Gotham Diary:
On the Vanity of Ultimate Causes
26 September 2013
It is not often that I haul out the dictionary. If I am at all uncertain of a word’s meaning, I locate a definition on the Internet, simply because it makes better sense to do so from a descriptivist standpoint: that’s what my readers are likely to do if they’re uncertain. Sometimes, however, I need more than that, a real authority, with the significant extras that only a good dictionary can offer.
I clearly remember the first time I came across the word “overdetermined.” It was in the pages of Harold Bloom’s important if repetitious study, The American Religion. The word appeared quite often, but I couldn’t think what it meant. Although I read a lot of Freud in college and after, I had somehow missed this word; or, perhaps, I understood it in the clinical sense (in the interpretation of dreams) but only in that sense. What I probably missed was the appropriation of psychoanalytic lingo by academic critics that occurred, roughly, during my undergraduate years, but that I missed because I was entirely wrapped up with Great Books and had no interest in current fashions. So, “overdetermined” seemed as odd in the context of discussing religious sects as “metastatized” would have been a century ago. I decided that this use of “overdetermined” was jargon, and not worth using.
Until the other day, that is. The other day, I overheard someone say, “Ultimately, it all comes down to sex.” Sex drives everything, even (especially) when you think it doesn’t. We’re all familiar, by now, not only with this line of thinking but also with its tiresomeness. “Sex,” as Bill Clinton reminded us, means different things to different people. And no doubt because the ultimate prime mover in this instance was held to be sex, I reflected that the reproductive and excretory functions are, even in rather primitive animals, like two different trains making use of the same tracks. You would think that, if ultimately, it all came down to sex, we would all have very special organs reserved to the purpose. But we do not.
The impulse to find ultimate causes is “irresistible” but, happy, not really, and I believe that life becomes both more promising and more interesting when you stop trying to pin them down. True, it also becomes more complex, and sometimes dizzyingly multifaceted. But, from what I cam make out of neurobiology from my seat high up in the peanut gallery, searching for the neuron or even the region of the brain that controls this or that high-level function is likely to be fruitless. Thoughts and feelings are overdetermined, “caused” by so many mental functions that the notion “causation” itself dissolves into meaninglessness.
The physical world, or rather the world studied by the physical sciences, seemed for a long time to follow a tight set of rules in which identical causes always and everywhere produced identical effects, but particle theory has undermined that simplicity. Even so, the physical world remains vastly more comprehensible than the biological world, which had led to many cases of Physics Envy. Physics Envy is the attempt — not just the desire — to frame a highly contingent body of data in the straightforward, reciprocal propositions of Newtonian science. Take economics. Economics is the study of human transactions. How passionately academic economists have wished and pretended that the humans engaged in transactions behaved as simply and predictably as planets! But they don’t.
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In these trying times of falls from fiscal cliffs, we naturally ponder the difference between liberals and conservatives. I don’t have anything terribly new to contribute to this analysis, but I think about it a lot, because I am so puzzled by myself. I ought to be a conservative. In many outward ways, I look like a conservative. I prefer old things to new ones; I’m reluctant to try out new schemes that bear traces of old ones that have never, as I can tell, been well understood. (Almost every proposal for educational reform is littered with scraps from the discard pile — excepting, of course, the altogether intelligent idea, now gaining force against the odds, that public school districts ought not to be in the business of funding and operating sports programs.) I’m a thoroughgoing elitist: we are always weighing things and finding some better than others, and the people with the best minds ought to be the people in charge of affairs. (Mind you, it is rare for a “best mind” to survive higher education undamaged.) I believe that we can all do better. We can make the world a better place.
But that’s just it! History clearly shows, I believe, that we are doing better. This is not to invoke the triumphalist chimeras of progress; we’re not doing that much better. But we have improved, as a race, since Ur of the Chaldees. War and pestilence are the great obstacles tothis improvement, but even there we have a knack for clutching small victories from the mouth of catastrophe. (The Black Death, horrible as it was, put an end to villeinage in much of England, which subsequently developed a standard of personal liberty that is now the global ideal.) We inch forward. Perhaps we are not moving fast enough; maybe we’ve done so much harm to earth’s biosphere that we’re already doomed. Maybe. Because I see no point in acting on such a belief, I don’t entertain it. We move slowly, but we move as fast as we can.
So I’m not a conservative, because I don’t share the core conservative credo, which holds that mankind is fallen and given inexorably to sin. People will be wicked and evil whenever they feel the need to be. There is no point to dreaming of improvements; we must make the best of what we have.
There’s a world of difference between making the best of what you have and making the world a better place. But it shrinks to the size of a quark in the presence of people who are simply itching for excitement.