Belt, Stick, Wrench

I'm a little fuzzy on the difference between experience-based causality and fate. There are some things I do know, like for instance causality is both recordable and identifiable by an objective standard of observation. It's how science works. Fate is the ordering of events along a path predestined by forces both eldritch or ineffable, no matter how hard you try to eff them. Causality can be both traced and explained: we slept together because we were lonely and drunk. Fate exists to fight explanation: we slept together because we were destined to be drunk and lonely at the exact same place at the exact same time and because Jesus. Or because tarot or wicca or wishing well or whatever. The temporal truncation of All Things Previous so that the present and future might be understood without the unhelpful clutter of why is a necessity of the destiny mindset. Plus then you don't have to tell the story of Spring Break '98 or why you're not allowed on Costa Rican soil.

It's only Fate until you break up. Then everything gets all causal in a big-ass hurry: prostitutes gave your boyfriend gonorrhea, therefore you had to light his clothes on fire. It's a logical chain of events written out like a geometric proof, governed by the same measurable laws that we might also use to, say, bisect an angle or stab someone in the neck with the pointy end of a pencil compass.

I think just by talking about it, I'm circling in on the distinction. I think Fate is causality where you've forgotten what the first act in the chain was. This is a pretty common mistake. Everyone knows "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." That's from... eh... you know, that one guy. The point of it is we have an ironic over-emphasis on our own, limited, sense-and-memory experience. Because what is so important as the World Before Me? What could those history people have to offer? They must have done it all wrong because look at them now: all dead.

The two supra-bestial things human intellect is capable of are diachronic thinking and conceptual imagination. The former affords us historical perspective and the insight that comes with it. The second can foster leaps of growth by filling in gaps of knowledge with the pure light of speculative conjecture.

The second one is dangerous, though. It's too easy for the thinking to go: this is something I really want. Then I got it. So obviously we can't deny the power in the generalized asking, in the fulfillment of the wish. Ignoring the preparation. Ignoring the variables. Trying and failing to categorize and internalize the un-cosmic sublimity of pure serendipity. It's the forging of connections that do not exist specifically at the expense of the connections that do. And then, dumbly, compounding the error by then deciding it must have always been thus. That's how we end up with conventional wisdom. And racism. And Sarah Palin.

And almost invading Syria. This is what we do, we're America. If there's a humanitarian or genocidal crisis,* we show up and we un-kill the people who were mercilessly killed by killing other innocent people AND PROBABLY ALSO the Bad Guys who killed people in the first place. It's our geopolitical lot in life because, well, why else would Jesus have wiped out the native population of a continent for us to make room for interstate highways? So we could rescue Bosnia and Iraq, correct.

But doesn't this behavior have a trajectory, a genealogy? If we thought about it rationally, wouldn't we just see that it's rollover collective guilt from knowing about the Holocaust and not doing anything--anything--about it? I know we weren't on the ground in a great position the whole time, but how much weight are we carrying around just from the SS St. Louis?** Every massacre we can project into a genocide. And look, we have a carrier strike group within a few hundred miles of there right now! Let's not examine the roots of the impulse, let's just rush in, save the day...

I think we as a nation need to have a Good Will Hunting moment, where kindly, bearded Robin Williams confronts us with our past and tells us, softly, gently: It's not your fault. Over and over. Yeah, we'll try to laugh it off or fight it at first, but then we'll break down, hug it out, cry it out and then, wow. Release. Hey, things are terrible in lots of places, but maybe we can take the time now to choose to break the behavior cycle, to ride off in a jalopy toward California to see what kind of future we might have with Minnie Driver. You know, as a nation.




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*Among white or oil-bearing Middle Eastern people, of course. Sorry Rwanda and Sudan!

**It looks like tonnage is around 16,732 gross register tons, so yeah, I guess exactly that much.