If you’ve ever been asked to simplify a complex idea, you know it’s incredibly hard. So why do we pretend it is simple?
Episode 30 of the Make Saints podcast: “Too Simple”
the episode script
Have you ever been told by someone that they don’t want to hear the whole story? They tell you to break it down to what’s most important. Then they say:
Explain it to me like I’m a 5 year-old.
Man, I hate that. Have these people never tried to explain complex ideas to kindergarteners?
They may as well ask us to design a load-bearing bridge across a chasm. No worries. I’ll wait.
They’re asking for a big thing to be made small — in an instant. Like, off the top of your head.
The thing about this isn’t just that one person is asking another for the impossible. It’s that they don’t even see why that is impossible.
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What we’re asking from simplicity
Many of us have a great deal of experience with the challenge of simplifying complexity. What the person who is asking us to describe it like we’re talking to a 5 year-old is trying to say is please make this complex thing more simple. Simplify it for me.
In other words, transform the concept and transport it from the realm of complexity to the realm of simplicity.
Don’t bring the complex idea into my simple world. Make the complex idea simple and then bring it to me.
We are quite literally telling each other to transform a thing, change it, so that we can understand it.
The Dark Side
It is also saying, I don’t want everything explained to me. I just want the gist. The Cliffs Notes or the top sheet.
This is different from simplicity. Summaries aren’t necessarily simple. They’re shorter, but a lot is left out.
If we want to understand a thing, we do need to wrestle with the whole thing. It’s a balancing act.
Simplifying stuff is hard.
Anyone who has ever learned a complex thing knows the challenge of trying to simplify it.
There’s even a well known saying among preachers that goes something like this:
- If you want me to preach five minutes, give me a week.
- If you want me to preach twenty-five minutes, give me a day.
- But if you want an hour, I can start right now.
Simple takes time. It is hard. Most of us can’t explain it to you like you’re a 5 year-old at the drop of a hat.
And the only people who can are experts and hucksters.
Why simplifying is hard
If you and I were asked to describe something a little complicated, like say, the Trinity, we’ve got a bunch of ways to go. But let’s settle on three (which is obviously totally appropriate).
- Simplistic
- Escapist
- Mystery
The Simplistic approach cuts corners, knowing they aren’t supposed to, but whatever. They’ll use an analogy to tell people the Trinity is like water, even though that’s modalism. They are so eager to make it simple, that they cut out stuff they’re not allowed to just to make it make sense. You’re not getting a condensed version of the whole story. You’re actually getting a distorted story.
The Escapist approach knows that the Trinity is just impossible to explain and after two thousand years we’re still incompetant in describing this junk, so what’s the point? So rather than go full nihilism, they say, how about we go volunteer at a soup kitchen?
The Mystery approach starts with the understanding of the complexity and that it is not solvable with shortcuts. So instead of explaining the Trinity or defining it, they adopt a relatable image that makes it all make a little more sense. The Trinity is a Divine Dance in which all are present and all is one.
Beware of the Dark Side
What most often passes for simplicity in our lives now is often simplistic. The pressure to make things shorter and easier to spread is so rarely lovingly crafted work after countless hours of study or even the attempts of hobby podcasters to shed a little light on a challenging phenomenon. It is most often the anxious headlines of overworked editors or manipulative deceptions of minute demagogues.
It is with that pressure to produce and the demand for simple that we all collude to disinform one another. We rather take short cuts because we long for it all to make sense. And the making of sense matters more to us than the understanding of the complex problem and why the solutions offered probably aren’t going to cut it.
And the thing is: we all know this. We just label it as “bias” or “partisanship”. And we simplistically blame politicians and the media for delivering it to us like hot dogs at the ballpark. Because they shout and we keep standing up.
So if we truly want these complex things to be more simple, we need to start with our patience. And then turn to the people who are skilled at simplifying difficult concepts, and not just so we understand them, but who do so accurately. Who account for why the simplistic solutions never cut it. So that we can get the whole thing. And maybe then we can realize the simple truth: some stuff really is that complicated.