Articles

This excerpt is from Rebecca's award winning book The Watchman's Rattle - learn more here

On the morning of August 29, 2004, I had an important insight. I remember the date because I was driving to the birth of my nephew Ben.

As I was rushing to the hospital, I was typing the address on my GPS screen, plugging my Blackberry into the cigarette lighter, getting my iPod into the docking station, plugging my laptop into a second outlet, putting my telephone headset and seatbelt on, and trying to drink my coffee. All the while keeping a two-ton vehicle moving at sixty miles an hour on the road.

That's when it hit me.

Life has become really complicated.

There was a time not long ago when all I had was a simple checking and savings account. But today, in addition to these, I find myself trying to keep up with CDs, bonds, mutual funds, REITs, ETFs, Spyders, IRAs, pensions, social security, and commodities such as oil, which seems to affect the value of every other thing. I have four different credit cards, each earning mystery points, air­line miles, free rental cars, extra nights at hotels, and global discounts I can no longer keep track of. What's more, my credit card companies have now become banks and travel agencies want me to order movie tickets, make dinner reservations, and write checks through them.

And then there's the big picture.

According to the U.S. Department Of State, there are forty-five active terrorist groups in the Middle East who want to kill me. On a good day I'm able to name three. And as long as I'm on a roll, let me be the first to admit that I can't figure out whether a national health care program is a good thing for me or my country because I don't have the time to study it. In fact, I don't feel qualified to vote on most of the initiatives on a ballot anymore. Although I worry about the effect that global warming and mounting government debt will have on my children's future, I no longer know what to do about them.

The world is starting to look a lot like the inside of my car.

But consider this: From an evolutionary perspective, social progress moves fast. It takes only weeks to develop the next iteration of a cell phone, law, or mortgage. And major discoveries in science, from the human genome to new fuel cells and galaxies in outer space, are also occurring at a remarkable pace. But our brains-the apparatus that must process all this new information­ evolve over millions of years. So while the world is changing in picoseconds, my brain is struggling to keep up.

But what happens if it can't? Can complexity race ahead of the brain's bio­logical capabilities?

In his book Making Things Work, Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute and professor at Harvard University, ex­plains the reason complexity poses a threat: "The rule of thumb is that the complexity of the organism has to match the complexity of the environment at all scales in order to increase the likelihood of survival." He then explains why the odds feel stacked against us: "What is a complex environment? A complex environment is one that demands picking the right choice in order to succeed. If there are many possibilities that are wrong, and only a few that are right, we have to be able to choose the right ones in order to succeed."

Many more wrong possibilities than right ones? Coming from a soft-spoken physicist at Harvard, that sounds ominous.

But here's the million-dollar question: Is escalating complexity just a modern­ day phenomenon? Or did people living in advanced Mayan, Roman, Khmer, and other civilizations develop the same contentious relationship with progress?

And even if they did, so what? That doesn't mean it had anything to do with their collapse.

Or does it?