Contingency or Coincidence?—Part 2

In fact, I like to speculate about what our world might be like, if a given major event had not occurred. For example, what if that contingent asteroid 65 million years ago had not blasted into Earth? At the time, the dinosaurs ruled the planet, and they had successfully done so for more than a hundred million years. (Try to wrap your head around that time frame: that's some 500 times longer than we humans have been a species!) At thatsmall mammals—from which we humans evolved—scurried around in the dark, trying to keep from being trampled upon or eaten by the big lizards. In the aftermath of the collision, the dinosaurs died out and the age of mammals began. How would life on Earth have been different, if that asteroid had missed the planet? Might today's dominant species be an intelligent lizard, rather than Homo sapiens?

In 2000 Al Gore lost the US presidential election... but he really didn't. Some nefarious activities by George Bush's brother Jeb, Florida's governor at the time, managed to prevent thousands of Floridians from voting—most of whom, since they were either black or poor, would have voted for Gore. George Bush would thus have been relegated to history's trash bin. By coincidence (well, actually with the aid of a biased US Supreme Court), Bush became president. Had Gore won, it's doubtful that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan would have happened. It's also likely that the US would have assumed a leadership role in dealing with global warming, rather than deny that it is happening. Surely history would have taken another path, had Gore become president.

Let's look at a third alternative possibility. Certain contingent events hundreds of years ago placed European countries in a position to dominate the planet—both economically and militarily. As Jared Diamond demonstrated so well in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, the Europeans gained the upper hand, when competing with all other societies on the planet. Europeans defeated and controlled peoples in the Americas, the Middle and Far Easts, and Africa. The European way came to dominate. But how radically different would today's world appear if, for example, Africans had held the upper hand? Or if the Aztecs had been stronger than the conquistadors? What if the mighty Islamic empire of the Middle East had won its rivalry with the West in the 1400s? Play history over again and the world would be a very different place.

I find this a fascinating game to play. Of course, there is no way to realistically guess how these and countless other contingencies may have altered the world of today. In a similar manner, I cannot begin to speculate who I might be if my parents had never married. I simply would not be!

This kind of musing is fun for me, but has no real point to it, other than reminding me that it didn't have to be this way. There was no destiny or cosmic intent involved in how things played out. Our future is not fixed by fate. Things simply happen, and they don't happen because they were supposed to. There is no plan. The future remains unknown and even random. The world wasn't destined to be what it is. May I let go the need to want to see some purpose that determined it all and simply accept and be thankful for what is.

Contingency or Coincidence?—Part 1

I am fascinated by the role of chance in the unfolding of history (as well as prehistory, before we humans came upon the scene). When we look back at events that occurred in the past, we can see that many (if not most) of them were flukes: complete surprises that no one could have foreseen. And when they occurred they dominated the course of events. Had they not happened, the present would have unfolded in an entirely different way. Had not Jack Kennedy been assassinated, for example, how differently would American history have unfolded? Had the Soviet Union not dissolved a quarter century ago, what would the world look like today?

The asteroid that crashed to Earth 65 million years ago and terminated the reign of the dinosaurs is another (prehistory) prime example. Another is the ice age of 10-20 thousand years ago that provided a pathway for Asian wanderers to inhabit the Americas. And, to bring it closer to home, what about that time when, as a teenager, I nearly trashed the family car? Had I expired in the accident, this blog (or my kids) would never have been.

I have tended to classify these events as being either an example of a coincidence or a contingency. They both describe similar happenings. To be more specific, a coincidence usually refers to a couple of events that occurred simultaneously, but with no apparent causal connection. A contingency usually describes a single incident that seems to have been unanticipated. In either case, it's a surprise, a chance, a random happening, a fluke, an unpredictable event.

It is a human tendency, however, to interpret most of these unforeseen events as neither coincidental nor contingent. We dislike having things happen for no apparent reason. We rebel against chance and arbitrariness. We want reasons for things. We read intent into incidents and want to believe that things happen for a purpose. We are inclined to look for patterns, or for the hand of God or some other superhuman cause. Something must have caused this significant thing to happen—it couldn't simply have been chance!

Many people wonder how they are to live their lives, if they concede that the universe is simply a chance unfolding. As Einstein once quipped, “God does not play dice.” He was referring to random events at the quantum level, but many people feel that his comment applies to a much wider range of events.

Having a scientific bent, I have fun speculating about events throughout history; looking at them as if they were quite random and unpredictable. When I let go the inclination to see a particular happening as caused by some powerful agent, I can ponder the many alternative scenarios that could have transpired instead. It helps me to grasp and appreciate just how fickle this world is.

More on contingencies and coincidences next time...

What’s It Mean, Alfie?—Part 2

Driving down the road one day, I was almost involved in an accident. Had I been driving one mile per hour faster or slower, things could have been entirely different. I may either be dead or not even know I could have had a close call. Someone buys a lottery ticket and wins big money. A ticket purchased just before or after that winning one lost. A gust of wind blows down a tree in my yard and just misses the house. Were any of these events predictable? Could they have been foreseen? Even in the aftermath, can we attribute any causal factor to them? Mightn’t it be a copout to say, “Well, I guess God didn’t want my number to come up just then”?

Sure, for many of the things that happen to us, we can connect the dots and see a causal relationship with something that happened earlier. I possibly wouldn’t have luckily avoided that car accident if I had been driving faster. If I had cut down all the trees around me, I could have avoided them being blown down on my house. If she hadn’t even bought that lottery ticket, she’d have had no chance of winning.

So we have a tendency to seek meaning in things when there often is none. Unforeseen events don’t have to have some law governing them or some significance to them. Why was I born who I am and in the circumstances I was? Why was I not born into a starving family in Africa? Why was I born with this birth defect? Is there any reason for these happenings? Why can’t they just be?

The story of Job comes to my mind when I ponder these things. Why do bad things happen to good people? Or the opposite question: Why do some bad people get away with their evil activities? Is there no justice in this world? We want all the loose ends to be tied up in the final scene of our life—as in a Hollywood movie. We want meaning; we demand accountability.

That attitude can lead to a lot of angst and anger—emotions that can often be avoided by simply accepting what is. If we give up the demand to know why things happen and accept not always knowing; if we can live with the mystery, we can unburden ourselves of a lot of trouble. Rather than fret over how or why something just happened—as we sit transfixed with either horror or glee—we might better put our attention and energy into intelligently responding, before the next contingency comes along and smacks us upside the head unawares.

I’m by no means arguing that we should simply believe life is one random event after another, and that we have no control over it. It’s a balance. It’s a paradox, even. Somewhere between life having no meaning (no reason, no purpose, or concluding it’s random) and its every detail being planned and caused by some external power, is a happy balance where I dance with life and make the most of the great mystery.

           

Unpredictable Life—Part 1

Who we are and what we're doing at any given moment is heavily dependent on specific events that occurred moments before—in the time immediately before “now.” At any moment an uncountable number of possibilities could happen, but only one does. All the other potential candidates remain mostly hidden to us. In our ignorance we view the one event that did happen as something that must have been destined to be so, as if fate or some superior power had decided ahead of time what would happen to us. An earthquake will be viewed by some as punishment from God. Winning the lottery may be perceived as a reward for being good.

Even if we don't see a divine hand steering every event, we want to believe that our personal lives have order, that there is meaning to the things that happen to us. We want to think that things have a reason for happening—that there is a purpose and continuity to this existence.

On the personal level we especially want to see a continuum to our lives. So we tend to adopt the belief that there is an understandable order in our lives—even that there is some guiding hand that propels us down a certain path. It's almost as if we were destined to become who we are. That belief is mostly untrue. Our lives instead are largely contingent on arbitrary events that continually happen to us—events that are unforeseen by us and mostly out of our control.

When I was 17 and a new driver of that several-thousand-pound vehicle called a car, there were a few times that I nearly got killed—but managed to survive them all. The grace of God? Pure luck? My first job out of college depended on a recruiter arriving a week late on campus and my spur-of-the-moment signing up to talk to him that day. A week earlier I was otherwise involved and would never have met him. Where else may I have gone to begin my career? I bought my favorite house after a stroke of luck (for me!) saw the previous buyer's financing fall through.

Why do we marry the certain person we do? What determines when our first pregnancy happens and the baby's gender? What brought us down with a near-fatal case of the flu in 1998? What made my plane land safely and the next one crash? Wasn't my birth dependent on a random string of events—for example the one sperm out of millions of my dad's that led to me? What if my parents had decided to make love another night, or a month later, when Mom had a different egg in her uterus?

At any moment countless possibilities, innumerable contingencies are waiting, just a few seconds into the future. What I will end up doing in the moment following will be only one of those things—but until it actually happens, I could be pushed in many unpredictable directions. I plan to go outside and weed the garden, but the phone rings and the caller dramatically changes my direction. I walk heedlessly out the door, sprain my ankle, and spend the next few days in bed. I go to a restaurant for a meal, order the “wrong” thing, and come down with food poisoning.

All contingencies, of course, are not unfortunate ones. For example, I was dating a certain lady years ago, who seemed like she'd make a good mate; but we soon broke up and I shortly found a gal who's made my life far happier. I took a drive in the country one day and found exactly the piece of land I'd been dreaming about.

More on contingencies next time...

Continuities and Contingencies—Part 2

In the late 16th century, Spain sent a vast armada to invade England and force it back into the Catholic fold (as well as seize the top-dog spot in Europe). The Spanish fleet appeared invincible. Continuity would suggest that the English were in trouble, but storms and other unforeseen accidents helped them to win, even though they were weaker. A most unfortunate contingency for the Spanish!

When we look back on events that happened, I think we can lose sight of the fact that there was nothing inevitable about them. We rarely think about the multitude of other possibilities that could have happened. It can seem as if events are preordained, but they’re not. Once something happens, it gets locked into place (especially in our minds), but before it did, anything could have happened. It could have gone an uncountable number of other directions. Let me count the ways (Ms. Browning).

There are myriad other ways of perceiving continuities and contingencies. For one, the concept of karma (a way of perceiving cause and effect) expresses continuity in life. What is happening to me today is to a large degree caused by what I did yesterday. I mistreated Joe and he strikes back today. I reached out with loving care to a stranger yesterday and life is sweet today.

Similarly, an alternative way of describing contingencies is the expression “Shit happens.” (Or its flip side, “Grace happens.”) Most things are beyond our control. We may try our best to live a good life, hoping that continuities will take care of us, but bad fortune may befall us. The story of Job is such a tale. Likewise, we may make many poor choices (that otherwise would lead us to experience some bad karma) but find that providential things happen to us. Moments of grace come, even when we don’t deserve them.

Yet another (scientific) way to express the play between continuities and contingencies is the wave function that governs the behavior of subatomic particles in quantum mechanics. The state of an object such as an electron is defined by its wave function—which describes the probability that it exists in a given location and moves in a given manner; in essence the wave function addresses the electron’s myriad future possibilities. Once an observation is made of the electron, however, its wave function “collapses” into a specific, determinate state. It’s been locked into place. It has passed through the quantum bottleneck.

How we react to contingencies says a lot about the kind of person we are. Some of us rely on continuities; we expect that things will turn out pretty much as we had planned. We want to believe that the world is predictable, dependable, and explainable. We get upset when surprises come along. We even try to force things, by using power to control events. But contingencies will disrupt our lives, despite our attempts to be in charge. If we fight this process, we can become so inflexible in our desire to control things that these disruptions throw our lives out of whack. Life like this can be very frustrating.

The other extreme reaction is to give up any effort of thinking ahead or trying to plan. Why try to chart a course, when uncertainties seem to govern? My life seems to be out of control, so I’ll forget about trying to arrange anything. One can surrender to the vagaries of life and let chaos reign.

I think it makes sense to seek a middle path. Continuities do exist. Plans can guide one’s life in a coherent direction, so it is reasonable to prepare for the future and hope that continuities will generally prevail. But it’s not the interruptive contingencies in life that matter; it’s how we respond to them. If we relax and go with the flow, acknowledging that we can’t control everything, life can be happier. If we are open to contingencies, putting full attention to the present moment, as they pass through the “bottleneck of the now,” we can respond to their surprises much more wisely. Inopportune contingencies won’t knock us off balance as much as they otherwise might, and we’re in a better position to take advantage of opportune contingencies. In other words, we can roll with life’s punches as well as embrace its kisses.

Continuities and Contingencies—Part 1

Recently I was introduced to the concept of “continuities and contingencies,” as described in an interview with scientist Walter Alvarez in Discover magazine. I had never before thought to have linked these two words, so afterwards my mind was abuzz with numerous fascinating implications. As described by Alvarez, continuities are a logical sequence of events, a historical trajectory—which links the future to the past in a predictable manner. If we look at yesterday’s happenings, we can make a pretty good guess about what’s going to happen tomorrow. If I stayed up and partied last night, there’s a good chance I’ll suffer from a hangover tomorrow morning. Continuities can be good predictors.

A contingency is something completely unpredictable. It’s chance; it’s accidental. It may or may not occur. When a contingency comes along, it can blow your continuity out of the water. It utterly changes everything. Alvarez quoted Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis: “I prefer to think of the present as a singularity… through which the future has got to pass in order to become the past. The present achieves this by locking into place relationships between continuities and contingencies.”

I love the mental image that creates, of viewing the future as containing an uncountable number of possibilities that have to pass through the bottleneck of the present moment to become actuality. Many things might possibly happen, but right now, only this one thing actually occurs. Afterwards we look back and note what happened, and make our conclusions—some valid, some specious. A past event may be perceived to have been caused by either continuity (it seemed logical, given what transpired before) or by an unforeseen contingency (the roll of the dice). If I get run over by a truck on my way home from the party, I’ll never suffer from that hangover.

Continuities are what we rely upon; what we hope (or fear) will happen. We plan for the future, doing things now that we trust will lead to things we expect. We want life to be dependable, for there to be coherence in our world. The laws of nature are continuities—expressed as cause and effect. I hold out a ball in my hand, release it, and expect that it will fall. I go to bed, having confidence that the sun will come up in the morning. Our lives take on patterns and cycles that lean heavily on continuities.

But the best-laid plans can go awry. As the saying goes, “Life is what happens when you had other plans.” In other words, contingencies enter the picture and it’s a whole new world. Contingencies bring unexpected events—both favorable and unfavorable. The mate we end up with is not who we expected. The job we landed was not what we planned to do. The flood (or earthquake or car accident) throws us into a completely different situation.

Shortly after Earth was formed, it collided with a planet about the size of Mars. A major chunk of Earth’s mantle was blown into space and later congealed into our Moon. (The rest of the impacting planet joined with the proto-Earth to become a newer and bigger Earth.) Without the Moon’s subsequent steadying influence on us, Earth would not be nearly as life-friendly as it is. What a fortunate contingency for us!

Another example of contingencies and continuities next time…