Simplicity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
There’s an old idea called Ockham’s razor which slices the complexity out of a problem to find the simplest solution that I’ve grown quite fond of. At first, I was annoyed by this way of working through questions, not because of how it worked, that made good sense, but because of how it was introduced to me as general knowledge that surely, I must already know about.
There’s a whole category of knowledge that tends to be approached in this way, stuff that’s so accepted that surely the listener will know what’s going on, even if the general knowledge in question has particular nuanced names that rely on a certain amount of specific background knowledge to really understand the general knowledge in question. I find this sort of problem comes up in financial and medical lingo in particular, and in any specialized lingo in general. Topics that were introduced to me in this way, from William Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey still tend to annoy me purely because the people who I first heard about these ideas from expected that I already knew about them. Both of these ideas are themselves quite useful, the frontier is central to my dissertation’s focus on the periphery of the European worldview in the middle and later decades of the sixteenth century, and yes, I’ve seen aspects of Campbell’s ideas play out in the stories I’ve read, seen, and heard. Still, like Ockham’s razor the fact that the people telling me about these just expected I and everyone else in the conversation already knew about them, never bothering to explain what they are, annoyed me.
So, to not be that guy, let me quickly digress a bit here. W.J. Turner was a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1890s who gave a lecture at the Columbian Exposition World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893 arguing that at that moment in time the Frontier of the American West was officially closed, that there was no new land to be explored or discovered between Atlantic and Pacific, and that the character of America’s very identity was bound to change as a result. Look ahead a few years to 1898 and the United States gained a small colonial empire mostly in the Pacific, extending the dream of a frontier further beyond the Golden Gate and West Coast to places like Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines, as well as northward beginning in 1867 with the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Today, that frontier is in orbit, in our solar system, and beyond in deep space. Joseph Campbell’s idea is that every hero story tends to have the same narrative arc, the sort of storytelling format that I was taught in my high school AP English classes. Yeah, Campbell’s ideas make sense, and that’s that.
Returning to William of Ockham and his razor, I think this is a principle that we really ought to use more often than we do. In our efforts to correct past wrongs we often over correct, only making things more complicated in the process. I’ve often thought of the last few decades as a sort of Wild West, a new frontier in certain parts of society, particularly in regard to information and the Internet. We’re also in a time when individuals are defining themselves and societal expectations at large as more than some sort of collective will as occured in past generations. I applaud all the self-investigation, I’ve done a fair bit of that myself, and yes, I find that it rather hard to define myself in so many ways. Still, as I’ve written before in the Wednesday Blog and its predecessors, we have a tendency to at times proscribe changes and reforms for ourselves and our perspectives that aren’t natural and often tend to be a bit clunky, making them uncomfortable to adopt.
One area where we over complicate things is in our symbols, especially for American states and cities. We have a tradition in this country that the easiest way to create a flag is often to use the seal of a government and put it on a field of varying color, often blue. It’s something we got from the colonial period, just look at all the Commonwealth flags that have a Red or Blue Ensign, with a Union Jack in the upper-left corner and the coat of arms of that government in the middle to the right. Here in Kansas City, our City Council just voted to adopt a new design for our city flag, moving away from essentially putting the city’s fountain emblem on the French tricolor with variations on the name of our city beneath the fountain and instead putting that same fountain emblem astride twin fields of blue and red. Yep, we’re keeping the nod to our French colonial and settler roots, which I appreciate, but we’re also making the statement that our flag presents simpler to get.
The flags of the American states generally are a mess, often again just the seal on a field of blue often with the state’s name written beneath the seal; here in Kansas the name is in yellow on a blue field while in my native state of Illinois it’s in black on a white field. We could do so much better than this, and in the last few years some states are beginning to change their flags to somewhat better designs. Mississippi finally dropped their Confederate battle flag design in favor of a new flag depicting a magnolia, the state flower, though they kept some wording on the new flag. Utah also just announced a new flag that depicts the state’s mountains and the old Mormon beehive insignia that appears on their state highway signs. This got me back to thinking, how could Kansas improve upon its state flag?
I found one proposal from a company called Flags for Good that got rid of all of the symbols of the current flag all together in favor of a green field with a yellow sunflower in the center. Another sunflower design proposed by a guy from Lawrence named Anson who runs the website www.newkansasflag.com kept the blue field except for the upper-right corner, presumably to symbolize the northeastern border of the state along the Missouri River, yet with a 34 pointed sunflower, symbolizing Kansas’s place as the 34th state admitted to the Union in 1861. I quite like both of these, after all Kansas is the Sunflower State, and as I’ve written before here, I personally think Kansas’s sunflower emblem state highway signs are among the finest in the nation. Their simplicity does a great deal to announce Kansas to the rest of the Union and the globe at large.
Simplicity is one of the finer aspects of life that we tend to forget about. Life itself is hardly ever simple, there is rarely ever just a right or wrong decision to be made but always shades of gray that need to be waded through to find the best answer for a given moment. I hope more people will begin to look for the simpler answers, give a yes or no instead of an unnecessarily longer answer when the simple affirmative or negative will suffice. Let’s at least make a few things easier on ourselves.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 