Interconnectedness is very rarely a straight line

Most of us now accept that everything is pretty well connected to everything else. Technologies have made this possible and they are driving profound changes. But it was not always so. As long ago as 2001, a well intentioned but largely derided report, by the politician and commentator Barry Jones was largely consigned to the historical rubbish heap because of a diagram that came to be known as ‘spaghetti and meatballs.’ It was an attempt to describe how the fundamental institutions of an educated society connect to each other. In the run up to an election, the advocates of linear thinking held sway and their view won the day. The idea of interconnection has been banned from the national consciousness.

But what price have we paid? The first is that it makes us hard to have a conversation in other than silos. Most of us ordinary people know that many things are connected. That is our everyday life. What was interesting about the diagram that Barry and his mates produced, was not the original diagram, but how each of the key institutions might evolve as they interacted with each other and as they evolved in their own right.

The second was that it made us hard to have conversations with people who see things in interconnected ways. One has to only look at the how we’ve managed to mangle terrorism, middle eastern tribalism and Islam to get the point. Have the machine based and the linear models, particularly in the western world, impoverished thinking in our societies?

Finally and by no means least, we have a major problem in working out how to balance competing priorities. Of course I know that water issues are important. So is education and so is reform of the health system. The move away from a fossil fuel world also ranks. But how do I decide what is important and how do governments decide what is a priority and what should get what from the economic cake? How can I, or they, possibly integrate anything if everything is presented in disconnected pieces.

The inability to see interconnectedness and to then integrate different ideas is to lose touch with reality. It is, if you think about it, the very behaviour we criticise in alcoholics and people with severe personality disorders. If we can’t discuss a simple diagram with a few extra lines on it perhaps you, me and our society are in a difficult place? Will it take some severe dislocation to rediscover what our biological selves instinctively knows – that everything is interconnected, and that better futures are created by strengthening some connections rather than others.