RALEIGH – Having spent most of my adult life around politicians, journalists, think tankers, and political activists, I think that the usual taxonomies fail to capture and convey important information about them. Yes, the familiar dichotomies – Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, true liberals and everyone else – have explanatory value. But here’s another division that I find useful: between simplicists and complexicists.
Invented words? I plead guilty. But political terminology, indeed the entire English lexicon, treats as traditional what must, at some point, have been innovative. Let’s punch the buttons and twist the dials on these new inventions.
Simplicists believe that public-policy problems have singular, all-encompassing solutions. For example, modern-day liberal simplicists see poor, single moms and want to give them money confiscated from those who earned it. Modern-day conservative simplicists see poor, single moms and want to get them married. Simplicists tend to focus on what is immediate and visible, missing or downplaying what may be eventual and invisible. They see gas prices rise and think government should cap them, not realizing that gas prices convey useful information about demand and scarcity that, if suppressed by regulation, will fail to induce change in consumer and producer behavior, thus ensuring more scarcity and even-higher prices in the long run.
Simplicists can also be conspiracy theorists, though they need not be. What exemplifies political simplicism is an image of society as a machine that, when operating “normally,” is quiet, frictionless, and productive. Economic or social problems represent symptoms that something has upset the machine’s default setting, a loose wire or a faulty switch. Fix it, and the machine will go back to purring, whirring, and spitting out widgets as before.
Complexicists know better. They know that societies are not machines, that the best analogies for them are organic, not mechanical. Societies are formed by longstanding institutions and ever-changing social relationships among diverse, ever-changing individuals. Because human beings are flawed creatures that make mistakes, all the institutions they create and sustain will be inherently flawed, never yielding the perfection imagined in ivory towers.
In the example of poverty, for example, complexicists recognize that temporary bouts of poverty, brought on by sudden economic or personal reversals, may occur in populations who differ markedly from the population of chronically poor people, whose behavior is often self-destructive and cyclical. They can spot the various roles that education, economic growth, drugs, physical and mental illness, religion, development patterns, racial and ethnic conflicts, diet, and technology play in triggering and lengthening spells of poverty.
To recognize that, say, poverty is a multi-faceted phenomenon is not to settle the matter of what governmental institutions (as distinguished from other institutions) can or should do to address it. Thoughtful complexicists may strongly disagree about the relative importance of causal factors, the proper priorities among public problems, and the efficacy and unforeseen consequences of coercive governmental policies. They still have something significant in common, however: a realism about the intractability of major social problems.
None of which is to suggest that complexicists can’t embrace and apply some simple, straightforward rules about how to analyze public issues and prescribe policy responses. In complexity theory, after all, elaborate or even seemingly random patterns and networks are constructed by a large number of simple equations and functions. In the moral sphere, human beings throughout history have responded to the complex problems of everyday life, problems of priority-setting and application, by first articulating some starting principles and general rules – such as the Golden Rule, which exists in some form in virtually every religion and cultural inheritance on Earth.
I believe that in order to resolve political debates about complex public problems, it makes sense to clarify your political starting principles and general rules. If your can get your opponents to agree on those principles and rules, you may find more agreement later on. But perhaps I’m just being simplistic.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.