The Future of Complexity

Christmas break starts with cleanup time. Going through accumulated notes orphaned on legal pads and pocket notebooks, and trying to catch up on missed reading--it seems always this time of the year that there's a backlog of New York Reviews, partially read, to finish (or even start.)

This Old Business extends to an issue from October that contains another memorial piece on Tony Judt. There are a couple of passages I wanted to note and save, that bear on the general premise of this site, what is involved in dreaming up the future. One of the constituents, reflecting reality, is complexity. So here's the pertinent bits in what Timothy Snyder writes about Tony Judt as an historian. Judt started as a Marxist historian, but moved from that single orthodoxy: "Yet even as he distanced himself from French Marxists, Tony resisted the temptation to substitute another source of intellectual authority for Marxism. Whereas some intellectuals of his generation replaced Marxism with something that seemed like its opposite—the market, for example—he instead rejected the very idea of a single underlying explanation of historical change. "

"Tony was typical of thinkers of his generation in his attempt to escape, in the
middle of life, from the attraction and pressure of structural theories such as Marxism. But he was unusual, as a historian, in that he chose pluralism, the embrace of multiple subjects, methods, and truths, rather than fragmentation, the flight to small islands of certainty. Many historians reacted to the end of faith in overall explanations by becoming experts in a narrow or specialized subject. In the 1990s, as he prepared himself to write Postwar, Tony chose the hardest path. Like Isaiah Berlin, another influential contemporary at Oxford, he accepted the irreducible variety within history, seeking to embrace difference within an account that was harmonious, convincing, and true. Tony brought together not only Europe east and west, but also Scandinavia and the Mediterranean. He wrote with equal authority about economics, society, politics, and culture, and granted the value of specialization by mastering the huge literatures of these fields, to which he imparted grace and unity."

Marxism is both a historical account of how the present arose and a prescription of how the future must be. In Past Imperfect, composed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tony permitted himself to be moralist and historian at the same time; during his research for and after the publication of Postwar, in the 1990s and 2000s, he allowed the two vocations of scholar and essayist to separate, to the benefit of both. As a historian he became more measured, and as an essayist he became more significant. His gift as an essayist, perfected after his move to the United States, was to be where he was and yet not to be where he was, to partake of the governing assumptions of his time and place without being governed by them. To take an example that is rarely mentioned: Tony was right, and right at the time, about the mendacity of the campaign for war in Iraq and the coming dreadful consequences for the United States. His inclination to criticize American policy, he thought, was what made him American."

After being diagnosed with ALS, Judt used the resources at his command and the collaboration of admiring writer and editor friends to write a dazzling amount of powerful prose, some of it published (and is still being published) in the New York Review, as well as in books: Ill Fares the Land, currently in bookstores, and a future publication, Thinking the Twentieth Century.

I see these approaches or attitudes as guideposts for considering the future, which inevitably involves reconsidering the past. Complexity is not only a feature of the world that science is coming to reluctantly accept and document (since western science is all about reducing reality to simple rules that can then be manipulated to make stuff happen--often enough, ways to excuse bad behavior and/or blow it all up.) But the future is a big place. And a complex one. While Marx had insights into history pertinent at least to the Industrial Age and after (if you assume we're in something else now; not sure I do) there are other causalities. History is overdetermined. Including the history of the future. Which argues for emphasizing the soul of the future, at least to me, at least in terms of what I stumble around calling my work.