We’ve lost our respect for complexity.
I was talking recently to a friend about a video essayist I like, (Dan Olson of Folding Ideas) and when asked why I thought he was any good I pondered it for a moment and said “he has a lot of respect for complexity”. On reflection, I think that is one of the virtues I look for in new people I meet more generally. Not that it’s something that we always have to be knees-deep in the details of a topic, but those that do that respect complexity in a way that I find admirable. Yet, over time, I feel we have lost a lot of our own respect for these people. Complexity is hard. Hard to work with, hard to remove if it’s unnecessary, but most of all hard to understand. We talk about complex subjects all the time. Medicine, politics, economics, sociology, morality and more. These are all deep topics that you can study your entire life, but everyone will end up talking about most of these, even quite often. So this isn’t just about academic papers and overly abstract hand-wavy blogposts like this one. I’m talking memes, news, thanksgiving dinner arguments, water cooler chats. We are constantly asking our brains to grasp at complex topics and distill down at least our own perception of them to something manageable.
We may be becoming worse at this. It’s not set in stone but the need to have quick and easy explanations for things, having peaked many centuries ago, has begun to rise again since the techno-optimistic days of only a few decades ago. That’s not been entirely without good reason, many things were promised then that have failed to materialize. From flying cars to world peace, some more sought than others. But the idea was that we would trust that society was heading in a good direction, and so these complex topics could be safely left to some group of people who would make it their life careers and so overall we would trust them to get the job done. Now, when many may challenge that notion of consistent progress of the world toward a brighter future, letting somebody else do it just doesn’t seem so right. Instead we now live in a time of doing your own research, of skepticism, but most of all, of the idea that understanding the full complexity of every topic that might cross your path is not only possible, but somehow, expected.
