reflections

Notes on Entropy at work

This may be the outline of something longer that I will write. Then again, i might give it up as being too complex for me to handle.

I have recently been listening to some free jazz. It is not easy listening. While there is coherence in the best of Ornette Coleman, for example, you have to pay attention or it just becomes noise.

I keep coming back to an observation about the history of music. There is a line of development in music that leads to an increasing degree of complexity. As more harmonic structures are allowed, or old conventions disallowed, the music inevitably became more complex. The final effort was to remove all sense of a tonality and music became only a series of notes generated by rules.

There is a similar tack in the visual arts as the conventions of older generations are discarded and we are left with an increasingly complex visual experience of Jackson Pollack.

In each case, there was a reaction as a "school" called Minimalism tried to restore some order and strip away the complexity and again make the music and the art accessible without having to pay the same degree of attention that you must pay to Coleman to fully appreciate the music. The arts had become the province of the aficionado and needed to be explained to the rest who only wondered "why does anyone think this is good."

Is this an example of entropy at work in a world outside the objective realm of thermodynamics? I think so.

The evolutionary history of this planet has been one of moving toward increasing complexity.

I would make the same observation about economy and politics. It has through the years, become increasingly complex. Even the growth in population makes that so. The Globalization of the economy is contributes So does the penchant of modern man to travel.

Just as complexity in music and art took it beyond the reach of the average viewer / listener so the complexities in economics and politics have taken them beyond the reach of the average voter. Just as in music and art, some try to reduce the complexity, to serve the economy and politics as something that all can easily understand.

The difference is that when minimal art and or music deliver tasteless pablum, only the individual is affected. In economics and politics, we are all affected. And, there is a very great danger that the new composer of our political future will be another Hitler.