Who Can Deal With Excess Complexity?

The thematic here is not all that new on this blog—but worth repeating. Not that such insights help in any sense at all—except the individual. When we are caught in a horrendous storm, it is reassuring sometimes to glimpse a few recognizable landmarks.

The motivation today is an editorial in the New York Times on the subject of ambiguities that surround the so-called Volker Rule. That rule, in a nutshell, is part of the Dodd-Frank financial law and restricts U.S. banks in the making of speculative investments on their own behalf. But it’s not the Volker Rule that interests us here but, rather, its extraordinary complexity—now that it is being implemented. Brigitte flagged the editorial for me with heavy commentary. In effect she said that complexity is simply swallowing us.

Indeed, having read the thing, I could not but agree. But as is often the case with me, I had a rather apocalyptic reactions to the thing. As I noted that reaction, the thought came that sometimes, certainly not all the time, the apocalyptic solution is the only one available. And we have quite excellent historical precedents for it.

The first of these is the Gordian Knot. That knot, no doubt, was the same sort of thing in ancient Greek times as the Volker Rule is for us today. And Alexander the Great dealt with it, metaphorically, by using his sword to disentangle it—with prejudice, as we used to say a few years ago. No doubt he wiped the slate clean and had his underlings start from scratch again, something that, alas, is absolutely necessary at long intervals in social affairs when things have become unworkable. The Hellenistic era, call it Ancient Modernity, is dated from Alexander’s death.

Our own era, Modern Modernity, can be dated from, say, the French Revolution. The Alexandrine figure of that time was Napoleon. He made order again—and that order then was copied by his friends and enemies, certainly in mainland Europe. He wiped away centuries of accumulated law in France and started again.

These are my landmarks. They give me a kind of futuristic hope amidst the prevailing vast confusion. Alas, it takes a single individual with genuine power to do what Alexander and Napoleon managed to do. No such figure is visible now. Therefore my use of that word, futuristic. To the old wisdom, “This too shall pass,” we might add a complement: “That too shall come…”

In Praise of Timelines

Speaking of orienting oneself in time, I’ve become quite fond of well-constructed timelines, certainly reading them—but above all in the value of “rolling your own.” Making a timeline makes you keenly aware of how things are related and in the linear fashion. And the very activity tends to force a look at the context in which a particular subject evolves.

I’ll give a brief example here of a Greek timeline of a mere 146 years. It embraces the best known core of Greek philosophical work—but seen in its own context.

469	Socrates is born
460	Thucydides is born.
446	Aristophanes (the playwright) is born.
431	Peloponnesian War breaks out, in effect Athens (and allies) against Sparta (and allies). It will lasts for 27 years. In the Greek context it is a kind of World War in two phases.
427	Plato is born.
399	Socrates dies.
395	Corinthian War (Sparta against coalition of Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Argos) breaks out, the second half of the Peloponnesian.
387	Corinthian War ends when Persia enters on Sparta’s side and saves its hide.
386	Aristophanes dies.
404	Peloponnesian War ends, largely because the Sparta’s ally, Persia, provides decisive aid. Persia is the Big Power in that time and region.
400	Thucydides dies.
387	Plato founds the Academy at his prime, aged 40.
384	Aristotle is born.
360	Philip becomes king of Macedon, and the expansion of that realm begins.
356	Alexander (later the Great) is born; he is the son of Philip.
357	Outbreak of the Social War, a conflict between Athens and parts of its alliance—Chios, Rhodes, Kos, and Byzantion—provoked by Athens’ demanding ways.
355	Social War ends. Athens is forced to give the rebels their independence, in part due to Persian pressures.
343	Aristotle becomes Alexander’s tutor and does the job for three years.
347	Plato dies at 82.
338	Athens loses its independence as Macedon extends its sway and comes to control all of Greece.
336	Philip of Macedon is assassinated. Alexander becomes king at 20, but he is already a genuine veteran of the wars of Macedonian expansion.
322	Aristotle dies at 62.
334	Alexander invades Persia (turn-around is fair play) by crossing the Hellespont (read Dardanelles) and the conquest of Persia is on.
323	Alexander dies in Babylon (make that Iraq, where else?) and the Hellenistic age begins.

As I’ve noted in an earlier post, this sort of thing is oddly informative. Reading Thucydides is like reading a modern author. The view point, the realism, the whole approach is modern. So are the conflicts that give this period its defining framework. The first date is that of Socrates’ birth, representing a kind of maturation of another age and time. Aristotle dies toward the end, himself a perfectly modern sort of thinker. And the last figure to pass is the man who produced the environment of an earlier modernity—the Hellenistic age.

Since of late I’ve been concerned with mathematics, I would here note where Pythagoras fits into this timeline. He came before Socrates, born 570 BC and died 495. That should please mathematicians—who like to think themselves foundational.

Picking up a Chronometer

One of the most striking features of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War is how modern that account sounds to our ears. That war—I think of it as akin to our own world war—took place 431-404 BC, and Thucidides wrote his history in the waning years of the fourth century BC. He died in 400 at age of 60. Now unless one’s college studies are still as fresh as a daisy—and assuming that one actually had a course on Greek history detailed enough to look at this period closely, the clash between Athens and Sparta is one thing, and philosophy quite another; the ordinary modern mind does not link the two. We have pictures of Socrates surrounded by disciples suspended in a kind of philosophical fairy land; and there is Aristotle filling thick volumes. The linkage between history and philosophy is a little vague in most minds except those of experts. To make some links, I thought I’d take a look.

The Peloponnesian war had been underway two years when a woman called Perictione gave birth to a little baby boy (427). She and her husband, Ariston, named him Plato—and you can be sure they discussed it and agreed, because this was a decidedly upper class family. Ariston traced his lines of descent back to two kings; and Perictione traced hers back to the famed lawyer and poet Solon. At this time the man who would later become little Plato’s teacher, a man called Socrates, had just turned 40. That war took quite a while to end; it lasted 27 years. Plato was a young man of 25 when it finally wound down. And Thucydides was 56. It was twenty years after this—and another war, the Corinthian, was still raging—when Aristotle first cried out as a baby after being born in 384 BC. Plato was then 45; baby Aristotle had become a man of 37 when Plato died at the ripe old age of 82 in 347 BC. And in that year a major future political and military figure, Alexander, later dubbed The Great, was just a boy of nine. Aristotle would soon be engaged to be his teacher.

Sometimes it is worth consciously pondering that all these famous people were once babies and had to have their nappies changed.

I link these people chronologically here by way of underlining that the philosophical works we place at the core of Western civilization emerged in a political, technological, and militarily advanced stage of Greek civilization, as documented in Thucydides' work. And this age had a tendency, a direction—thus toward the expansive, the materialistic. It was a culturally modern time, the transition between what is called the classical period in Greece and the Hellenistic—the latter an overflow of Greek culture to a much wider region, the consequence of Alexander’s conquests. The classical period followed a deeply religious age from which very few “great names” survive. Why? Because we only value figures who’re like us. If we were drawing parallels to our own stage of culture, we’d be looking at a period extending roughly from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II, call that classical, and the period of global Americanization that followed and is our own time now; call it Hellenistic. What I’m after is the feel of things, and this, I think, properly captures that feel.

Why did I do this? I tried to answer a question. And it was this: How could it come about that a person brought up in a Catholic tradition and exposed to philosophy by the Jesuits, thus to a philosophy firmly centered on Thomism, would have developed a great distaste for the Aristotelian view of reality? The fault is largely mine, of course. It is true, of course, that Thomas Aquinas was a staunch, loyal, persistent Aristotelian, but he Christianized that philosophy by brilliant innovations. My fault—because what stuck to me was the Aristotelian foundation. Something in me clashed with it—and therefore I never did manage to advance to the brilliant innovations. I had problems with the base.

It has always seemed to me that Aristotle’s natural leanings were materialistic—and I was born into an age where—almost undetectable although it is—the spiritual focus is once more increasing; and it is this new, faint something that attracts me. Thus, in later times, I felt much more drawn to Aristotle’s predecessors, thus the Platonic, and what emerged later from it, the neo-platonic and mystical schools that developed from it across the board as the Graeco-Roman world slowly decayed. And this foray into chronology took place by way of getting a better feel for the times, the tempora. And, I would submit, the times then match the times now. And that explains my drawing back from the Aristotelian, however modified. I’m more poet than thinker; the content is less important to me than the smell.

Notice the interesting “materialization” of philosophy in this chronology. Socrates, a deeply spiritual figure, is the teacher of Plato, a metaphysician who taught by dialogue; he is the teacher of Aristotle, the logician and physicist, who, most significantly, rejects Plato’s eternal forms; and Aristotle is the teacher of a warrior and conqueror whose world was decidedly the here and now.
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I try always to promote this great edition of The Peloponnesian War: The Landmark Thucydides.