Complexity interlude
Perhaps we need more complexity and not less?
I pick up my series of essays about collapse. When writing I suddenly stumbled on the word complexity and the often repeated statement (also by me) that we live in a world of ever increasing complexity (which will inevitably lead to collapse). But when I look around in society, I can see many aspects of very low complexity, just look how industrial agriculture or forestry look like. Nature is certainly a lot more complex than our society and our bodies are marvels of complexity.
The framing of complexity being The Problem of the modern world, is not so helpful. Perhaps the framing should rather be something like this: we strive to make the world as simple as possible, modernist civilization is after all built around straight lines and predictability. In this process we lose biological, ecological, emotional and spiritual complexity as we simplify and reduce everything to technological processes, administrative systems and money. We also seem to lose some social complexity when human relationships and institutions are replaced by money and bureaucracy.
I haven’ read Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk (on my list), but my understanding is that he talks about ‘high-context’ and ‘low context’ cultures, where the modernist culture is a low context culture. Similar thoughts but with other words are expressed by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass. This seems to reflect more or less the same perspective.
So perhaps the framing should rather be that we have replaced the ‘natural’ and ‘human’ complexity with a economic/technological/bureaucratic complexity? For each technology we introduce we reduce complexity in our relation to the natural world and to our bodies and to the interpersonal relationships while we increase the complexity of the technosphere. And for the increase of complexity in the technosphere we also increase the economic complexity. All this necessitates an ever increasing political and administrative complexity. Which is mirrored by the loss of complexity in our relationship to the rest of the the living world. And so it goes on and on. This is even so pervasive so that when nature enters the political debate it is often reduced to being our civilization’s toilet, after all that is what the reductionist debate about nature as a carbon storage boils down to.
So yes, a collapse will lead to diminishing complexity of our man-made systems, but hopefully increasing complexity in our relationship to the living world. Or phrased a bit differently, the challenge now is to revert the trend and simplify the modernist civilization and replace man-made complexity with natural complexity.
High and low context Cultures: Another framing is Connections. Today's culture is connection scarce, because it boxes people in and makes everything transactional.
An improved culture would seek to create connections. Add context. That means less transactions (tit for tat) and more obligations (giving and trusting). A switch of economic principles in certain areas.
Scale needs transactions, but that does not mean that people need to live without context. Localisation, Federalization, Nested communities, everything that Elinor Ostrom devoted her work to. Or Murray Bookchin.
ah, I continue to be inspired by your posts, Gunnar. :-)
It’s an interesting observation you make and I would mostly agree with your flow of conditions that in a way characterizes modernity. It did however trigger some thoughts.
Sure modernist design and structure might be built around a striving towards predictability of outcomes, but paradoxicallyat the same time modernity, and its enlightenment foundations is built around a flexible and malleable sense of subjectivity and meaning. In my view, social and subjective life has become more complex. Morally, with the enlightenments severance of inherent human telos and meaning we are faced with more choices and plural values that more often than not are incommensurable. For example, being able to value nature/stewardship and freedom/progress doesn’t seem to be something we can have co-exist within ourselves, we can value both but cannot escape the trade-offs of pluralism. Meaning modern life gives us unavoidable circumstances where complexity increases since values conflict. Beliefs and morality are fragmented and no longer inherited from previous generations and institutions but options among many, which generates continuous moral choice and self-formation rather than inherited scripts for how to live. Modern life is in other words more of a project to be perfected and realized. Relationships must be actively managed all the time because the individual is measured along the metrics of their achievements and performance, not only as a personal antidote to nihilism perhaps, as Nietzche might have put it, but to feel the basic security of being an accepted and appreaciated part of the tribe and their culture. Where our lives previously were place based, we now live in multiple contexts and our lives are a lot more networked which means mental and emotional bandwidth is spent managing looser ties across platforms and circumstances which leaves us with numerous more demands.
I would perhaps argue that the loss of connection you speak of is a result of us turning inwards towards managing our individuality as it is within this realm that we need to compete for work, love, friendship and belonging through the pressures and forces of mimetic desire. In this light, I feel that prescribing a more complex relationship with the natural world is unrealistic and perhaps even undesirable. In my view, we are not facing a future where a previously shared and coherent moral framework that simplified decision-making will suddenly stop receding from the pressures of secularization and pluralism.
When what we might really need to invest in are slow meaning-bearing practices which seems quite far off when so much of our time is spent within the attention economy which add more distracting and sometimes unavoidable complexity to our sense of subjective entrepreneurial selves. If it is technological complexity that in part drives these social forces is probably true but I don’t see less social, emotional and relational complexity as a result. Perhaps I am wrong. But I just felt perhaps my thoughts might add some nuance?