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Falling In Love
On The Beauty Of Randomness

Anchor 1

Reign?

 

I wonder often why people who campaign for equality and fight with their lives for democracy choose to be ‘reigned over’, thus venerating inequality?

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I wonder, too, why a nation of reigned-over people need to ‘house’ and ‘dress’ the ‘reigners’ in displays of entirely we-are-better-than-you layers of top-of-the-ladder wealth?

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And that leads me to this: if a bequeathed, bloodline-based position of Head of State were held by a poor family living on a housing estate and speaking from a tiny balcony of a paint-peeling apartment there, would the country still revere and bow to that family? Isn’t the visible material divide between the venerators and the venerated essential to the veneration?

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I’m an American and a British citizen. So I come by this query predictably. And I puzzle fervently over the conflation of equality and inequality.

In particular I stand bemused when I hear the radically different interpretations of democracy embedded in these two versions of our patriotic songs – same tune, unsettlingly different lyrics.

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USA:

 

My country, ’tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died,

Land of the pilgrims’ pride,

From every mountainside

Let freedom ring!

UK:

 

God save our gracious King,

Long live our noble King,

God save the King!

Send him victorious,

Happy and glorious,

Long to reign over us,

God save the King!

I love both countries. I am a grateful and admiring citizen of both. And I know that there is no such thing as a pristine democracy. I also know that pure equality does not exist (algebraic equations notwithstanding). I know as well that there are a few practical advantages to an inherited Head of State, riches-bedecked or not. Such is the never-simple nature of human social inventions.

 

But I won’t, because I can’t, make peace with the institutionalised oxymoron of ‘democratic constitutional monarchy’. If we espouse equality and democracy, we must, I believe, foreswear bloodline-inherited structures, however stirring their rituals, however dazzling their dress. Democratic republics are dull by comparison, but the radiance of their consistency of values and structure is worthy of their people. And thus glorious.

 

Every so often I need to say that.

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Anchor 2

Instead?

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“The slaughter of the Indians is America’s original sin.”

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My first encounter with that take on four centuries of decimation of Natives by White Americans fascinated me. America’s original sin. My country’s original sin. Good expression.

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Maybe not. Embedded in that take is the very racist imperialism that drove the slaughter of “Indians” by White people in the first place. “America’s original sin,” clearly not the Natives’ sin, was only White America’s sin. But was there ever a White America?

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Only by conquest. So, no. “America" did not exist until that land mass was invaded and conquered by White Christians from Europe. “America” was their concoction.

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So whose landmass was it? Did it “belong" to the 13,000,000 1 humans whose people had been there for 26,000 years, having themselves migrated from Asia? If so, from that point on, how should White Europeans have regarded it? When Leif Eriksson, then Christopher Columbus, then Amerigo Vespucci arrived from Europe, was it right, was it moral, for them to invade it? Was it theirs for the taking? Did it matter that it was already populated?

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They thought so. And so did the White European monarchs and aristocrats who funded them. They regarded all of the world as rightfully theirs and all non-White beings as subhuman, dangerous animals to be destroyed.

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This view trickled down for 400 years almost in tact into the words of White Europe’s most enduringly idolised leader, Winston Churchill, who said as if unassailable: “I do not apologize for the takeover of the region by the Jews from the Palestinians in the same way I don’t apologize for the takeover of America by the whites from the Red Indians or the takeover of Australia from the blacks. It is natural for a superior race to dominate an inferior one. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." 2 

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There it is. The rationale: Whites invaded because there was no one there.

But let’s imagine that the White “explorers” and “settlers” had not lived by racist assumptions. And let’s say that they wanted only to explore what lay beyond the European horizon, pick up a few spices along the way, or to escape European religious persecution. And let’s say they sailed, stepped ashore, and suddenly encountered the occupants of that land.

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Now what? What would non-racist arrivals have done?

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What they did do, of course, sweepingly put, was to claim the land as theirs and to decimate the original occupants, reducing them by 1900 to 237,000. 3

 

But if they hadn’t, if they had recognised that this land was already someone else’s, what would they have done?

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What should they have done?

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1 David Michael Smith, University of Houston, https://www.se.edu/native-american/wp-content/uploads/sites/49/2019/09/A-NAS-2017-Proceedings-Smith.pdf.

 

2 Mike Burch, Omega Consulting Group, and Tariq Ali, Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, Verso, 2022.

 

Total western hemisphere indigenous deaths from White invasions between 1492 and 1900 numbered close to 175,000,000 .

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Anchor 3

Dessert

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Pleasure never makes it to the top of my to-do list. Ever. It is always last. Right down there with “dessert.” Dessert. That is the problem. The delicious things in life are allowed only after the meat and vegetables. You don’t want to fill up with frivolous things because you won’t have room for the important things. And when it comes to food, dessert is not important. In fact, you could argue it is dangerous, charged as it is with all that sugar, even the benign kind if your dessert is, heroically, fruit. But even with its vitamins and enzymes and minerals, fruit is just too delicious to be important, i.e., first.

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The trouble is that “dessert last” doesn’t stop at the dinner table. It rolls right off into the whole of your life, generalised into “pleasure last”, and voilà you have my to-do list. Pleasure at the bottom. My just deserts.

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However, being a self-improvement junkie for the past zillion years (56), I am now setting out to put pleasure at the top of my to-do list. I think you would agree that “pleasure first” is an improvement “must” for over-working obsessives like me. Actually, I am not yet quite setting out, still tying my shoes and filling my water bottle. I’m terrified of the whole idea.

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Will I morph into a metaphorically mostly-sugar person? Will I slowly rot? Will no one, including myself, be able to find me, much less take me seriously? It’s hard enough being seen when you are old, but if you’ve also re-prioritised your to-dos and are now starting the day with pleasure, risking never getting to all the admirable worky things on your list, and if people find out, how will they look at you? These things torture me.

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I should relax, actually, because who's going to find out? If I still deliver on my work promises, even if they are the last thing I do in the day, who will know?

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The challenge, though, is not really other people’s judgement of me. It is mine. I do not think a person is a wholly worthy person if they put pleasure at the top of their to-do list. I think they are indulgent, self-serving, superficial, and generally deserving of any consequence of “sugar-first” they may suffer. Of course, I don’t think this logically, in any defensible sense. But it’s in there elbowing its way to the front of my attitude every time I decide how to spend my time.

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The worst consequence of that judgement nightmare is my own guilt. Even if I were able to start with pleasure and then successfully through the day complete all the not-so-pleasurable things on my list before anyone got suspicious, it just seems wrong, a thing needing forgiveness by the ultimate forgiver, even if there isn’t one.

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Don’t get me wrong. I adore my work. So it is a pleasure of a certain sort. But that pleasure is not the bottom-of-the-list kind. It is work, so no guilt.

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Maybe I will “just do it.” (No shoes needed.) I’ll select a pleasurable thing and close my eyes and jump. What is the worst that can happen? For example, I can start every day, not just my official author days, with writing. Or I can sit quietly contemplating the beauty around me, especially the nuances. Or I can read sciencey things that will never make it into pieces for this website. Or I can write to someone out of the blue. How bad can that be?

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I can “just do” one of those things first and see what happens to the rest of my day and to my long-term impact on the world. I’m sure there is an algorithm for that.

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For sure one thing I truly madly deeply can do is keep my email app closed until after lunch. I can. Really. If the Little Engine could, I can, too. Maybe I won’t start there. Or maybe I will. I should. Slay the biggest beasts first, I say. When I am saying anything, that is, about taking back your life and rethinking your entire childhood and re-writing all the children’s books and Sunday school lessons and reiterative unsolicited nonsense jackhammered into the willowy wills of our young, ever-popping-up selves. Which is not all that often. But.

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The point is when it comes to a balanced life, pleasure belongs at the top of the to-do list. So I will put it there starting tomorrow.

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And I promise not to jump to the bottom to start my day.

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Anchor 4

Falling In Love

On The Beauty Of Randomness

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It’s true. It was a bit like falling in love when I met randomness for the first time, looking into its eyes, never being the same again. You know that feeling? That sense that everything before has been second place, not quite it, and that the search for the true thing is over; and then the revelling in it; and then its turning of life upside down; and then the “ah, yes, this is what right-side-up is?”

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You may not feel that way at the end of this piece, and that is fine. Almost no one with whom I share this idea swoons, but rather does a kind of about face with their face, and disappears. Some are nice and smile as they go. Others, well….

 

So who knows? But here is the concept just in case:

 

The unfolding of the universe is random.

 

Isn’t that a simply dazzling idea?

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Isn’t it a relief, like the “whew” after turning your slacks around so that the front is in front? Or like collapsing into a soft chair after hearing that she is not mad at you after all? Or looking up at the Montana night sky?

 

It is for me. Now. But randomness as a concept, as an explanation for the emergence of the wonders of the universe, including humans, had been an untouchable idea most of my life. I had been surrounded by design-pedlars, by intention-mongers, by meaning-makers everywhere. And I understand why. Human brains have, and love to use, the capacity to see sequences, to find “this-then-that” in everything. That lively human function makes us love causal relationships. Add to that our love of ascribing meaning to everything, and you have our understandable devotion to the idea that something designed and birthed the universe on purpose, and with conscious intention caused new things to arise as they did, and along the way imbued it, and us, with significance. And still does.

 

It’s tempting, isn’t it? The trouble is that it doesn’t make sense. Our brains tell us that, too. They betray themselves. They love the idea of “conscious cause”, but they also possess the capacity to scrutinise it. So they do. And they are not impressed.

 

Either they then retreat beneath it, or they lie on top of it, trying to pat down the lumps, worried. If the world is not the intentional and conscious design of a being, a god, of some sort, they wonder, if big changes just pop up haphazardly with the god either under its own duvet, or dead or, worse, nonexistent in the first place, what then?

 

How can we live, we wonder, in a universe that cares nothing about anything, including us, that spins and roars and explodes and swallows itself up capriciously in great gulps of gravity? Where is the beauty in that?

 

Right here. Right in the centre of its very arbitrariness, in the interface of it and us. Here in our brains. Here in the middle of the wondrousness of the very fact of its own randomness. Here in this recognition: every new development in the universe, massive and minuscule, is accident. Right there is where the beauty lies.

 

Don't worry. Causal sequences do exist. Life is full of those thises-then-thats that delight us. Seasons repeat; babies gestate; meteors crater; roots rot; cars start; lipstick fades. But established sequences like those come from inside themselves, from their built-in molecular commands, not from an outer conscious force telling them every second what to do.

 

It is not those existing, dependable, internally-driven sequences I am talking about. I am talking about the original, long-ago, first “arising” of each of those sequences’ ancestors. And of all of the ones happening now that we cannot “see”. That is where the wondrousness lies for me – in life’s moving along with a sequence and then “out of the blue” introducing a new one. What causes that? What is doing the introducing? How, in other words, does the first bit of the makings of a new causal sequence “arise?” It isn’t there, and then it is. How does that happen?

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Most likely you would answer, “God does it.” I know very few people who wouldn’t say that. Some might snippily eschew the word “god” for fear of appearing unsophisticated, unintellectual, unworthy of PhDs and things. They would instead say “energy” or “spirit” or “intelligence,” even “universe.” But they would mean a something, an entity, a causer of some sort.

 

And maybe there is a causer of some sort, a “god" who causes things suddenly to come into being. Certainly most of our religions really, really want us to think so. Religion and deity-based culture seem hopelessly uncomfortable with the alternative, the idea that new phenomena in the universe come into being out of nowhere. Randomly. As in “they just happen.” In fact, scientist William Godwin suggests that “discomfort with randomness produces religion." 1

 

He also proposes that the idea of a causal being, a god who creates everything, cannot be disproven, and therefore can’t comprise a scientific theory. But being un-disprovable does not make it true. It just makes it stare into space.

 

The concept of randomness in creation, on the other hand, looks right at us, replete with probability. Randomness is an explanation that holds because it is where every “god caused it” argument ends up anyway. “God caused it” ultimately crash-lands into Plato and St Thomas Aquinas who would not touch, “what caused God?” So the quandary persists: what is the first cause of everything?

 

For most of my adult life I have sat this whole thing out. From the first days of my philosophy studies I could see that reason was never going to solve the problem of “first cause.” So I got on with other philosophical conundrums that had a better future.

 

But recently I have come back to the proposition of a conscious first cause. And happily I have consciously abandoned it. I have turned around to look randomness straight in the eyes. And, yes, fallen in love. What if randomness, I have begun to wonder, is actually a thing, a beautiful thing, not just a dumping ground for dead-end first-cause quandaries? What if randomness is a phenomenon in its own right, something to be parsed, reassembled, and marvelled at?

 

Godwin explores it this way:

 

“Randomness is just one facet of the larger field of probability. All of life is probabilistic, though that thought makes many people uncomfortable – most humans seem to want certainty, even though there is no certainty in life.

 

But at bottom there is randomness in all aspects of life. For that matter, there is randomness at the very basis of everything in the cosmos. I strongly suspect that whatever quantum effect sparked the initial formation of the cosmos in the “big bang” was a random event. And certainly everything since – the formation of gas clouds, of slightly higher concentrations of gas that began to grow larger by gravitational attraction, the formation of stars, the fusion process going on in stars, the formation of planets, etc., are all probabilistic events. If this or that molecule had happened to drift in a different direction, the outcome would have been different." 2

 

Swimming along in this current is the notion of meaning. When things are random, they do not have meaning. And again our brains stomp their feet, or their neurons, at that idea. No meaning? Does my life have no meaning? We curl our lips.

 

But the fact that the design of our brains includes its capacity to inject meaning into events does not mean that meaning itself exists. I can decide to find meaning in things; in fact, finding meaning is a moving experience, a positive one, a bit like a watercolour that captures nuances of life that then give us joy. Meaning lifts our hearts and proposes purpose. Purpose then directs our lives in ways our brains regard as good, and whose hormones make us happy and healthy. In that way finding meaning in life may well be a survival feature of human evolution.

 

So let’s keep ascribing meaning and assigning purpose. Absolutely. Let’s, though, along the way, consider not seeing meaning as a conscious construction by a bodiless being. Any attempt to defend rationally the idea of a sentient, ongoing, orderly former of the universe and maker of meaning plummets us ultimately into disappointment. Dependably. And then in order to lift ourselves out of the failure, we feel we have no choice but to abandon reason and embrace faith. We have to stop wanting to know and start agreeing to believe.

 

And that, I think, is sad because it deprives us of the, dare I say it, holy experience of contemplating randomness itself, which is ineffably sweet. And which I invite you to do right now.

 

Find a seat within view of a flower, or strings of spider web, or Venus, or the face of the human you love most in the world. Now gaze. And just for a few seconds imagine the moment when there was no such thing, and then there was out of nowhere a tiny change in what was that led to another random tiny change and another until there was that thing, that thing you now see. Its beginnings were not there. And then they were. All by itself this thing started into being. No plan, no blueprint, no map, no permission. It just started.

 

I ask you, how amazing, how rapturously incomprehensible, is that? How beautiful?

 

How life-changing to let it be possible that there is nothing that causes anything completely new to come into being? And yet it does. The new thing appears, imperceptibly, meaninglessly, miraculously.

 

All around us are the fruits of that randomness. Give yourself a week, just a week, of immersion in this notion: nothing was or is on purpose. Nothing is “meant to be.” Our brains observe what is and imagine a maker and make up its meaning.

 

But we don’t make up randomness.

 

It is here for real for us to love.

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1 William Godwin, Exchanges, p. 98, 24 February, 2014.

2 William Godwin, Exchanges, p. 97, 24 February, 2014.

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