Complexity Versus Profundity and the Hunger for Transcendence

Following is a passage from a novel in progress—the third novel in the Jon Mote series that began with Death Comes for the Deconstructionist. Jon is a troubled soul, in many different but related ways. He tends to be obsessive in his thought life, which is the only life any of us really knows. He’s abandoned the religious faith of his youth, but is still haunted by it.

He wants to be a good, reasonable, modern person, with a lot of faith in science as the ultimate arbiter of what is real. But he can’t stop himself from thinking there may be much more to reality. It leads him to reflect on the possible difference between complexity and profundity. He wonders whether complexity is the realm in which science thrives, but if profundity is even more important and something beyond the reach of mere measurement.

The novel, about the killing of Bible translators and titled Woe to the Scribes and the Pharisees, may appear in 2018. (In this scene, Jon—a word guy—is chewing on the phrase “Back to square one.”)

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And what if game is the wrong metaphor and pure logic and sequence and measuring the wrong strategy? Or at least an inadequate strategy—both faulty and incomplete? What if we were wrong to embrace complexity to the exclusion of profundity? Ever closer inspection of the physical yields ever more layers of complexity. Every seeming single thing is revealed to be a mere surface beneath which swarms a sea full of even more basic things which form it, and each of those more basic things is a multiverse of more basic things still, stretching beyond and below the reach of both our instruments and our speculations. It’s turtles all the way down and all the way up.

But there is nothing profound in mere complexity. We are like overexcited children on Christmas morning, ripping off the wrapping of a present, inspecting its contents briefly—perhaps with an ooh or aah—but moving quickly to the bright wrapping of the next present in line, thinking it might be even more exciting than the one we just opened. Each of them interesting perhaps, each of them revealing something. But at the end of the day, the children are tired and maybe just a bit crabby. They are back to Square One.

Profundity has to include human longing. Shakespeare is profound because he probes the human condition in search of clues for how and why we live. He embraces oughts and shoulds and explores the relative value of things. Formulas deal with complexity, stories with profundity. If I need to know how to kill something, I need formulas. If I need to know whether to kill something—or someone—I need stories.

Same with God. Or no God. Or let’s leave the desert God out of it for the moment and just talk about transcendence. Something bigger than—or at least in addition to—the physical. Or at the very, very, very least, the physical as more inhabited, more personal, more charged than we typically conceive of it. Let’s do away with the machine metaphor once and for all, for God’s sake. (Sorry.) Not because it’s uncomfortable, but because it fails to adequately describe our experience. And because those who claim that it does strike us as not the wisest among us. Intelligent often, but not particularly wise. They seem too much like the children unwrapping presents, satisfied with mere complexity and multiplicity.

See what it’s like to live inside my brain? Is it any wonder that it sometimes feels crowded in here? Not a television with too many channels to choose from; rather a multiplex that plays all the channels at the same time in the same room at oscillating volumes with no off switch. Because who’s to say which channel is telling me the truth or the Truth? (Or, if there is no Truth, which channel is the most entertaining.)

Oh, the “T” word. How impossible to use with a straight face today. And yet the single thing I yearn for most of all. (At least in the top three.) Not all of it of course. But enough to point some directions. Enough to encourage a bit of optimism, a gram of hope. Enough to get me beyond Square One.

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