Life Inside the Murmuration

Why the systems shaping our lives may be hardest to see when we are inside them

Watch a starling murmuration for long enough and it starts to look impossible.

Thousands of birds sweep across the sky as if they share a nervous system. The flock contracts, expands, twists, splits and reforms, apparently without a leader or any instructions. Research suggests that an individual starling mainly interacts with about six or seven nearby birds. Each bird has a relatively small social world. Yet together they produce something vast.

Inside the flock

Now imagine being one of the birds. You would have excellent information about what was happening beside you. Bird to the left. Bird to the right. Speed up. Turn. Don’t collide. You could probably give a perfectly reasonable account of every movement you made.

What you might not have is the view from the ground. You might not know that, for three seconds, you were part of something shaped like a whale.

That possibility bothers me, because I suspect humans spend much more of our lives in this position than we realise.

Human murmurations

We like to think we understand the systems we live within because we understand the pieces closest to us. We know why we took the job, bought the house, voted the way we did, joined the church, left the church, sold the shares, sent the angry message, or decided that everyone under thirty has lost their mind.

Locally, the explanations may be perfectly good. But millions of locally sensible actions interact, and something else appears.

A housing boom. A recession. A political realignment. A religion. A fashion. A moral norm. A cultural prejudice. None exists entirely within any one person, yet all can move people around.

We are very good at explaining the bird in front of us. We are less good at noticing when the thing that needs explaining is the flock.

We explain the birds

Take politics. After an election, we look for a cause. The leader was popular. The campaign was poor. One issue mattered. One scandal changed the mood. These things can all matter, but they also unfold within demographic change, economic pressure, media systems, social identities, technology, and millions of conversations between people who will never meet.

We point to visible birds because visible birds are easier to explain.

The same problem appears in economics. Nobody experiences “the economy”. We experience our salary, rent, mortgage, grocery bill, customers, savings, and whether someone is willing to give us a job. Yet all those local decisions combine into movements that can surprise almost everyone participating in them.

Racism at more than one scale

Racism gives us a harder version of the same problem. We naturally look for racism in individuals. Who said the racist thing? Who made the discriminatory decision? That matters, and individual responsibility does not disappear simply because a system is complicated.

But racism can also persist through institutions, inherited rules, neighbourhood patterns, economic differences, language, expectations and habits that no single person designed. Sociology has long examined racism across interacting individual, institutional and historical levels, rather than as individual prejudice alone.

The pattern can therefore exist at more than one scale.

This does not mean nobody is responsible. Murmuration is not absolution. Birds still flap their own wings.

It means that individual intention may not be sufficient to explain the shape produced by thousands or millions of intentions interacting over time.

Emergent Ignorance

Biogenics has a term for the blind spot that appears here: Emergent Ignorance. The basic idea is that components can participate in higher-order systems they cannot fully perceive. The stronger claim, that such systems may sometimes be fundamentally inaccessible to the components within them, remains a hypothesis rather than something we know.

A neuron does not understand the thought it helps create. A cell does not know the person whose liver it is keeping alive.

Humans invented hills

Humans have one considerable advantage over neurons and liver cells. We invented hills.

History is a hill. Statistics are a hill. Sociology, economics, anthropology and science are hills. Good journalism sometimes forms a small mound. These tools allow us to change scale and glimpse patterns we cannot see from street level.

But climbing the hill does not turn us into God. The economist remains within an economy. The historian inherits categories from history. The sociologist belongs to a culture. The political analyst participates in the information system they are analysing.

Even our maps of the murmuration are drawn by birds. That does not make understanding impossible. It makes certainty harder to justify.

The wrong scale

Perhaps one of the great errors of human thought is assuming that because something has an explanation, there must be one available at our preferred scale. We hunt for the person, decision, law, event or ideology that “caused” the movement.

Sometimes it is there. Sometimes the cause may be distributed across the flock.

What pattern am I inside?

This changes the question worth asking.

When a society suddenly shifts direction, when a belief spreads, when an institution behaves oddly, when a market panics, when an old prejudice persists despite people consciously rejecting it, perhaps we should occasionally stop asking only, “Who did this?”

We might also ask: What pattern am I currently inside?

Still one of the birds

A starling inside a murmuration probably experiences one reasonable local adjustment followed by another. Turn. Accelerate. Avoid. Follow.

From the ground, something enormous moves across the sky.

Human history may feel much the same while we live through it. Arguments, purchases, elections, inventions, fears, fashions, friendships, rules. Countless local movements that make sense to those who make them.

Only later does someone climb far enough up the hill to notice the shape.

And even then, they are still one of the birds.