The Fate of Complexity in a Time of Memes

The Blinch

G. K. Chesterton was an unmissable presence on the English literary scene of a century ago. Indefatigably opinionated, he published thousands of magazine and newspaper pieces, some of them on painting and sculpture. Responding fully to a work of art, he wrote, is a process of “learning how to experience our experiences. It is learning how to enjoy our enjoyments.” A process, in short, of becoming self-aware. Yet entertainment was at least as important to Chesterton as art, and he supplied his readers with a lot of it. His Father Brown stories cast a priest in the role of detective, and The Man Who Was Thursday, 1908, turns the spy thriller into a playground for metaphysical speculation.

Chesterton also sought ways to make theology palatable to a wide audience, for he was animated, whatever his subject, by religious faith. In 1922, he converted from the Anglican Church to Catholicism. He later stated that “there are ten thousand reasons” for his conversion, “all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.” He had, of course, more to say on this subject. “There is a sense in which the Faith is the simplest of religions; but there is another sense in which it really is by far the most complicated. And what I am emphasizing here is that, contrary to many modern notions, it owes its victory over modern minds to its complexity and not its simplicity.” Chesterton became a Catholic not only because he believed that its doctrines are true but also because the Church endows their truth with an irresistible complexity. This amazes me. In our time, public figures and popular writers contort themselves violently to keep things simple. And so does the sizable portion of the public that puts so much effort into producing our era’s exemplar of simplicity: the meme.

Because nothing is truly simple, a qualification is needed. To produce an image or a video clip that goes viral and becomes a meme requires thought, imagination, and an acute sensitivity to the moment’s vibe. Simplicity is to be found in the meme’s effect: a guffaw at a baby’s bizarre behavior or a moment’s fright as something suddenly goes wrong. Meme-makers have a persistent soft spot for images of soda bottles exploding in the faces of elderly people. They also like the intense but inscrutable expression of the Blinch (Blue Grinch), the wildly exaggerated mannerisms of certain drag queens, and Moo Deng the baby hippo. Now, Moo Deng is indeed an appealing creature and drag queens who go viral are, beneath their extravagance, subtle and highly evolved performers. But the subtlety or any other complexity a meme might feature invites only a quick response, which is savored for a nano-second, and then the meme-lover moves on. Memes teach us how to be superficial.

Complexity persists, of necessity, in many of the culture’s corners and strata—in science and technology, for example. The triviality of our meme reactions does not find a congenial habitat in the profession of computer coding, much less in the discipline of quantum physics—though it’s possible, I suppose, that some coders and physicists play with memes in their leisure hours. However that may be, I am concerned with the realms of art and literature, where complexity has not gone away; it has been swamped by the meme tsunami.

An intricate tangle of anxieties and aversions drives the meme-addict to embrace the crude joys of militant simplicity. If memes were not so good at blocking self-awareness, those who consume them would glimpse the complexity of their needs. And even if moments of insight do occur now and then, they are not frequent enough to slow the production of memes. To those averse to complexity, quick bursts of fun provide a comfort difficult to give up. It is a comfort to be found nearly everywhere if one cultivates the necessary attitude.

Picasso, we assume, did not intend Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as a meme. Still, it functions as one whenever a museumgoer strolls past the painting, registers its presence, thinks “modern masterpiece,” and strolls along to the next modern masterpiece. Neither a text nor a performance of Hamlet can be turned into a meme, yet those devoted to sophistication-signaling have no trouble coming up with a meme-response to a still from Laurence Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s play. A still from The Maltese Falcon is vulnerable to the same treatment. So is a collection of Emily Dickenson’s poems. Complexity has no defense against those who defend themselves against it with the stratagems of simplification.

G. K. Chesterton saw in complexity a value so obvious he never felt obliged to justify it. He believed in complexity just as he believed in the endlessly complex tenets of the Church, and his faith led him to the thought that “the riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.” After a trip to the United States, he wrote a book called What I Saw in America, 1922. Though he liked much of what he saw, he came to doubt that American democracy was truly democratic. In his view, “the highest point of democratic idealism and conviction was towards the end of the eighteenth century.” Aware that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder, Chesterton nonetheless managed to admire him for declaring that “all men are created equal.” Since Jefferson’s time, he believed, science had undermined the foundation of religious belief that sustains the democratic ideal; moreover, science provided rationales for the notion that all people are not created equal. Only a revival of Christian faith can save America from its anti-democratic tendencies, according to Chesterton.

I do not believe this. Secular souls can embrace equality as fervently as religious ones do, and among the believers there have always been proponents of racism, hierarchy, and oligarchy. Chesterton gives us no airtight argument that democracy rests on Christian faith. What he does is entangle the ideas of belief and disbelief, religion and science, equality and inequality in a complex pattern that challenges us to disentangle it. To meet the challenge, we must think clearly, temper thought with intuition, and trust our best instincts. The complexity of the task makes it worth the trouble.