The Virtues of Complexity

...First, let's see how Borges would show Teller to be wrong, before we go on to consider how Borges is also beneficial to our health...

...In discussing the nutrients of knowledge, Teller's one big thing is the pursuit of simplicity in human knowledge, often accompanied by a Deweyan quest for certainty...

...Neither hope nor fear are logical correlates of ignorance, just as amorality is not a necessary consequence of the abandonment of cumulation in knowledge...

...Cain is as evil as Hitler...

...By regarding each moment as autonomous, as unconnected to the one before it and the one after it, in delighting in the infinitude of the mind while lucidly recognizing the finitude of human accessibility to reality, Borges is led to oppose with sustained vigor anything which ruptures the irretrievable...

...Borges is well known for his mus-ings that one day the number of possible musical combinations will be exhausted...

...no single viewpoint is necessarily more valid than another opposite one...

...Conclusion: The possibilities for ignorance are infinite...

...The fact that Teller does not say "whimsical, random, and even confused" betrays an inability on his part to appreciate the joie de combattre with the absurd that is possessed by most "many little things" thinkers...

...but perhaps it will be illuminating to recast it briefly in terms of finite-self-faces-infinite world versus infinite-self-faces-finite world as applied to, say, history...

...The initial problem of relativity is posed succinctly by Teller: Suppose a cigarette lighter is pushed in just as the car which contains it passes a hitchhiker, and then pops out fifteen seconds later (the car is travelling at sixty miles per hour...

...Not so the Faustian, whose whole intellectual cast comes from his ability to perceive that actions taken today may not have their day of reckoning for years...

...The possibilities for human knowledge are finite for Borges, or, when there is a passageway to the infinite, it is to an infinity of ignorance...

...Jo much for style...

...and David Donald, among others...

...But it has its Faustians too, and although it is the former group which irks Teller, and rightly so, he lets slip a metaphor which puts the alert reader in mind of the best sort of "anti-growth" writer...

...Unhappily, since each memory brings with it the potential to be itself a memory, our minds, if they are finite as according to Teller, will cease to absorb new knowledge at a geometric rate...

...Beyond this, Teller suffers from the unfortunate conjunction of metaphorical onanism and malapropism which plagues many towering intellects when they attempt to apply the one big thing that has been their life's work to all the little things which constitute human life: He frequently fails to carry his metaphors to their logical climax, and therefore avoids having to face the sad fact that they are often not only wildly irrelevant, but in fact often support the very contention that he is attempting to impugn...

...And it is precisely a lack of constancy and the consequent discordance of everyone pulling in different directions morally, politically, economically, and socially, which is held by theorists of the one big thing to be the democratic downfall...

...Forster or Camus...

...What is meant by "historical velocity," a term used variously by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...instead, the simultaneous advent of progress and personal discomfiture is reason enough for him to condemn progress on grounds of guilt by association...

...And it is in politics, history, moral philosophy, and economics, not science, that these dangers are held to be greatest...

...The answer is that there is nothing in the ultimate finitude of human knowledge which of necessity elicits a dangerous and debilitating fear of the unknown...

...Einstein's invariant is a certain relationship between the speed of light (c) times the time elapsed between the two events (t), and the distance between the two events (r...

...c) The two sides of this triangle are equal to one another...

...he is unable or unwilling to investigate cause-and-effect relationships...

...His world-view embodies the disbelief in truth and continuity that one might expect of a true fox, with none of the sad moral, political, and historical consequences which are alleged to accompany such disbelief...

...A great many people considered the first stirring of the Industrial Revolution to be the Devil's work...

...It is this constancy which explains why most Western democracies, though enwrapped in a dervish of catch-up, are not falling apart...

...He has Achilles interpolate a hypothetical propositon'' a) Two things equal to a third are equal to one another, b) Two sides of a triangle are equal to MN...

...Those of our contemporaries who must bear the dull pain of Dr...

...Not only that, but we shall forget more and more as time passes, so that we shall be remembering, and remembering remembering, fewer and fewer things until our minds resemble a hall of mirrors, an infinity of reflections on one thing...

...For example, in "Avatars of the Tortoise," Achilles and the tortoise study this lucid reasoning: a) Two things equal to a third are equal to one another...

...This, of course, is not in the grand tradition of true hedgehogs who would see a political pattern in science...

...For Teller, the pursuit of simplicity and the quest for certainty in knowledge can only make sense if knowledge and experience are "cumulative...

...In politics, the war is between those who fear that belief in many contending small things leads to nihilism and those who fear that belief in one big thing leads to authoritarianism...

...Now, what is the social correspondent of this invariant...

...Faustus, there is a great difference between the metaphor of Dr...

...Borges, by contrast, quotes Bernard Shaw: "Do not let yourself be overcome by the horrible sum of human sufferings...

...But you are wrong...

...To the driver of the car, the two events are not separated in space...

...Teller thus has an ideology, and in this case as in most others, the ideology is less concerned with how the world is than with how we ought to look at it (the first question is addressed in the midsection of the book...

...is, looked at on the flip side, the sum and substance of the teleological argument for the existence of God...

...Nevertheless, Teller could acknowledge the truth in what I have called "Borges' view" (or he could simply poke fun at it), and still, by retreating to higher ground, make a case for the simplicity-certainty-cumulative knowledge-discovery Weltanschauung, because while it may not be accurate, it is salutary-in politics, history, and morality...

...What is thought by the simplifier to be a relatively shaky basis for trenchant morality-that all events are disconnected and unrelated-is shown by Borges to be capable of sustaining an immovable and even a harsh moral system...

...Let us replace the speed of light with the speed of information about events, and, as before, time with history and space with distances within the socio-economic hierarchy...

...In casting about for a counterpoint to Teller, I came across Jorge Luis Borges, who seems to return almost anything Teller says, blow for blow, opposing him diametrically on nearly every question...

...Most people are at rest while cars move in all possible directions...

...such a sum does not exist...

...they lead to false hopes and contagious fear...

...Such a fearless symmetry inevitably leads us to wonder about the roots of this incredibly pervasive ideological conflict, a conflict which, though manifested in many different forms, is probably, as Isaiah Berlin suggested in his own particular manifestation, the greatest intellectual division in human history...

...certainly not so the possibilities for knowledge...

...I never pass in front of the Recoleta without remembering that my father, my grandparents and my great-grandparents are buried there, just as I shall be someday...

...Nevertheless, a great grey area sits between those thinkers who know one big thing and those thinkers who know many little things, and in this great grey area there reposes a mottled band of gadflies who persistently shove the foxes and the hedgehogs off course whenever they attempt to come together, as does a force field to the negative poles of two magnets...

...Borges, on the other hand, doesn't see it that way...

...So there is a war on all fronts between the forces of complexity and the forces of simplicity, the unlimited mind combining the limited constituents of human knowledge in myriad forms versus the limited mind reducing endless knowledge into simple, digestible form...

...Einstein's singular contribution was to show that not only does the space between events differ for observers, the time does as well-it is infinitesimally longer for the hitchhiker...

...Most interesting are those who know one big thing, but unlike Confucius, whose one big thing was a leitmotif which pervaded every small thing, their one big thing is a singular idea which must be made to apply to every small thing, no matter how procrustean the attempt...

...For example, whereas Teller, in contemplating the effects of complexity and surprise, two of his betes noires, avers that they are likely to inspire both dangerous hopes and debilitating fears, and ventures the bold assertion that "by its nature, the future is the only period that can really inspire fear," Borges has written that hope and fear are "in vain, for they always refer to future events...

...For Nietzsche, the finite world would spark an infinitude of intellectual artifacts...

...We can thus understand the limits and prerequisites of a "democratic perspective": Only when most of us are at rest will each of us be linked to the stabilizing constancy of a social and historical truth...

...The pursuit of complexity seems a much bigger thing than the pursuit of simplicity, if only because the latter pursuit must end well before its goal is attained...

...Needless to say, the tortoise then insists that Achilles add: d) If a, b, and c are valid, z is valid...

...More interesting are those who know many small things, but prefer only one of them-like E.M...

...Here Teller applies a political metaphor to science...

...Of course, in explaining either phenomenon we should not overlook the simple need to lie...

...Totalitarian nations avoid this problem by enforcing a uniform view of social change, and then eradicating the other two variables which are available to democracies to correct for their multiform views of social change-history and information-which, if given variable play in totalitarian societies would destroy them, sooner or later...

...Teller's low amplitude tongue-lashing, that is, those whom he might accuse of having a "Faust-fixation," are usually much more effectively scorned as latter-day Luddites...

...We may thus suspect that the roots of the division also lie far beneath its particular manifestation as a desire for simplicity and predictability versus a love of complexity and unpredictability...

...obviously, this war itself reflects a division between those who prefer to know one big thing (the children of simplicity and certainty) and those who prefer to know many small things (the children of complexity and surprise...

...The regressus in infinitum of the tortoise-the fact that every proof requires a previous proof, which leads to Achilles' intense frustration-is the sum and substance of Thomas Aquinas's cos-mological argument for the existence of God...

...that Borges represents the literary imagination viewing a finite world from an infinite mind, and Teller the scientific purview of an infinite world from a finite mind, and certainly, Teller's outlook is less pervasive in literature than it is in science...

...But it is necessary to ease the stranglehold that Teller's conception of scientific endeavor has on modern consciousness...

...Teller has written a book, The Pursuit of Simplicity, * which treats the subject of human knowledge...

...No historical dilettante he, for "neither vengeance nor pardon nor prisons nor even oblivion can modify the invulnerable past...

...His allusion is to the Mish-nah, one of the two books of the Talmud, namely, the passage in which it is stated that he who kills one man destroys the world...

...it is that the bewildering complexity of the world, the absence of certainty in knowledge, the pervasive flux of existence are dangerous for finite minds, for such complexity, uncertainty, and flux leads them to believe that the only philosophical question is the question of suicide, that there is no reason for a man not to kill his brother...

...Awareness of the fact that some things will always be mysteries need not be unhealthy, and not simply because such awareness will convert us from contemplating the finitude of human knowledge to employing the infinitude of the human mind...

...To his credit, Teller does not maunder over such dangers, but his purpose in writing The Pursuit of Simplicity was to calm us on these matters...

...I know one big thing...

...Borges is singularly able to repel these traditional assaults on the complexity-unpredictability mentality where his ideological confreres succumb to charges that a "many little things" outlook leads to nihilism, improvidence, and relativism...

...It must be a little thing, because if it is a big thing, it will ultimately be more destabilizing than the fox's view of the world, for simplicity as a big thing is a promise which cannot possibly be met, and as an invariant it depends precariously on the relations between many complex and changing big things...

...Now the question is-if the two observers were to report their finding, who would be correct...

...Teller may think that he is giving these anti-growth, anti-progress plaintiffs a real what-for by comparing them to those who wailed about Dr...

...And if anything dampens fear of the unknown, it is belief in God, a belief which Shaftesbury's skeptic Philocles maintains cannot be the outcome of the simplicity school since the limited mind has no way of demonstrating that the design which "lies within our view or knowledge" is not but "a mere point still, a very nothing compared to what remains...

...Teller, in another instance of metaphorical onanism-malaproprism, appropriates what he terms "complimentarity" (which was Niels Bohr's rationale for holding two contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time, like the notion that light is waves and the notion that light is particles) and applies it to morality, i.e...

...For although Dr...

...Government bonds in March, 1993, and the current economic heterodoxy, which believes that some people know more little things than other people, and that therefore cerebracracy unobtrusively elides into plutocracy unless the government monopolizes certain types of knowledge...

...It seems worth remarking that both history and information are most vulnerable to eclipse in Communist societies, the former largely because of the poverty of Marxist historiography, the latter if for no other reason than the absence in Communism of one of the most effective devices of communication, the market...

...It's as if one needs more time to absorb events of greater size...

...And, neatly enough, his one big thing is that there is one big thing: "Science introduces consistency and simplicity into a world that without them appears confused, random, and even whimsical...

...No moral relativist he, for Cain is as evil as Hitler...

...the perspective of each will be the perspective of most...

...and so on...

...A constancy can be divined in two ways-either c (the speed with which information about Exxon's profits is conveyed) is larger for the farmer than for the shareholder, or t (the sense pf history) is larger for the farmer...

...On the question of substance, The Pursuit of Simplicity finds Teller coming down on the side of simplicity and certainty as requirements for Grade A knowledge, as desiderata in and of themselves, as opposed to complexity and uncertainty...

...Tradeoffs are therefore necessary...

...To the hitchhiker, on the other hand, the two events are one quarter of a mile apart...

...Simply by examining Borges' style (incredibly unambiguous for something so sophistic), we may see what happens when finite man sets out in search of infinite knowledge, which of course is exactly what occurs on the road to science...

...The one little thing is the simplicity which comes from the finite mind addressing the infinite reality...

...No counselor of political instability he, for hope and fear are by their very natures in vain, so there is no need to sweep them under the carpet of consciousness by pretending that the world is other than it is...

...For him, a regime is not evaluated historically by the sort of citizen it produces, nor even by the aggregate number of people it kills, a regime is judged at every moment on every count...

...The very quesion which terrified Heidegger-"Why is there something rather than nothing...

...Eastern culture, almost always on a completely different schedule than Western culture, in this rare instance offers us a pertinent exchange between Confucius and one of his many disciples: Confucius, a man vastly underrated in his own time, and greatly overrated in our time, once remarked to a student whose name has been lost in the sands of time: "You probably think I know many, many things...

...Let us take the case of the perceived success of our socially ascendant group, say, the shareholders of Exxon, which is greater in the eyes of a farmer than in the eyes of the shareholder himself, because the shareholder is moving while the farmer remains static...

...Although this is not Einstein's formulation, we may say that (c x t)/r is a constant for all observers...

...The upshot: The pursuit of simplicity leads ultimately to knowledge of one little thing...

...Jorge Luis Borges is in a unique position to answer Teller, not just because his own system of metaphor points out the follies of the hedgehog school, but because he also possesses an answer to the inevitable comeback of the simplicity theorist that even if the complexity-unpredictability school is correct, it is dangerous (that is, the nutrients of complexity are poisonous, whereas the nutrients of simplicity are not...

...All of this verbal lucubration may cause one to wonder what was so bad about metaphorical onanism...

...The conclusion: When, as finite selves, we hurtle into the future, ostensibly accumulating knowledge a la Teller, we actually shall be accumulating memories, and memories of those memories, and memories of those memories of those memories, so that, the more we know, the less we can know...

...b) Two sides of a triangle are equal to MN...

...z) The two sides of the triangle are equal to one another...

...those literary and non-literary figures offended by Dr...

...They are more akin to Matthew Arnold's division between those who see life steadily and those who see it whole, or Daniel Boorstin's bifurcation of chasseurs of historical knowledge into discoverers, who believe in the existence of simple truth ultimately to be converged upon by different intellectual disciplines, and explorers, who believe no such thing...

...Bury would have accused of thinking '' too much of direct results and immediate concerns" and that the American historian Oscar Handlin would vilify for sacrificing facts to relevance-and what Bury would have called history as science-a history in which the writings of the historians are as complex and serendipitous as the subject about which they write, and in which accuracy is more crucial than usefulness...

...He does not say that the world is simple and certain, that would be the position of a true Berlinian hedgehog...

...Although Teller considers only science, the children of simplicity and certainty are always at war "with the children of complexity and surprise...

...then I remember that I have remembered the same thing an untold number of times already...

...Yet the very pith of Bell's depressing message was given a cast of exuberance, hope, and fearlessness by Learned Hand several decades before: "The spirit of liberalism is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.'' A recognition of the factitious and fractured nature of human knowledge can be downright exhilarating...

...Having made such a charge, I feel honor-bound to substantiate it...

...Literature, for example, would be infinite even if Lasswitz's universal library were established, because there are as many ways to read a text as there are selves, and each person is an infinitude of selves...

...Teller, as I suggested before, knows one big thing which he cannot see in every little thing and which he therefore must apply to every little thing...

...The beginning and the end of the book contain Teller's ruminations on the nutritional qualities of scientific knowledge, that is, what sorts of things it is good for us to know, and how such knowledge should be packaged, evaluated, ingested, and regurgitated...

...In a more political vein, albeit a vein which still leads to the same major artery, namely, the pernicious-ness of an awareness of ignorance, Daniel Bell wrote not long ago that "the failure of liberalism is the failure of knowledge...

...The many big things form the complexity which accrues from an infinite mind addressing a finite reality...

...Fortunately, Einstein did discern an invariant in the midst of the apparently whirling relativity of the physical world, an invariant which, if the metaphor of relativity is successfully squeezed through the strainer of credulity into the social mold, may indicate the way in which stability and consensus can emerge from social flux...

...Now to a member of that group (who corresponds to the driver), the change in status appears much less striking than it does to the seething member of another group...

...What advice would Einstein proffer if, as do Teller, Borges, and all others who have a metaphorically fertile and multi-potent worldview, he were to accept the applicability of the stuff of science to the stuff of politics...

...The message of relativity is not that there is one big thing and many little things...

...Where are constancy, truth, or at least common standards, when none of us are at rest, and when each of us views very differently his own condition and that of others...

...Thankfully, however, not all human endeavor is terminable when finite knowledge meets infinite self...

...It means that if more things happen to the farmer, if present occurrences, rather than future anticipations, take up his time, if he sees life whole in contradistinction to the shareholder who sees it steadily, he has less occasion to resent Exxon's higher profits...

...The pattern can be drawn out if we replace space with socioeconomic differentials, and time with history, and change the event from the pushing in and popping out of a cigarette lighter to the rise in status of a socioeconomic group...

...The appropriate course of action to take in evaluating Teller's position is to elicit a second opinion from someone elaborately representative of the complexity-surprise school of thought...

...a security risk...

...The people today who want to enlighten everyone on the evils of progress may not realize that they are intellectual descendants of a medieval movement...

...The Luddite is superstitious and unsophisticated...

...What of the charge that if we don't persist in thinking about the unthinkable (which essentially means simplifying for our finite minds that which cannot be simplified), our ignorance will fill us with irrational proclivities toward the future...

...that one day there could exist a "universal library which would register all the variations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols, in other words, all that is given to express in all languages," and so on...

...These two cultures-the culture of simplification and consistency and the culture of complexity and inconsistency-are the real two cultures, for they cut across C.P...

...in fact, in much of early modern British literature...

...Relativity thus suggests the appropriate compromise for hedgehogs and foxes, and this is only fitting when one remembers that relativity is a theory of both change and constancy, relativism and the absolute, certainty and uncertainty, predictability and absurd surprise...

...Since "the pursuit of simplicity" and the concomitant retreat from complexity are played out over the course of social as well as natural knowledge, it might be illuminating to attenuate into the social order one pregnant metaphor from the physical realm: relativity...

...It may appear for a moment that the debate has been recast into C.P...

...there are no tradeoffs...

...There are, of course, those who know a few medium-sized things...

...Simply put (how appropriate...

...In history, the war is between a democratic history-one that the English historian J.B...

...The impulsion of Faustians is very different-it is the very selfishness of others which appalls them, in particular, the selfishness responsible for instances in which private gain knowingly comes at the price of public loss...

...Neither poverty nor pain (nor anything else for Borges in this peculiar essay) is cumulative...

...Teller offers the following: The problem of two observed distances between two events might be solved by adopting a democratic perspective...

...Consider the following typical Borgesian observation from A New Refutation of Time: Let us consider a life in whose course there is an abundance of repetitions: mine, for example...

...Lastly, the Luddite is very time-bound, he has an inability to comprehend the cunningness of history...

...Relevance and usefulness in history, information in economics, tradition in politics, dogmatic belief in religion, and systems in morality each play their part, but their parts are more or less ultimately limited...

...The tortoise accepts a and b, "but denies that they justify the conclusion...

...Luddites are selfish-their ge-schrei about "progress" results from a selfish sense that progress threatens them personally, whether we are speaking of print union members who refuse to allow a newspaper to automate, or members of the "new class" who react unfavorably to a nuanced reduction in the size of government...

...In economics, the war is between the "rational expectations theorists," who believe that the economy is simple and predictable enough for a ten-year-old child to know the rate of return on U.S...

...Faustus (Faustians) include most of us and are by no means as easily dismissed as are Luddites...

...Faustus and the metaphor of Ned Ludd...

...How, then, would Borges skewer the simplifying, consistent, cumulative knowledge mindset...

...Faustus, an alchemist, was supposed to have superhuman powers because he had sold his soul to the Devil...

...Let us also recall that the newly arriviste conventional wisdom is that, if social groups perceive social events from the perspective of their own situations (much as the driver and the hitchhiker perceive their event from relative perspectives), we shall be bereft of common invariant standards unless a way is found to compensate for these differences in social vision...

...Snow's dichotomy between literature and the sciences...

...The midsection of the book considers epistemological problems in scientific knowledge, in particular, those of the geometry of space and time and the conundrums of particle physics...

...A Tellerian approach to history would simply be history as science, history as the simple attempt to grasp more and more knowledge of the past...

...translation mine) One learns from experience that whenever Isaiah Berlin and Confucius share a perception of a certain matter, they probably are right...

...The first-if the speed of information about Exxon's profits is faster for the farmer than for the shareholder- means, essentially, the modern commonplace of the farmer correctly anticipating Exxon's profits and demanding correspondingly higher food prices before the fact, which leads to a constancy borne of a rough equality of socioeconomic velocity...

...Knowledge of our own ignorance is poisonous...

...And since c, the speed of light, is itself constant, the larger r is (it is larger for the hitchhiker), tlfe larger t must be for any observer...

...Leave the decision to the majority who are at rest...

...Many years ago, Sir Isaiah Berlin published The Hedgehog and the Fox, a treatise in which the greatest minds in Western culture were divided by Sir Isaiah into two groups: those who knew many little things (foxes) and those who knew one big thing (hedgehogs...

...we must persist in our attempts to think the unthinkable, or at least we must believe we can...

...Edward Teller would agree...

...For Borges and his intellectual confreres, by contrast, the molten foundation of their ideology is man, an infinite self, attempting to deal with a finitely knowable reality...

...the thought that the world is complex and unpredictable because it might actually be whimsical is intolerable...

...it exists if the historical period during which Exxon's profits increased is greater for the farmer than for the shareholder...

...The extent of this difference in purview is the measure of the envy the latter group feels for the former, and of the social wear-and-tear which results...

...It is that there is one little thing and many big things...

...The result is interpretation in history, dynamic uncertainty in economics, innovation in politics, wonderment in religion, and value in morality...

...c) If a and b are valid, z is valid...

...as an invariant it depends on the relations between men's minds and their world...

...It is useful for the reasons given in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Yeats' "Second Coming...

...But there is a second haven for constancy in a society of relativity...

...One of these thinkers is Edward Teller, the nuclear physicist who is not now, nor ever has been...

...It is true that the anti-growth movement has its Luddites...

...for Collingwood, the finite world sparks an infinitude of intellectual representations of itself...

...but instead of providing the most flagrant example I shall instead spotlight the one which I think does the most damage: About the time that the Middle Ages were expiring, the legend of Dr...

...Snow's original terms...

...As I have suggested, this dichotomy pervades most intellectual disciplines...

...A Borgesian approach, the other great mindset, would take the point of view advanced in Nietzsche's Use and Abuse of History, in which history is not to be a scientific diagramming of memory but a pregnant suggestion and potent prod for artistic creation, or of Collingwood, for whom history is ultimately defensible as a history of the mind, not of "reality,'' and therefore is already art, and requires artistic talent for its elucidation...

...The Faustian, on the other hand, is appalled at the superstition of others, the reckless Micawberism one sometimes finds in businessmen which impels them to stake a measure of social well-being on the shaky justification of their own whims...

...Either way, this is history for a Borges, a fox, not a Teller...

...in fact, any movement which is simple-mindedly anti-growth is Luddite...

...But it is on these grounds that Borges makes the most effective case for the complexity-uncertainty-ignorance-exploration outlook...

...Faustus gained popularity in Europe...

...This constancy is not an equality of socioeconomic acceleration, it is a quid pro quo: The higher socioeconomic velocity of the Exxon shareholder is offset by the higher historical velocity of the farmer...

...However, it is the burden of democracy to identify some means of distilling constancy from the bubbling inconstancy which results from differing views of the magnitude of social change (r) and of the speed of history (t), and different accessibilities to ready information (c), which unlike the speed of light is not a constant...

...I would suspect that if one wends his way through the labyrinthine plumbing of the mind which underlies each of the two ideologies, he will discover that the cleavage is as follows: For Teller, and for most minds who prefer to see the world simply and certainly, the inchoate bedrock of their ideology is man, a finite being, attempting to grasp the infinity of reality (and the only way that can happen is if the finite being manages to codify, that is, simplify, infinity...