David Cowles
Dec 1, 2024
“Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess.”
When I was a bit younger, it was almost guaranteed that any major high school exam covering American History would include the question, “What were the causes of the American Civil War?”
In those days, if you wrote “Slavery” across your exam paper, handed it in and headed for the beach, you probably weren’t going to get college credit for your efforts. Today…?
But the question is a good one for several reasons:
It concerns something we still care about.
It allows for weighted consideration of economy, technology, ideology and culture.
It encourages the precocious student to reflect on the nature of causality per se, especially in the context of historical process.
The American Civil War did not spring unheralded from the head of Medusa but neither did it evolve with billiard-like efficiency. Two hours into exam time, you think, “Everything caused the Civil War…and nothing caused it,” and now you’re on to something! Now you’ve earned that college credit.
Marxists call this ‘over-determination’ – events are the intersections of multiple causal chains. Like peaks and troughs on the screen of an oscillator, some waves reinforce, others dampen, and some cancel. You are face to face with the ‘3 Body Problem’, dumbed down for us social science majors.
On one hand, history is not magic. It does not rely on spells and incantations; nor does wishing make things so, not even “when you wish upon a star,” Pinocchio. On the other hand, spells and incantations need to be studied as phenomena in their own right and the wishes of various population groups can be a powerful historical force. Yup, it’s the 3 Body Problem, for sure.
Everything interacts with everything else. We understand each interaction on its own, but we are flummoxed by the search for an overarching algorithm. For all our erudition, we are ultimately forced to conclude that anything could have happened…and been explained in terms of everything else.
This leads to an odd cognitive state in which we can predict nothing…but explain everything. The eyes in back of my head see 20/20; my other eyes…not so much.
The 2024 US Presidential election is a case in point. Long expected to be the ‘closest race ever’, it wasn’t close at all. But no one knew that 5 days before. Sure, some may have guessed right, but guessing is not knowing…even if you think it is. It’s impossible to know the future; that’s what makes it future. So no one knew!
No one, that is, except a certain woman in Iowa. She had been polling Iowans for decades and had a reputation for uncanny accuracy. Iowa was not even one of the so-called Battleground States. It was Trump +8% in 2016 and in 2020 and in most 2024 polls.
Suddenly, on the weekend before the election, pollster Ann Selzer announced in the Des Moines Register that she had detected a major groundswell of support for Harris: Iowa was now Harris +3%.
If that had happened in Iowa, TV networks would have been able to call the nationwide race for Harris by 10PM EST. Suffice to say, they didn’t! The Harris-Walz Wave turned out to be a trough. Iowa ended up Trump +13%. Selzer was off by a whopping 16%. How’s that for a margin of error?
The first polls close in some states at 7PM EST. We were on the edge of our seats. If the Selzer Effect were real, it would be evident in the first returns from Indiana and Kentucky. Could one person be so right and everyone else so wrong? 7:05, 7:20, 7:35 – nothing unexpected in the data! No sign of any last minute migration from Trump to Harris…because there wasn’t one.
But if there had been such a shift, would that have meant that Selzer was ‘right’? Not necessarily. A broken clock displays the exact time…twice a day; but referring to those moments, we don’t say ‘the clock was right’.
A football co-captain calls, “Tails” and it is tails! But we don’t say that the captain ‘got it right’. Being right is more than just being correct. Right is anchored in reason. Why did you think what you thought and was that reasoning valid and/or supported by the relevant evidence?
Back to Iowa. Had it gone Harris’ way, folks would have said that Selzer was right. But note, it’s the same Selzer. The outcome, unrelated to her work, just happened to be different.
Now libraries are filling up with articles explaining Trump’s triumph; but no one was prepared to publish such a column on the Monday before. The fact is, we are always flying blind into an unknown and undetermined future; looking back, ‘it was always obvious all along’. But to whom? God? Or not even?
Science has a name for this state of affairs; it’s called Kaos (chaos)! Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess. Our Civil War exam taker figured it out: if everything causes everything else then nothing causes anything! Anything overdetermined is everything undetermined, and by the exact same amount.
Yet events do not seem entirely random either. They relate to one another but not in mutually reinforcing causal waves. But what’s the alternative? Short of pure mysticism, how else can we account for the regularities of experience?
Every event is an expression of the entire Universe. It is a synthesis of what has been and what is coming to be. The event itself samples and weights everything that is and projects it forward into what is to become. Every event is a dissipative membrane, templating settled matters of fact with pure possibility.
Events live in the space between what has passed away and what may yet come to pass. The event itself has no past or future but the event swims in a sea of time. Even then is what we mean by Present. As such every event must begin by executing judgment on the world it inherits (the past).
To act as judge, our event must include elements of a different ontological order. We can only judge the contingent from the perspective of the necessary, the actual from the perspective of the ideal. This realization was Plato’s greatest gift to Western philosophy, and it is what connects Plato to Nietzsche, strange bedfellows indeed.
A box of Cracker Jacks cannot execute judgment on a Beethoven symphony. Judgment must be from the transcendent perspective of eternal and universal values (e.g. Beauty, Truth, Justice).
Only ‘what is not of this world’ can judge ‘what is of this world’. Jesus nailed it during his brief interview with Pontius Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world…the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the Truth.” (John 18: 36 – 37)
Scripture doesn’t give Pilate his due. He was no slouch. He answered Jesus in his best Oxbridge accent: “What is truth?” thereby earning himself posthumous degrees emeritus from 3 Ivy League colleges.
The creative advance is always fueled by the desire for Good. “I set before you life and death; therefore choose life.” (Deut. 30: 19) However, we live in an alienated, entropic, post-utopian world. Our goals are pure, but our pursuit of those goals may not be. We do not always follow through on our good intentions.
Because of this, there’s often “a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.” In other words, we can’t get out of our own way.
Accordingly, as we pursue our initial objective, we entertain new objectives along the way. We get distracted. “What I wish to do, I do not do; what I hate, I do.” (Romans 7: 19) Our beautiful sweater ends up more like a bundle of yarn. And so the academic discipline known as History is born.
David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com.
