Tag Archives: simplicity

A view from behind a church on the Greek island of Santorini.

On Simplicity

On Simplicity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how the greatest wisdom is simple in nature.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:Photo by Elizabeth Duke.[1] Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba, trans. Peter Bien, (Simon and Schuster, 1946, 2014), 81.[2] “Elephant Tails,” Wednesday Blog 5.24.[3] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.[4] “On Political Violence,” Wednesday Blog 5.17.
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, how the greatest wisdom is simple in nature.

Over the last several weeks I’ve written about forms of knowledge and knowledge collecting. Knowledge is easier to identify, as it is empirical in its core. Yet on a scale even beyond knowledge lies wisdom, the cumulative sum of humanity’s understanding of the underlying character of human nature. It’s very easy for me to get bogged down in words, words, words and tie myself in knots which I find nigh unbreakable and even more undecipherable. Yet amid all those layers of paint there are often gems which merely need good editing to illuminate. This is what fills my days today, a big edit which I hope will signal the beginning of the end of my years of doctoral study.

In these years, while I’ve devoted my days to reading histories of the Renaissance intersections between the Americas and France, I’ve made a point of reading for fun all the same. I need to read things not related to my research for the escape they provide. At times these fun readings have been more thoroughly connected to my research, as in my recent choice of Jason Roberts’s Every Living Thing, yet in Binghamton I spent many happy evening hours reading Star Trek anthologies and novels while returning to my vocation each day. Of the stories that I’m drawn to, I enjoy reading books and watching films with characters that embody a certain lived experience that begats wisdom. Recently, this desire for such a character led me to read Peter Bien’s new translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba. This is phronesis. Zorba’s wisdom is one that’s been gathered over the sixty years of his life and funneled toward living a good life as he sees fit. His is a simple wisdom which recognizes the physical limitations of the body in opposition to the limitless potential of the soul. I loved the first dance scene in Zorba the Greek in which the old miner erupted upward from his dinner and began to leap about. Kazantzakis describes it as though his soul could not be contained by his body and that it was that spiritual essence which spoke so fervently and wordlessly of its own joy. Kazantzakis can make even the simplest of scenes appear elegant and luminous. His description of the passage of time on the Mediterranean reaching up from Africa to the southern shore of Crete is one of my favorites. Here, I quote from Bien’s translation with the affection that beautiful prose deserves:

“The immense sea reached African shores. Every so often a warm southwest wind blew from distant red-hot deserts. In the morning the sea smelled like watermelons; at midday it vented haze, surged upward discharging miniature unripe breasts; in the evening, rose pink, wine red, eggplant mauve, dark blue, it kept continuously sighing.”[1]

The wisdom inherent in Kazantzakis’s prose lies in his ability to evoke the variable texture of nature, the changing face of it with the passage of the day. I remember once in Binghamton I have the idea to take a selfie once an hour throughout the day to see how my face, hair, stubble, and what not changed as the hours passed. I know for instance that if I want to have a lower register in my recordings of this Wednesday Blog that I need to record first thing in the morning when my tenor is closer to a baritone. This week, owing to a general sense of exhaustion, I haven’t gotten around to writing this essay until nearly 90 minutes before when the podcast normally publishes. Rather than force myself to write something earlier in the day I waited and gave myself the time to think of something good.

Wisdom is knowing that worrying won’t get you anywhere; it lies in the peace of mind and heart that keeps us happy and healthy. This evening, while I was having dinner with one of my best friends and his wife and young son, I brought up my particular conundrum of the day. Jokingly, the suggestion that I write about simplicity was made. I shrugged, thinking of William of Ockham, one of Bill Nye’s favorite history of science examples to use, and decided to run with it. After all, often the wisest people that I’ve met are the ones who embrace the simplicity of living a life embracing their own nature. The wise know that they are going to grow old and die and don’t worry about it. I find myself thinking of this as I watch without much resource as my hair recedes. I’ve joked that my particularly follicly impaired genes may require an eventual investment in a variety of hairpieces for different degrees of formality. I’ve grown in my own comfort with taking care of myself, applying sunscreen before going out on walks around the neighborhood now to mitigate the inevitable that comes from having largely Irish genes and living in the far sunnier Midwestern climate than my ancestors’ rain soaked home soil in Mayo. In his Saint’s Life, Alexis Zorba often doesn’t worry about these things and expresses frustration and even anger when the narrator, his boss, frets about the things he cannot control. I’m better at this than I have been, which is reassuring in some ways of looking at things, yet I still have room to grow.

Wisdom is trusting the people around you to do what they feel is best. If the simplest solution is often the best, then why aim to make things overly complex? Complexity requires forethought, or sometimes is the result of a lack of forethought. Last summer I delighted in writing several essays for the Wednesday Blog attempting to adapt chaos theory to explain human behavior.[2] We need both complexity and simplicity to understand ourselves and the world in which we live. Think about it: we cannot narrow things down to binary options. More often, the binary is one of a series of binaries which together form a logical thought or series. I marvel at the fact that computers most fundamentally work in the binary language of 1s and 0s, and that in this manner language and thought are boiled down to so rudimentary an interpretation. It’s for this reason that while I’m concerned by the rise and development of artificial intelligence and its misuse, I feel a sense of assurance that it is still limited by its basic functions and limited by the abilities of its artifice.[3] The human brain is a wonderous and ever complicated organ which evolved to fulfill its own very particular needs. On the simplest level the brain thinks, it sends directions to the rest of the body to keep the body operating. In a theological framework, I’ve argued that the brain may be the seat of the soul, the consciousness that is at the core of our thought. My earliest memory that I’ve written about here was the first time I recognized that particular voice of my own consciousness, which occurred sometime when I was 3 years old.[4]

Wisdom is intangible, it’s something that you have to learn to recognize. This is perhaps the most complex tenant that represents something simple. In order to truly become wise, one must understand that wisdom isn’t something you can buy off the shelf or write your way into. For all the words which Zorba’s boss writes, allowing them to consume him, he remains feeling unfulfilled in life. It’s why the narrator of the novel struck out from his books and sought to live among ordinary people, buying a stake in a lignite mine on the southern shore of Crete. On his way there in the Piraeus he met Zorba, the man who within a few pages became his foreman and the one who’d realize his idea of finding wisdom in the living world. The simplest explanations are often best. Zorba lives to enjoy the life he has, and when things go wrong––as they often do––he finds something to build upon and start over again.

A couple of months from now I’m going to be contributing my own experiences to a tacit knowledge panel at the History of Science Society’s conference in New Orleans about how I’ve been able to maintain a full research load and writing all year round with hardly any funding at all. I recognize that the circumstances of these past few years have been marked by my own poor decisions and mistakes that I’ve made along the way. Yet in spite of those, and bad luck in many respects, I’ve been able to continue with my work and to produce historical studies that are beginning to make a decent contribution to the history of science in the Renaissance and specifically to the history of animals in that same period. I’m looking forward to that panel, and to the two papers I’m presenting during the same weekend. Maybe, like Zorba, when things feel like they are about to go well I’ll feel the need to rise to my feet and leap into the air as though my soul were attempting to escape from my body. Simply put, for all the trouble that life has brought, joy is overpowering when pure.

[1] Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba, trans. Peter Bien, (Simon and Schuster, 1946, 2014), 81.

[2] “Elephant Tails,” Wednesday Blog 5.24.

[3] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.

[4] “On Political Violence,” Wednesday Blog 5.17.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Simplicity

Simplicity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week to finish out March, a few words on the need to keep things simple. Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane ~ Here are the two websites I mentioned regarding the new Kansas flag proposals: Flags for Good's Kansas Flag: https://flagsforgood.com/products/kansas-flag Anson from Lawrence's New Kansas Flag: https://www.newkansasflag.com/
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

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.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog