Ensemble Effects, or Why Secular Church Sucks (9/30)
I'm writing 30 essays in 30 days, this is number 9.
Repeatedly, you hear the same doomed inquiry: why do believers have a monopoly on church? Why can't we just get together in a nice building, play music, celebrate the enormity of the universe, and leave out all of that fear of God stuff? That sounds nice.
But, as my chess teacher is fond of saying, theory and practice are the same in theory, but not in practice. Experiments in secular church seem to result in short-term happiness and long-term nothing. Pretty soon, most people stop going, and the few remaining are torn apart by schisms over whether the tone should be anti-religious or para-religious. Apparently, you don't even need to have religion to have a religious schism.
So, how can we solve this? What is secular church missing? Well, as the (extremely entertaining) above-linked article points out, successful religious communities tend to demand costly sacrifice. Requirements solidify group identity. Perhaps to get secular church working you could institute some costly sacrifice and get the whole thing working, like a strict tithing system.
But maybe not. Maybe you'd find that wasn't enough. Okay, you ask your congregants, what would help? Well, having it in a Panera Bread is kind of dispiriting. Could we get a cathedral, or something? So, you rent a cathedral—you’re in the Czech Republic, so this is super cheap—and, mysteriously, that doesn't work either.
It's because you're still missing the point. You thought you could take out what you thought of as the extra stuff. Y'know, the hellfire, the weight of history, the burden of familial tradition, the incense, and so on. But maybe those were all crucial load-bearing elements. Maybe they're all part of an interdependent gestalt that's very difficult to reproduce or even map out. (Some religious people might speculate that God is partially responsible.)
There's a term for this kind of thing in marijuana pharmacology: ensemble effects. At one point, it was thought that THC was the sole active ingredient in marijuana. This would be convenient. We could just manufacture THC at low cost and get all the psychoactivity we're looking for. Apparently, not so: the other compounds we thought were just random plant shit are important components. Simple THC gets you some of the marijuana fun you love, but not all of it.
I think ensemble effects are everywhere. And they're typically exposed when we try to optimize for some factor which we think is the key factor, or hide something we think is an unfortunate appurtenance. It's one thing you miss when you See Like a State. Let’s call this the Optimizer’s Folly.
There are all sorts of examples besides marijuana and church. (Although that's already an impressively large area of inquiry.)
Here's a cute one. The Vienna Sausage Company of Chicago operated out of a non-purpose-built space, which entailed some awkward maneuvering. Before the sausages were cooked, this one guy had to accompany the uncooked meat on a circuitous tour of the factory—getting to the smokehouse was really inefficient. But, eventually, they built up enough capital for a new factory, in which these laborious trips were no longer required. They built it, and there was an immediate inexplicable decline in the quality of their product. Two years later, they figured it out: that circuitous trip through the factory warmed the sausages before cooking, which improved their taste and texture, because ???. At great expense, they built a warming room to recreate what they thought was an unnecessary hindrance.
Another: when I started learning the piano, I was neurotic about the sound of my playing. It bothered me that the sustain pedal made this little whooshing noise, no matter how quietly I pedaled. I mentioned this to my teacher. He told me that this pedal noise was, in fact, part of the piano's sound, and that it'd sound weird if it wasn't there. "Go back and listen closely to the studio recordings you like," he said, "you didn’t notice it before, but you’ll hear it." And I did. It was this subtle punctuation mark placed between harmonic changes. It was nice, especially in sparser pieces, like this fantastic performance of Gymnopedie 1. Would the music, in fact, sound weird without it? It seems plausible. I'll defer to my teacher, whose job involves obsessing over little whooshing noises.
The Optimizer's Folly happens a lot in art-making. Some enterprising person comes along who makes boundary-breaking performance art. And it looks like there's a central quality to their work that makes it vital, which can be easily imitated, or just tweaked slightly. Presto: the market is filled with insanely cringeworthy performances conducted by people who mistook the broken boundary for the combination of mysterious vital forces that make, say, Marina Abramovic as effective as she is.
The upshot is simple. Don't assume you know what the load-bearing element of a process is. It's not obvious. There are often (perhaps usually) subtle contributing factors to any process complicated than flipping a pancake. Trying to make an optimized version of the thing you 'understand' might just be a fancy way of breaking it.
When Soylent first came out I spoke to a few scientists to ask what was wrong with his concept. If we know, hypothetically, what each individual nutrient, protein and vitamin in our food does for our body and the mechanism behind it, why can't we extract it and put it in a shake that gives you everything you need? They said it doesn't work that way.
The example they kept coming back to was Lycopene, which you get mostly from tomatoes and without which your risk of prostate cancer apparently goes through the roof. If you take it out of the tomato, it doesn't work, not because the molecule isn't responsible for the phenomenon, but because there's something about it being in the tomato that makes it different. Didn't know there was a name for this until now.
Thanks for writing these, I've been getting a lot out of them.