Columnist Rachel Beckett is a Stroud-based writer and thinker who is concerned about making the world a better place.
An author, publisher and mother, Rachel will be sharing her thoughts with readers every month.

DID you ever attempt one of those children’s puzzles where you have to copy a picture square-by-square?

The image has a superimposed grid of 16 squares, each of which you must copy individually.

It’s harder than it looks. You need to compare lengths and proportions.

Even so, the finished picture usually shows some distortion and needs adjusting.

These days we just scan a picture with no fuss - in full colour, and not a grid in sight. That’s got to be better, right?

Well, maybe. The scan’s done for us - all that’s left is to look at the picture - unless we’re too busy with the demands of technology!

Where is the role for our comprehension, sense of proportion and judgement in all this?

Actually, to capture the picture the scanner has to take a similar approach to the children’s puzzle - it reduces the whole thing to a detailed grid of pixels in powers of 16 (red, green and blue come in 256 flavours, for example).

But the scanned picture has been broken down and analysed so completely as to eliminate any need for judgement.

Science and technology have come a long way with this approach.

It’s amazing what you can do by isolating elements and understanding them.

Yet taking something apart doesn’t guarantee you’ll find answers.

Even after further dismantling you may be none the wiser.

Even so, I’ve noticed requests for ‘granularity’ popping up in contexts normally associated with intuitive human judgement.

There’s an impetus to divide and separate, seeking ever more differentiation and detail. The result? You are denied a proportionate overview and the chance to get things in perspective.

This untrammelled reductionism ignores the possibility that the answer may actually lie at the macro level, in ‘the big picture’.

One of the great strengths of the arts and humanities is that they recognise emergent properties - ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’.

Just as the grid-drawing exercise is inaccurate without an overview, analysis is futile without an awareness of context and how issues relate to each other - we might call this relativity.

Interestingly, a jpeg is nearer to this than some other graphics files.

Rather than recording each bit of data in isolation, it’s programmed to consider and assess groups of data collectively, looking at emergent properties and saving memory space.

A visual artist takes the copying-puzzle approach, but with only one box - the paper!

When painting realistic watercolours of people’s houses, I used to find myself constantly comparing shapes and proportions - the size, shape and angle of the chimney in relation to the roof, for example.

Surely we need less ‘granularity’ and more openness to emergent properties if we are to understand the major issues of our time - climate change, social disintegration, and political sclerosis.

By nurturing our ability to think in a connective, creative way we’ll gain a fuller understanding - and the vitality to tackle the challenges we face together.