In our narratives about how our world works we lean heavily on the idea of cause-and-effect predictability. But a causation slot that must be filled in makes the world seem more knowable than it really is.
In his book How The Mind Works (1997) psychologist Stephen Pinker notes that the very idea of science assumes that there are direct causes for any material effect. Ask an experimental psychologist about the nature of a particular behavior, and the conversation will eventually drift toward its possible social or familial roots. Look at research on urban gangs, and the talk will soon include the contributing forces of peer and environmental factors. The social and hard sciences are generally in the business of seeking first causes. They need this conceit in order to work. To be sure, we are often better off because of their efforts, but not always.
For most of us this science template has probably infused itself in the ways we make sense of the everyday world. Looking for causal chains seems like the very definition of mental rigor.
From this perspective cataloguing effects is not enough. For example, uniform crime reports are interesting, but only get us so far. Our accounts for how the world works is anchored in our faith that things can only get better when causes are revealed and controlled. After all, events without apparent causes are disorienting. A tree that falls and kills a passerby tests out willingness to accept seemingly random events with lasting consequences. We want to know why, and how to control conditions that can prevent such deadly events.
Even with this natural impulse, we overuse the template. A causation slot that must be filled in makes the world seem more knowable than it actually is. We cherish lexicons of determinism. For example, we easily classify people into personality types, where the labels (“neurotic”, “needy,” “depressed,” “obsessive,” to name a few) become concrete explanations for behaviors tied to personality traits. But why Aunt Millie has a personality disorder is still anyone’s guess. Similarly, when a plane falls out of the sky we resort to the same template for making sense of what has happened. When we ask “what went wrong?” we expect a precipitating cause to be named. Only later do accident investigations usually reveal multiple problems that combined to create a disaster.
In our rushed and over-communicated age we rely heavily on the simplistic and deterministic.
Consider a different kind of example. Imagine if you are a neuroscientist. How long can you retain your professional credibility if you take the risk of acknowledging that the mind is partly “unknowable?” Neuroscientist’s study the brain and generally shun discussion of the “mind,” the useful label for what the brain has given its owner by way of a wealth of experiences and perceptions. What I see in my ‘mind’s eye’ is likely not what others see. But how do we find the causes for those mindful thoughts? A brain scan won’t cut it. Consciousness can’t be reduced to predictable neural pathways. And so the idea of mind muddies the scientific impulse for the measurement of particular effects. Thus the brain sciences generally remain silent on this rich idea, preferring to study the organ of thought more than thought itself.
This kind of problem is why the search for first causes tends to force us toward the absurdly technical or the overly simplistic. On the simplistic side, compressed ideas about why things happen indeed yield answers: usually good enough to see us to the end of the day, but not very reliable as bases for creating lasting understandings. The shorthand vocabulary of causes that we inevitably use give us dubious deterministic links that we nonetheless cling to. And so Muslims cause terrorism, African-American males are dangerous to be around, and politicians are corruptible. Each labeled category is pushed next to an arrow that points to a list of supposed causes, producing “answers” that in their narrowness are hardly worth knowing.
Sometimes the best response in reply to an unfolding set of events is uncertainly. Even with the need for simplicity in our busy lives, we have to save room to let in the messiness that is part of the human condition. Instead of imagining arrows, we need to think of webs. A web is a better representation of lines influence that are complex and pass through rooms of intermediate and unknown causes. If we want to be a little smarter all that is required is the resolve to give up the short-term thrills of unearned certainty.
If older Americans are uneasy about the man who will occupy of the White House, it may be because the recent election has parallels to the dark aftermath of The Battle of Chicago.
Just a few days ago President Obama closed out his eight years with a heartfelt appeal to preserve our freedoms. It was delivered to Chicagoans just a few blocks south of Grant Park, marking yet another quadrennial transfer of power. As it was in 1960s, so it is now: the transition has left millions of Americans with a sense of unease about what comes next.
Though it can be risky to look for historical parallels, the coming transition offers the same stark questions of character that surfaced after The Battle of Chicago in Grant Park: a national trauma that contributed to the election of Richard Nixon.
That nadir was the summer in the election year of 1968. Americans were shaken by the impression that the superstructure of our nation-state was beginning to fall away. The stains of the assassination of President Kennedy five years earlier were still sealed into the fabric of the culture and only a preamble for what followed. Martin Luther King was gunned down in April while organizing a poor people’s campaign in Memphis. Two months later Robert Kennedy was fatally wounded while campaigning in Los Angeles. By August, and against an enveloping sense of doom, there was at least the modest hope of some sort of political redemption as Democrats gathered in the Windy City to stage-manage a presidential nomination. It was supposed to be a celebration of the orderly transfer of national leadership that would finally acknowledge increasing public opposition against the Vietnam War. The conflict had already taken almost 17,000 lives. The nation was not only at war with the North Vietnamese, it was increasingly apparent that it was at war with itself, especially younger Americans who could be conscripted into what many saw as a meaningless conflict. Inside the International Amphitheater near the stockyards the party trudged toward the nomination of Hubert Humphrey. He was to replace a mortally wounded Lyndon Johnson who had dithered his administration into a freefall trying to find an exit from its war policy. Johnson’s attempts at leadership had divided the Democratic Party so badly that it was in the process of incinerating itself.
That would become all too clear on the night of August 28, when hundreds of anti-war activists and many young Democrats were on hand to inadvertently seal the fate of the party. Their goal was to march in front of the Hilton and Blackstone hotels across the street from Grant Park and within earshot of the convention delegates. But they would witness the fury of what an official commission later described as a “police riot.” Some of the activists were troublemakers. Most simply wanted to register their frustration with the inertia that had overtaken the nation.
The city and the nation had seen police violence many times before. But this bloody battle in the park and surrounding streets settled into the national consciousness as a symptom of a deep and unbridgeable political rupture. It virtually guaranteed that the government would be handed over to the G.O.P. candidate, the secretive and suspicious Richard Nixon. Nixon was a living paradox who could barely conceal his instincts to vilify his supposed opponents–Jews and the press in particular–and ignore the formal limits of presidential power.
Both Nixon and Trump struggled to overcome the common impression that they were not only tortured personalities, but placeholders for someone better.
Fast forward to today and the epilogue for another chaotic election. President Obama’s farewell address in the same city brings us full circle. As steady and centered leader prepared to depart, an untested victor with another long enemies list and a Nixonian yearning for legitimacy prepared to take over.
Even in 1968 we knew that Nixon’s demons included an ongoing resentment toward the Kennedys, first because of his loss to JFK in 1960, and more generally because the Bostonians were effortlessly likeable. Trump labors under a more complex but similar burden of insecurity, on display in his nonstop insistence on his greatness, but also heightened by our awareness of the natural grace of his predecessor.
And so the victor feeds our collective discomfort. Even with the formal powers granted by the office, both Nixon and Trump struggled to overcome the common impression that they were not only tortured personalities, but placeholders for someone better.
