Complexity interlude

Perhaps we need more complexity and not less?

A complex system, a farm in Samoa 2010, photo: Gunnar Rundgren

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.