WHEN EFFECTS BECOME A COMMON CAUSE

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 22, 2020

Sometimes I feel like St. Augustine of Hippo, other times like Johann Gutenberg, still other times like Stephen Jay Gould, but most times like Chicken Little.

St. Augustine (354 – 430 C.E) talked to God, and he claimed in his “Confessions” that God often spoke to him.  But were he not the benefactor of a generous sponsor in his youth he might never have risen above the unknowable’s, leaving the saving of the Christian faith to someone else as Christianity was already on life support at the time in the 4^th century C.E. 

Like many others, I talk to my own mind, and sometimes it answers pointing me in the right direction moving my unconscious accommodating mind forward.

Johann Gutenberg (1400 – 1468) was a goldsmith who had been misinformed in 1439 about the date of a Pilgrim’s Fair in nearby Aachen.  He had agreed with a couple of investors to make small mirrors to sell to these pilgrims at the fair.  When it turned out that the fair was to be held a year later, he revealed to his co-investors that he had been thinking about making individual letters on metal plates so as to combine and recombine them to print on paper. 

The revolutionary technique of moveable typeface would radically change the world of documentation in the West, replacing as it did, handwritten manuscripts.  The effect of Gutenberg’s letters of metal would change the map of Europe, considerably reduce the power of the Roman Catholic Church, open the floodgates of knowledge to a wider audience, provide a dissemination process for Martin Luther’s message of Reformation, spawn the identity of diverse peoples with their own native language, which in turn would lead to nation building, and a new enterprise system called “capitalism.” 

When I look back on my own long life, not being particularly gifted in any real sense, but repeatedly enjoying fortuitous situations due to timing and circumstance, l feel blessed sharing what I would deem an intuitive instinct for survival with inventor Gutenberg. 

Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002), a paleontologist of the first rank, has been one of my heroes, not because I am that interested in his discipline, but because I love reading his books and his hundreds of articles in Nature, as few write with such clarity and poignancy.  He also loved baseball and was fond of baseball stats as am I.  My Beautiful Betty once endured nine hours of cassette tapes of Gould’s “Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin” on our way up north by car from Florida for a summer vacation.  Alas, my sense is that were Gould alive today he would scoff at the panic and pandemonium of the current pandemic.  He writes:   

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.

Stephen Jay Gould is best known for his "theory of punctuated equilibrium," which proposes that evolution of species is not a slow, gradual process of change, but in fact consists of long periods of stability broken by shorter periods of rapid change.

In a more modest sense, I have posited the belief that success is not a linear curve of constant effort to the achievement of some goal, but a gradual process of change interrupted by periodic failures, or gestation periods, where pain and risk are considered and an inventory taken of where we have been, where we thought we were going, and where we actually are.

I call this the “Plateau of Failure” and every successful person experiences it if their ultimate success is truly genuine and essentially new. Otherwise, the experience no matter how high a person climbs is not new but a repeated imitation of what was and what continues to be. Once the gestation period on this “Plateau of Failure” has passed from disappointment to the calm of an intuitive grasp of reality, it progresses to instinctive integration and insight, erupting into a new explosion in personal growth. See diagram “Triangle of Growth".

When I say I feel most like Chicken Little, it gets attention but is not meant exactly in the sense that you might think. You know the story of Chicken Little who throws his small town into panic by claiming “the sky is falling,” but is unable to find the piece of the “sky” that hit him, earning the displeasure if not the scorn of his fellow citizens. The moral of my story is that we jump to conclusions to what the real situation is and what it tells us by embracing some form of mass hysteria, which leads us vulnerable to manipulation by unscrupulous foxes who could be a politician, neighbor, scholar, preacher, media personality, scientist, academic, or our own conscience.

WHEN EFFECTS BECOME A COMMON CAUSE

We have the effects of splitting the atom, of radioactivity and nuclear waste; the exhaust of our internal combustion engines in our automobiles filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide; the dropping dung of cows across the planet producing methane gas, and now cows and other domestic and wild creatures being considered the source of pathogens contributing to pandemics, climate change and global warning. Effects have, indeed, become a common cause.

Plagued with effects while cause forever proves elusive, dread has become a common cause. Biblical scripture reminds us of this:

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth (REVELATIONS 6:8).

Today, I opened my May/June 2020 copy of Foreign Affairs with the cover story headline “The Fire Next Time: How to Prevent a Climate Catastrophe.” For some reason, I thought the issue would be on the COVID-19 Pandemic, but it was on climate change and global warming, commencing with 2018 Nobel Laureate William Norhaus on “How to Fix a Failing Global Effort.” In other words, on the effects of our present dilemma. The Western mind even in the sacrosanct chambers of academia cannot get past the failure of Western mind to think other than deductively.

The Western mind of ours is absolutely obsessed with “effects” and has no inclination to chase causes. It is a mind always catching up with some disaster or failure of people across the West to behave as mature adults. It has precedence.

Socrates set out to discover the true definition of justice with the idea that ethics would resolve the matter. Plato then followed with his notion of “ideal forms,” treating beauty as abstract and physical forms as only shadows or images of reality. Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that beauty, in fact all objects and concepts, were intrinsic and not abstract, and that they had to be analyzed on their own. As the father of Western logic, Aristotle was the first to develop a formal system for reasoning, observing that the deductive validity of any argument can be determined by its structure giving birth to the syllogism: all men are mortal, Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.

The legacy of these three (i.e., Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) is that, throughout the ages, the discovery of the truth has been an attractive idiom for academics, theologians, scientists, journalists, and idealists: “Truth will set us free!” But whose truth?

This has led to a near total reliance on deductive reasoning and an obsession with effects leading to a consensus of a common cause. Incredibly, this doesn’t seem to discourage the constant engagement in circular logic and crisis management with the treatment of effects as if they were causes.

We see this in the composition of the arguments in Foreign Affairs; we see this in the daily television long winded conference calls of the President of the United States and his collection of scientists and technologists at his side from the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

In earnest, these devoted public servants are all dealing with the effects of this pandemic. It is what we as Westerners do best, which is to pursue effects; our legacy from the “Gang of Three” (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) and our attack weapon. And so now, consistent with this, the Holy Grail is the search for an effective vaccine for COVID-19.

I am not a TED television viewer, but occasionally one of these speakers’ performance will be sent to me by e-mail. They all appear to deal with effects, sometimes with such passion that you temporarily lose your orientation, and think they are addressing causes, but it is never so. They put on a solid performance of what we want to believe at the moment.

Author David Quammen (born 1948) in his book “Spillover” (2012), a book with some 70,000 copies in print, claims to examine the emergence and causes of new diseases across the world, insisting most pathogens that lead to pandemics originate with wild animals or even possibly domestic animals.

No surprise, Quammen, like many others, questions the origin of COVID-19. When asked in an interview if the animal population should be inoculated with a vaccine (ref: Ebola in Africa), he answered a qualified “yes,” except for the possibility of locating all the gorillas who would be hard to find.

My mind raced, “Say what?” In another appearance, Quammen touched on the case of livestock carrying pathogens harmful to humans, implying perhaps all domestic animals should be vaccinated as well.

Now, funny as this sounds, it is scary that attention is focused on the effects derived from possibly treating animals, domestic and wild, as common carriers of pathogens harmful to humans, and seeing people in the audience nodding their heads approvingly.

Quammen goes on to say 60 percent of all communicable human diseases originate with animals. Then a reference to HIV/AIDS follows in this same breath, a disease that killed 35 million in three decades, but without a clear understanding of the cause other than promiscuous male-to-male sex and addicts sharing narcotic syringes. The effect of this behavior and the sharing of needles resulted in destabilizing the immune system of the sufferers with these terrible consequences.

But these casualties were not domestic or wild animals but human beings who had conscious minds, but never apparently exercised the discipline or embraced the business of growing up. Behavior has consequences which humans can control if wild and domestic animals cannot.

This error is endemic to Western thinking man because we are not educated or culturally programmed to deal with a changing complex world. Our sanguine spirit prevents us from seeing the extent of our failing Western mindset. We can describe, analyze, evaluate, and create explanatory models, but none of this changes the reality of the complexity of modern interaction. It is time we create new gods of our minds and let the “Gang of Three” rest in peace.

When I came into the world, there were less than 2 billion souls; today there are 8 billion; a 400 percent growth in one person’s lifetime.

We have not been taught to think creatively, but only critically; not shown how to think constructively and move forward but instead provided with apologies for our situational fault lines; fault lines for which we cannot be blamed because we are not in charge; so, we fall back on the bromide: how could we design a way forward when we have never been taught how?

Author and psychologist Edward de Bono captures the essence of our dilemma:

Western thinking is failing because it is not designed to deal with a changing world. It is failing because it is inadequate to deal with change, because it does not offer creative constructive and design energy. It is failing because it suggests dangerous judgments and discriminations which tend to make things worse (as in legislative chambers and politics). It is failing because its complacent arrogance prevents it from seeing the extent of its failures (Parallel Thinking, 1995, p. 225).

The hope of this observer is that some learning and less addiction to effects will result in a fresh if also a new embrace with causes once the current pandemic has subsided.