Life is Complicated -- And Here's Why
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Red sneakers facing a twisting path
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** Quotation
You said you think you know some things. What you mean is, you’ve constructed simplified representations of how those things work. But don’t confuse yourself by thinking your simplified mental constructions are realistic, or worse yet, true … Nothing useful is real. If it’s complicated enough to be realistic, it’s too complicated to be useful. That’s why we build models. Representations. When we say we know things, we just mean we have mental models of those things that we like. Often we like them because they’ve been useful. But let’s not confuse having a useful model with actual knowing.
– Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan and Shannon O’Donnell, 2009, from the book Adventures of an IT Leader
** News and Analysis
“Sometimes it feels as though all citizens of red states are lumped together, as if everyone here, especially those in rural areas, is the same. In early December when McConnell shot down the $908 billion stimulus plan, Twitter lit up with hatred for Kentuckians. Shortly before the November election, the MSNBC journalist Joy Reid tweeted her dismay with the state’s voters. Her followers responded by talking about the stupidity of Kentuckians, many posting memes of shirtless men with mullets or declarations that all people in the state are white supremacists. After the election, the hashtag #FuckKentucky was popular on Twitter. Social media is not known for its decorum, but what troubled me more than the hashtag was the way Kentuckians were painted with broad strokes as hicks, hillbillies, and a host of derogatory terms who live in “the armpit of America” and who wouldn’t deserve pity even if we were “ravaged by COVID.” These volatile responses trouble me, not only because I don’t like being reduced to a stereotype, but also because that response feeds the GOP rhetoric I hear at home: The liberals just think you’re deplorable, so why not flex your muscle any way you can to spit in their faces?”
– from “A Warning From a Democrat in a Red State (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/warning-democrat-red-state/617501/) ” by Silas House at The Atlantic
** Essay: Life is Complicated
** Is It Really So?
Yes. We have this truth from no less an authority than Sir Raymond Douglas Davies, testifying back in 1971 (https://music.apple.com/us/album/complicated-life/1532715910?i=1532715921) :
Gotta stand and face it: Life is so complicated.
Even earlier, back in 1920, H. L. Mencken offered us this comforting assurance (https://practopian.org/quotes/easy-solutions.html) :
There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible and wrong.
I was thinking about life’s complications recently when I heard Barack Obama’s insightful interview with Brené Brown (https://brenebrown.com/dtl-podcast/) . The whole podcast episode is well worth a listen, but just to cherry pick a few relevant nuggets:
When I actually took my theories and started testing them in neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago, suddenly I started realizing: Oh, people are complicated, and situations are complicated….
If there’s one thing I wanted to communicate in this book, it’s that the higher up you go in politics – but I think this is true of any organization – the more you will be confronted with challenges, problems, issues that do not yield a perfect answer.
[But] just because something doesn’t have a perfect answer, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a better answer. So my interest in rigorous debate, good analysis, good facts… is so at the end of the day you can make better decisions, even though you know they’re not going to be perfect.
I do think that the benefit I got from my academic training… was still having respect for the fact that, as complicated as the world is, there are still tools we have, and the capacity to reason things out, that we ignore at our peril.
So there you have a definitive consensus from cultural icons of three generations. Yes. Life is indeed complicated.
** Does It Have to Be This Way?
At some point you might suspect that these people are making things sound more complicated than they really are. I mean, you know how these elites are: if they didn’t make everything so darned complicated, then all these high-priced experts would be out of a job, wouldn’t they!
But there’s a very good reason why life is so complicated, and has to be this way, and it’s called… evolution (https://practopian.org/tags/evolution.html) .
To start with, science tells us that life here on earth is not being guided by any divine intelligence, and so we are not on our way to fulfilling some grand design. No, all forms of life here on earth – ourselves included – were produced by a blind watchmaker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_Watchmaker) , as the saying goes, and so there is no ultimate truth, no great plan… we’re all just muddling through one day at a time, one generation at a time, trying to adapt as best we can to whatever reality is throwing at us this week. In other words, there is no perfect state to which we can aspire. And so, as Obama tells us, there are no perfect answers, and it often takes a lot of hard work just to figure out which answer might be a bit less bad than the others.
But the complications brought about by evolution don’t stop there: they run even deeper. Because the innate mechanisms of evolution present us with a series of delicate balancing acts for which there are no definitive solutions.
** Competition vs. Cooperation
Most of us understand very well that evolution involves competition. One species competes against another, individuals within a species compete against others, and there are winners and losers. And we see the same sort of competition playing out in our cultural evolution (https://practopian.org/tags/cultural-evolution.html) as well, with competition between nations, and between corporations, and between individuals.
But of course evolution also exhibits many signs of cooperation. Groups of chickens practicing peaceful coexistence lay more eggs than super chickens striving to dominate other chickens (https://www.2civility.org/super-chickens-lesson-competition/) . The cells within our bodies cooperate with each other in order to form the more perfect union represented by each human being. And individuals and departments within corporations cooperate with each other in order to deliver products and services that are superior to those produced by other companies.
But who decides when we should cooperate, and with whom, vs. when we should compete, and against whom? And on what basis are the decisions made? When should states operate independently, essentially in competition with one another, and when should they cooperate as part of a united federation (https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text) ?
As noted above… it’s complicated.
** Retention vs. Innovation
Two other required elements for evolution are retention of what works, along with trials of new things. Without change, nothing would ever evolve. But if you change everything all the time, then odds are that nothing will work right ever again.
Again, this balancing act is required for genetic evolution, but equally important for cultural evolution.
And so we have the constant question of when should we innovate, and when should we stick with the tried and true? And when we try something new, which new thing should we attempt?
Again, there are no silver bullets, no magic answers. If in doubt about this, just ask BlackBerry (https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21120107/tcl-blackberry-ends-phone-global-rights-date-2020) and Kodak (https://rbj.net/2017/09/13/kodaks-decades-of-decline/) .
** Simplicity vs. Complexity
Is it better to use simple designs or complex ones? Better to be a large complex life form with a sophisticated culture, or a simple coronavirus? Better to be a large integrated organization or a small, nimble startup? Better to compete with a few complex, expensive fighter jets, or a large fleet of small simple drones (https://defensesystems.com/articles/2015/08/31/darpa-gremlins-reusable-attack-drones.aspx) ? Better to fix a flight control problem with a simple software fix, or to design a whole new airframe (https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-fi-boeing-max-design-20190315-story.html) ?
Well, once again… it’s complicated.
** And So…?
Alright, so life is complicated, and it’s going to stay that way. At this point you might be wondering: “Other than ruining my day, what exactly was your point with all this?”
Just this: when we try to over-simplify issues and people and positions, we almost always cause ourselves problems.
To put it another way: extremist positions at either end of a spectrum almost always yield worse outcomes than more nuanced positions somewhere in the middle.
Is it better for each individual to have absolute liberty to do whatever they want, or better for us all to be assimilated into a mindless, conforming society?
Well, probably better to have something in between those two extremes, even if that does tend to… make things more complicated.
Is it better to follow a religion whose leaders tell us exactly what to think or do in any situation, or better to believe in an unfeeling mechanical cosmos devoid of all meaning?
Well… perhaps it might be better to believe something in between those two extremes (https://practopian.org/blog/hbowie/religion-storytelling-and-art.html) .
Is it better to have a society run by capitalists in charge of big business, or socialists in charge of big government?
Well, once again… I know by now you see this coming… the answers are complicated (https://practopian.org/blog/hbowie/what-to-do-about-big-business.html) .
Now, of course, this sort of message doesn’t sell well in today’s media landscape. We all would like a quick fix of simple certainty, and no matter where we turn today, we can find an army of pushers (https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-pusher/1440859623?i=1440860186) waiting to feed our habit, even giving the stuff away for free, just to keep us hooked.
And so we’ve grown used to consuming short spurts of alleged facts mixed in with provocatively worded eyeball-grabbing opinions. And just about all of these proclamations – no matter the source, no matter their political slant – try to boil down complex people and situations and issues into simple conclusions.
And so it’s good to be reminded from time to time that people and situations are rarely as simple as we would like them to be, and not usually as straightforward as we are often told they are.
Of course big meaty books are one way to avoid short, simple, misleading answers. And novels in particular allow us to explore in depth all the intricate twists and turns of complex characters and situations.
Here’s a final quotation taken from such a work, the novel Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng:
In Pauline and Mal’s house, nothing was simple. In her parents’ house, things had been good or bad, right or wrong, useful or wasteful. There had been nothing in between. Here, she found, everything had nuance; everything had an unrevealed side or unexplored depths. Everything was worth looking at more closely.
And so I will end with my wish for the New Year for all of us: may you see the people and situations around you with new eyes, and with greater nuance, and find unexplored depths in everyday places and familiar faces.
And may you fully appreciate your complicated lives.
– Herb Bowie, published at Practopian.org (https://practopian.org/blog/hbowie/life-is-complicated.html)
If you liked this piece, feel free to give it a few claps on Medium.com (https://hbowie.medium.com/life-is-complicated-1ff526b35164) .
** Next Steps…
Thanks for reading!
Feedback is always welcome at hbowie@practopian.org (mailto:hbowie@practopian.org) .
This post, and so much more, can always be found at Practopian.org (https://practopian.org) .
** Recent Writings You Might Have Missed
- “Diving Back Into Our American Muddle (https://practopian.org/blog/hbowie/diving-back-into-our-american-muddle.html) ” As we approach not only the end of the Trump presidency, but the unraveling of the Trump mythos, we have to ask ourselves: what will replace it? Trump came to ascendancy because he was able to tap into the resentments and disaffiliation of almost half of our population. These people will not suddenly feel reaffiliated into something larger than themselves just because Trump has left the building.
- “Hallelujah (https://practopian.org/blog/hbowie/hallelujah.html) ” The history of Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” is a fascinating one. Cohen’s songs had never really been embraced by the masses, and his first recording of “Hallelujah” in the early eighties was part of an album so lacking in obvious commercial appeal that the president of CBS Records responded to it by saying: “What is this? This isn’t pop music. We’re not releasing it. This is a disaster.”
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- “Reframing our Debates about Capitalism (https://practopian.org/blog/hbowie/reframing-our-debates-about-capitalism.html) ” There is a flaw in the reasoning behind our infernal, never-ending, society-splitting debate concerning socialism vs. capitalism, and I want to point it out.
- “The Era of Environmental Accommodations is Over (https://practopian.org/blog/hbowie/the-era-of-environmental-accommodation-is-over.html) ” When historians look at the long span of our human history, they try to make sense of it by breaking it up into phases. One might describe our most recent phase as one in which we dealt with environmental issues through a series of accommodations. But it is becoming increasingly clear these minor adjustments are no longer sufficient.
- “The Shocking Truth About Us Liberals (https://practopian.org/blog/hbowie/the-shocking-truth-about-us-liberals.html) ” Consumers of right-wing media seem to have some very odd ideas about us liberals. Let me set the record straight.
- “Undoing Trumpism (https://practopian.org/blog/hbowie/undoing-trumpism.html) ” Getting Trump out of office is an important first step. But it won’t be enough to put an end to Trumpism.
- “Cooperation, Competition and Coercion (https://practopian.org/blog/hbowie/cooperation-competition-and-coercion.html) ” When we look at the major societal choices facing us today, and the major political battles in front of us, I’m starting to think the primary question is not really whether we want a society that is more cooperative, vs. one that is more competitive, but rather the following: Are we ready for a society that is less coercive?
- “Can the US Become a Truly Egalitarian Society? (https://practopian.org/blog/hbowie/can-the-us-become-a-truly-egalitarian-society.html) ” As with many of us, I’ve been thinking deeply lately about the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breanna Taylor, and so many other people of color, and wondering how and why these atrocities continue to occur in my country, and what we can do to turn things around.
- “Democracy (https://practopian.org/basics/democracy.html) ” A Practopian “Basics” piece that fleshes out the following core value: “We believe in democracy, with all citizens having an equal say in defining their society’s laws, and an equal opportunity to influence their governments.”
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