I have been thinking and writing a lot about causality lately. My recent blog post Why? vs Why Not? discusses the weightiness of the question why. My contention is why is weighty precisely because it asks or, perhaps, demands to know the causal provenance of a phenomenon. And, as I outline in that post, tracking down the causal provenance of a discrete phenomenon against the backdrop of all the other—i.e. hidden—causal forces is no simple matter. This is true for all phenomena, but it is particularly difficult in the domain of the psychological, because... there are no discrete phenomena.
In my most recent post, The future is everything, or how to psychologize with a hammer, I take direct aim at Freud's would-be scientific project, namely to penetrate deeply into the client's psyche to find "a link in the chain of causation" that is missing from the client's story. It was Freud's belief that in so finding this missing link in the chain of causation, the therapist could then help the client to understand their story in total and effect a cure. That was the dream of a man who thought he could bring the same scientific rigour to psychology as chemists and physicists brought to the physical world. It was a misbegotten dream then as it is today. The idea that a person could peer into the past of an individual and find the discrete moments that would verifiably produce behaviour decades later is fantastical thinking. I get the idea, and perhaps it's even a noble one. But it's simply not a dream that can be operationalized in the real world.
How should we think about causality, about the question of how a thing comes to be? My general response is... with an enormous amount of humility. The desire to answer causal questions is to produce certainty. When we are able to answer why, we are attempting to cut away the possible or the probable to end at the certain or determinate. Certainty is univocal, whereas possibility is polyphonous: that is, possibility is complex and informationally noisy. From the metabolic vantage point I have been taking in my writing lately, it is simply true that certainty is much less resource intensive than indeterminacy.
I have two stories to demonstrate this, one that looks at causality in the present moment and one that looks at causality in a more futural sense. Today's story is about the latter. It is sometimes entitled, The Parable of the Chinese Farmer. I've always thought the ethnicity of the farmer is not the critical descriptor but the ethnicity of the story's origin, which is why I call it The Chinese Parable of the Wise Farmer. Some of the other names the story goes by are the following: The Taoist Farmer, The Farmer and his Horse, The Father, His Son and the Horse, and The Old Man Loses a Horse. You get the picture: there's a farmer, a son, and a horse. This is a very old story. It dates from the 2nd Century B.C.E.
The Chinese Parable of the Wise Farmer
Once upon a time there was a farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.”
The farmer replied, “Maybe.”
The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!”
The farmer replied, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad.”
The farmer responded, “Maybe.”
The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!”
The farmer responded, “Maybe.”
This simple parable demonstrates that when we look into the future, the things we take as causal turn out to be much more complex than we are capable of imagining. The story presents events that on first blush seem obviously good and bad. That is, the individual events appear to the neighbours of the farmer to cause goodness or badness, a kind of one to one correspondence. And they might seem so to the reader as well... but not to the wise farmer, who is deeply humble before all the possibilities—polyphonous futures—that might arise.
Who among us would be so patient as the farmer as to the outcome of his horse running away? After all, this story is over two millennia old, and a horse to a peasant farmer centuries before the birth of Christ was perhaps a family's most prized possession. To lose that possession appears to the neighbours as something that is unalloyed badness. The neighbours claim to know—to have a sense of certainty—that the horse bolting "is most unfortunate." But the wise farmer knows that he doesn't know the outcome of things until they have actually come to pass. So he says, "maybe," which simply means "I don't know" or "I couldn't say."
And the outcome of the farmer's horse running away? In fact, what comes to pass is the horse returns with more horses, a windfall for the farmer. But then the windfall for the farmer—an unalloyed good— causes his son to be badly injured... and so on.
The importance of this parable cannot be overstated, and it is an orientation with which we nearly all need practice: that is, actively recognizing that the factors and forces that produce—i.e. cause—outcomes are much more complex than we first imagine.
Why is this parable important for us all to take to heart? Well... first, it's just true that we are not great at predicting the future. The farmer is humble before the power of the universe to produce outcomes. He knows one thing: that he is not able to tell what causes what, and so... rather than staking a claim to knowing the future with certainty, he simply shrugs his shoulders and says "maybe." It might sound facile to say, but the word maybe—like why not from a previous post—is one of the great defences against anxiety and uncertainty. It does not solve the problem of uncertainty, because... there is no ultimate solution to the problem of uncertainty. Or perhaps I should say, uncertainty is a problem that can only be solved retroactively, i.e. when whatever comes to pass comes to pass, one can then say with certainty what has come to pass.
I know... this is all starting to sound very navel gazey. But here's my point: if you are able to effect an orientation towards humility rather than arrogance, of accepting a stance of not knowing rather than a requirement for certainty, in short being able to pull out a strategic maybe at the right time, then, just as with why not, you relieve yourself of the requirement to answer. Maybe becomes a question for the world to answer, relieving you of the weighty responsibility of knowing with certainty.
