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Longing for Simplicity
'Wolfgang Blau
Wolfgang Blau
Every era has its myths. The defining myth of the so-called Information Age proclaims that our world is supposedly becoming increasingly complex. Nevertheless, complexity is perceived subjectively; it depends on the observer's point of view.
Thanks to digitization and pervasive networks, we in the G8 states for example, are experiencing a knowledge explosion; meanwhile many intellectuals of other ethnic groups perceive our Western worldview as increasingly ill-suited to do justice to the complex needs of human existence. Are we really living in an age of exponentially growing information? Or isn't the current mass extinction of species along with the disappearance of ancient languages and traditional knowledge the most severe loss of genetic and cultural information in the history of humanity? Both statements are true.
Complexity is the simultaneous presence of seemingly contradictory truths. Unifying these contradictions within us calls for mental tools and learning techniques that our culture is hardly providing.
After two thousand years of male-dominated and monotheistic patterns of thought, we are accustomed to structuring our world of experience hierarchically from top to bottom and, in case of doubt, to perceiving mono-causality as the more truthful answer of choice.
In order to be able to make our way in a world that is poly-causal, less hierarchical and increasingly organized along the lines of network structures, we have to adopt more holistic methods of thinking. We need a worldview that derives the greatest feeling of security, authenticity, rootedness and sense of belonging precisely from the complexity of our existence and not from oversimplifying everything.
Simplicity could be characterized as the ability to describe a lot with a little; whereby the “little” must not be flat and monocausal but rather embraces dual principles, profound and multi-causal, much like the periodic table of elements which describes the complex characteristics of the elements in a simple system without oversimplifying.
The New Homelessness
Nowadays, thanks to Google Earth, we can marvel at our planet's most remote regions via satellite, while it becomes ever more challenging for us to map out our own lives. Nothing is straightforward anymore now that all of our grandparents' cultural anchors have come loose of their moorings: the future of nation-states is uncertain; the significance of once identity-endowing national languages is diminishing; the concepts of the nuclear family and lifelong marriage are making room for new lifestyles; while the monotheistic religions are losing their monopoly on interpreting our spiritual needs.
Few of us would willingly re-erect the mental prisons of the past, though many of us long for the seeming simplicity of bygone times.
What makes this longing for simplicity even more bewildering is the fact that even its own social icons are themselves anything but simple: the open source movement, the slow food movement, citizen journalism and experiments in participatory democracy are all much more complex and more difficult to get a comprehensible overview of than the monopolies and monocultures to which they are juxtaposed. In our minds, though, these movements are still associated with a positive feeling of the new simplicity.
Also the popular reference to nature as a symbol of simplicity can only hold up as long as we don't equate simplicity with primitivity. In comparison to playing a computer game, time spent lolling on a lush summer meadow might indeed seem to be the more simple pleasure. However, the chemical and physical processes transpiring in this meadow are nevertheless more complex than anything that humanity has ever been able to fully understand, let alone invent.
In her ability for complexity that is efficient and of unsurpassed beauty, nature is our most important teacher to understand simplicity. This perspective on nature is being described by author Janine M. Benyus as “biomimicry.” As a research approach, biomimicry has led to surprising breakthroughs in many different fields in recent years-from trucking companies' fuel-saving algorithms based on the communication patterns of ants to super-efficient turbines whose flow designs are derived from marine algae.
What biomimicry researchers have in common is their recognition of the fact that nature has considerably more design experience than humanity does, and that we human beings are inseparably part of nature. According to this way of thinking, even an automobile is a manifestation of natural life, though its current design doesn't even come close to mirroring the simplicity-expertise of nature.
Simplicity and Simplification
Simplicity is the art of reduction to the essential. The simplicitas of Antiquity, however, was far more than a value-neutral design principle; it was in equal measure a synonym for honesty and directness. Striving to attain such directness and authenticity often succumbs to the allure of shallow foreshortenings. After all, nothing produces the illusion of simplicity faster than a bogeyman: open source versus commercial software, slow food versus fast food, citizen journalism versus old media, non-profit versus global corporatism, David versus Goliath, us against them, good versus bad.
Adherents of a misconceived simplicity also easily fall victim to the universally explanatory pseudo-logic of conspiracy theories. Or, for example, they fervently hope for crises to escalate and come to a head so that the world might “finally come to its senses.” Experience shows, however, that catastrophic climaxes of crises do not lead to more rationality; instead, they are likely to result in increased fundamentalism and more resource wars to the detriment of a society’s weakest members. Simplicity is fragile.
Democratic forms of government constitute one of the oldest collective experiments in search of simplicity. Too much complexity leads to a loss of cohesion and governability; too little of it results in dictatorial conditions. Yet, even in the G8 states, the advantages of democratic societies are again being fundamentally called into question. President Putin's dangerous contempt for democratic constitutions is tolerated in the West and shrugged off with the suggestion that Russia just wasn’t made for democracy; as if democracy were, in truth, merely a luxury and not a necessity essential to every society’s capacity to innovate. Even China’s murderous disdain for the human rights of its citizens is dismissed in the West by pointing out that the country first has to develop economically.
Some people even advocate dictatorship for a limited time in reference to the looming catastrophe of global warming because they believe that our democratic decision-making processes are too complex and time-consuming to prevent the melting of the polar ice caps and the halting of the Gulf Stream. Thus, the historical experience that dictators do not voluntarily abdicate is giving way to a longing for supposedly “simple solutions.”
Amartya Sen, 1998 Nobel Prize winner in economics, has already impressively refuted this myth of temporary dictatorship for the purpose of faster development. In his essay “Democracy satisfies,” he shows that a high degree of political participation has a demonstrably positive effect on a society’s economic development and its ability to respond effectively to crises.
“The rights of political participation are important not only for the fulfillment of needs but also for their formulation,” wrote Sen, who went on to quote from a speech by Chinese dictator Mao Tse-Tung: “Without democracy, you learn nothing about what is taking place at the bottom; the situation becomes unclear; you will not be in a position to obtain sufficient opinions from all sides,” said Mao in 1962 after his reforms had failed and millions of Chinese had died of starvation. “There is no communication between above and below,” according to Mao. “Top leaders will have to base their decisions on one-sided, incorrect information; it will thus be difficult for you to proceed in a way that is anything other than subjective.”
Simplification and simplicity often appear in similar attire but they differ dramatically in their readiness to respect complexity and to nurture diversity.
Unsuitable Pyramids
Complexity is not inherently overwhelming. We experience complexity as overwhelming only when we feel forced to set priorities where it is impossible to do so. We could term this quintessentially European conflict “The Pyramid Dilemma.” This is our inheritance from the Age of Feudalism, when there was no conceivable organizational form-either in the material world or the spiritual realm-other than a hierarchical system of vertical gradations of power.
King
Noble Men
Common Folk
Some examples of the characteristic pyramids of feudalistic thinking are: “God, angel, devil” / “man, woman” / “pope, emperor, king, clergy, aristocracy, the common folk, serf” / “human being, animal, plant” / “employer, white-collar worker, blue-collar worker, unemployed” / “fellow citizen, fellow European, foreigner” / “government minister, member of parliament, voter.”
Those who structure their world in pyramids can only conceive of coups within these hierarchies, but not horizontal or spherical forms of organization that, for instance, might acknowledge that an adolescent schoolgirl could possess entrepreneurial instincts that are just as sharp as those of the CEO of a major corporation.
In this vertical attitude of mind, even the earth’s fauna has a feudalistic hierarchy mapped out for it: an “animal kingdom” with the “lion king” reigning over the desert, the bull elk as “king of the forest” and with ants or bees serving their respective “queens.”
The societal pyramid is an innovation-inhibiting system that fosters unhappiness. The population of every tier battles against those on the tier below to prevent their own relegation. New ideas rise very slowly to the top, if at all. Non-hierarchical patterns for organizing highly complex matters do indeed exist; this is illustrated by the cultures of North American Indians with their so-called “Medicine Wheels.” Instead of structuring the world in pyramids, these cultures tend to order the various aspects of our existence on an equal basis in circular configurations. Within this way of thought, our basic human needs, for example, are of a spiritual, physical, emotional and mental nature. In contrast to the well-known pyramid of needs proposed by Abraham Maslow, the founder of humanistic psychology, none of each of these needs is said by the Indian cultures to be pre-eminent or to possess greater importance in life than the other three.
The very idea of forcing these four realms of needs into a vertical ranking order would be considered primitive in these cultures. Instead of hierarchical-linear thinking, these cultures tend towards spherical ways of looking at things.
The history of the Iroquois Confederacy illustrates that a culture which conceptualizes human nature in non-hierarchical circles is well-suited to bringing forth different representative forms of government. The Iroquois Confederacy endured for many centuries and featured a very sophisticated balance of power, equal rights for women and men and a complex legislative process. It inspired several of the USA’s founders. In their correspondence, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine repeatedly expressed their admiration for the elegant simplicity of this Indian system of government. They felt it was more democratic and more efficient than all of the Old World's forms of state that were known to them.
Paralyzed Decision-Makers
Anyone who views this excursion into other cultures as merely esoteric, might want to, for example, take note of the divergent behavior of current European and American media managers.
It is a well-known fact that the top executives of traditional media enterprises in the US and Europe are confronted by a dilemma. In the 1990s, the digitization of media production enabled more and more channels and periodicals. Today, an even more radical process of transformation is rearing its head. After the digitization of production, now the distribution of media content is also being increasingly digitized, and this makes possible—in the TV industry for example—such a complex multitude of new transmission methods, playback devices and, thereby, new forms of programming that even industry experts are loosing their overview.
Americans and Europeans seem to have different ways of dealing with the frightening impossibility to get an overview. European media managers tend to visualize the world of new ideas as a pyramid. They naturally assume that in the near future some medium will once again establish itself as the king-medium, just like TV once was, and that a specific transmission technology will dominate. They perceive the current upheavals simply as the chaos phase between the collapse of an old pyramid and the rise of a new one.
Accordingly, the Europeans’ preferred tactic is to wait. Their assumption: the longer they postpone their critical investments in new infrastructure and business concepts, the greater their chance of recognizing the future “king” and putting their money on the right horse.
The Americans, on the other hand, seem to be having an easier time getting comfortable with the idea that the time of pyramids just might be coming to an end for good and making way for a media ecosystem in which provisional diversity becomes permanent. They're investing more frequently and are experimenting more. They accept narrower profit margins and, paradoxically, are making bigger profits by doing so.
Whereas the Europeans first want to take a wait-and-see approach to establish whether an idea has what it takes to make it to the pyramid’s peak, Americans are getting involved earlier and have thereby gained market leadership in almost all digital media industries.
Here, the key difference is not the American entrepreneurs’ often-cited readiness to take risks, but rather the increasing inability of our vertical worldview, still imprinted by feudalism, to arrive at a state of simplicity and from there to generate the appropriate strategies.
We can never afford to not have hierarchies and ranking orders. Yet, they are only able to provide us with orientation as long as they constitute one ordering principle among many and coexist with spherical and horizontal orders. Our current feeling of being stressed and burdened by the world's complexity and new technologies is due above all to our unconscious compulsion to establish priorities and ranking orders where this is no longer possible. At this point, we know too much to be able to still find our way to simplicity in this antiquated way of thinking.
What we’re experiencing today is the long, slow decline of the Feudal Age whose political institutions have for the most part been extinct for centuries but whose internalized patterns of thinking are still impeding us to this day. The growth of knowledge via the Internet did not trigger this process; it merely accelerated it. One result of this process is our ever greater longing for simplicity.
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