it could not qualify as a stable holon. In a primitive society the
tribe might be the highest unit of the shallow hierarchy, a more or less
self-contained whole. But in a complex society, with its many-levelled
hierarchies, it is equally essential that each holon -- whether an
administrative department, a local government or the fire brigade --
should operate as an autonomous, self-contained unit; without division
of labour and delegation of powers, according to the hierarchic schema,
no society can function effectively.