After every post I write attempting to elucidate a small sliver of a difficult question, I’ll soon stumble upon a piece by some other writer which raises a different angle to the question that I did not consider. Sometimes it nicely supplements my own points, and sometimes it leaves my entire post in intellectual shatters. So it goes. This is a generalist blog which at its best aspires to synthesize widely disparate areas of human behavior and endeavor. It fails often; one can only synthesize so much, across so many domains. Only rare polymaths can weave together coherent narratives and analyses culled from the endless back catalogue of human history, politics, art, science, and economics. The rest of us operate within a narrow and attenuated amplitude, which is why it’s a nice idea to keep our conclusions modest and provisional.
This problem of information synthesis is why writers and policy analysts tend to specialize. Adam Smith explained the profound productivity benefits of labor division, but he also warned that such stark division might atrophy one’s interest in, and ability to understand, phenomena outside one’s particular domain. Specialization may in this way “corrupt the courage of the mind” and leave us ill-equipped to deal with multivariate issues of common concern.
As our modern systems and institutions become more complex, requiring more and more micro-specialization to understand each tiny constituent part, it becomes near impossible for anyone to step back and see how the systems relate to one another. As the complexity of modern political and economic life deepens, the systems become more globally integrated, and therefore more fragile. Just when the ability to synthesize and understand the totality is most urgent, hardly anyone among us is able to do so.
I think this unprecedented complexity and growing inability to synthesize information across domains has profound implications for our politics.
We are in the midst of a crisis of authority in this country in which the legitimacy of and trust in our traditional institutions has been undermined. The church, government, the Supreme Court, mass media, corporations, schools—are all experiencing near-historic lows in public confidence. Some of this is recession-related no doubt (bank hatred), but much of it is cumulative. Here is the basic state of things:
One reason for the growing public distrust in our elite institutions is the seeming failure of these institutions to foster shared prosperity and the inefficacy of our political class to resolve any of our most urgent problems.
But I think the basic inability of most people to understand what the hell is going on has some explanatory power as well. I think this lashing out at traditional institutions of authority is a reaction against the impotency in the face of the staggering complexity of our modern economic and political systems.
This dawning of complexity really began accelerating with the rise of globalization and the end of the Cold War, and culminated in two events: 9/11, and the financial crisis.
Prior to the end of the Cold War and the rise of true global integration, Americans to some degree had been insulated economically, culturally, and politically. Suddenly the shades were drawn up and we rubbed our collective eyes and we saw a whole interconnected world out our window. Unimaginably complicated financial interactions, political and religious ferment all around, previously dispossessed and impoverished societies demanding recognition and prosperity and security; beguiling technological breakthroughs. We rode a tech bubble through this vertiginous era, and easy credit and rising asset prices, along with unmatched military supremacy, helped provide the veneer of insularity to which we were so accustomed.
The veneer was stripped away on 9/11, and the modern world—by way of the 7th century—flooded in for good. We were offered innumerable explanations for what had happened. It was our freedom; it was foreign policy blowback, it was poverty, religion, the consequence of dictatorship and political repression. Americans had no historical context with which to make sense of it, and no ability to synthesize these complex and interconnected social disciplines. How to understand the lineage of Islamic thought and the wellsprings of accumulated grievance and pathology running through the Arab and Muslim world? I never learned about that in school. What of the sectarian and ethnic divisions that had convulsed a quarter of the world for a millennium? Nope.
As benumbed Americans fell back on the ready-made tropes of demonization and jingoism and nationalism, our elites were equally clueless. They gave us TSA, torture, warrantless surveillance, CIA kill lists. The president said Iraq and we said sounds good. We spent the next several years fumbling through ill-conceived and ill-executed wars in deeply hostile places, and at home we were changing the relationship between state and citizen, likely forever.
Then the financial crisis hit. While were were still flailing about through our newly-discovered political vulnerability, our crippling economic vulnerability revealed itself. We discovered our collective economic fate was controlled by unscrupulous bravados who conjured up exotic financial instruments that none of them understood, based on bunk risk models, in order to realize short term profits and bonuses. There was a whole new set of explanations and buzzwords: tranches, CDOs, Glass-Steagall, Dodd-Frank, Basel III, TARP, flash crashes, Fannie Freddie. There was a whole new cast of villians. Banks, yes, but also federal debt, public unions, Wall Street, the federal reserve system, China, illegal immigrants.
We are all now faced with the same problem of synthesis that I struggle with in miniature on the blog. How to understand and explain why the fate of our financial well-being depends on whether the Eurozone monetary union is fortified? On arcane votes by the Slovakian Parliament or popular referenda in Greece. Why American job growth depends on raising nominal GDP targets. Why income stagnation, rising inequality, why the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the rise of China and India. Where does education fit in? Health care? Immigration? And I hear those climate problems are still with us.
What of the hardening class lines and lack of income mobility in this country that entrap people by accident of birth? Is it regulations and marginal tax rates? Is it monetary policy? Is it our weak redistributive welfare state? Technological displacement? Unskilled immigration? Declining marriage rates? I have impressions but I don’t know! Who does?
So how have we reacted to this impenetrable thicket of complexity? Look back at the graph above. We lash out and rather indiscriminately blame all of our elite institutions of traditional authority. Faced with our own inability (with good reason!) to articulate substantive critiques and marshall sound arguments in support of our reflexive policy preferences, voters and politicians alike settle on simplistic platitudes, emotional appeals, identity- and heritage-mongering, slogans from perceived golden ages.
None of these phenomena are new, and of course it’s not the first time that bedeviling events have evolved beyond our capacity to understand them. But I believe this new brand of complexity we face, revealed emphatically by 9/11, globalization, and the financial crisis, has given us a slate of unprecedented policy challenges that admit of no apparent solution.
Attempting to synthesize these infinite data points across myriad academic sub-specialties may be futile for all but the freak geniuses among us; but alas, we are incorrigible pattern-seeking creatures and we’d rather settle on an impoverished narrative than no narrative at all (which likely describes this whole post). Politicians are as stymied and impotent as the rest of us. So they glom on to ready-made sophistry churned out by partisan think tanks, telling us it’s simple, we just do what we did before, we do what Reagan did thirty years ago, we regain our surety and our sense of agency by means of a mysterious alchemy involving American ingenuity and the rolling up of sleeves and squinting anew at the words of the founding fathers in search of hidden signposts.
I don’t mean to make this a partisan argument because I don’t think anyone is immune. But clearly a right-wing militarist political party with reactionary social instincts is especially vulnerable to all this. When you graft the profound changes in our culture on top of the political and economic morass, you have the recipe for a rather difficult Republican moment, which we are in the midst of now. What sort of basic ideological and cultural biases must one revisit and overturn in order to actually grapple with and assimilate these changes? Very few people are interested in that sort of skin-shedding. It will take a long time.
We have had amorphous protest movements on the right (Tea Party) and the left (Occupy Wall Street). Both have as their targets one or more institutions of traditional authority. In one way, the fall from grace of these instutitions is welcome, as they have proven themselves inept in dealing with the problems of compounding complexity.
But this loss of trust is also troubling. While these institutions are insufficient, they are also necessary. There is a worrying strain of nihilism running through this elite backlash. With the terminal undermining of trust in our institutions, the very idea of collective action in response to national problems takes a hit as well.
Politically and electorally, this will lead to a tumultous time. If our elite institutions are seen as suspect and effete, the politicians empowered to run and regulate them will be seen that way as well. This will induce a period of rapid electoral see-sawing as we flit from one partisan savior to another. This constant instability might make our institutions even less effective and further undermine public trust, leading to ever-more violent electoral swings and partisan rancor.
That’s a rather dystopian vision and I hope I’m wrong. But I do not see our reaction to the problems of network complexity and multivariate synthesis growing more sophisticated any time soon. In the meantime you can continue watching me lurch about for answers.
As I noted 
