John Dewey and Fragility

Last week I quoted the philosopher John Dewey on the difference between life and non-living matter.

"The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered. While the living thing may easily be crushed by a superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence."

A friend asked why I considered that profound. I'll reproduce here my response, with some very slight re-working.

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One obvious example of what Dewey has in mind is the immune system in humans and in just about all other creatures with blood coursing through veins.

There is a wide range of infections which cause various nasty diseases in humans, whence most of those struck can and do recover, and which can only strike any of us once. Why? Because the immune system adapts to that particular germ in the course of fighting off the infection, and adapts so well there won't be a "next time." Smallpox of course is the classic example. Survive it once and you're forever free from such danger.

In such a case, the living system, the human body, has successfully 'turned the energies which acted upon it into the means of its own further existence,' to adapt Dewey's language.

Another simple example, still at the physiological level: muscle tone. When life is too easy, when you get into no fights and never have to carry heavy things around, your muscles are in danger of atrophy. The flip side of that is that muscles develop and remain strong under conditions of challenge. Since we don't live in caves, civilized folk have to develop exercise regimens to simulate the conditions of regular challenge for which muscles evolved. Still, the principle is the same as it is for immunology. The human body is turning its challenges to its own advantage.

This Deweyite observation struck me as profound in part because it anticipated by decades a theme in the recent writings of Nassim Taleb, a Lebanese financial trader turned philosopher whose latest book is aptly titled Anti-Fragile.

Taleb's point is that our usual focus on the distinction between the fragile and the robust is too narrow. A robust stone (to go back to Dewey's example) would be a very dense one that would survive the collision with some likely other object. But non-living matter of that sort can't aspire to the superior condition of anti-fragility. That ought to be the goal for living creatures and the social systems they create.

The phrase "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger" is so often used as a vain boast that we may ignore what is important there. The fact that vain people make that particular boast is an indication of a real and valuable ideal. It is possible in many respects to "gain from disorder," as Taleb puts it.

A Review of Taleb

The stewards of an economic system in which some banks are considered "too big to fail" have by that admission conceded its fragility, and they plainly seek at best to make it more robust by shoring up those banks.

The ideal, surely, would be an economic system where the failure of particular institutions would prove a good thing for the broader system, one that would gain from disorder.

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