Genre

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

The Simple and the Complex

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Simplify, Simplify!

1

To put it simply: Life is complex. Reality is complex. Human individuals are complex, and human societies are complex. Truth is complex, and accurately perceiving it is complex. Explaining one’s perception of “the truth” is complex too, and understanding another’s explanation of “the truth” is more complex still.

Yet we prefer to simplify.

To act, or at least to interact, requires us to proceed as though we knew that reality does exist, not just in our minds but “out there,” independent of anyone’s mind. We know that what we usually perceive all around us – and perhaps within as well – is chaos, but we want to believe that “underneath” the complexity, there is an underlying order.

We wonder about complex questions; we may ask others complex questions. Yet we prefer simple answers.

Isn’t that true?

2

When it seems more than likely that the reality within which all human beings have ever lived,

...and when we know with certainty from our own experience that the reality in which we ourselves live is not simple, and is hard to understand or to know well,

......why do we settle for relentless repetitions of definitive, uncomplicated statements of what’s supposedly true and what’s supposedly right …

.........rather than insisting upon the kind of provisional, convoluted descriptions of our world that we have every reason to know are more likely to correspond accurately to the complex reality in which we live?

Why is that?

Are we too dim-witted to prefer complex answers to complex questions, to choose complex statements about our complex world over answers that are too simple to be true?

Are we too lazy to concentrate long enough to hear complex answers explained fully, or to think hard enough to grasp the meaning of complicated statements?

Our political leaders and, even more ominously, our radio, television, and newspaper elite seem to think so, don’t they?

3


Politicians must appeal to a majority of voters. Media sources of “information” must appeal to large numbers of consumers. What we find most appealing today seems to be emotional stimulation. The politician whose campaign can elicit feelings of affection, respect, and camaderie are the ones most likely to be elected. The media outlets whose programs and publications can elicit the most entertainment, the most titillation, the most fear or the most outrage are the ones most likely to outpace their competitors.

What do we know about emotional stimulation?

Whether fellow-feeling or anger is the emotion in question, it tends to be short-lived. Thus, in order to achieve lasting success, the politician or the media outlet must keep stimulating and re-stimulating emotion. The television channel or network that presents the news of the day in a straight-forward, matter-of-fact tone without emotional commentary does not succeed. The politician who explains his position without oratorical flourish or appeal to love (family, patriotism, the Divine) or fear (the enemy, the evil-doer, an approaching cataclysm) does not succeed.

An uninflected, several-part statement of either fact or opinion is mockingly called “professorial” by media critics or political commentators and just “boring” by the rest of us. Such an appeal not to emotion but to reason – one would think – would not require frequent repetition, but the popularity of a candidate or of a reporter does require frequent stimulation of the expected emotion of the day.

4

Another thing: we are just too busy to pay that much attention or to give that much effort to prefer the truer and the more realistic (i.e. more complex) statements of what we face in our lives over simplistic platitudes, especially ones we have heard over and over.

Our jobs, our families, the business dealings necessary for our daily private lives, and our needs for stress-relieving or health-promoting activities require our immediate attention. We tell ourselves we can think carefully about the harder, long-term issues that affect us “when we get a break.”

And since the long-term issues tend to be problems, it’s no fun to think about them either.

5

Harry Truman is remembered for “plain speaking” and for saying, among other things, “Give me a one-armed economist" – one who would not answer a complex economic question, “Well, on the one hand…”

But President Truman’s witticism merely expressed a whimsical wish that the most important facts in our lives were not themselves complex, requiring multi-part statements and explanations. As a responsible leader, he recognized that they were in fact not simple and straight-forward.

We need today leaders and newscasters who are bold enough to tell us that the world we have to deal with is not simple and easy, but difficult and complicated. They can flatter our vanity by saying to us, “I know you would prefer to be moved, but it is more important for you to be informed.” But whether they flatter us or not, they need to appeal to our highest ideals and our highest abilities, our abilities to listen and to learn, to seek the real truth rather than the “simple truth,” to seek to become fully informed and to think for ourselves.

If we continue to prefer simple platitudes to careful explanations, if we continue to prefer to have our leaders appeal to us through emotion rather than reason, we have little hope of adequately facing up to the hard realities surrounding us.

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