Causes No Longer
If,
in Chaos Theory,
for sensitivity to initial conditions, we substitute
sensitivity to final conditions,
we are in the form of predestination,
which is the form of fate.
Poetic language also lives with predestination,
with the imminence of its own ending
and of reversibility between the ending and the beginning.
it is predestined in this sense
-it is an unconditional event,
without meaning and consequence and which
draws its whole being
from the dizzying whirl of resolution.
It is certainly not the form
of our present history and yet
there is an affinity between the immanence
of poetic development
and the immanence of the chaotic development
which is ours today,
the unfolding of events
which are themselves also
without meaning and consequence
and in which
-with effects substituting for causes
-there are no longer any causes,
but only effects.
The world is there, effectively.
There is no reason for this,
and God is dead.
The Illusion of the End, by Jean Baudrillard, trans. by Chris Turner, page 121
You’ve heard of the butterfly effect, how a single butterfly’s wings in the Indonesian jungle may cause a hurricane off of St. Kits in the Caribbean? To refresh our understanding of Chaos Theory, Britannica has this to say:
…a diversity of systems have been studied that behave unpredictably despite their seeming simplicity and the fact that the forces involved are governed by well-understood physical laws. The common element in these systems is a very high degree of sensitivity to initial conditions and to the way in which they are set in motion.
Chaos is a state of effects, effects untraceable to their cause. “Chaos effect” serves as metaphor for a condition without overarching principle, absent a prime mover according to which actions can be attributed.
Like the live street interviews which Jimmy Kimmel conducts outside of the studio. Americans encountered on the street are asked simple questions. The wild-assed answers are often not even wrong, they emerge from the mashup of a mind that clearly is “in orbit” having left any grounded frame of reference. These interviewed Americans appear rational, until, – until a simple question is asked. The absurd is naturalized.
Such demonstrations are humorous material for a late night television show. However the state of a society, intellectually as chaotic as smoke in a cloud chamber, is horrifying given the demands of a functioning democracy.
Imagine with me if you can a similar chaos, but a chaos that is embraced, like that of a poem. When I read poetry I subconsciously step outside of reason, that manner of thinking shaped by education and culture, in order to allow the language to speak. My reason shuts-up for a while, so that I can be swept away by the poet’s language. The language of poetry is sensitive, to ignite my mind/my thoughts. My take-away from a poem is up to me, transforming with each occasion of reading a poem. T. S. Eliot’s The Dry Salvages offers something different today, by comparison to my first discovery of the poem some 30 years ago. Every select word and chosen line, nudges me along, in a predestined direction. The destination of the poem is in the words, has been waiting there all along. Waiting until the reader is ready.
“The world,” the external-real, is just there – without rhyme or reason. And failing abysmally against everything I had hoped, I have yet to discover any guarantor of overarching reason, insurance that “all will be well”. Everything, absolutely everything just is.
There’s just “us chickens.” And poetry.
Stanza 2 from The Dry Salvages:
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.
CLICK HERE if you’d like to read the entire poem.
8 thoughts on “Causes No Longer”
I would disagree with the premise of chaos theory only in that the root of any event can be determined if enough information is present, even if it is based upon the flapping of a butterfly’s wing. Our minds (and the current iteration of computing) are not capable of that kind of data analysis, but the information is there.
A quote attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler around 1770 reads:
“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”
There is evidence that he did not actually write these specific words, but they do encapsulate his general premise regarding democracy.
What I take from the basic intent of those words is that people eventually vote for their immediate selves, that the future is of little value in the decision making process. I believe this to be true, especially in the current iteration of the democratic experiment. The majority of voters did not vote with reason and aforethought, they voted with their emotions which included a large dose of unqualified fear. Fear manufactured by those with an insatiable appetite for power and greed.
It’s very difficult for me to find the upside of this life, at least in the greater sense of the world at large. There are certainly moments in the very small pond of friends and family that bring sparks of joy, but my cynicism overshadows those bits of light.
I too used to find humor in the insipid ignorance of the Jimmy Kimmel sidewalk interviews, but no more. They are now just another set of bellwethers (perhaps the beating of a butterfly’s wings) predicting our imminent downfall, our expulsion from an Eden that we did not understand and never fully appreciated.
To imagine that a butterfly’s wings could cause a storm half way around the world is a very difficult stretch of the mind when you consider the fact that the sun exerts many trillions of times more energy than a small flap of a butterfly’s wing.
Cause and effect can only be surmised. Though it is easy to imagine that even an unintended, minor event can inexorably alter the future. Let’s say you are walking down the sidewalk of a busy street on a rainy day. A raindrop falls into your eye, so you stop for a second to blink. The woman who was walking next to you suddenly disappears because the car that skidded on the wet pavement and jumped the curb threw her 50 feet.
If the condensation in the cloud had not formed at a precise moment, at a weight that would cause it to drop at a specific velocity and land in your eye at that exact moment, you too would be dead.
We are all at the mercy of the cosmos. Even the tiniest of things can change the future. Perhaps the woman who was killed had been on the cusp of a breakthrough that would have saved thousands of lives or perhaps she was a terrorist planning something awful. The future was changed for good or bad, but either way it was altered.
And so yes, Gary, the imperceptible gust of air from a butterfly’s wing could make an enormous difference, but we will never know.
Cause and Effect is so well established that there’s no counter-evidence, as long as that is the frame of reference which we need, or choose to utilize. On the other hand, witchcraft, magic was persuasive, a frame of reference that was long used. Want to know whether now is the “right” time to launch a war – call upon the local shaman to kill a chicken, and have a look at the guts.
Wow, if a butter fly can cause all that then what must millions of cars rushing more than 60 mph be doing? It is very complex isn’t it?
Gary, millions of cars burning gasoline, creating urban contamination, etc., etc., are hardly comparable. A butterfly is an event too small in scale to attract any notice, any analysis, or report. A good example would have been the summary execution of an agitator by Pilate the Roman Governor of Judea, Palestine. That was unremarkable by any standard, simply the way Rome managed affairs. Thousands of similar executions took place when and where necessary. Nevertheless the stories wrapped around that event, several generations later contributed to the fracturing of Rome’s hegemony, to the ascendancy of “the church” as the center of social organization for generations to come. That was a butterfly effect.
I totally understand what the butterfly effect is and what is meant by using it. I guess because of the enormous amounts of energy involved it would be more believable if we said the Atomic Bomb effect. Many times people use the butterfly effect to say that it could cause an Einstein to be lost, they never say it could cause a Hitler or Staline to be created.
Your complaint is frivolous. Under the certain circumstances, small shifts/changes can have world changing effects. Maybe Stalin’s step-dad in a vodka fueled black mood beat him when he was seven, which became a turning point… I do not know.
Of course negative outcomes as well as beneficial can occur. Any evaluation of the outcome, liked or disliked, is not the point.