Unavoidable Tethering
A social scientist discovered dependent origination
To me, determinism is awe-inspiring. Our present moment is woven together with infinite threads that stretch back billions of years. Try to pull on one thread, hoping to just change one microscopic corner of the tapestry, and the entire fabric would begin to unravel. Pull one thread, change the entire image. Tweak one strand from the past, and you likely wouldn’t exist, or perhaps you’d have a different partner, or different children. But for a different tiny change, you might also have avoided that horrific heartbreak, or the loss of a loved one, or close friend. This leads to a deeply moving conclusion. Our best and worst moments are inextricably linked. The happiest experiences of your life are part of the same thread in which you suffered the most crushing despair. One couldn’t follow without the other. That may sound strange, but I obviously wouldn’t exist if my great-grandfather’s first wife hadn’t murdered her family, so my most joyous moments are unavoidably tethered to that horrific tragedy. In a literal sense, my most euphoric moments couldn’t exist without their suffering. That doesn’t mean that we should celebrate suffering, but that future elation will emerge directly or indirectly from seemingly senseless suffering can be a consoling truth that blunts our worst moments of pain. Conversely, my joyous moments will, in some way, lead inexorably to someone else’s agony, or my own. That’s just the way it works. For good or ill, I find this mind-bendingly beautiful, providing the most vivid sense of interconnection
Klaas, Brian. Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters
I was listening to this thought-provoking Russ Roberts podcast with Brian Klaas about his new book Fluke and its message resonated so strongly. Themes of the podcast were: the radical uncertainty about the effects of our actions, the contingency of historical events, the need to live an ethical life in the face of this, and the corresponding need to embrace the uncertainty rather than hubristically try to over-optimize for certainty. All of this is very much in keeping with the Buddhist idea of dependent origination. One particular aspect of this is the idea that who we are is the consequence of all the things that happened to us, both good and bad. Klaas suggests we should hold two views simultaneously. We should regret our harmful actions, as well as our own suffering, as a way to improve our actions from a forward looking perspective. But we should also see them as essential to making us who we are - our sorrows are also the causes of our greatest joys. Not only this — that all the joys in our life is built on the foundation of our forebearers’ monstrous crimes1. Brian’s life story is an example of this (alluded to in the above quote). I would modify his point slightly to say that we shouldn’t regret the past, but instead, we should grieve it. That doesn’t mean wishing it were different; instead it means fully accepting it for what it is (was).
Surely all of us, as the descendants of a hundred thousand years of human history only exist today because of terrible acts that our ancestors committed. Some of us may know more of those acts than others (and may be nearer in time), but all of us carry this inheritance.