Marilynne Robinson's Simple Wisdom

We are bombarded each day with the world’s seemingly intractable problems and with differing guidance on how we should respond to those problems. According to some, the world’s complex problems should be left to those with complex answers. According to others, we need to spend less time mucking about in nuance and instead identify the clear rights and wrongs contributing to the world’s problems. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead provides a path between these incomplete solutions for addressing the world’s problems.

The book is not short on complex problems. The narrator, Pastor John Ames, confronts intellectual and societal problems throughout the book—mostly encountered through his prodigal godson Jack—including racism, pacifism, predestination, providence, and apostasy. By his own estimation, through weekly sermons delivered to his local congregation, John Ames had written roughly as much as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in addressing these issues. From all appearances, complex problems require complex solutions.

At another level, the book is about small acts. Delivering meals, sitting on a porch talking with friends (and enemies), and the laying on of hands all take on eternal significance.

One of the core themes of Gilead is that when Christian are confronted with complex problems, those problems require simple acts.

We live in an age of complex problems. The background noise of our lives thrums with a dull drone of intractable legal, economic, social, and technological problems. Polarization, isolation, globalization, exploitation and the like are our daily bread.

Scrolling through news sites would lead one to believe that there are only two prescriptions for such complex problems.

The Problem with Complex Solutions

First, some tell us that the problems are so complex that they can only be addressed by complex solutions. On this telling, only experts are equipped to handle complex problems and the rest of us either need to get on board or get out of the way. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn noted in his Nobel lecture from 1970, “[i]t would seem that the appearance of the contemporary world rests solely in the hands of the scientists; all mankind’s technical steps are determined by them.”

What form do these complex solutions actually take? It might mean that we need experts to try to get more data about the problem. For many, there are few problems that a well-organized spreadsheet can’t solve. Or it may mean that we need experts who try to regulate the problem away—coming up with complex governance schemes to get humans to act (or not act) in a preferred way. Or perhaps we need experts to come up with new technology to solve the problem. And when all of those strategies fall short, we need experts who can litigate the complex problems away. If we can’t agree on a solution to a problem, we can at least find a way to send it to the courts.

My own experience suggests such complex solutions are often incomplete. I am a lawyer. I practice one of the professions that helps solve complex problems. But while I am equipped with a technical vocabulary and a procedural toolkit to help navigate their problems, my work can—at best—provide incomplete solutions. I can help create temporary (state-enforced) peace, but I can’t actually solve the problem for both parties. The other “expert” professions may face similar struggles in being unable to craft complete solutions. Scientists may be able to develop a technology that simplifies or eases lives.

But, even if people are willing to adopt the solution (which is not a given), those solutions themselves may have unintended consequences—creating new complex problems. Life prolonging medicines can increase the quality of life for many humans. But they can create real difficulties for society, from the depletion of Social Security to the allure of euthanasia when someone’s life is judged to be “not worth living.” Complex problems may require complex solutions, but complex solutions often beget new complex problems. As Wendell Berry has aptly summarized, “The smartest and most educated people are the scientists, for they have already found solutions to all our problems and will soon find solutions to all the problems resulting from their solutions to all the problems we used to have.”

In addition, my experience suggests that the “expert” professions that provide complex solutions to complex problems are not simply altruistic problem solvers. Again, take my profession of lawyering. The profession as a whole benefits from complexity. Lawyers rely on people having intractable problems that they cannot solve themselves. We have professionalized legal complexity (and often charge a high hourly rate for that service). We may help you solve one problem while, at the same time, identifying ten more problems. Unfortunately, lawyers are far from alone in benefiting from the increased complexity of problems. The incentives of the various “expert” industries are not always aligned with simply solving the problem.

To be sure, complex problems do often call for complex solutions. It is worthwhile to gather data to understand trends about our consumption patterns and our maladies, about our immigration policies and our economic well being, about our investment in foreign conflicts and loss of life, and about our use of technology and our loneliness. It is worthwhile to try out policies in an attempt to solve the social problems we face. The development of new technologies can better our lives. And, yes, there are even instances when it is helpful to have lawyers and courts step into the gap of apparently irresolvable problems.

The problem comes when we completely outsource concern about the world’s complex problems to experts to come up with the solution. We do damage to ourselves and our neighbors when we abdicate responsibility for society’s problems to the “experts.” Such abdication can quickly lead to apathy (the problems are simply beyond me), naivety (I don’t need to try to understand this because someone else will), or paranoia (if I don’t understand or trust the solutions, perhaps I’m being manipulated by the experts).

In short, yes, complex problems require complex solutions, but we should not use that complexity as an excuse to simply step away from the problems.

The Problem with Simple Answers

Second, others claim that complex problems actually have simple answers. Rather than telling us that experts need to save us, we are told that the complexity is a lie and the real solution is to just find easy labels for the world around us. On this account, there are white hats and black hats; good guys and bad guys. Getting too bogged down in all the shades of gray renders you complicit in the wrongdoing of the “other side.”

The impulse here is understandable. Particularly in times where there are as many opinions as there are facts about any given situation, we need heuristics to operate by. No one of us can thoughtfully assess every controversy in the news. I can no more be an expert on South American economic policy, Middle East foreign policy, as well as the domestic policy debates on immigration, artificial intelligence regulation, and childhood vaccines, than I can track all of the surnames in a Russian novel.

Confronted with so much information about so many issues, it is no surprise that we are inclined to find mental shortcuts to help us make quick judgments in the face of complexity. We can simplify and sort each new controversy based on preconceptions, tribal affiliations, or our preferred new source.

The reality is, each of us does this. None of us can take in and understand all of the information presented to us about all the problems we are confronted with in our daily lives. We, implicitly or explicitly, identify others that we trust to help us process the world’s complexity. To not use such heuristics is not an option. Either it would leave us either hopelessly overwhelmed by trying to analyze each problem from first principles or so adrift that we would have to disengage from the world’s problems altogether.

The real issue arises when we do not acknowledge the complexity of the problems around us; the party line simply becomes orthodoxy. We have fallen prey to a concern expressed by Solzhenitsyn in that same Nobel lecture, that “[t]he primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy.” If we become so entrenched within our tribes, our positions, and our shortcuts that we mentally swipe left or right on each newly encountered problem, we have lost the battle. Over-emphasizing the need for complex solutions can cause us to distance ourselves from the world’s problems, but over-emphasizing the need for simple answers ends up doing the same thing.

What then? The path through complex problems does not run through complex solutions or simple answers. Instead, the path through is often inglorious: complex problems must be addressed through simple acts.

The Necessity of Simple Acts

What do I mean by a simple act? I mean an act taken with no expectation that the act will solve the problem in its entirety. I will cite just a few examples from the lives around me:

• Picking up elderly congregants to bring them to church.
• Delivering meals to families that have just added members and to those who have just lost them.
• Sitting up late with a friend who is struggling.
• Picking up the phone to put a human voice to a complicated legal situation.

Such small acts will not “solve” polarization, climate change, the loneliness epidemic, the demographic cliff, Social Security, or any number of society’s other complex problems. But performing small acts isn’t just spitting into the wind. In performing these small acts in the context of communities, we create a tapestry that strengthens our ties to one another while we work out the hard problems together over the long haul. This is liturgy—the work of the people.

Indeed, simple acts do something more profound than changing the world. They change us. They serve as a medicine to our ills. They restore agency that complex solutions take away. And they reintroduce nuance that has been stripped away from complex situations by simple answers.

Small acts can make us the kind of people who recognize (and appreciate) complex problems and solutions when they come, yet live with conviction and humility in the face of it all.

Gilead does not end with solutions to the complex problems that plagued John Ames throughout his life. He does not reach any resolution about predestination and whether his best friend’s son can be saved. He does not find a satisfactory answer for why, in God’s providence, his first wife and child were allowed to prematurely die.

Nor does Gilead end with simple answers. John Ames doesn’t label his prodigal godson as an irredeemable sinner or as a misunderstood saint. He doesn’t label his parochial Iowa home as the best of a fading American dream or as a social and intellectual backwater. He doesn’t reject the God who allowed tragedy to strike or paper over the pain felt from those tragedies to save God from the world’s difficulties.

Gilead, instead, ends with a simple act. As his prodigal godson Jack prepares to leave town, John Ames lays a hand on him and blesses him. This act does not solve his or Jack’s existential problems. This act does not solve the societal problems on the horizon for his soon to be widowed wife and fatherless son. But all the same, John Ames concludes that “it was an honor to bless him” and that he would “have gone through seminary and ordination and all the years intervening for that one moment.”

A simple act in the face of complex problem—the only path forward.