There’s a reason why I devote an entire chapter of Inside the Liberal Arts to the idea of complexity. I argue that complexity is one of the foundational “gateway concepts” of liberal learning: an intellectual driver that (as part of the simple-complex axis) explains a lot about how we explain things to ourselves and one another. And it’s hidden in plain sight, so to speak. We can choose to recognize and use it, or not.
In this post, I won’t explore the inner workings of complexity – which aren’t, after all, very complex. That can wait for a future post; and for the record, the chapter I refer to is pretty darn readable. Like the book overall, it’s abstract for a reason; but there are no tricks or hidden agendas, no technical terms or academic jargon, and few footnotes, should those happen to bother you.
But enough of self-justification. What I want to discuss here is a particular problem surrounding the idea of complexity: its deeply embedded but sometimes hidden presence, not just in higher learning but in our moral and political discourse – and indeed, in our values themselves.
Let me say at the outset that, while some may disagree with my analysis, it is not (as far as I can tell) the result or reflection of a political bias. (And I use bias here in a neutral sense; if we didn’t have such biases, we wouldn’t have clear political views, and that would be bad for democracy.) What I have to say about complexity has nothing to do with whether, or in what contexts, it’s a good or bad thing as a mental disposition or interpretive style for understanding the world. There is much to be said for simplicity as well as for complexity – and of course they are relative, which is to say logically inverse to one another. We need to commute between them across the axis they share, not cling to one pole or another.
Besides, it’s all contestable. There’s no deciding who’s right or wrong on the question. But that’s also a subject for another post.
What I do want to suggest is that, whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not, we contest the idea of complexity whenever we argue about political or moral questions. And that is something we need to understand. To be good citizens, we need more of what I call ideological literacy. We need to know, at least in general terms, what we are arguing about in our politics and why we come to it from different and, for the most part, irreconcilable perspectives.
Example: A simple solution to health care is to say: let the market dictate what people can afford to pay for their health care. The market is blind and therefore just. A complex answer: people seldom choose to be sick or injured. We are morally obligated to help when they cannot help themselves in the crucial area of medical treatment, clinical, pharmacological, etc. And not just that: if we leave health care to the market, the market itself will suffer, due to both the great loss of human productivity and the other costs that allowing suffering will impose on society. It will diminish national prosperity. (The failure of the market to maximize overall prosperity, regardless of who benefits and who suffers, is a much wider phenomenon, but health serves as a salient example).
That’s why Alexander Hamilton promoted the 1798 Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen, which mandated health insurance for sailors; not only did the unhealthy sailors create a problem for port cities; they created a problem for national economic well-being. It was in the nation’s interest to have them be insured.
This axis between simpler and more complex views ramifies across virtually everything we believe and argue about. But it’s an essential part of our politics. Conservatives believe in free markets, liberals in regulated ones. Conservatives believe in literalist interpretations of the Constitution (or other texts), whereas liberals believe in critical interpretations of the meaning and spirit of the law, both in historical terms and in its present context. Conservatives believe in free will and existential responsibility; liberals see deterministic factors in society and individual lives along with personal agency. Conservatives think partitionally and in terms of division and particulars; liberals think holistically, and see a world of connections and relations.
Conservatives believe in narrower conceptions of democracy (ones that include private financing of political campaigns, among other things), and aren’t worried about inequality; liberals are for the (much more complex) goal of achieving certain forms of economic, not just political, equality.
And so on.
It’s okay to be a conservative or a liberal or anything in between, to lean toward the simple or toward the complex. It’s also okay to suppose that the simple-complex axis has nothing to do with our thought or our politics. Because it’s okay to be wrong.