A Bullet Fired Many Years Ago

Human beings have brought a conflict into being - a conflict between linearity and complexity.

The linear is best conceived of as the child of Isaac Newton - the idea that effects have causes, that reality is a series of these linear interactions chained together to produce the universe as we know it. In this world, the "root cause" is the prime mover - the cause at the very beginning of a chain of effects. Effects progress, like waves, down the chain of causality before crashing onto the shores of our lives, resulting in babies, or economic collapses, or the decision to buy one house instead of another. This is not exclusive to physics. What we call "traditional" psychotherapy has a linear bent that becomes visible anytime we ask "why" we are a certain way - am I anxious because of the way my mother treated me? Am I traumatized because of the car accident?

The sister of the linear is identity - the idea that "things" "are" a certain way. "I" (the subject, itself a "thing," an object about which we can talk) "am" (an identity) anxious, or traumatized, or a father, or President of the United States, or intelligent, or a good person. Identity can be hard to think our way around because it's embedded in our language - anytime we use any variant of the word "is" we presuppose identity. This is precisely why followers of Alfred Korzybski, creator of General Semantics, created "E-Prime," a version of English without the verb "to be."

Korbyszcki called these things Aristotelian systems - systems descended from the logic of Aristotle. It is hard to understate the extent to which Newtonian-Aristotelian ideas permeate and inform Western intellectual culture (and possibly other cultures as well; I'm writing from my own experience, which is primarily limited to the culture in which I live). The concepts of linearity and identity are so fundamental to how we think that they become invisible; it seems illogical to think without them - what else even is there?

And yet, reality is not Aristotelian. In fact, our universe is complex; there are NOT clean and clear cause and effect relationships "out there" for us to discover, but rather a messy and over-determined inter-causal web which defies easy description. "Things" are not "one way or another"; instead, there is constant flux, a kind of liminal both-ness which defies definition.

To return to psychotherapy, the reality of our psychic lives does not seem to be one of a "current state" being "caused" by "a past experience" - but rather a messy, co-mingled biological soup onto which meanings are hoisted and invented, rather than "discovered." Psychology seems to be less that of cognitive-behavioral theory and more akin to the lectures of Jacques Lacan, who rejected the idea that the unconscious is "in us somewhere," a deep and hidden place we could explore and "figure out." Instead, Lacan urged us to accept the fundamental inaccessibility of our own being, the fundamental split between our being and our knowing. Lacan is famously difficult to understand; some say he did this on purpose to reproduce the sensation of true psychoanalytic inquiry. I'm not sure, because I can barely understand a word the guy says.

While this may seem quite theoretical, it has very real effects in our daily lives. The greatest writer on this topic is Sydney Dekker. One of Dekker's concerns is safety investigations. He is often called upon to diagnose the causes of airplane or industrial accidents, to explain why deadly events occur and how to stop them from happening again. His study of human error in the midst of complexity transformed the way I see the world.

For Dekker, understanding Newtonian-Aristotelian ideas is not idle philosophy. It is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. That our systems are complex explains what Dekker calls the "drift into failure": the natural tendency of our systems to decline into disaster. Environmental pressures, unruly and hard-to-predict technology, social processes which normalize growing risk; these are the elements of working systems that drive them, inexorably, towards collapse. No one is exempt.

Dekker's message is straightforward:

"The growth of complexity in society has got ahead of our understanding of how complex systems work and fail. Our technologies have gone ahead of our theories....Complexity is a defining characteristic of society and many of its technologies today. Yet simplicity and linearity remain the defining characteristics of the theories we use to explain bad events that emerge from this complexity. Our language and logic remain imprisoned in the space of linear interactions and component failures that was once defined by Newton and Descartes."

And that's the rub: without understanding what underlies the disasters in our lives, we will fail to address them effectively. We will blame "lazy employees," we will point our finger at broken parts or out-of-date processes; all the while, projecting our knowledge of the future onto an uncertain past. In a very real way it is our Newtonian-Aristotelian bent that prevents us from seeing what is really there. Linear progress of cause and effect is, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould (quoted by Dekker), “a noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, nonoperational idea that must be replaced if we wish to understand the patterns of history.”

Over the next few weeks, I plan to more fully explore Dekker's ideas, particularly those in his fantastic Drift Into Failure (These essays are a bit more time-consuming than normal, and my life is currently more stressful than normal, so I reserve the right to punt on that if need be).

The most powerful idea of all, however, is that the Newtonian-Aristotelian axis it not all there is. Life is not a series of dominoes falling, not a series of bullets fired from the past and striking us in the present. Instead, it is far messier, more unpredictable, and more ambiguous than we think.

Accepting this is the first step towards both a more empathetic and powerful view of the world - one which understands the profound predicaments in which find ourselves, and marvels at the human ability to make our way regardless.

Yours,

Dan

SOME STUFF I'M READING:

The always wonderful Ted Gioiaon the current state of culture (spoiler: not great)