What is simplicity? And is it desirable, on principle? A good question. My recent essay on the origins of the universe, arguing that the simple explanation, its creation by an omni-potent God, is more plausible than its sudden emergence as a result of infinitely complex (and disputed) events, angered some readers. They took the view that only the simple-minded see virtue in simplicity, and that a love of complexity is the mark of intellectual maturity.
So, returning to the subject, let us look at complexity, and what promotes it. There seem to be three main factors. The first is constructive knowledge. Human beings are clever creatures and delight in their ability to create, and to put their creations to the test. This is particularly true of those who design machines. A quarter-century ago I inherited in my Somerset house the latest model of boiler, a French make, designed to save fuel. It may have done this. Hard to tell, because it was always going wrong and had to be expensively repaired. Eventually, in exasperation, I called in an expert who examined it carefully and reported: ‘This is a most ingenious mechanism. The trouble is, it is over-engineered, and that always means trouble.’ So I replaced it with a simple, reliable thing, which may use more fuel but has never gone wrong.
The term over-engineered struck me as a useful concept. It occurs when the designer of a machine is given complete freedom to exercise his skills without reference to the consumer who uses it. He produces something delightfully complex which he would like but which the buyer cannot master. One reason, I believe, why Western car makers failed to compete successfully with Japanese imports is that they entrusted the design to their engineers. The result was complexity, and buyer resistance. The Japanese, by contrast, reversed the design process and began with the buyer, and what he or she wanted. Then they worked backwards and gave the designer a strict mandate. The result was simplicity, and large sales. There is a sound commercial principle behind this approach, but also a more fundamental intellectual one. The point was made brutally by the scientist E.F. Schumacher: ‘Any intelligent fool can invent further complications but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.’
A second factor is time, a variation of Parkinson’s Law: ‘Complexity increases in accordance with the number of people with time to promote it.’ This law applies particularly to academia. In the last half-century, the number and size of universities has increased enormously. So has the multitude of academics, and the pressure on them to produce the results of ‘research’, to determine job security and promotion. But in many subjects the scope for legitimate research has not kept pace with expansion. The result is ingeniously created complexity, which goes under the name of postmodernism, the academic equivalent of over-engineering. In literature, the work was once comparatively simple. You studied the best plays, poetry, novels etc, and read comments to elucidate them. Postmodernism separates the student from the texts by an ever-widening volume of ‘explication’ until the plays and poems cease to have a value or meaning to themselves and become merely an occasion for academic contextualising. The complexities are so great and difficult that the student often ends by failing to study, or even read, the texts themselves.
The same process has been taking place in the study of history. It is by its nature a simple subject. You begin by reading good secondary authorities, like Gibbon, Macaulay and Trevelyan, then proceed to the contemporary authorities, chroniclers like Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Matthew Paris and so on, then dig further, into the objective records, charters, exchequer pipe-rolls, court cases. You also use physical, as opposed to written, evidence: coins, archaeological findings, weapons etc. Postmodernism rejects this simple approach as falsification. It has been well summed up by Gertrude Himmelfarb: ‘Postmodernism is a denial of the fixity of the past, of the reality of the past apart from what the historian chooses to make of it, and thus of any objective truth about the past… Postmodernist history recognises no reality principle, only the pleasure principle — history at the pleasure of the historian.’ One of these complexity-makers, Keith Jenkins, who has edited The Postmodern History Reader (1997), insists: ‘We can never really know the past… the gap between the past and history… is such that no epistemological effort can bridge it.’ For an overview of the way in which underemployed academia has converted the positive simplicity of history into the destructive complexities of postmodernism, I recommend the essay by Ian Mortimer, ‘What isn’t History?’, in the issue of History for October 2008.
Complexity can be destructive not just of knowledge, and the process of acquiring it, but of more basic material things. The third way it is created is by the obsessive use or misuse of new technology, and this leads to the most dangerous consequences. The electronic revolution, which appears to simplify complex processes by making them so easy, in practice also has the opposite effect. Its very power and simplicity incite human beings, with their love of exercising their ingenuity on novelties, to engage in infinitely complex transactions which eventually pass completely beyond their intellectual, moral and emotional control. The danger of this corrosive complexity was first demonstrated when a young man, sitting behind a cluster of electronic screens, contrived in a few days to destroy Barings Bank, an institution created over two centuries by conscientious traditional bankers. Before the electronic revolution, and its complexity-power, this tragedy could not have occurred.
We have now seen the same principle of complexity-corrosion applied to the world’s entire banking system, by way of subprime mortgages. The mortgage process, which goes back to the early Middle Ages, is inherently simple. You buy a house and use it as security for a loan, paying the lender interest and, by annual increments, the principal. Electronic technology allowed the process to become progressively more complex, in which thousands of people and institutions had a role, and a share of the profits, in each house-buying transaction. Complexity settled down, like a cloud of unreason, behind which colossal mountains of debt were created. This might not have mattered so much had not an analogous process been corroding banking.
A bank was, until comparatively recently, quite simple. Depositors put their money there, and the bank used it to make loans, interest payments being adjusted accordingly. This simple process had huge constructive value. But modern technology has allowed banks to create new and infinitely complicated systems of credit and debt. Again, a cloud settles down obscuring the magnitude and dangers of what is being done. Worse, the greed-inciting systems of bonuses to senior bankers means they have a direct personal incentive to use technology to multiply the level of transaction, chiefly the acquisition of debt, and the scale of the bonus is determined by sheer magnitude, making no distinction between good and bad debt. Thus the entire financial world was running a colossal Ponzi scheme, whose ruling principle was complexity. Now that it is too late, we can grasp this, and a longing for simplicity possesses the world. For we feel instinctively that simplicity makes moral control possible. Complexity, beyond a certain point, rules it out. We see it now, surveying the ruins of global finance. Why should it be any different for the origins of the universe?
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