on complexity
and how to deal with it
I’ve been writing a lot and publishing very little. Part of the reason why is that I haven’t been able to wrap my head around the two topics at the center of my offline-hours focus: complexity and religion. With both, I’m trying to understand the malaise that seems to have taken root within our discourse, our society, and ourselves, and how we might resolve it.
It’s something like this: the world is complex, and we don’t have a very good way of dealing with it. We usually end up encoding this complexity into a narrative, but that can be risky. The narratives we used to rely on, like religion, are drying up, and (perhaps partially as a result), our realities seem to be getting even more discordant and incomprehensible.
I’ve never been good at making quick judgements about complex things—people, relationships, emotions, markets, morality, etc. People have often confused my uncertainty for impassivity or a lack of conviction. I feel, however, that it’s irresponsible to take a strong stance on anything without first understanding it all the way down. For all the uncomfortable ambiguity it entails, I’ve come to appreciate this posture of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (read: epistemological humility) because at least it’s honest.
context maximalism
Recently, a friend of mine called me a ‘context maximalist,’ and I think they’re right. When I get interested in something, I accrue tons of information and carry it around for weeks or months, trying to find a sensible thread through discourse with any willing party. I develop conviction through ethnography, investigation, and debate. And yet my convictions remain (sometimes annoyingly) fluid; transient.
I almost always find that reality is far more complicated than we take it to be, and that the only easy answers are the ones we’re looking for. Inevitably, we reduce complexity, and invariably, we do so subjectively. How we reduce it, and how much, is a function of the amount of chaos, ambiguity, and uncertainty we’re comfortable dealing with.
It’s easy to misapply a narrative to something, and it’s even easier for that narrative to backfire. Narrative is, after all, the powerful force that encodes knowledge. We can know nothing in a completely objective way—instead, we understand and remember through stories, for which context is critical
is it true? does it matter?
The mistake is almost always one of misplaced objectivity. In the face of incomprehensible complexity, we yearn for ontology, and we have no problem finding it. We’ve never had exposure to more information or the agency to make so many decisions. We’ve never known more, and yet we’ve never been so unsure.
With every piece of news, or new invention, or new set of data, the same human themes emerge—a critique on haves or have-nots or virtue or vice; an assurance of salvation or demise. There has never been a neutral consensus.
The way you understand something, or the way you remember it, is how you give or take its power. No matter the truth, anyone’s memory of anything is interpretive to the extent that we might simply consider truth a relative matter.
This accounts for quite a bit of social friction. My hunch is that early globalization (among other factors) caused such a shock of narrative violation that it sent the world to war twice. A world of incompatible realities and their irreconcilable values collided with an overwhelming force that we are still reckoning with. But now, these inconsistencies have subdivided from massive empires into smaller groups—from the scale of national ideology to intersectional disputes. By volume, perhaps this friction has grown, but at least it’s more evenly distributed.
“We are not sufficiently described by the best thing we have ever done, nor are we sufficiently described by the worst thing we have ever done. We are all of it.”
- Atul Gawande
losing our faith
Perhaps the most powerful forcing function for this kind of pluralism has been the massive secularization of every developed society. One hundred years ago, when you went to war against an ideological enemy, you knew you were going to the same hell.
Beyond a shared ontology, this loss of religion has left a gaping hole in the middle of our collective consciousness that we haven’t yet managed to fill. When we take Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, we risk more than ever plummeting into a void. Leading alternatives so far include mission-driven or values-aligned work (did Standard Oil have a mission statement?), political factions, families, and hedonistic pleasure.
I’m sort of envious of my friends who are devoutly religious. Perhaps unpopularly, I think religion is great. It fills a gap and provides a blanket of assurance—of trust, reverence, and certainty—that is genuinely beneficial. It provides a deep, strong, positive community and a sense of meaning. And, according to my friend Yasmeen who researches at the intersection of religiosity and mental health, it’s shown to correlate with happiness and calm. She can’t decide if it’s a function of the meditative posture of prayer or of that aforementioned assurance, or of something else entirely.
I tried hard at religion. One half of my family is devoutly but gently Christian; the other is politely atheist. My siblings and I went to church most Sundays. In high school, with the guidance of a friend who was also a professor of religion, I read through the Qu’ran, the Bible, and the Torah. And later, like every college student, I read the (summarized) Bhagavad Gita and the Dao De Jing. But despite my best effort, I could not resolve my skepticism, and I became morally conflicted about aligning myself toward a human institution that felt so morally rotten.
what now?
We’re inherently oriented toward some kind of faith—we need to believe in something, to revere in something, to be headed in some direction, and we need answers to questions posed by our consciousness. It’s not a matter of why so much as how, and the complexity of our world demands it even more.
Taking Nietzsche’s approach of defining our own morality—of willing our own will—still seems presumptuous. If you’re not religiously inclined, maybe the best option is to go on a walk, make eye contact with a tree, and mind our narratives.
Memory, like every complex system, is more fluid than it would have you think. The way you remember something is ultimately your choice—you have the power to discolor or defend whatever narrative you choose for it. It will be discolored with time anyway.
Nothing—no relationship or person or reality—is defined by its best attribute nor its worst; not by its beginning nor its end. It is all of it. You can love something you do not understand; you can appreciate something without having an answer for it.
Each pass of remembrance either reinforces or reconstructs whatever narrative you’ve built around a reality, even if it’s completely made up. Do not let a bad end ruin a good thing. Do not remember something only by the way it ended. And stop trying to make sense of everything—try instead to be in awe of it.
hard to believe it’s September already.