Reducing complexity to absurdity

I first learned about a “spherical cow” in my graduate school, and that too as a humorous take on the tendency of theoretical physicists to reduce complexity by making absurd assumptions. It goes something like this. If you want to model the shape, structure or actions of a cow, you would need complex equations and intractable calculations. Some of those may be impossible to compute. But the computing problem is resolved if you imagine that a cow is perfect sphere and follows simpler equations. While I am not sure if anyone has actually modeled a cow as a sphere, but the idea is a metaphor in theoretical physics and chemistry to reduce complex phenomenon into something drastically simple so calculations could be made easier. Of course, the simplification is purely illustrative. It serves no real purpose and cannot capture anything real. While it certainly makes equations easier to compute, the results are not relevant or meaningful. Fortunately, no serious theoretical physicist takes the idea of a spherical cow seriously.

But apparently there are others who do.

When the problems and events of a country of 220 million people are discussed in cricketing metaphors, I wonder if we have taken the spherical cow approach of politics a little too seriously. It is one thing to make an offhand remark, but when on the eve of a historic political event, the Prime Minister says that he will play till the last ball, what does it mean? Why is the political process (real or flawed) is reduced to a nail-biting cricket match? Why are elected representatives of a country, that has very real social, economic, security and political challenges, imagined as mere players on a cricket field? It is already troubling enough that the Prime Minister largely speaks in cricket terms, but the fact that those who surround him from his party, and those who despise him, speak often in terms of “bouncers”, “full tosses”, “sixers” and “wickets”. The leading newspaper, upon the success of the no confidence motion, had its editorial titled “Back to the Pavilion”.

The reduction of a political process, and its manifestations, into simplistic cricketing terms is bad for three main reasons. First, it is a non-serious approach to a very serious issue of governance. Governance is not a match, or a competition, or can be reduced to a game of balls, bats and wickets. Unlike a cricket match, real lives are at stake here, and so is the future of a country. Our people deserve policy, and debate on the policy, not non-sense posturing about playing till the last ball.

Second, the idea of politics and political process as a sporting event reduces it to binaries of winning or losing. Winning at all costs, a Trumpian approach to politics, is both extremely dangerous and antithetical to what leadership is. The US has lived through this evil ideology in the very recent past. This approach paves the way to unconstitutional actions (as we saw in the beginning of April) and reduces each policy action as a new trick to defeat the opponent, as opposed to one that focuses on taking care of the people in the country and thinking about important local and global issues of the time.

Finally, a reductionist approach to governance using cricket metaphors is incredibly exclusive and takes away from an inclusive engagement by all sectors of society. For someone who is unfamiliar with what an “inswinger” is, what a “no-ball” means, or what the “third umpire” does, the entire discourse is gibberish.

A lot has happened in the country in the last month and half. We need to unpack it through deep self-reflection and intellectual engagement – not through simplistic terms of “game over” or “wait for the second innings”. One hopes that we can graduate beyond cows, sacred or spherical, as we take stock of our present and the future. 

 

Published in The Express Tribune, April 12^th, 2022.

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