The Other Side of Complexity

If you understand what the following quote means, tell me in the comments and I will allow you to choose a sentence that will be added to my next article verbatim. (Don’t spend too much time on it; it is pretty indecipherable.)

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to "normalize" formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

If you were able to make sense of this, good job! However, I fail to see how this quote could speak to anyone, except for a handful of academics that are already intimately familiar with this scholar’s work. The author is a well known humanities scholar at Harvard named Homi Bhabha. If he ever reads this, I apologize for scapegoating him. It is not personal; he just writes in a way that really helps my point.

Me with a book in a Harvard library, thus proving that I am not anti-academia

In all honesty, I cannot understand what this sentence says. I know that Bhabha’s thought is influential in contemporary philosophy, but I find it impossible to even approach his work because of the linguistic puzzle it requires me to solve. Unlike some critics, I will not make the claim that complex language compensates for a lack of real content. (If you are interested in that claim, take a look at the Sokal affair) My point is that if I, a self claimed philosophy nerd with a ton of time and space to engage with complex writing, am discouraged by the language here, I can safely assume that most of my audience will share my sentiment.

We seem to have this implicit notion that ideas worth engaging with must be complicated. Their presentation must include technical jargon, vocabulary taken from thesaurus dot com, and sentence structures that perplex the reader. I remember being taught in school that we must not use the word “good” in essays. WHY? Some things are good — why must we make them excellent, favorable, virtuous, marvelous… Why can’t good just be good?

For me, this was a mental block that kept me from publishing my writings for years. I thought that there was an onus on me to write amazing, intricate things. These days, there is almost a surplus of that kind of writing. Hell, type a prompt into ChatGPT, and it can produce an essay with “proper form” in mere seconds. So perhaps, the new generations of writers should focus on simplicity instead. Not simplicity that shadows the complexity of its content, but simplicity that brings ideas to life without a significant amount of work needed from the reader.

Now, simplicity is a fickle thing. Proverbs are not simple in the same way that clickbait TikTok videos are. It can be illuminating, or it can be unrefined. With that in mind, here is a quote that actually speaks to me:

For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.

Spoken by 20th century US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, this quote makes sense to me. On one side of complexity is over-simplification that removes nuance and provides a coarse, black-and-white, pseudo-understanding. (Think: 7 times Cleopatra was a total girl boss) At the center is complexity itself, exemplified here by the jargon-filled language of Prof. Bhabha. There is a high barrier to entry in this form of writing, and it is only accessible to a small and homogeneous audience by design. Finally, after we dive in and bathe in complexity, there is simplicity returned. Here are proverbs, nuggets of wisdom, and in my opinion, well-done pop-science/philosophy/history. This kind of simplicity functions like a lightning that strikes in a dark forest: The environment is lit up in a way that allows us to see the entire landscape, even if we cannot discern every individual object that surrounds us.

Dall-E rendition of Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, two amazing science communicators

So, this is my literary manifesto, in case people still write manifestos. I want to develop a kind of writing that maintains the complexity of the world, while remaining accessible to anyone with a genuine interest. Pop-[x] fields get a bad reputation, but all the work I am doing is in service of becoming a genuine science communicator. If I can get there, that would be… well, good. (There, I said it).

[This article was inspired by the quote by Justice Holmes. Thank you Satheesh for introducing me to his work, and helping this particular lightning strike.]