Hail Caesar!

Philosophy, region, and the philosophy of religion can appear in the most unexpected places. Why just the other week, I was watching the movie Hail Caesar!, when a insight hit me. The movie features both priests discussing the Trinity and communists, led by Herbert Marcuse, discussing the dialectic, which is itself unusual for a movie. The latter made me nostalgic for graduate school. However, the nature of both concepts -- the Trinity and Hegelian dialectic -- are complex, which means "hard to explain." In both cases people -- both Christians and communists -- argue hilariously. The sum total of both debates can be summed up by the Rabbi: "These men are screwballs!" 

But the key insight is that, viewed from a certain perspective, neither the Christians nor the communists are screwballs. Instead, both are using the ill-suited but until recently the only tools available -- propositional logic and prose -- are inadequate for the task. Instead there are what are called feedback relationships that pervade, comprise, and control social systems including political systems. These relationships, being complex and essentially mathematical (actually differential equations), are pervasive in electrical engineering but not so much in religion, politics, philosophy, or economics (PPE).

The question then becomes, how best to bring this insight into PPE? There are several insights that bear mentioning. First, the temporal and causal perspective is increased beyond what science traditionally can handle. Successful science experiments usually are rigorously controlled so that their causal factors and results can be clearly identified. While a useful enterprise when skillfully executed, such experiments are of limited utility for complex social systems that evolve over extended, multi-generation time periods.  Recent results on wicked problems have begun to characterize how to think about complex, temporally extended policy problems. Narrative techniques are especially helpful to think about social structuring and policy problems, as with the Bible, but more about that later.