Here's a fun (Utopian) experiment

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By the power vested in me by Mother’s Day, I dragged my family to the Hancock Shaker Village outside of Pittsfield, Mass. We spent a beautiful spring day exploring the grounds and buildings of an 18th-century village, remnants of a Utopian experiment that took root in New England and beyond during the Second Great Awakening.

The Shakers in America

As Utopian experiments go, the Shakers may be the most enduring. Conceived in Manchester, England, in 1747, the Shaker lifestyle was characterized by industry, celibacy, and pacifism. They promoted equality of the races and sexes, embraced new technologies, and engaged in elaborate dances. Today, two Shakers remain at a village in Sabbathday Lake, Maine.

The Shakers may be best known for their furniture, which prioritized natural wood over veneer and ornate carvings. They saw embellishments as attempts to distract from a design’s underlying corruption. But “if the design was well conceived, an effect of rare charm was achieved,” writes Edward Demming Andrews in Shaker Furniture: The Craftsmanship of an American Communal Sect. 

While at their peak in the mid-19th century they comprised only a few thousand members, their impact on culture has been outsize, having influenced both the Bauhaus and mid-century modern design movements. 

Why stop there? Here are two Shaker maxims and how they apply to communication.

Language is both necessary and useful. According to the linguist S.I. Hayakawa, language conveys information and emotion through statements of fact, inferences, and judgements. Not only that, but language extends our nervous systems: we benefit from others’ hard-won experiences simply by reading, listening, and observing. Societal trust may be a necessary precondition to justify the high evolutionary cost of language development.

A focus on utility urges economy of language. “Never use two words where one will do,” is sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson, and George Orwell wrote, “Never use a long word where a short word will do.” Never x when you could y, in other words, where y = x (less is more).

We so often give into the conventions of whatever medium we are using, particularly when we’re communicating for a practical or technical purpose. But this maxim teaches us that utility does not supplant beauty. Far from mere frippery, beauty can coexist with utility and can, in fact, be useful in its own right.

Simplicity is prized in communication. Simple concepts are easier to understand. They require the brain to use less energy. Simple ideas are more easily spread. It’s tempting to equate simplicity with honesty and truth.

But something I’ve learned from years of working to make science more accessible is that simplification can be a dangerous business. Just as an oversimplified spoon may spill hot soup in your lap, an idea that is oversimplified can do real damage.

It’s often necessary to sacrifice precision when communicating for a broad audience, but never accuracy. Simplicity must work in service of clarifying fact.

How can you tell if an idea is oversimplified? It’s helpful to know the common ways in which things can go wrong: hasty generalizations, dropped qualifiers, correlation conflated with causation.  

The dictionary gives us an important clue. Merriam-Webster defines oversimplification as “to simplify to such an extent as to bring about distortion, misunderstanding, or error.” In other words, you’ll know that you’ve oversimplified when the damage is done. 

To me, this is an argument for trying an idea out on someone else, be it an editor or a stand-in for your audience. Strong communicators can embody their audience’s perspective, but there’s no substitute for seeing how an idea lands before it’s ready for prime time.

My take: If we’re using language thoughtfully to communicate a fact, idea, or emotion; and if we’re doing so accurately and in a way that deserves trust, the bedrock on which the whole endeavor is built; we shouldn’t hesitate to make it beautiful.

More on this topic:

• This profile of the last remaining Shakers tugged at my heartstrings.

• A 1997 Bureau of Labor Statistics paper applies Shaker principles to web design. (Even back then, they knew pdfs are good for printing and not much else.)

• Randall Munroe used simple language to explain Einstein’s theories of relativity in “The Space Doctor’s Big Idea.”

• This episode of the podcast Complexity from the Santa Fe Institute explores the role of language in human evolution.