The complexity problem

Finance leads the complexity rush because it is the activity least constrained by material factors, like materials, energy and human skill levels. But increasingly everything we experience, from jet travel to the latest mobile phones, is influenced by the trend to greater complexity, mostly manifest as ever more sophisticated digital code.

If we are reaching the manageable limits of complexity, what we need to do is to stop relying on more complexity and to simplify life. However, this would mean giving up a lot of things people in the rich west take for granted. Our fast-throughput, mass-consumption lifestyle has been largely enabled by the incredible advances in scale and complexity over the last two centuries. These were the years after the industrial revolution when the large scale use of fossil fuels and better access to cheaper raw materials drove accelerating economic growth.

The industrial revolution led to an explosion in the availability of new goods and services. We stopped relying so much on ourselves making and doing things, and more and more on others who we paid. Life increasingly came down to working for the money in order to consume ever more complex goods and services.

Now of course people do not readily give up something for nothing. It is like the old adage about giving up smoking: at the same time you give up, you take up something else to compensate. How can we manage a transition away from ever greater complexity?

The five century long history of the West itself suggests the solution. Until the Renaissance in the 16^th century and the Enlightenment in the 18^th century, life was dominated by concepts of religion. This was a very limited kind of spiritual experience but it provided a framework for living, and for a millennium of so the Catholic Church was the most important institution in the West. The Renaissance and Enlightenment undermined and then directly confronted religious obscurantism, instead throwing up the powerful productive forces of science and industrialisation. Basic improvements meant that the old foes of humanity, disease and famine, were at last beaten back, and continued improvements in the overall standard of living was a potent manifestation of science-based mass-industrialisation.

The Church may have told the poor to suffer and be rewarded in heaven, but science and industry increasingly fixed the problems here on earth for everyone.

What was not so apparent was that these new forces of materialism had their own self-reinforcing dynamics that would soon cause their own problems. Mass production of goods promoted capitalism, which tended to create a new kind of wealth disparity and whole new social classes with divergent interests. For millennia there had been basically a tiny ruling class (the aristocracy) and the great mass of the poor. Industrialisation created the middle classes and a new industrial working class. The politics of this new class conflict became increasingly toxic until extremes on the right and left generated militant totalitarian societies. Communism in Russia and later China and fascism/militarism in Italy, Germany and Japan generated powerful but unstable nation-states that tended towards military aggression. Combined with the new mass-industrial technologies, which could pump out shells, machine guns, cannon, tanks, warships and airplanes at an accelerating rate, this led to mass-warfare that eventually reached global scale in the worst three decades in human history. From 1914 to 1945 multimillions of human beings were killed and maimed and untold damage to property occurred.

In addition, the scale of resources extraction, industrial production and waste creation became so great it began to seriously interfere with natural systems. Pollution of air, water and land, limits on potable water and arable land, and availability of critical minerals and other substances became increasingly threatening. By the 1960s human civilisation was reaching some of the basic limits to socio-economic growth on this planet.

New ideas have emerged to help us understand and choose our place in things. We have the new intellectual content already apparent in the concepts of environmental sustainability and the quantum universe along with old ideas about community and morality that never lost their importance.

Along with that content we have the new form in the many digital technologies now available, from mobile phones to the Internet. Although digital technology presents its own problems of complexity, it ultimately represents an extraordinary development in the capacity of human beings to communicate with each other. It is this capacity that is causing all the headlines about spying, cybercrime, the loss of privacy, changes in the behaviour of children and adolescents, and so on.

In effect, digital technology itself has become so powerful and so pervasive it is fundamentally changing the way people live. It is enabling the aggregation of vast new collections of people and interests. This is reflected In a negative way by the instant celebrity culture that mars the web, and in a positive way by the rise of crowd sourcing, just two examples.

We have seen the creation of a myriad websites, including Online Opinion, each trying to play a part in a critical shift in consciousness. So far it has to be said that noise has drowned out any profound new message, and of course the existing powers – big corporations and governments - are in the game as well. But as things become more desperate, and the need for new ideas becomes clearer, the necessary structures and people may appear to enable a basic rethinking about how we live and how we can do better.

The general direction in which we must go seems clear. Technological and organisational complexity has reached its limits, so we must return to a life based in human capacities and human inclinations. We can use the techno-organisational systems we have created so far to promote this shift, bringing people together in new ways. We can, and must, maintain connections at global levels to avoid falling back into international conflict, reconstruct activity national and local levels by reinventing democracy and community, and find the time to prioritise the things that really matter to us and make life worthwhile.