The Complexity-Worshippers

The new attack on reason

A message from MIT President Sally Kornbluth arrived with the July edition of Technology Review.

Coming in the wake of open anti-Semitism at MIT, of illegal encampments on campus, and of President Kornbluth’s embarrassing testimony before Congress, the message is a study in Polyanna-ish evasion.

The title of her piece is “Connecting Across Differences.” That is a new low in what Ayn Rand dubbed “floating abstractions.”

It has been a year of unexpected challenges. But as I write today, I am encouraged by two things. First, the MIT community and the vital work we do for the world have continued to thrive. And second, we have taken positive steps to apply our legendary problem-solving skills to an age-old challenge: finding ways to build meaningful connections across differences.

Connecting—how? By holding hands? Differences—between what? Between those who want to live in peace and those who want to kill them?

How is it possible that this fatuous wool-gathering passes for intelligent (or intelligible) writing? Remember, these are the words of the president of perhaps the greatest science and engineering institution in the world?

How is it possible that no one in “the MIT community”—except this alumnus (’65 course XXI)—rises to call this gigantic bluff?

Well, you see, it’s not as simple as that. Life is very complex. Truth has many ambiguities. Things are never simple, and never ever black and white.

Palestinians roasting babies alive in ovens? You have to be nuanced.

Palestinians phoning home to proudly tell Mommy and Daddy how many Jews they killed? You have to contextualize it.

There’s always another side to consider. You can’t be simplistic.

President Kornbluth leaves nothing to inference: “embrace complexity,” she urged, quoting two Dartmouth professors who had spoken at MIT.

Professor Heschel told us that her goal as a teacher might be to leave her students with the feeling that what they’re studying is even more complicated than they may have realized when they started.

She added: “At a university, complexity is a very good thing.”

This is nothing less than an attack on reason itself.

It says, “You think you understand something? Hah! That’s the infallible mark of immaturity. True wisdom comes from realizing that your puny intellect is no match for the complexities of the world.”

Now, here’s the simple truth. Man’s reason is his conceptual faculty, his ability to form and use concepts. Concepts’ whole function is to simplify the otherwise bewildering variety of things in the world.

Concepts reduce the many to a one. The compression reflects objective, mathematical relationships among the characteristics of perceived concretes. (See Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.)

The concretes that concepts integrate may differ, but only in terms of their measurements. Lengths differ, but they are all measurable by the same unit of length. Tables differ in their number of legs, their size and flatness of their surface, etc. But all these differences are quantitative differences; but tables still has a different range of shape-measurements from those of a chair or a bed.

Connecting across differences? That is exactly what concepts do. But they connect across non-essential differences in degree, not across fundamental differences in kind.

The concept “property rights” connects across owning $10 and owning a $10 billion. It connects across owning a shack and owning a mansion. But it does not connect across stealing someone else’s mansion.

The concept “genocide” connects across the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate the Jews and the Soviets’ attempt to exterminate the kulaks.

But “genocide” doesn’t include Israel’s desperate attempts to prevent being exterminated.

Conceptual connection (more formally, “integration”) requires a recognition that small differences—nuances, if you like—become irrelevant when contrasted with fundamental differences.

Integration is the forming of an intellectual connection, a connection among things with a common characteristic(s). The “connection” that President Kornbluth seems to be talking about is an emotional connection. That kind of “connection” rises almost but not quite to the level of: “I hear you.” “I get where you’re coming from.”

Which is as nothing.

“Complexity is a very good thing”?

“We muddy the waters to make them seem deep,” said Nietzsche.

“It’s not reality that is complicated, it’s you who are confused,” say I.

To be pro-complexity is to be anti-reason.