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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

When Adaptation Becomes a Metaphor

Dillard's New Theory of Everything

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Another Theory to Explain Why Everything Changes

Joseph Dillard's Beyond Realism and Liberalism: Adaptive Reorganization as a Theory of International Relations arrives with an impressive ambition. Realism, we are told, asks how states survive competition. Liberal institutionalism asks how cooperation can mitigate competition. Adaptive Reorganization Theory, or ART, supposedly goes deeper, asking whether the organizational arrangements produced by competition or cooperation preserve a system's capacity to reorganize when circumstances change.

That sounds profound. It also sounds suspiciously familiar.

The central concept is “reorganizability”: the capacity of a system to change itself when its existing adaptations stop working. Dillard argues that states, civilizations, organizations and international systems can become extraordinarily powerful while simultaneously becoming less capable of changing course. Indeed, one of his most interesting formulations is that adaptation can increase while adaptability decreases. Successful arrangements accumulate resources, legitimacy, expertise, identity and institutional defenders precisely because they have worked in the past. Eventually their very success can make them difficult to replace.

There is something genuinely valuable here.

But then comes the familiar Integral temptation: take a good insight, place it at a deeper evolutionary level, give it a grand conceptual architecture, and announce that we have discovered the underlying structure of the whole thing.

That is where the trouble begins.

The Good Idea Buried Inside the Grand Theory

Let us start by giving Dillard his due.

Political institutions really can become victims of their own success. Military doctrines become obsolete. Bureaucracies defend procedures that have ceased to serve their original purposes. Corporations continue investing in yesterday's technologies. Political systems suppress inconvenient information. States become attached to strategic assumptions that once made sense but subsequently become liabilities.

Dillard's examples—Rome, Qing China, Britain, the Soviet Union and Kodak—are intended to illustrate precisely this phenomenon. Rome retained enormous military and administrative power while experiencing increasing difficulty in reorganizing itself. Qing China adopted Western technology without sufficiently transforming the institutional structures surrounding it. The Soviet Union accumulated immense power while restricting corrective feedback. Kodak remained associated with a successful technological paradigm while the environment around it changed.

Fine.

But notice what has happened. We began with an ordinary and well-established observation about institutional rigidity and ended up with “evolutionary reorganizability.”

Why?

Dillard's answer is that evolution supplies the deeper level. Nation-states, sovereignty, capitalism, socialism, democracy and international law are historically recent organizational arrangements. Evolution is older and more fundamental, so the deeper question is how living systems maintain enough organization to survive while retaining the capacity to reorganize.

But this is precisely where one needs to resist the seduction of evolutionary language.

Something does not become more explanatory merely because it is more ancient.

The Evolutionary Depth Fallacy

Human beings are biological organisms. That does not mean that everything humans do is best explained by biology.

Language is biologically dependent, but linguistics is not reducible to cellular biology. Money depends upon human organisms, but monetary economics is not a branch of evolutionary biology. Governments consist of biological organisms, but constitutional law does not become more explanatory by invoking natural selection.

Likewise, international relations is certainly constrained by the fact that human beings are evolved organisms. But it does not follow that evolutionary theory is therefore the deepest explanatory framework for international politics.

This distinction is particularly important because Dillard's theory is not really about biological evolution. It is about institutions, information, strategic behavior, political learning, technological change, diplomacy and collective decision-making.

And once those things enter the picture, we are dealing with a highly distinctive form of cultural evolution.

Dillard recognizes this problem. He notes that human cultural evolution differs from genetic evolution because humans transmit acquired information, deliberately modify environments, construct institutions and intentionally alter selection pressures.

Exactly.

But then why should “evolution” do the explanatory work?

At this point evolutionary theory risks becoming the metaphor that explains nothing because everything has been renamed in evolutionary terms.

Reorganizability: A Discovery or a Renaming Exercise?

This is the central problem.

What exactly is reorganizability?

Dillard proposes indicators such as suppression of contradictory information, difficulty reversing failed policies, rigid models of adversaries, declining experimentation, centralization, unreliable commitments and dependence on crisis for correction.

These are perfectly reasonable indicators of institutional dysfunction.

But we already have names for much of this.

We call it path dependence.

We call it institutional inertia.

We call it organizational learning failure.

We call it competence traps.

We call it policy lock-in.

We call it groupthink.

We call it failure of feedback.

We call it exploration-exploitation imbalance.

We call it loss of adaptive capacity.

Dillard's own notes acknowledge these parallels. His discussion of success traps explicitly connects ART to organizational research on reduced exploration and institutional inertia, while the paper's account of ARCR draws upon existing work on reciprocity, repeated interaction, information and credible commitments.

So what precisely has ART added?

That is the question the paper never satisfactorily answers.

The Reorganizability Trap

There is an even more fundamental problem.

Suppose a country successfully reorganizes after a crisis. ART can tell us that it possessed considerable reorganizability.

Suppose another country fails to reorganize and collapses. ART can tell us that it lacked reorganizability.

But now the explanation risks becoming circular.

The successful system reorganized because it was reorganizable.

The failed system failed to reorganize because it was insufficiently reorganizable.

The outcome becomes evidence for the explanatory variable.

This is not yet a theory. It is a vocabulary for describing outcomes.

Dillard knows that this problem exists. His notes explicitly say that the proposed indicators constitute an important step toward making reorganizability empirically testable, and that the research task is to determine whether the variables can be operationalized into a reliable measure across scales.

That admission is important.

It means that ART is not yet the theory Dillard's title announces.

It is a research proposal for a possible theory.

There is nothing wrong with that. But it is a very different claim.

Rome, China, Russia: Examples Are Not Evidence

Dillard's historical cases are rhetorically effective because almost anything can be made to look like an example of adaptive failure after the fact.

Rome becomes a case of declining reorganizability. Qing China becomes a case of technological adaptation without sufficient institutional reorganization. The Soviet Union becomes a case of political rigidity. Kodak becomes a corporate success trap.

But these cases do not establish that reorganizability caused their trajectories.

They illustrate the concept.

That is all.

The fall of Rome has multiple competing explanations. So does Qing China's decline. So does the Soviet collapse. Kodak's failure can be discussed in terms of technological disruption, corporate decision-making, market structure and organizational incentives without invoking evolutionary reorganizability.

A theory becomes interesting when it tells us something before we know the outcome.

Could ART have predicted the Soviet collapse?

Could it have predicted that Qing technological adaptation would remain institutionally insufficient?

Could it distinguish Britain from Rome before their respective trajectories became historically obvious?

Could it identify an apparently successful political system today and tell us, independently of its eventual fate, that it is entering a reorganizability trap?

That is where the real scientific work begins.

ARCR and the Four Horsemen of Adaptability

Dillard's ARCR proposal—Autonomy, Reciprocity, Confirmation and Reliability—is more concrete. But here too the grandiosity exceeds the evidence.

Autonomy can generate alternatives. Reciprocity can restrain exploitation. Confirmation can provide corrective information. Reliability can make cooperation sustainable.

All reasonable propositions.

But four reasonable propositions do not automatically become a theory of evolutionary organization.

Dillard himself concedes that ARCR is a hypothesis rather than an established four-factor model and that its components already have substantial analogues in evolutionary biology and international-relations scholarship.

This is actually the point at which I would stop calling ART a “theory” and start calling it a framework.

A framework can be extremely useful.

But a framework does not become a theory merely because it is described as operating across multiple scales of reality.

The Integral Habit: Everything Is Connected, Therefore We Have Explained It

There is a distinctly Integral flavor to Dillard's procedure.

Take concepts from biology, psychology, organizational theory, international relations and evolutionary theory. Identify a pattern that appears at all these levels. Give the pattern a unifying name. Then declare that the new concept reveals a deeper evolutionary structure connecting them.

This procedure is intellectually seductive.

It is also dangerous.

Because the broader the concept becomes, the easier it becomes to find examples.

Adaptation occurs everywhere.

Systems reorganize.

Feedback matters.

Successful arrangements can become rigid.

Competition and cooperation interact.

Environments change.

Organizations learn—or fail to learn.

All true.

But a concept that can accommodate almost anything may predict almost nothing.

This is exactly the point at which Integral theorizing repeatedly gets itself into trouble. The larger the explanatory net, the greater the temptation to confuse comprehensiveness with explanatory power.

A theory of everything is not necessarily an explanation of anything.

Adaptive Space Is Not Necessarily Better Space

Dillard's notion of “adaptive space” is similarly attractive. Political systems can eliminate possibilities by defining certain actors as permanent enemies, certain policies as unthinkable and certain institutional arrangements as inevitable.

This is an important observation.

But there is a hidden normative leap when openness to alternatives is treated as inherently adaptive.

Sometimes alternatives should be excluded.

Sometimes a threat really is a threat.

Sometimes a policy should not merely remain “within adaptive space” but should be rejected.

Political systems have to make choices. They cannot permanently maintain every conceivable option.

There is an unavoidable tension between exploration and exploitation. A system that explores everything may accomplish nothing; a system that exploits one successful strategy forever may eventually become rigid.

Dillard recognizes this tension, but ART does not yet provide an independent rule for determining where the balance should lie.

And that is the point at which evolutionary language quietly stops doing explanatory work and ordinary political judgment returns.

The Geopolitical Application Is Where the Theory Gets Political

This becomes particularly visible in Dillard's discussion of Europe, Russia and the emerging multipolar order.

Dillard argues that Europe should ask what strategic autonomy is for. Europe could become more militarily autonomous while reproducing the same adversarial assumptions and bloc politics that characterize conventional great-power competition.

That is an interesting political question.

But it is not an evolutionary deduction.

Likewise, keeping negotiated arrangements with Russia within “adaptive space” may be a reasonable subject for political discussion, but ART cannot establish from first principles that such an option should be pursued. The theory can tell us to keep alternatives available for examination. It cannot tell us which alternative is actually preferable without importing additional empirical and normative criteria.

This is important because Dillard himself explicitly warns against turning ART into a hidden political morality. He says that the framework should evaluate adaptive processes rather than mechanically generate political prescriptions.

I agree.

But then ART must stay in its lane.

It cannot simultaneously claim to be politically non-normative and smuggle political conclusions in through the word “adaptive.”

Multipolarity Is Not More Evolutionary

Dillard is careful not to simply celebrate multipolarity. A multipolar system might produce more experimentation and independent centers of innovation, but it might also generate arms races, rigid blocs and mutually reinforcing propaganda systems.

This qualification is welcome.

But it also demonstrates the weakness of the theory.

Almost any geopolitical arrangement can be described as either adaptive or maladaptive depending upon what consequences one emphasizes.

Multipolarity can increase alternatives.

It can also increase conflict.

Unipolarity can produce stability.

It can also produce complacency.

Bipolarity can reduce uncertainty.

It can also produce dangerous confrontation.

Centralization can suppress feedback.

It can also enable rapid decision-making.

Decentralization can encourage experimentation.

It can also produce paralysis.

Once all these possibilities are admitted, ART becomes less a predictive theory than a sophisticated vocabulary for saying:

It depends.

And of course it does.

Power Is Not the Enemy of Adaptation

Dillard's contrast between power and reorganizability is also too tidy.

Power is not simply the thing that states accumulate while gradually becoming rigid.

Power can itself generate adaptive capacity.

Military capability can create security. Economic resources can finance experimentation. Technological superiority can provide alternatives. Industrial capacity can provide resilience. Alliances can create redundancy. Political influence can buy time for institutional adjustment.

Conversely, a highly flexible system without sufficient resources can simply be overwhelmed.

Dillard recognizes that defensive capacity can preserve adaptive space.

But once this is admitted, the neat opposition between power and reorganizability begins to dissolve.

The more interesting question is not whether power or adaptability matters.

Obviously both matter.

The question is how power itself affects the capacity for adaptation, and how adaptation affects the distribution and use of power.

That would be a genuinely interesting research program.

From Theory Back to the Humble Research Question

The irony is that Dillard does not actually need the grand evolutionary claim to make his most interesting point.

Strip ART of its evolutionary grandeur, and something valuable remains.

Successful institutions accumulate commitments.

Commitments produce interests.

Interests defend institutions.

Defended institutions filter information.

Filtered information reduces corrective feedback.

Reduced feedback makes failure harder to detect.

Failure becomes harder to reverse.

The system eventually encounters a changed environment for which its previously successful adaptations are poorly suited.

That is a fascinating causal chain.

And it can be studied empirically.

There is no need to invoke the entire history of life to get there.

The Real Challenge to Realism

Dillard wants ART to move beyond realism and liberalism.

But the strongest challenge to realism does not require declaring evolution the deeper explanatory level.

Realism asks how states survive under conditions of international anarchy and power competition. Liberal institutionalism asks how cooperation can emerge despite those conditions.

ART's genuinely useful addition could be much narrower:

What happens when the adaptations through which a political system has achieved security become obstacles to its future adaptation?

That is a question neither realism nor liberalism necessarily exhausts.

But notice what follows.

ART need not replace realism.

It need not replace liberalism.

It need not replace institutionalism, complexity theory, resilience theory or organizational learning.

It could simply be another lens.

And that would be enough.

A Theory Still Waiting for Its Evidence

Dillard ends with a striking formulation: “Power determines what a system can do. Reorganizability determines whether it can become something else when what it is doing stops working.”

As a metaphor, this is excellent.

As a theory, it remains unproven.

The next stage cannot be another set of historical examples. It must be measurement, comparison and prediction. Dillard needs to specify exactly what reorganizability is, how it differs from resilience and adaptability, how it can be measured independently of outcomes, what ARCR predicts, what observations would count against it, and what empirical cases distinguish ART from existing theories.

Until then, “reorganizability” is an interesting name for a problem rather than an established explanation of it.

And perhaps that is the real lesson of this paper.

Dillard has not yet gone beyond realism and liberalism.

He has gone beyond them rhetorically, by placing their familiar concerns inside a much larger evolutionary vocabulary.

But the decisive theoretical step has not yet been taken.

The fascinating question is not whether political systems adapt. Of course they do.

It is not whether successful adaptations can become rigid. Of course they can.

It is not whether feedback, experimentation, information and institutional flexibility matter. Obviously they do.

The real question is whether “reorganizability” adds explanatory power that these established concepts do not already possess.

That is the burden of proof.

Until Dillard meets it, Adaptive Reorganization Theory remains less a new theory of international relations than an ambitious metatheoretical re-description of things we already know about institutional change.

And that is not nothing.

But it is also not yet a revolution in international-relations theory.