The Reality of the Abstract

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The Reality of the Abstract

We tend to live our lives in what might be called “the immediate and the concrete.” But much of what shapes our destiny operates at a different level—through forces and patterns that are not directly visible, yet whose effects are everywhere.

This raises a fundamental question: How real are such forces? More generally, how real are the abstractions through which we understand our world?

My position is that well-conceived abstractions are very real—indeed, often more fundamentally real than the concrete events through which they are expressed.

Consider a simple example. Walking along the street, you hear two people having a conversation. They are speaking in English. Is the exchange of sounds—the concrete noises—more real than “the English language”?

Consider also the American tradition of exploding fireworks on the Fourth of July. Any particular fireworks display is a concrete event, happening in a specific place at a specific time. But the tradition itself—the pattern carried forward year after year—is in many ways the deeper reality. The individual displays come and go, but the tradition persists, shaping behavior across generations.

Or consider this: there are billions of human beings walking around on this planet. Are those individual organisms more real than the human genome? In some ways, the genome is the deeper reality, because it is the enduring pattern of which each individual is but a temporary embodiment.

Or suppose you observe a person over time and notice consistency in his actions and character. Is that person’s “character” less real than the individual actions from which you infer it? Or is it, in fact, more real—because it is the underlying pattern that explains those actions?

In each of these cases, the abstraction is not merely a mental invention. It refers to something that operates in the real world, shaping events in powerful ways.

We see this also in collective human phenomena. Consider what happens during a panic. Individual people, acting out of fear, rush to withdraw their money from banks. But the panic itself—the collective force moving through the population—cannot be understood simply by looking at each individual in isolation. Something real exists at the systemic level, shaping events and producing consequences that affect millions of lives.

To see only the individual pieces is to miss the patterns that connect them. And those patterns are not imaginary. They are part of reality.

This does not mean that every abstraction is equally real. Some abstractions exist only because human beings think in those terms. But others refer to forces and processes that operate independently of whether we recognize them.
Biological evolution, for example, shaped life on Earth for billions of years before any human mind understood its existence. The evolutionary process did not depend upon Darwin’s insight in order to operate. It was real long before it was recognized.

Similarly, when we speak of economic panics, cultural traditions, or social movements, we are referring to patterns that exert real influence in the world. These forces cannot be reduced to any single individual, yet they shape the behavior of individuals and the course of events.

We recognize their reality not because we can see them directly, but because we can see their effects. Just as we do not see the wind itself, but see the trees bending under its influence, so too we infer the presence of larger forces from the patterns they create.

To deny the reality of such forces simply because they are abstract would leave us blind to some of the most powerful determinants of our collective fate.

Here is an analogy that may help clarify the relationship between the concrete and the abstract.
Imagine the surface of the sea. At the concrete level, what exists are individual drops of water. Each drop moves up and down, largely in place.

But when you step back, you see something else entirely: a wave moving across the surface.

The wave is real. It moves. It has power. It shapes what happens to each drop of water.

Yet the wave is not identical to any individual drop of water. It exists at a different level of reality. It is a pattern moving through the water, using the water as its medium.

So it is with many of the forces that shape our world. We can look at individual events and individual actors, and understand them at that level. But to understand the deeper forces shaping the overall pattern, we must look at a higher level—the level of the wave, not just the water.

This distinction between the enduring pattern and its temporary embodiments is essential to understanding many dimensions of our world.

The individual drops of water come and go, but the wave continues. Likewise, individual human beings and individual events pass into history, while the patterns that shape human affairs persist across generations.

Languages endure even as speakers die. Cultural traditions persist even as the individuals who embody them are replaced. Systems of belief, ways of organizing power, and patterns of behavior continue shaping the world in ways that individuals don’t well control.

This is why it is not enough to focus only on the visible events immediately before us. To understand what is happening in our world—and to understand what may happen next—we must learn to recognize the larger patterns moving through the human system.

The better we understand these forces and patterns, the better we understand the world we inhabit—and the greater our capacity to shape our future wisely.