Archive for the ‘Butterfly Effect’ Tag
Oh…nuts
Filed under: chaos, interconnected | Tags: Butterfly Effect, linked world
Leave a Comment There was a lot of commotion recently about some nutty pastor in Florida who announced he was going to burn Korans on the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. First he was…then he wasn’t…then he might after all…then finally he didn’t.
There were many reactions to this minister’s announcements. It was opposed by the White House, General Patraeus, and the Vatican, among others around the world. He also wasn’t too popular in his home town. Meanwhile, Muslims in many places were vehemently opposed to his plans, while some right wing wackos thought they were swell.
But not many raised an important question that was asked by a commenter on a Washington Post blog:
This “church” has around 50 members. 50 whackjobs who are now front and center on the world stage with everyone from Hilary Clinton to Angelina Jolie commenting on their proposed lunacy. How did this happen? It’s so discouraging that an ignorant and intolerant few can cause so much trouble. Posted by: calgrl75
This is an important question for the time we live in. After all, it was another small group of “whackjobs” that were behind the 9/11 attacks in the first place. It seems that a by-product from our hyper-connected world is that a tiny group can have an out-sized effect on the world we live in. Andy Warhol’s claim that in the future everyone would have 15 minutes of fame doesn’t seem to do this phenomena justice.
What’s going on here? Robert Wright has suggested that this phenomena is a reflection of our increasingly interlinked, interdependent world. Writing in November 2001, he observed: “…more and more, even fairly small groups with intense grievances will have the power to disrupt the world…”
Michael Gerson also noted our interlinked world when he said:
It is a horrifying wonder of the Internet age that a failed, half-crazed Florida pastor with a Facebook account can cause checkpoints to be thrown up on major roads in New Delhi, provoke violent demonstrations in Logar province south of Kabul, and be rewarded with the attention of America’s four-star commander in Afghanistan and the president of the United States.
That such tiny, nutty groups can have profound impacts on our world appears to reflect a kind of butterfly effect on steroids, in which minor actions in one place can unexpectedly set off major storms someplace else in the world.
Our natural instinct in dealing with these cases is to try to control them; we want to silence them, arrest them, even – in the case of al Qaeda – bomb them back to the Stone Age. However, such actions are often as likely to inflame the situation as anything else, making the wackos victims or even martyrs. In addition, by reacting to their actions, we inadvertently give these nut cases a form of control over our behavior. Rather than acting on the basis of our beliefs and values, we wind up reacting to theirs.
But if we can’t control them, what can we do?
We might start by considering a suggestion made by Margaret Wheatley in her book Leadership and the New Science: “What if we stopped looking for control and began, in earnest, the search for order?”
People have a variety of ideas about where that order may be.
Robert Wright suggested in 2001 that these nut cases would push nations to become even more interdependent: “…more and more, it will be in the interest of nations to perceive and address simmering discontents, not just the discontents of Muslims, even if these discontents are the most pressing right now.”
Geneva Olelhoser has suggested that letting people like Terry Jones be heard can produce public benefits. Referring to Jones’ provocations, she notes:
Gatherings of clergy across all faiths took place. And those conversations got attention they’d never have gotten without the crisis. People have been awakened to prejudices and fears within their own communities, and to the global impact that these seemingly local occurrences can have.
If you think about it, this is pretty much the way we move forward as individuals: crises strike, they seem impossible to understand or accept, yet eventually we grow from them. The new media ecology makes it much more apparent (compared to the old top-down, “only what’s appropriate” method) that we humans tend to behave in unruly and undignified ways. But it also makes it much more likely that we will see the full range of opinion among our fellow human beings, and that we can all learn something together.
Alan Wolfe also suggested that giving extremists some space could be the best defense against extremism:
Publicity may be what extremists crave but it is also the best defense against extremism. No society can rid itself of those who burn with hatred. A wise society will give them the space to burn themselves out. When the ashes cool, we will recognize that although Jones thought he was using the media and commanding the attention of the powerful, they were at the same time using him.
This isn’t to say a forceful response is never called for. Certainly al Qaeda’s terrorism had to be dealt with. But it’s important to understand what the ultimate goal in such a response is.
Lawrence Wright , author of the excellent book on al Qaeda “The Looming Tower,” has argued that Osama bin Laden’s ultimate goal in his terror attacks was to draw the United States into a ground war in Afghanistan. Wright notes that bin Laden felt once that happened, the U.S. would be worn down in a lengthy war of attrition, just as the Soviet Union had been previously. When that plan blew up in his face with the routing of his forces by the Americans, bin Laden and al Qaeda were “repudiated throughout the world.” According to Wright, the U.S. had won its war against al Qaeda. But the American invasion of Iraq and that war’s subsequent chaos had “…given them (al Qaeda) new life.”
As Wheatley notes, the success of a society – like any other organization – in dealing with chaotic influences depends on whether its leaders are up to the task before them:
Anytime we see systems in apparent chaos, our training urges us to interfere, to stabilize and shore things up. But if we can trust the workings of chaos, we will see that the dominant shape of our organizations can be maintained if we retain clarity about the purpose and direction of the organization. If we succeed in maintaining focus, rather than hands-on control, we also create the flexibility and responsiveness that every organization craves. What leaders are called upon to do in a chaotic world is to shape their organizations through concepts, not through elaborate rules or structures.
This assumes that the leaders’ primary focus is on the well-being of their society in the first place. If they instead are consumed by a lust for power and control, or are devoid of firm beliefs rooted in reality rather than ideological delusion, then all bets are off.
In that case, the nut cases will take over the asylum.
Blizzards and Butterflys
Filed under: chaos | Tags: Butterfly Effect, global warming, weather
Leave a Comment A flock of robins arrived in my Albany, NY neighborhood today. I used to consider them a harbinger of spring, but these days I’ll see one or two around occasionally during the winter. (Apparently some of them stay in upstate New York over the winter.) Still, seeing a flock of robins in the middle of February seems unusual.
Robins feasting on crabapples - 2/15/10
Strangely enough, they were not my first “harbinger” of spring. That honor would go to some daffodils I have, whose tips first made an appearance around the third weekend in January.
Daffodil shoots - 2/15/10
Last week the talk was about all the snow that was falling on Washington, DC and its vicinity. All of a sudden, conservatives were proclaiming that a couple snow storms disproved the idea of global warming and political action on climate change became less likely. According to the Washington Times:
Those who value freedom should thank Mother Nature for her sense of humor, undermining the case for global warming one flake at a time. So although we’re quite tired of shoveling, we say, “Bring on the blizzard.”
I don’t see what “valuing freedom” has to do with recognizing scientific facts – unless it has something to do with maybe a freedom from reality. And apparently conservative weather observers tend to be selective in their portents about climate change. They don’t seem interested in things that disagree with their perspective – like the absence of snow at the Vancouver Winter Olympics or the early appearance of robins and daffodil shoots in upstate New York. It sounds to me like they’re engaging in a bit of cargo cult science.
Or maybe, as Stephen Colbert suggests, they’re just “peek-a-boo-ologists.”
I had a conversation (of sorts) with a friend who happens to have strong Republican/conservative views. He gave the usual anti-warming arguments – it’s a natural phenomenon, some climate scientists did funky things with their email, etc. – and concluded with the point that while he thinks global warming is happening, he doesn’t see any way humanity could be responsible for it. He then walked off before I could talk to him more on the subject.
I always find the claim that there’s no way human behavior could affect the weather rather curious. I remember a similar claim being made back in the 1980′s about acid rain. Interestingly, we gained an added perspective on human responsibility for acid rain when the Clean Air Act actually led to a reduction of acid rain.
I’ll leave it to the experts to discuss the hows and whys on the relationship between global warming and local extreme weather events like a snow storm or two on the east coast of the US. I tend to consider this issue by asking a question drawn from chaos science.
Edward Lorenz began the study of what became chaos theory when he discovered what came to be called the butterfly effect. The term came from the title of a talk he gave on the subject: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” The point of the talk was that tiny variations in the makeup of a dynamic system – such as the weather – can have a profound effect on the outcomes of that system.
My question regarding global warming is: if it’s possible for something extremely subtle – like the flap of a butterfly’s wings – to have an effect on our climate and weather systems, how could it be possible for trillions of tons of carbon dioxide released through human activity to not have a profound effect on those same systems?
Butterflies on Valentine’s Day
Filed under: chaos, uncertainty | Tags: Butterfly Effect, careers
Leave a Comment Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? ~ Edward Lorenz
When you reach a certain age, you realize that there were certain moments in your past that significantly affected who and what you are. My life would be very different today if Mona at the Job Service office hadn’t told me back in the 70′s about an upcoming civil service test, or Becky at a friend’s party hadn’t persuaded me back in the 80′s to give aikido a try.
The same can also be true of relationships: looking back, you may realize that one person has had a profound effect on your life. For some, it might be a teacher or mentor; for me it was Susan.
I first met her on a ski weekend at Stowe in December, 1994. Each year about 100 of us go to Stowe to start the ski season off with skiing, lessons and camaraderie. Many of us have participated in this ritual for years, so new people tend to stand out. At the Thursday evening party that year, I noticed a cute blond standing by the fire; I went over and introduced myself.
I soon learned that her name was Susan and she lived in Rhode Island. Someone she knew through work, who lived in Michigan, had mentioned he was a regular at our clinic (the group comes from a variety of places around the country). She was interested in improving her skiing, so she signed up with the trip organizer. Her Michigan friend wound up not being able to attend the clinic that year, but Susan decided to go anyway.
I was intrigued by both her appearance and the way she spoke, and we wound up hitting it off. By the end of the weekend, we made plans to get together for New Year’s weekend. As things turned out, that second weekend together didn’t go quite so smoothly. While it ended on an awkward note, we still were attracted to each other and decided to keep in touch.
To make a long story short, we continued to see each other and our relationship grew. We dated for about two years, until the strains that often come with a long distance relationship took their toll. But even though we stopped dating, we’ve kept in touch – commiserating occasionally about work, relationships, skiing and life in general. Although our lives have gone in different directions, I still feel a special connection with Susan.
A few days ago, I was clearing out some files on my computer when I came across a copy of an email Susan had sent me a week after our bumpy New Year’s weekend. There were a number of things that struck me about that note, including her insight into some issues I was facing at the time and her generosity in focusing on what I was going through (rather than any irritations she may have felt about my behavior that weekend).
But beyond that was a sense of how far I’ve come since that time. Before then I had felt blocked and frustrated, having a sense of what might be called my “vision” but not knowing what to do about it. But thanks in great part to Susan’s encouragement and example, I’ve been able to get beyond that blockage and just do things I believe in, without too much concern about their outcome.
That can be a big step – especially when your ideas are out of the mainstream, as some of mine seem to be. But thanks to Susan, I went ahead and signed up for my first Pan-Mass Challenge. And thanks to her, I turned my offbeat ideas into my web site Quantum Age …and now this blog.
Edward Lorenz was a pioneer in chaos theory who coined the term “butterfly effect” to describe the phenomena in which small variations at one point in time can create a dramatic difference in outcomes. This is now a common subject in popular culture, even if some scientists feel it’s sometimes used incorrectly.
I believe it does have a usefulness in understanding how certain events or people can have a profound effect on our lives. The catch is we need to understand that it’s impossible to predict in advance which events or people will have that effect.
Last spring I was on a panel of former political science graduates at my college, Hobart & William Smith. Our task was to give current poli sci majors an idea of the range of career opportunities they might pursue with their degree. But one thing that struck me was the hunger many of them had to nail down a “right” answer to the question “What should I do?
Our panel tried to give our audience ideas, but I had the sense we weren’t really giving them what they wanted. What that was, it seemed, was certainty: the message that if you do such and such, everything will work out well in the end.
The problem is that life is always uncertain. For one thing, we don’t know how much the world will change over the course of our lives. When I graduated from Hobart in 1974, there was no way I could have known I would someday spend much of my working time on a personal computer, and include among my pasttimes creating and writing for a web site and blog. Such things hadn’t even been thought of back then. Beyond that, we have no idea what future events and people will come to have a profound effect on the direction our life will take.
I won’t presume to tell others how to live their lives. But personally, I believe there’s a value to not getting too hung up about the future. Instead, I believe it’s important to be aware of what is going on around you and what strikes a chord within you, and to then act. Maybe you won’t wind up wealthy and famous. Maybe others will even consider you a little peculiar. But if you are at one with yourself, that won’t really matter.
Who knows? Maybe some day you’ll be lucky enough to meet someone who will enrich your life in unpredictable ways.
Happy Valentine’s Day, Susita!
It’s A Wonderful Life
Filed under: chaos, dual nature, interconnected | Tags: America, Butterfly Effect, change, individualism
Leave a Comment Back in 1997 I wrote a piece about the movie It’s A Wonderful Life for my website, offering a Quantum Age perspective on this holiday classic. As one of our holiday traditions in the USA is to catch a rerun of the movie, I figured I’d take this opportunity to offer a rerun of my essay.
It’s one of the all-time favorite holiday movies in the United States. While much of it dwells in a world that is dark and harsh, it delivers a message of hope. And it’s so straightforward in its intention, the name of the movie is also its message: It’s A Wonderful Life.
The main character in the movie is George Bailey, a lifelong resident of Bedford Falls who becomes so despondent about his life he wishes he had never been born. Miraculously, an angel named Clarence appears and grants him his wish. As a result, George sees what life in Bedford Falls would be like if he hadn’t existed.
And what a different life it is! His younger brother is dead because George wasn’t there to save him, and a naval transport and all on board are lost in a WW II battle because his brother didn’t live to save them. George’s wife Mary is a spinster librarian, instead of the mother of their children. And the charming community of Bedford Falls, in which many have realized the American Dream of a home of their own and a happy family life, has been replaced by Pottersville, a tawdry honky tonk town in which evil Mr. Potter owns everything and people are hardened and bitter.
Realizing that, as Clarence says, he really did have a wonderful life, George begs to be able to live again. And thus, to his joy and amazement, he finds himself back in Bedford Falls, reawakened to a life that’s both demanding and rich.
This movie is clearly not a reflection of the traditional Newtonian world view. That perspective, with its paradigms of clockworks and machines, removes the human element entirely from the landscape. In embracing the detachment of objectivity, it makes people’s lives irrelevant. The overriding message people receive is “You’re not important, the world can manage quite fine without you.”
It’s A Wonderful Life offers a very different message: one person’s life can make a huge difference in the world.
Even though it was released in 1946, this movie seems to be very much in tune with the quantum age. For one thing, a basic premise of both this movie and quantum physics is that life revolves around relationships. Nothing happens in a vacuum; everything is intertwined with, and interacts with, everything else.
Indeed, everything we learn about George Bailey is revealed in the context of his relationships with others. Much of the movie consists of scenes of his life in which he deals with family, friends and customers. Through these images we learn who George is, and what qualities of character he possesses. We learn that he’s honest, conscientious and caring. We learn that he is not afraid to speak his mind when confronted with injustice. And we learn that he puts the highest value on his relationships with those around him.
But relationships do not work in only one direction, and It’s A Wonderful Life is not just about George’s relationships with others. It’s also about their relationships with him. While he may have helped others in very many ways, they helped George as well. On George and Mary’s wedding night, his friends Bert and Ernie help turn their leaky and run-down house into a honeymoon suite. And when George’s uncle loses the bank’s deposits and it looks like the world is crashing around him, his friends and relatives come together to save him and the bank.
Contrast that to the solitary and amoral Mr. Potter, who seems to be an incarnation of the objectivist world view. Eternally detached from the world around him, Potter measures everyone and everything he encounters solely on the basis of what they can do for him. There is no feeling in his world; everything is viewed through the cold lenses of objectivity and materialism.
Clearly, relationships are the spring that nourishes George Bailey’s life. But by themselves, relationships would not seem to explain the dramatic changes that take place when his life is, as it were, “erased from the books.” Is it possible that any one individual could have that profound effect on the world around him or her?
Having lived for many years in a rationalist-objectivist world, our inclination is to devalue the impact an average individual can have on the world around him or her. We generally live with an image of the world as an immense machine, grinding inexorably along without any concern for, or input from, mere mortals like ourselves. With such a mindset, we tend to view the story of George Bailey as a charming fairy tale, heartwarming but unrealistic.
But if we view it from the perspective of chaos theory, George’s story becomes much more believable.
That is because according to chaos theory minute variations in initial circumstances can have profound effects on outcomes. The classic example is known as the Butterfly Effect – the idea that the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in Texas can eventually effect the formation of a hurricane off the coast of Africa. But an awareness of this dynamic can even be found in folklore:
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the rider was lost;
For want of a rider, the battle was lost;
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost!
We experience examples of this everyday. We leave home for work a minute later than usual; we come to an intersection just as a slow driver passes by; we wind up behind this driver for two minutes; they turn down a side street and we soon after come to a traffic light just as it turns red; and things like this continue to happen so that we’re eventually twenty minutes late for work!
While we experience this all of the time, we usually don’t think about it, or consider such dynamics as important. But chaos science has found that this dynamic is present everywhere in the day-to-day world. From a curl of smoke to a massive hurricane, or from an electronic pulse in a computer processor to the world economy, minute variations in initial circumstances can create wildly different outcomes.
In such a world the existence, or lack thereof, of any individual becomes a critical factor in the unfolding of that world. Even further, any variation in the behavior of any individual can have vast and unforeseen repercussions. This is a common theme in modern entertainment. Michael J. Fox goes back in time in Back To The Future, and eventually his current family’s life is radically altered. Characters in Star Trek are frequently reminded of the importance of the Prime Directive, which is to avoid interference with any developing civilization, lest its developemental course be inadvertently altered. Such stories can sound fanciful, but we find them easy to understand intuitively because we experience the same dynamics in our daily lives.
The significance of their message, however, can be unsettling. It’s one thing to view ourselves as insignificant cogs in a vast machine; it’s something quite different to discover we are navigators on an unfamiliar road with no map to guide us. All of a sudden, every choice we make becomes tremendously important.
I believe much of the turmoil people feel in their lives today is a reflection of a dawning recognition of this truth. We are torn today between a well-worn sense of insignificance and futility, and a dawning intuition of great personal responsibility. Common reactions to this intuition are to attempt to resurrect institutions and values from the past in which we can once again lose ourselves, or to attempt to control every minute variable that might have a negative consequence for ourselves, our society, or our planet.
But perhaps we can learn to accept this new awareness, and live our lives like George Bailey: be true to ourselves, consider how we can make our world a better place, and find happiness in the small joys life offers. Perhaps, in living this way, we will come to the same realization that George Bailey came to on a fabled Christmas Eve: it really is a Wonderful Life.
© Dave Higgins, December 1997. All rights reserved.
