Devilry in the Details

When Crispin Sartwell vented on X about poor customer service involving a car that was unresponsive to a key fob, I’d just returned from my VW dealer in North Jersey to get a battery replaced for a fob for our Beetle. You can put a new battery in yourself, though VW recommends you go through them, to lower the chance of an incorrect installation, and get them a few dollars in mark-up. The guy at the parts desk made a joke about the $10 job having a huge price tag if denominated in a currency such as that of Venezuela, where his mother came from, and I told him I’d been to Venezuela three times in the 1980s, as my father sold beans there. We lamented the current state of that country.

I’ve been contemplating what’s involved in dealing with small problems, mechanical and otherwise. The other morning, the door on our new Fisher and Paykel fridge was open; its seal has a stiffness that requires a hard push to close it properly. There’s supposed to be a door alarm, but that doesn’t seem to be working. The fridge is supposed to be connected to wi-fi, but getting that set-up required several attempts, and when done, didn’t seem to have any relevance to the door alarm. I can, however, now theoretically change the temperatures in my fridge and freezer compartments from a world away.

Unlike my wife, I’m not great with mechanical things, though I have the ability to navigate paperwork, not least in recently becoming an Austrian citizen. That skill set has its limits, as when I recently failed to notice that, in seeking to collect a few hundred dollars in stock as administrator of my uncle’s estate, and using the option of waiving the medallion signature guarantee, whereby a bank certifies that I am who I say, I needed to not only pay a fee for that waiver, which I did, but write the check number in the space provided for the signature guarantee, as noted in small print.

In 1999, I wrote an article for Reason magazine titled (by an editor) “Is God in the Details?” This was an article about physics, but the title drew on idiomatic statements from figures in architecture and art, often stipulating the Devil, but in any case making a point about how details matter in larger outcomes. The physics in my article is somewhat dated now, but the broader point—that drawing religious conclusions from physics findings is an undertaking fraught with risks of self-delusion—still stands. It occurs to me, also, that writing a “cover story,” such as this, for a magazine, is something I haven’t experienced, or even aspired to, in decades, an indicator of how print has been eclipsed by digital.

Small problems sometimes combine into large, societal problems. I’ve an electric leaf-blower, much better for the environment than pollution-spewing gas ones, but lacking their power and requiring long recharge times (or a property one can walk around with a long cord). We’ve had a landscaping crew handle our blowing the last couple of years, spewing out emissions and making a lot of noise; electric blowers don’t have the juice for professional work, and doing it myself would be much more burdensome than paying them (also to mow the lawn, for which my mower’s no cleaner anyway). Battery power’s improved fast in recent years, but not enough to make garden power tools green.

Another example of a large-scale issue arising from numerous personal ones: Political fights over voter ID have boiled down to Republicans demanding ID to combat voter fraud, and Democrats opposing it as unnecessary (since voter fraud is rare) and moreover as likely to throw out legitimate votes (as many eligible voters wouldn’t have documents on hand to prove citizenship). Both parties have self-interested motives in this debate. In my opinion, the Democrats are right that numerous legitimate votes would be thrown out because of ID requirements, and that this would be bad for the functioning of democracy. Less clear is whether the Republican Party would be the net beneficiary of such an outcome, as it’s possible that many Republicans—perhaps more than Democrats—would have difficulty regularly providing a passport or birth certificate; this may be expected, in fact, from an older demographic less likely to have traveled recently, or to have kept track of documents over time.

In the 1960s, social scientists came up with the concept of “wicked” problems. These are social problems that are hard to resolve because they’ve certain tricky characteristics, such as lacking an agreed-on definition of what the problem is and what would constitute a successful solution. An offshoot of this idea is “super-wicked” problems, which have complications such as time pressure and that the people trying to solve it may also help cause it. Voter ID and climate change may be wicked or super-wicked, not least because they both involve innumerable small problems that people face in everyday life.

—Follow Kenneth Silber on X: @kennethsilber