The Human Need for Simplistic Explanations for Complex Phenomena

Yes we do tend towards this need. But on a social level, perhaps it is exacerbated by individualist ideology (more on that later). In keeping to ourselves and remaining determined to be self-sufficient, we would prefer simplistic explanations, because they are the best we can do with our own individual brainpower. To expand our explanatory powers, we would have no choice but to outsource much of our inquiry to others with differing specialties, others who can see angles to the problem we don’t necessarily see. It would require putting our trust in others and dampening our egos so that information can be shared, instead of us constantly butting heads in order to emerge with the better argument. The argument may be better rhetorically, but does that make it more true or useful?

Now it is evident that many times competition is very useful for strengthening arguments and forcing individuals to do the necessary research and thought in order to construct a better argument in the hopes of coming out the victor. This principle can be applied to other social spheres as well. But then what is happening in these arguments? Some arguments are inferior and false, and sometimes outright ridiculous. But then many of these arguments, if one looks close enough, are saying very similar things. Many times those in a heated conversation will talk right past each other, sticking to their differing conceptions and word choice and wielding them as if they were weapons or tools to best the other.

Are these rituals necessary, or are they simply a centuries old habit? Is it possible for us to really communicate when we converse?

For one to truly converse with another, it may be necessary to understand something that can often be very difficult to understand: the other person’s historical and emotional constitution, and how that relates to their favored ideas. When I say this I mean that each person has their own personal history: their formative moments in which they may emotionally adhere to certain principles without thinking about it. Or they emotionally adhere to a principle due in large part to the very constitution of their person.

Upon knowing this about a person, it is still not clear how to communicate one’s own ideas, much less be able to understand one’s own emotional position and be able to reconcile that with the other’s. But if we begin to pursue these lines of thought more, and investigate these mechanisms, we may come closer to an improved form of communication.

What does this have to do with simplistic explanations for complex phenomena? Well, take a  thinker engaging in today's competitive individualistic logic. They are going to be motivated by a wide range of things: a burning obsession with their specialized knowledge, a desire to contribute to human knowledge and discussion (or implicitly, to join in community), and perhaps also within that spectrum of motivation is the desire to be great.

This all happens in an individualistic society, whose logic necessitates a competition for prestige and resources. Given this logic, it becomes important for a thinker to huddle down in some lair somewhere in order to produce a unique ideology, a closed system that can explain the given subject matter in a way that ties the system to the thinker and becomes proprietary. The proprietary nature of the system and its foreign nature provokes other thinkers to assail it with their own arguments. The greatest honor is being the greatest thinker and being beloved by the most amount of people in this environment, is it not? Sure there will be adherents and proponents to these thinkers, but then there will be plenty of opponents as well. Now sure, one's system may be more error ridden than another's, causing it to appear justifiably inferior in their peers' eyes, but aren't all closed systems of this nature cursed with blind spots by definition?

Its also worth pointing out that certain systems of thought are much more open and encompassing than others. Philosophical Buddhism for example, or the systems offered by those in the Heraclitean strain such as Hegel and Marx. But then these systems, upon being introduced into individualistic societies, still seem to attract their share of followers that wish to adopt simpler versions of the more open systems and wield them to propel themselves to power.

If we look closely at what appear to be very different systems of thought, we often find deeper strands of concepts and symbols that are all contrived to better understand the same reality. We find that different thinkers are operating in different modes or strata of thought. What if instead of arguing with each other, we each endeavored to genuinely understand each others' arguments and worked together to reach a higher understanding? Is it possible for us to decouple our ideas from our persons?

Of course, that could be quite a difficult thing to ask of human nature. After all, here I sit, huddled in a lair of my own constructing my own arguments that may appear foreign to other thinkers. We do have to take some time to ourselves to do proper research and construct rigorous bodies of thought without becoming distracted by the social noise around our peers (though even solitary research could be construed as a social act, which is often overlooked). And one could imagine someone coming across these arguments, and finding them to be erroneous, since they see the problem from another angle, begin to become argumentative and then I, feeling threatened, attempt to diffuse their own arguments in order to defend myself, and so the process continues ad infinitum.

But then the core of this problem seems to lie in our social relations and the intuitive and emotional way we engage our peers, as we've been taught to do in this society. Can we carefully reprogram ourselves for better communication and more cooperative social relations? This very thing may be happening within the Occupy assemblies.

So maybe we desire our simplistic explanations because we feel so embattled as individuals in this society, and in order to make ourselves whole and secure, must go out and fashion simpler closed systems of explanation to wield as swords and shields in debate and attack each other to gain prestige. What if we located our ideas not in our persons, but in the space between us, hanging there among us, constantly being refined and revised by a multitude of thinkers acting as equals. Would this bring us closer to a complex explanation for complex phenomena?

Objectivity and Stability

A lot has been said about objectivity at this time of national instability in the US, especially media and journalistic objectivity. The argument is that all reporting is somewhat subjective in a sense and to claim it is objective is false and even deceiving. It transforms the subjective (for example economic events through the lens of the dominant neoliberal ideology) into the objective through deceitful posturing, thereby lending them the veneer of a reliable, honest account of the facts. But what really is objectivity? And why does it seem to be breaking down in our national discourse?

Let’s argue that instead of being some absolute value, objectivity instead is a quality of not only a sincere attempt to understand the facts, but an underlying stability among the consensus surrounding those facts. When we understand something is objective, we not only feel certain that it corresponds with the facts as we see them, but feel certain that everyone else feels certain that it corresponds with the facts as well. We have no concrete means of verifying anything to the point of absolute certainty, but we can approximate this via universal consensus.

Objectivity will always occur inside some sort of ideological framework. Ideology doesn’t have to be some rigid dogma. It can be a faint yet firm framework used to understand the world. Science itself is an ideology in this sense. Science, as an ideology, puts emphasis on empirical facts and careful methodical logic in order to approximate objectivity. Science anchors its conditions for knowledge on external, verifiable phenomena, and because of this, it enjoys the greatest stability, reliability, and flexibility of all of our ideologies. Scientific content is always being revised, but the form of gathering content and the criteria for understanding the content will never change.

But then you have a more metaphysical, mystical, or dogmatic ideology, and you have a framework for understanding the world that is floating so to speak. It is floating on human understanding itself. This sort of ideology runs the danger of being revised and wielded by power, since its core content can be modified in accordance with the interpretation of intellectual authorities. Not only that, but the form of the ideology itself could be quite incongruent with the underlying reality it is trying to explain, and this incongruency may never be rectified. But nevertheless, an idea of objectivity can emerge within this limited framework among its adherents, so long as they all firmly believe that their ideology accurately describes the world and that there is a broad consensus on this fact.

Political ideologies are probably the most volatile in this regard. They emerge out of groups often with a strong emotional tie to some perceived reality that is generated within their own socio-political group, usually due to some reaction or desire for change. Objectivity becomes a perception to a truth concerning a limited group in political space. But that does not diminish the perception that there is an objective truth to the ideology’s adherents and their amplified certainty upon agreeing with one another. Though of course, some political ideologies are going to be closer to approximating reality than others.

But what happens when conditions under these ideologies begin to break down and its adherents experience group schisms or simply begin to disagree? Or what if one ideology comes up against another? Well then the competing ideas perceived to be inferior are experienced as contrivances. And sometimes all of the participants come to realize their own ideologies are contrivances and thus subjective, or that there are conflicting ideologies but there’s only one that’s right, and then issues of faith come up.

Now take journalism in the media. The dominant outlets gather their information and frame it through the lens of the dominant national ideology (today, in this case, Capitalist ideology, which can range from liberal to conservative depending on the consensus of national power). Now when the nation was stable and there was a decent enough consensus this process was called objective by reporters and administrators, and many probably believed it. But now that the nation has become unstable, and the national body has broken up into multiple groups with often widely differing ideologies, many perceive these posturings of objectivity to be ridiculous and insincere. Many even claim that any sort of objectivity is false and that everyone should just report with an explicit opinion.

This is more of a result of social fragmentation than a reflection of any truth. We can have objectivity, or at least, again, the approximation of it. Our ideologies and opinions can be closer to observed realities than inferior ones. And we can all agree on a given interpretation. This state of affairs can be extended for as long as the given consensus is a solid one supported by a useful, reliable, flexible ideology. When it can no longer function on its own merits, it is time to build a new one. 

On Laying Claim to Information

I seem to have a strong inclination to desire credit for the ideas I've put together. I speak to others about my own ideas and develop suspicious fantasies in which they take my ideas and publish them as their own and reap the benefits. But then a contradiction arises. Where did I get my own ideas? Did I not take them from others in the same process and present them as my own? What’s the difference? That I combined the ideas into a unique product that reflects my own unique creative character? But can’t my friends do this as well and claim originality? Thus beating me to the punch? Well, then we can nitpick about various amounts of work that went into the respective projects and we see that if one outright steals another work without doing work themselves, and then gets rewarded for it, we seem to have intuitions that conflict with that. But there’s more to this problem.

We see that some individuals are rewarded more than others. Is it because they worked harder? We see many that work as hard as you can possibly work and they still seem to be treading economic water. And who chooses what to reward whom with what? And by what right? Of course all of these questions could easily be answered with our current dominant ideological presuppositions. We reward the best because we value what they put forward the most. They are the best because they are the strongest or the smartest and this is all just and blah blah. But these lines of thought are no longer working. And they are boring anyways. What’s really happening?

Today’s pop stars make mounds of money and everyone buys their music. But for most of them I and many others whom I have talked to think the music is crap. What constitutes crap? Who has a right to say? Well that’s another question for another day. But we see here that some individuals are being rewarded for creations that many of us don’t really value, and whose said creations we aren’t even sure are that original or good. Same with today’s popular books and movies.

Of course, I’m being a bit coy here. We know there are groups in this culture that are more powerful than others, and are more able to influence the expressions of our dominant culture, and they control most of the economic means of manifesting these expressions and this is another problem altogether. But these naïve questions are worth asking when dealing with pure ideological issues.

We as individuals seem to be stuck with this strong inclination to lay claim to whatever we can get to first in the natural world, and then militate against any advances to this claim so that we may reap rewards by holding it. We have these strong inclinations due in part to the fact that our economic system handsomely rewards this behavior, which is a mechanism whose blueprint could be traced back to the individualist ideology itself. Is this the best way we can think and act in this natural world of ours? Are we doing our fellow travelers any favors with this line of thinking? Are we even doing ourselves any favors?

After all, our quality of living and general daily experience could be attributed to the many social connections we interact through on a daily basis. What happens to those connections when we are all set against one another in competition for natural resources? What happens to each individual as those connections are severed and whole sectors of society are slowly less enriched when another breaks away in power and accumulative powers?

I and many others keep our relationships for the most part because we don’t engage in this behavior. We don’t militate against our friends and families because we are suspicious they are going to steal from us. To do so (and sometimes this behavior is justified, though you can then trace those causes back even further and you end up becoming more confused) would be to break apart those relationships, probably resulting in a lot of pain.

And let’s get back to our discussion of ideas. Where do these ideas come from? You can trace their origins across thousands of thinkers across centuries. And each one contributes a bit to the overall cloud. So do I really know where I got all my ideas? Are my ideas original? Or just rearranged ideas from previous thinkers, mixed with my own subjective experiences and understanding of empirical facts, which can all be found in a public domain anyway? And if my ideas are decent, won’t other thinkers take them and make them their own as well?

So at this point we must ask, whom do we really reward and whom do we really revere? Sure it is ok to reward fantastic work, and it is okay to revere great figures as well, because well, they do exist. Some people are different than others. We don’t have to deny that. But shouldn’t we be thankful for our surrounding connections as well? Shouldn’t we be thankful for those who populate our lives? And for those that carry out the daily tasks that sustain our society? What is keeping them from being rewarded and revered as well? If at least modestly. And wouldn’t it be better for all of us as individuals if each of us were a bit happier in our day to day interactions? Now these are the things we should really consider. 

Introduction

I write at a strange time. I enter my apartment courtyard through a sort of cage that I unlock with a key. Outside in the alley, human beings that could very well be my friends are rummaging through trash cans trying to dig for cans and bottles, presumably so they can take them to a recycling center where they can scrounge together a few dollars for something to eat (or drink, who knows). A sign posted on the garage outside compels me to call the police if I see these characters, for they are liable for a fine or jail. A fine? But these people are sifting through garbage. They can’t have very much money to offer. Jail? What if they have friends or family somewhere that are waiting for them to get back with their scraps? And these punishments for digging through the trash? The sign says we need to reclaim our alleys. Reclaim our alleys? Who is “our”? And reclaim these alleys from whom? Whose alleys are they? Why are the allies ours and why are these trash diggers the occupying enemy?

Take this micro problem and blow it out to the macro and you have a picture of the madness that has befallen our modern society. From where does this madness come (hint: it has been with us for a while)? How did it happen? How did we get here? Why do some have so much and so many have so little? How are we supposed to survive as a society when none of its constituents care for one another? What then is this society composed of? Atomized individuals pursuing their own self-interest? But what holds us together? How is this theory supposed to work?

Well we can answer that pretty quickly. It doesn’t work. And this can be scarcely described as a society. Or at least a democratic, free society. Of course when individuals are left to pursue their own selfish interests, many will seek power. Many already have power. Since power tends to constrain those who don’t have it, I suppose we don’t really have a free society anymore.

But then exploring these issues will take much time and care. They are complicated issues to be sure (and all-encompassing), and they require the aperture of awareness to be pulled far back, perhaps to cosmic proportions in order for us to examine the nature of our own species and how it relates to the earth. And so we must accurately isolate and criticize those tendencies (and resulting ideologies) of ours that we view to be flawed and destructive, but at the same time we must put forth a positive evaluation of all of the values, principles, and accompanying tendencies that we find to be good and constructive, lest we sink into an abyss of despair.

And I’m not trying to be overly dramatic here. Take a look at the national mood and the day-to-day people relations before us. There are patches of sunlight, of good people trying to share their good and do their good. But spend a long enough amount of time with anyone, and you will find dark valleys to match those sunny peaks. And so it goes for modern man. We are constantly in danger of falling into despair. But we don’t. And we don’t necessarily give up in the face of these cascading human disasters because our humanity (or our tie to the cosmos) is still there (and cannot be destroyed). And we often attempt to bring it back. Well, let’s keep at it then. Not every day will be a good day. And I know I won’t find the answer in a sudden revelatory dash of brilliance (though some breakthroughs in thought can happen sort of like this). But we can still work everyday at improving our situation. And why not do this in the spirit of the internet age? In diffuse (but still interrelated) form on a blog? Let’s see if we can begin to master or at least improve our faculties of understanding in this emerging mode of internet consciousness.