In my Situational Assessment: 2017, I quoted a post from Reddit:

“The Blue Church is panicking because they’ve just witnessed the birth of a new Red Religion. Not the tired old Christian cliches they defeated back in the ’60s, but a new faith based on cultural identity and outright rejection of the Blue Faith.” — /u/notjfao

A number of folks noted that they were not familiar with the concept of the Blue Church and wondered what was meant by it. The Democratic Party? Liberalism? Progressivism? As I mentioned in SA:2017, I had originally lifted the idea wholesale from that Reddit post with only an intuitive sense that it (and its juxtaposition with a Red Religion) was useful and pointed at something real.

In this essay, I dive into the concept. Below I endeavor to provide an answer that is adequate to Deep Code. I believe that the results are well worth the effort, but this is not a simple journey. Few things of importance these days are. If we want to get to the bottom of the contemporary situation, we are going to have to get comfortable going deep.

The abstract is this: the Blue Church is a kind of narrative / ideology control structure that is a natural result of mass media. It is an evolved (rather than designed) function that has come over the past half-century to be deeply connected with the Democratic political “Establishment” and lightly connected with the “Deep State” to form an effective political and dominant cultural force in the United States.

We can trace its roots at least as far back as the beginning of the 20th Century where it emerged in response to the new capabilities of mass media for social control. By mid-century it began to play an increasingly meaningful role in forming and shaping American culture-producing institutions; became pervasive through the last half of the 20th and seems to have peaked in its influence somewhere in the first decade of the 21st Century.

It is now beginning to unravel.

In part it is unravelling because of developing schisms within its master narrative, the Blue Faith. These are important, but they are not the subject of this essay. In this essay, I am focusing on what I think is both much more fundamental and much less obvious: deep shifts in technology and society that are undermining the very foundations of the Church. Shifts that render the Church itself obsolete.

If you are ready for a deep dive, come on in. The water is warm.

Complexity and Control

Yaneer Bar-Yam’s book Making Things Work, does an excellent job explaining the relationship between complexity and the kinds of control structures that we humans build to try and manage that complexity. For those who want to go deeper, I recommend the whole book. The basic idea is actually pretty simple.

Imagine a boat. We are going to row that boat, starting with but one paddle. If you’ve ever learned to canoe, you know that this isn’t simple. There is an art to it. You have to hold the paddle correctly, you have to learn how to put it into the water, how to stroke, how to return. The difference between doing it well and doing it poorly is significant. But, with a little practice, almost everyone can get at least reasonably capable of rowing their canoe.

This is a “management of complexity” problem. The relationship between oar, water, boat and person is complex. All of these systems are feeding back on each other in subtle and hard to predict ways. But the “control capacity” of a standard-issue human is up to the task. The human body, adapted to things like walking upright on two legs and throwing rocks has enough control capacity to manage this level of complexity.

Now add another oar. Generally, even someone experienced with a single paddle takes a little while to get it figured out. In particular, you have to learn how to simplify the problem by constraining some of the degrees of freedom of the paddles. Perhaps you fix the oars to the boat so that they can only traverse a single path. Certainly, you are going to have to make sure that you are paddling both oars in the same rhythm. By getting the oars into “coherence,” you can get the complexity of the problem inside your control capacity.

Coherence is one of the most important concepts in the management of complexity. When you take two systems (two paddles) and synchronize them, you radically simplify the complexity of the overall system. By getting two paddles into coherence, you are able to turn two paddles that you can’t manage into one big paddle that you can manage.

Now add another person to the mix. Side by side — each with one oar. This kicks the complexity up a lot. We are now dealing not only with two oars, we are dealing with two different control structures. And, of course, the only way to get things moving is for the control structures to get into coherence. Fortunately, humans are pretty good at this too. Like dancers or musicians playing together, we have a lot of bandwidth for small group synchrony. Getting into flow together takes some doing, but with a little practice we can manage this complexity.

Now add another ten people into the boat. This is a real problem. The complexity of this overall system exceeds the natural control capacity of “group flow”. Try as you might, it is darn near impossible for a group of twelve people to “self organize” into an effective rowing team.

Unless you put someone in charge.

Add someone to the front of the boat whose job is nothing but synchronizing the whole team (“stroke!”) and reduce everyone else’s job to responding to the signal coming from that leader (“stroke!”) and suddenly the system comes back into control. In effect, you’ve replaced thirteen individuals with one “group of people” and one “leader” in a control hierarchy. This is a radical simplification. As the Greeks and Romans of old discovered, it scales. As long as the people rowing the boat stay inside their box and focus only on doing their job, and as long as the coxswain says in a simple rhythm, you can stack dozens of rowers and get the job done.

Notice what happens here. In particular, notice what has to happen up and down the control hierarchy. The bandwidth (the amount of signal) going up and down the hierarchy has to be extremely simple. (“Stroke!”) Imagine if the rowers had to paddle and converse about where the boat should go. It couldn’t be done. Imagine if the coxswain had to try and control two boats simultaneously. Except in the very rare circumstance that the two boats could be consistently and precisely coherent, it couldn’t be done.

These are the core concepts to understand the Blue Church. The complexity of the system. Our ability to simplify the system. The control bandwidth available to manage the simplified system.

The Complexity of Modern Life

In 1860, the population of the United States was 30 million people. Six short generations later, the population had increased tenfold to over 300 million people.

Consider this. For the first millennium A.D., the human population was relatively constant. Over the next six hundred years, it only barely doubled. Then, suddenly, with the beginnings of the industrial revolution it began to take off. By the 20th Century, the rate of growth in the United States (and the world) absolutely skyrocketed. The past 150 years have witnessed an unprecedented explosion of population, and along with that population, an explosion of social complexity.

By any measure of social complexity, the transition from the 19th to the 20th Century was extraordinary. For the first time in human history, the population shifted from a rural to an urban majority bringing the increased pace of life and social interaction that comes with big cities. Horses gave way to railroads which were replaced by automobiles and then airplanes — shrinking the world into a single connected meta-community. We went from Darwin first postulating evolution in 1859 all the way to Crick and Watson’s DNA in 1953. We went from the first theory of electromagnetism in 1864 to the actual deployment of the Atomic Bomb in 1945. This was a hell of a century.

And just like in our example of adding a dozen people to our boat, this expansion of complexity created a problem. The forms of social control that had been used to get us to the 19th Century were inadequate to the levels of novelty and complexity of the 20th Century. Society cannot function without a regulatory structure adequate to its level of complexity.

The Blue Church was the emergent solution to this problem.

Understanding Media

Technology is not neutral. As Marshall McLuhan wrote, when we innovate technology, “we become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

McLuhan’s theories are subtle and powerful. In fact, it is hard for me to imagine anyone being able to navigate the contemporary environment without at least a good grasp of his principles. If you’ve never read his stuff, I recommend Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man.

I’m not going to try and recapitulate McLuhan’s work here. Instead, I’m going to steal some portions of it and recast it in a very different form to make it accessible for our present purposes.

Imagine a landscape of rolling hills. Now imagine rain falling evenly on this uneven ground. What is going to happen? Well, eventually, the water is going to run downhill, gather in the valleys and, depending on the actual shape of the terrain, either form into a flowing river or gather into a lake or pond.

Once you know the “shape” of a particular space and the nature of the forces acting in it, you can make some neat predictions about how it is going to play out. Of course, the future is never locked down. The lake might overflow and transform into a waterfall. A meteor might fly out of the sky and change the shape of the whole space. But, subject to certain constraints, you can predict the future.

Media is like a landscape. The kind of human social dynamics and psychologies that form around an oral tradition are quite different than those that can (and do) form around a literate media.

The 20th Century brought a number of technological advancements. One of the most important was the emergence and development of “mass media.” While the various kinds of mass media (newspaper, radio, television) are different, as “mass” (or “broadcast”) media they share a basic shape: they are asymmetric. One to many. Author to audience. Coxswain to rowers.

Not everyone can get access to the printing press, the radio station or the television broadcast booth. Those few that can are the ones to get to create the narrative. Everyone else is the audience. We read, listen, watch. But not much else. (Actually, we do one very important thing else, but I’ll get to that in a moment.)

The key insight for this post is that as an audience we are coherent. As a mass, we transform from millions of diverse individuals into one, relatively simple, group. So long as we can be maintained in this coherence, we present something that can be managed.

This is the formal core of the Blue Church: it solves the problem of 20th Century social complexity through the use of mass media to generate manageable social coherence.

The Formation of Good Opinion

Once you grasp the basic shape of the Blue Church control structure, you begin to see it everywhere. There is a basic bi-directional flow. In the upwards direction there is the flow of “credentialed authority.” The “experts” who are authorized through some legitimizing process to be permitted to form and express their opinions through some form of broadcast media. In the downwards direction, these “good opinions” which anchor and place boundaries around our collective social coherence.

Consider academia. The students are the audience. Their job is to pay attention to the credentialed authority. To listen and watch closely and to learn from the professor the nature of “good opinion” in this particular domain. If they do a good job in this, that is, if they can answer questions correctly according to the authorities’ evaluation process, then they pass. If not, they fail.

While the content matters, the form is crucial. Regardless of the specific subject matter, every class is a lesson in how to play the Blue Church game.

The professors, in their turn, are authorities largely because they did a good job being students and were invited into the authority hierarchy. Here they learned the nuance and boundary of good opinion, the social pecking order (Harvard is at the top thank you) and the ins and outs of being a good expert.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the academy is propaganda or bullshit. In fact, in many ways, the opposite. It works. This process of academic credentialization has proven to be a powerful engine for filtering out nonsense and searching for truth. While there have been a lot of digressions (string theory) and inappropriate authorizations (economics), in the main, the 20th Century expertise machine has been the crown jewel of civilization.

What I am pointing to here is the formal structure. Broadcast. Asymmetry. An architecture that enables a scalable division of labor for social sensemaking and decision making. No one could possibly try and understand even a small fraction of what is going on in the world. So we break the problem up into bits, hand the smaller problems up the expertise hierarchy where they are processed and reduced to simple shared “good opinion” which is then broadcast down and out to the whole population.

This gets us good answers to hard problems and, more importantly, gets us all more or less on the same page. And *this* enables us to run a modern society.

For example, imagine what street traffic would look like if everyone had their own opinions about what should happen. Disaster. But as long as we all agree, implicitly and without much consideration, that a red light means “stop” then suddenly millions of people flinging tons of steel about at sixty five miles per hour is manageable.

Similarly, as long as we all agree that “free trade is a good idea”, or that “borders should be protected,” or that “healthcare is a human right,” or that “people should be treated equally,” or that “carbon emissions lead to global warming” then the still enormously difficult job of designing and implementing policies based upon these assumptions and frameworks can be managed and the ship of state moved forward. (“Stroke!”)