Complexity is the norm, the natural state of the universe. Even simple primates like us have evolved to master the complex, the densely interwoven, the multifarious. Neuroscientists credit our right hemisphere, the holistic hemisphere, with our capacity to navigate the subtle nuances and intricacies of our continually changing circumstances. We enter a room, and right away we feel something is off; there is a “bad vibe” or an uneasiness to the atmosphere. The feeling emerges directly, and long before we are able to identify its source—and often we never actually locate the source, or we misidentify the source, indicting a feature that is salient but ultimately benign.
Intuition, that potent and spontaneous prod that can make us look up or suddenly change course, is our species’ response to complexity. And it is feeling that has the rudder. The right hemisphere is not adept at expressing itself conceptually—concepts being largely a linguistic, left-hemisphere creation—but has, over the eons, become a maestro of emotion. More can be carried atop a momentary impression, a fleeting feeling, than can be packed into a library’s worth of words.
One of the many paradoxes of modern civilization is that it involves a radical simplification of complexity. Despite its labyrinthine bureaucracies and its sparkly surface distractions, civilization replaces subtlety with garishness and nuance with coarseness. Hues that bleed into each other in novel and unpredictable tones are forcefully overlaid with granular categories, standardized and homogenized for maximum distribution, with a premium on the lowest common denominator. And so, we have reds and blues and greens and their approved variants, but we have no words for the densely shaded chromatic spaces between the dominant stripes of the rainbow. We have a single word for lavender, despite the infinity of colors enfolding a single flower.
