COMPLEXITY

The thinker makes a great mistake when he asks after cause and effect. They both together make up the indivisible phenomenon.

—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

 

 

 

THAT’S ALL TRUE, but in avoiding the trap of magical thinking we shouldn’t fall into the trap of linear, rationalistic, reductionist scientific thinking, which is just as delusional, only operating under a somewhat different set of delusions.

A fundamental delusion underlying magical thinking is megalomania, in that magical thinking presumes our minds are so powerful that our thoughts by themselves (or with actions incommensurate with the longed-for outcomes; for example, orgasms stopping military aggression) significantly influence the real, physical world, such that there is no need for us to commit ourselves to tangible, physical action based on cause and effect. For example, in magical thinking mode, I might believe that if I visualize a river running free this might somehow cause the dams on that river to disappear. Non-magical thinking would imply that if I want a dam removed, I need to follow some sort of chain of cause and effect, where I (and perhaps others) take the necessary actions to either go step-by-step through the legal processes of decommissioning a dam (and before that, learning how to effectively participate in these processes), procuring funding for removal, waiting too many years while antienvironmental politicians hold up dam removal in attempts to gain concessions from those they know love the river, finally watching the dam come down, then celebrating the river running free; or going through the step-by-step process of acquiring explosives (and before that, learning how to effectively work with dangerous materials), setting the charges, firing them, and then, once again, celebrating the river running free. Or maybe I can just have an orgasm and hope things turn out all right. Only a megalomaniac—and a powerless one at that—would think that one’s thoughts and desires are so potent they substitute for effective action.

A fundamental delusion of science, on the other hand, is an equal megalomania, in that science presumes our minds are so powerful that we can fully understand what causes lead to what effects, even when cause-and-effect associations in the real world are quite often not only more complex than we think, they are more complex than we are capable of thinking.

To take a fairly simple example, what causes flare-ups (or even good and bad days) of Crohn’s disease? As someone who has nearly died from this disease several times, who has lost several feet of my colon to this disease, and who more or less constantly monitors my condition, my pain levels, my stool frequency and runniness, the relationships between what I eat or what I do and how I feel, I still have a hard time determining cause and effect. What caused this flare-up? Was it because I got too tired? Was it because I was in a stressful situation? Was it because I ate this or didn’t eat that, or came in contact with this or didn’t come in contact with that? Was it because of the antibiotics I took for some other condition? Was it nothing I did or didn’t do, but instead the disease acting on its own? So, I eat a certain food. Tomorrow I feel much better. Is it because I ate this food, or is it not? How do I establish causality when there are so many variables?

The same was true a few years ago when I had a terribly painful prostate infection. I had good and bad days. Were the good days due to drinking a daily glass of vinegar, as one remedy suggested, or was I trying to make correlation equal causation? Did I drink glassfuls of apple cider vinegar for nothing? Did orgasms help (at least the prostate has something to do with orgasms, so this does make more sense than orgasms for peace)? Why did prostate massage sometimes seem to help and sometimes seem to hurt?

I’m not saying we can’t establish causality. I know that herbs prescribed by a great Chinese herbalist eventually got rid of most of the prostate infection, and so far as Crohn’s, I know that eating meat makes me feel better, and eating fruits and vegetables makes me feel worse. I know that some medicines help (but sometimes at severe cost: a potential side effect of two of the drugs I take together is, as my doctor puts it, “an especially nasty form of lymphoma that causes, well, death”), but even that isn’t a one-to-one correspondence: sometimes they help and sometimes they don’t. Why is that?

In the real world, causality can be extremely difficult to assign, even when the complexity consists only of one body (which, or who, is of course made up of millions of different entities sharing that skin). When we increase the complexity to include much larger-scale communities of many different forms of beings, causality becomes that much more difficult to establish. What happens when you remove armillaria ostoyae, a so-called parasitic mushroom, from the forests of Cascadia? What happens when you remove chickadees? What is the relationship (or rather, what are the relationships) between chickadees and tree growth? What happens to a forest if you remove salmon? What about passenger pigeons? What are the relationships between the extirpation of passenger pigeons and the near-extirpation of American chestnuts? What are and will be the full effects of plastics on oceans? What are and will be the full effects of global warming on tidewater gobies, Dungeness crabs, pikas? What are and will be the combined effects of plastic, global warming, industrial agriculture, dams, and industrial fishing on smelt, salmon, brown pelicans?

How does science deal with this complexity? It systematically excises it from its equations (and of course equations in the first place excise free will from among those subjects to be equated: those subjects who have been perceptually turned into objects by those doing the equating). Years ago I talked about this with the philosopher Stanley Aronowitz, who said, “For some scientists everything outside the box—defined by the rules of scientific discourse—must be ignored. And sometimes they get very agitated when you call them on the game they’re playing.”

I responded, “And the game is . . .”

“Religion. Teleology. Control. The desire for prediction, and ultimately the desire to control the natural world, has become the foundation of their methodology of knowing truth.

“Think about it. What is a laboratory experiment? At the beginning one must select from the multiplicity of objects and relations that constitute the world a slice to study. How do you conduct a laboratory experiment? The first thing you do is factor out the world. You factor out emotion. You factor out ethics. You factor out nature, if you want to put it that way. You factor out the cosmos. You create a situation of strict abstraction.”

In other words, you reduce cause and effect to just one cause and just one effect. That is the point of laboratory experiments.

He continued, “From that, we think we can extrapolate propositions which correspond to the world and its phenomenon. Or rather scientists think that. And these propositions do correspond to the world, so long as we ignore the actual physical world and its context.”

I asked him, “What are the social implications of this?”

He said, “The point of science—and this may or may not be true of individual scientists—is to make the world subject to human domination. If they can abstract, and then they can predict on the basis of that abstraction, then they can try, at both the human and natural levels, to use that prediction in order to exert control.

“Let’s use genetic engineering as an example. The ideology underlying its conceptualization is that we cannot and will not depend on nature to yield its own productivity, both in terms of its own development and human need. We’re going to intervene, because the process of maturation has to be faster, because the output has to be more plentiful, because production has to be cheaper, because humans have to be more in control of the process.”

I need to say this again, since science is at this point a fundamentalist religion within this culture, and any criticism of science leads quickly to people misinterpreting what was actually said, and leads also to the frenetic quivering of so many sphincters: I am not saying that it is impossible to determine with some degree of accuracy cause and effect (in some cases); nor am I saying that the tools of science are not useful for gaining some pieces of information; nor am I saying that we should not attempt to understand cause and effect. I am merely suggesting humility. I am saying that it is arrogant, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, to think that we can even begin to comprehend the vast multiplicity of subtle and not-so-subtle associations of cause and effect in complex natural communities. And it’s even more arrogant than this to perpetrate mass changes on these complex communities—to destroy these communities—without regard for the harm those changes—that destruction—causes. And even more arrogant than this is the belief that just because you don’t see—or can’t comprehend even the existence of—cause and effect associations between some action and a possible reaction, they don’t exist.

The fact that there are many cause and effect associations we don’t understand doesn’t mean, of course, that having an orgasm will likely have much effect on the US war machine, or that singing back the salmon can in any way substitute for dam removal. I’m merely saying that the fact that magical thinking is silly doesn’t imply that magic itself is silly. Magic may very well consist in part of entering into relationships with powers—and entering into relationships with cause and effect associations—not normally discernible by scientific methods or by those whose minds are too constrained by those methods.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about a line by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

We’re often told that when Europeans first invaded the Americas, various indigenous peoples perceived many European technologies or trappings—including big ships, domesticated horses, armor, guns, and so on—as magical or as sent from gods. Likewise today when we think about extant indigenous peoples encountering airplanes (or pop bottles falling from the sky), movie theaters, televisions, telephones, or other pieces of modern technology, we can sometimes believe—rightly or wrongly—that indigenous peoples continue to perceive these technologies as forms of magic, or as the work of gods (crazy or not). I’m not sure if this is always true—not only because I’m not indigenous and so don’t know their experience, but also because I’ve seen videos of indigenous peoples firing arrows at helicopters, which suggests they saw these helicopters not so much as being magical as being intrusive—but it does seem to me that it would make a certain amount of sense, in that when we—any of us—see something new, our first impulse is often to attempt to categorize this new thing according to our current perceptual framework. Of course. Until and unless one’s current perceptual framework is broken or otherwise abandoned (insofar as a perceptual framework can ever be fully abandoned), it will in great measure determine our interpretations of everything we see. So a person who believes in magic and who sees the divine in everything will quite possibly perceive new things within that framework, perceive them as magical, as manifestations of the divine. Likewise, a person who believes in capitalism will quite possibly perceive new things through the lens of how he or she can make money off of them. We see this latter all the time, as those who believe in capitalism—which sadly, is most people in this culture—will not only attempt to make money off of, for example, global warming (see the moneylust with which the capitalist press is describing the potential for profit as melting icecaps open a northwest passage as well as new oil fields), but will also in general project their greed and propensity to exploit onto the natural world. Or another example: nice people often perceive others as nice until their perceptual framework is smashed, and more hostile people often are quicker to perceive hostility. And another: if I believe nonhumans are sentient, I will, all other things being equal, be more likely to perceive some new action by a frog or tree or river as a sign of this other’s sentience, and if I believe nonhumans aren’t sentient, I will, once again all other things being equal, be more likely to perceive that same action as reinforcing my belief that these others don’t think. And so on. It’s pretty straightforward: believing is seeing, until something dramatic happens to shake my original belief.

There’s another way, then, to view the original contacts between the civilized—those who rely on the technology of machines—and the indigenous, who are generally considered by nearly everyone within this culture to be technologically backward (after all, they never invented chainsaws), and whose cosmologies are considered by many of the civilized to be based on superstitions, that is, based not on sound scientific principles, but rather on magical thinking, on such nonsensical actions as rain dances or conversing with plants, nonhuman animals, spirits, ancestors, and so on. Many of their cosmologies are based on what to the scientific mind would not be considered principles involving direct cause and effect. In short, many of the civilized look down their noses at the indigenous, and can say, voices dripping with either scorn or condescension and pity, “They believe in magic.”

I know that the word magic is used in this sense pejoratively, but what if we remove the implied insult and ask, what if these people are right? What if traditional indigenous people do believe in magic? And more to the point, what if Arthur C. Clarke’s statement, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, is also correct? What are the implications?

Years ago Jeannette Armstrong went to northern Russia to stay with traditional indigenous peoples there. The people were hungry because the caribou had not shown up. Then one day one of the people in the village who was skilled in these matters declared the caribou were in a valley some distance away. Hunters set off, found the caribou, killed some to eat, and brought back food and skins. Jeannette asked the man how he knew where the caribou were, and he responded, “How do you know where your hand is?”

I have read credible accounts of indigenous peoples conversing with rain clouds, rivers, mountains, trees. I have read credible accounts of one indigenous culture—now driven extinct by the dominant culture—in South America where the members of their communities routinely shared dreams, by which I don’t mean they talked about their dreams on awakening, but rather that everyone in the community dreamed the same dream. How did they do this? And how did indigenous peoples discover that certain poisonous plants can be turned into powerful medicines through complex preparations (grinding, curing, boiling, skimming, and so on)? Was it trial and error, as some scientists suggest, or was it because, as the indigenous say about their own processes, the plant told the people what to do?

Or how about this: many traditional indigenous peoples were able to meet human needs while actually improving the health and biodiversity of the land where they lived (as do other wild beings, such as salmon, cedars, waxwings, grosbeaks, and so on).

Is that magic enough for you?

Jeannette told me another story of the indigenous. Early in the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas indigenous peoples from all over the world gathered for ceremonies. One ceremony took place in a school gymnasium. Jeannette noticed that at the start of the ceremony the lights hanging from the ceiling started to sway. She elbowed the person next to her, looked up. He followed her gaze, then nodded. As soon as the ceremony ended, the lights stopped swaying. Again she elbowed him, looked up. Again he followed her gaze. Again he nodded. Then he said, “And that is why they [the civilized] want to kill us.”

Is that magic enough for you?

But maybe it’s not magic at all. Maybe it’s just a technology sufficiently advanced to seem like magic to us. Oh, I’m not talking about any technology so primitive as to require gadgets. I’m talking about technologies involving songs, dreams, the interpretation of dreams, awareness of one’s surroundings, the ability to communicate with—which definitely includes listening to, believe it or not—one’s surroundings. How did that man know where the caribou were? Was it a lucky guess? Was it because he smelled something? Was it because he knew the caribou so well that he knew where they would be? Was it because the caribou gave him a dream? Was it because he had been taught by his elders how to interpret a dream from the caribou? Was it because he had been taught how to smell the air, how to listen to the wind? Was it because, as he said, he and the caribou are part of the same body? How had he learned to perceive this, and to work with it?

Advanced technologies—whether or not they involve machines—are complex and demanding. They must be learned. They must be supported by a communal infrastructure. They don’t just happen.

Think about it. You’ve probably seen an automobile. You may even have driven one. But could you make one from scratch? All by yourself? I know I couldn’t. For me to build a car—this piece of advanced technology—requires complicated mining, energy, transportation, and economic infrastructures in order to deliver the materials to my home. It requires the knowledge of how to form metal parts into necessary shapes (as well as the ancillary technologies, equipment, and infrastructure to form them), and then the knowledge of how to fit them together. It requires the proper tools to fasten them, as well as the fasteners themselves. It requires significant commitment and sacrifice on my part.

Why should we not expect as much about these other technologies? Why, apart from ethnocentrism and arrogance, would we presume these other non-machine, “magical” technologies do not also require communal infrastructures? Why would we presume they wouldn’t require knowledge that has been passed down and built upon for generations, analogous to how the dominant culture has been building upon its knowledge for generations (except that many indigenous cultures are far, far older, with at least the potential then for older lineages of understanding and technology)? Why would we presume that to work with these technologies would not require years of training, sacrifice, dedication? Why would we presume they would not require tremendous precision? Many ancient figurines and paintings, for example, do not show people in random poses, but rather are precise instructions for exact positions people can assume in order to induce trance states, with different positions shown by different figurines and paintings yielding radically different trance experiences.²³⁶

There’s a sense in which our magical thinking can be seen as efforts—however feeble and untrained—to reconnect to these ancient technologies, and the near-ubiquity of this impulse for magical thinking can be seen as a marker of not just our propensity to live in denial (although that propensity is certainly overwhelming, at this point), but rather as a marker of the strength of our ancient, embodied connection to these “magical” forces and processes.

That’s one sense. There’s another sense, however, in which much magical thinking is not only lazy—how much less work is it to try to sing back the salmon than to remove a dam?—and not only is it a toxic mimic of real magic, it is grossly disrespectful of the complex technologies required to perform real magic. To say that people can merely “dial in” if they feel like it (and “if you can’t, no big deal”) is to say that anyone can operate these advanced and complex technologies, no commitment or knowledge (or effort) required. Would we say the same about constructing and flying an airplane? Would you want to ride in an airplane built and piloted by people with such minimal understanding and dedication? I wouldn’t. So why should we expect these dabblers to be any more successful at the technologies of “magic” than we would their equivalents if they dabbled in aeronautics or aviation? And why should we trust them any more?

Magic happens. It’s all around us. Sometimes it leaks into our lives. But these leaks reveal mainly the power of magic or the numinous, such that even those who know nothing about magic, who have no communal infrastructure to support it, and who have made no particular commitment to it (and in some cases are actively committed to worldviews that disavow it completely) can still perceive it, if only vaguely. To fully enter into relationship with these technologies requires a commitment as deep and broad and abiding—if not moreso—than the commitment required to fabricate machine-based technologies.

Of course the question arises: if indigenous peoples had (and some still have) such advanced technologies, how has civilization conquered nearly all of them (and will probably conquer the rest as soon as the civilized decide to steal the resources on these people’s lands)? Doesn’t that prove that the civilized have more advanced technologies? Isn’t that the general rule, that those with more advanced technologies generally conquer those with more primitive technologies?

Well, they do and they don’t. It depends on what you mean by technology, and it depends on what are the functions of your technologies. The question ignores the fact that different technological strains have different functions. A straightforward example should make this clear.

Let’s say you and I are going to be locked in a room where we will fight to the death. We each get to bring one and only one piece of technology to this fight. Would you rather have a relatively primitive 1873 “Peacemaker” Colt Single Action Army revolver (in perfect working condition with plenty of ammunition)—or if necessary, the even more primitive sword or club—or would you rather have what is supposed to be currently the world’s most technologically advanced laptop computer, the Macbook Pro (complete with a 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, next generation 802.11n wireless, gorgeous upgraded displays, wickedly fast NVIDIA graphics, and a beautiful 17-inch monitor)? If the laptop doesn’t seem likely to do the job for you, you can instead choose an iPhone. They’re pretty darn advanced. Or if you don’t think computers will help you, you could instead choose a bag of remicade, which is a highly technologically advanced medicine made of a combination of mouse and human genetic materials. It works wonders on arthritis, Crohn’s disease, and even ankylosing spondylitis. Or how about the most modern vacuum cleaner? A CD player? Microwave oven? No? I’m sure you can see that all of these technologies are far more advanced than a 135-year-old gun (and infinitely more advanced than a sword or club), so they should serve you better in your attempts to kill me, right?

I’ll take the gun, please.

The point is clear: to compare a gun to a CD player is to compare apples to oranges. The same is true when we compare this culture’s technologies to the technologies of many other cultures. Different technologies have different goals, and whether one person is able to kill another using some piece of technology is no indication of which person holds more technologically advanced tools. Nor is it an indication of which culture is more technologically advanced, more evolved, or, to get to the point, smarter. It might be an indicator of which has more technologically advanced means to kill, and it might be an indication of which culture has a greater propensity to kill, regardless of technology.

The fact that we even have to talk about this—the fact that a common belief is that one reason this culture has conquered most of the rest of the world is that this culture has more advanced technologies—says much about this culture’s relationship to technology, and what is the primary thrust and purpose of this culture’s technologies: it makes clear something we don’t often like to talk about, which is that the raison d’être of so much of this culture’s technology is conquest. This shouldn’t really surprise us, of course, since this culture is based on conquest (as Stanley Diamond famously wrote, “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home”); it could not be what it is without conquest; it could not continue without conquest; and as we’ll see over the next few years (because we live on a finite planet and there are fewer and fewer places remaining for it to conquer), it will collapse quickly without constant conquest and theft. So of course this culture’s technologies will be primarily technologies of conquest, of domination, of control (as George Draffan and I made clear in Welcome to the Machine, the function of a machine is to convert raw materials to power: this is no less true for this entire machine culture than it is for a particular machine such as an automobile or forklift). This culture’s economic system is based on conquest, domination, control, exploitation, theft, and slavery. This culture’s governmental systems are based on conquest, domination, control, exploitation, theft, and slavery. This culture’s religions are based on conquest, domination, control, exploitation, theft, and slavery. This culture’s epistemology (these days, science) is based on conquest, domination, control, exploitation, theft, and slavery (and if you don’t believe me, just ask Francis Bacon). This culture is based on conquest, domination, control, exploitation, theft, and slavery. So we’d be foolish to expect this culture’s technologies to follow a different path.

But other technologies, other epistemologies, other religions, other forms of governance, other economic systems exist, some of which are based on principles other than conquest, domination, control, exploitation, theft, and slavery. Some are based on long term (as in thousands of years) mutually beneficial relationships. In fact these other technologies, epistemologies, religions, forms of governance, economic systems, and so on, are quite natural, and until this culture began to destroy them, lasted far longer than this culture has.

I have a friend who lived for a time in northern Pakistan. While she was living in Hunza Valley, she had conversations with a ninety-eight-year-old-shaman who told her (among other things) that what we call magic isn’t magic at all, but in fact forces who have existed from the beginning of time and who can be harnessed, “but only if you listen and show respect.” My friend told me that “He compared his belief in these forces to things like this culture’s discovery of magnetic fields and electricity, saying if hundreds of years ago anyone had claimed that lights would turn on at the flip of a switch or that you could talk with someone thousands of miles away using a c-shaped utensil, people would think of it as ‘magic.’ The biggest difference, he said, between believers in science and believers in magic is that the former use the forces they harness to advance ‘the human project’ only, with no respect for the forces with whom they’re interacting, but rather an attitude that these forces should be bent to their will and made to ‘perform.’ . . . He told me that eventually these forces will tire of us and ‘bite us in the arse.’ He laughed out loud as he said this last bit. Practitioners of magic, on the other hand, mainly interact with the forces they understand to exist with a respect and awe for the forces themselves and with the understanding that these forces may or may not choose to respond. Further, the use of this ‘magic’ was not only for the benefit of humans but all ‘things which have spirit.’”

My friend dreamed of Hunza the night before we talked about magic. She told me, “I was standing outside my room looking at Rakaposhi (as I used to). I saw the peak change from white to grey and in my dream I was terrified. Usually when I dream of Hunza I wake up happy. But I realized that this dream was the peak letting me know its extreme distress. It needs our help. This culture is killing everything, and we need to stop it.”