Acknowledging Chaos
Humans and the systems and technologies they employ can predict future outcomes to some extent, but chaos will always remain an influencing factor.
What I read: “The forces of chance” by Brian Klaas. Published October 29, 2024
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about philosophy. Among the schools of philosophy, Stoicism has risen to become more readily embraced by a modern audience.
The truth is that every school of philosophy has been influenced by another school of thought and each is an amalgam and variation of previous ways deep thinkers have tried to explain the world. But Stoicism is also a worthwhile standalone system of thought to study.
Among Stoic thinking is the concept of unpredictability, or to put it in the words more often used, things beyond our control. Using the vernacular of the article by Brian Klaas, I contend the chaos to which he alludes falls into the same category as things beyond our control.
The ancient philosopher Epictetus had some wisdom to bestow upon us regarding acknowledging things we can’t control.
Work, therefore, to be able to say to every harsh appearance, ‘You are but an appearance, and absolutely not the thing you appear to be.’ And then examine it by those rules which you have, and first, and chiefly, by this: whether it concerns the things which are in our control, or those which are not; and, if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.
In other words, do what you can in life to manifest the life and world you want, but realize all along that there will always be things outside of your control. We can control how we respond, but we can’t necessarily change certain things that are truly beyond our control. The more you realize this, the more at peace you’ll be.
For me, the topic of Klaas’s article is in the same ballpark as the Stoic concept of accepting that some things are beyond our control. Chaos is indeed beyond our control and chaos is always a factor in everything we do and experience.
The social world doesn’t work how we pretend it does. Too often, we are led to believe it is a structured, ordered system defined by clear rules and patterns. The economy, apparently, runs on supply-and-demand curves. Politics is a science. Even human beliefs can be charted, plotted, graphed. And using the right regression we can tame even the most baffling elements of the human condition. Within this dominant, hubristic paradigm of social science, our world is treated as one that can be understood, controlled and bent to our whims. It can’t.
Our history has been an endless but futile struggle to impose order, certainty and rationality onto a Universe defined by disorder, chance and chaos. And, in the 21st century, this tendency seems to be only increasing as calamities in the social world become more unpredictable. From 9/11 to the financial crisis, the Arab Spring to the rise of populism, and from a global pandemic to devastating wars, our modern world feels more prone to disastrous ‘shocks’ than ever before. Though we’ve got mountains of data and sophisticated models, we haven’t gotten much better at figuring out what looms around the corner. Social science has utterly failed to anticipate these bolts from the blue. In fact, most rigorous attempts to understand the social world simply ignore its chaotic quality – writing it off as ‘noise’ – so we can cram our complex reality into neater, tidier models. But when you peer closer at the underlying nature of causality, it becomes impossible to ignore the role of flukes and chance events. Shouldn’t our social models take chaos more seriously?
I recall having a conversation with someone in my life who’s essentially a climate change expert having worked in a related field for decades interfacing directly with climate scientists as far back as the early 1990s. When I tell him that I’ve read a certain article about climate change telling me how bad it’s going to get, most of the time he says it will be far worse than that. Why? Because even the most sophisticated climate models don’t adequately take into consideration domino effects and, using the word evoked by Klaas, chaos.
Yes, we know climate change is real. Yes, we know it’s going to be really bad each year for the rest of our lives and perhaps the rest of the lives of every child walking the planet today. Few reputable scientists disagree about that. However, can they predict with certainty “how bad” it’s going to get and “how soon?” No. Their models rightly tell us it could be a climate hellscape, but just how bad that hellscape is going to get and how quickly is a bit of a crapshoot.
We can’t even predict with great accuracy weather for more than a couple of weeks at a time.
Chaos theory, to this day, explains why our weather forecasts remain useless beyond a week or two. To predict meteorological changes accurately, we, like Laplace’s demon, would have to be perfect in our understanding of weather systems, and – no matter how advanced our supercomputers may seem – we never will be. Confidence in a predictable future, therefore, is the province of charlatans and fools; or, as the US theologian Pema Chödrön put it: ‘If you’re invested in security and certainty, you are on the wrong planet.’
Take modern American politics. There is an entire end of the political spectrum that has shunned facts and truth and replaced it was lies, conspiracy theories, hate, and a type of radical right-wing extremism many of us thought could never manifest so strongly in our country. But here we are. Chaos applies to politics as much as it applies to everything else.
In our own lives, a single random incident can change our life forever. A bad auto accident, sudden illness, or loss of a job can quickly send our personal lives into disarray. Can one predict these things? No. Chaos doesn’t care about anything other than unpredictably shaking things up without our consent.
Klaas references the folly of assuming measurements and predictions can always be entirely accurate.
But there were wrinkles in this world of measurement and prediction, which the French mathematician Henri Poincaré anticipated in 1908: ‘it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter.’
I encourage you to read Klass’s fine article. It’s important for us to learn and study facts, systems, science, and truth to the best of our abilities, but it’s also important to realize that chaos might have other plans for us. Acknowledging chaos as an ever-present factor in our lives can bring some peace when things go awry personally or on a larger scale. We can take solace in doing what we can to affect outcomes, but at the same time accept that sometimes chaos has other plans.
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