the Marimbist

(It’s 4.30 am.  I’ve slept eight hours already and I can’t sleep any more.  Isn’t jetlag fun?…)

This is an essay that I’ve been planning to write for some time (and I’ve got a long list of ideas that fit into that category).  A fascinating—and surprisingly fiery—conversation with my very intelligent little Sister yesterday gave me a framework for this essay and I’m hoping that the ideas will coalesce below around the basic tenor of our conversation.  Unfortunately (for Li Hong), she gets to lose this argument because it’s MY blog and I’m the one writing it down.  :)  Hopefully, she’ll leave a comment if she feels that I’ve misrepresented her views—then as long as she doesn’t make TOO much sense, I’ll approve her comments.  (That last clause was sarcastic, I’ll approve any and all comments that aren’t spam.)  This week in Singapore/Malaysia has been a prolific one for me in the writing department.  I hope my experience in China will be as inspiring…

The basic conversation started something like this:

Li Hong:  Do you believe in “Cause and Effect?”   (Note:  I didn’t initially hear the capitalization.)

Z:  Absolutely.  If I were to punch you in the face, and you were to cry, then my punch is the cause and your crying is the effect.  How could I not believe in this?  (Note:  She is a tiny little “slip” of a woman and it was fun to tease her with a violent image.  I’m not sure why, but I truly enjoy finding these little thoughts of things that would never happen in the real world.  There’s another essay here if I can figure out the cause of this…effect.  )

Li Hong:   Then why did someone like Mozart exist?  There had to be a reason that that particular person got chosen to be a genius at music.  Why did my Sister get cancer?  Why did a Singaporean woman die in the attacks in Mumbai last year?  There HAS to be a reason for these things to happen to these people and the Buddhists believe that the reason comes from Cause and Effect.  That Singaporean woman was the first person from my country to die in a terrorist attack.  Why her?!

To avoid too much dialogue, I’m going to shift to prose to enumerate two concepts:  Both of which Little Sister (and seemingly Buddhist tradition) is calling “Cause and Effect.”  It also seemed that this term is connected (in a wider and very interesting way) to the concept of Karma.

I’ll start with a brief (and unfortunately, fictional) story:    My friend Tim Daly won the lottery yesterday.  How exciting is that!  A million people played the lottery and HE was the one that won!  What are the odds?  (1,000,000:1.)  At first glance—and certainly my gut reaction agrees—this is MIRACULOUS!  Tim just won a billion dollars and I KNOW HIM!!!  There must be some reason that he won and all those other people didn’t.

Well, let’s look at the story from a slightly different angle.  Let’s be aliens from another world (maybe Singapore).  We don’t know Tim Daly, it’s two days ago and because we’re Singaporean, we are capable of visualizing the entire pool of lottery players as a group in a (very large) field.  Tim Daly is one of those people, but we’ve never met him (or any of the others) and we’re just looking at a million people waiting to see the lottery numbers.  We Singaporeans have been asked to tumble the ping pong balls in order to determine the winning lottery numbers—and… out pop the numbers.  One of those people in the field wins the prize and his name happens to be Tim Daly.  It’s kind of a strange name.  Here’s the important part:  Because we don’t know him, there’s nothing miraculous about the fact that he was chosen.  We KNEW that we were going to choose some single person from the group and then one person was chosen—this is absolute cause and effect.  Moreover, no matter which of the one million people had been chosen, there would have been friends and family for whom the experience would been thrilling and seemingly magical/miraculous.  This is also cause and effect.  There is no magic involved with one person being selected.  If, however, you were to tell me BEFORE the balls were tumbled that Tim Daly was going to be the winner—THEN you’d have some magic.  I would truly be impressed, but I’ve not seen anything like that happen in my 42 years.

Why was Mozart (specifically) chosen to be the greatest melodic genius of Western Musical history?  It’s the same as Tim Daly.  There is a “Bell curve” of intelligence.  The vast majority of people fall near the middle if you graph them by their intelligence.  Average intelligence is in the middle of the graph, geniuses are to one side and mental retardation is to the other side.  As you move to the extreme sides of the graph, the number of people reduces until you have VERY few extreme geniuses and roughly EQUALLY few extremely handicapped people.  Mozart was one of the people far out on the genius side—and his Father was a well-known musician driven to make his son into a prodigy.  There’s nothing magical/miraculous here either.   There have been millions of musicians throughout history and a few of them were geniuses.  If Mozart’s name had been Braun, then we would be asking, “What made Braun such a genius?”  Here’s a sentence that’s never been written before:  Mozart equals Tim Daly.

Why did my wife (Le Hong’s Sister) get cancer?  This may be a different type of question—by which I mean that there may actually be a direct cause and effect.  We don’t know why people get cancer much of the time.  Le Khin might have been exposed to something at some time in her life that seemed innocuous at the time—it might still seem innocuous because we don’t yet know that it’s a carcinogen.   On the other hand, people’s tendency to get the type of brain tumor that she got may have its own statistical Bell Curve.  If that’s the case, then SOMEONE was going to be far out on the bad side and we just happen to have loved that one unlucky woman.  Poor her.  Poor us—either way.

The Singaporean woman in Mumbai?  The terrorists were going to kill people that day.  They prepared carefully and the police didn’t get lucky enough to stop them before the mayhem.  Then the direct effect was that people died.  One of them happened to be from Singapore—which has about 4 million people and is nestled between the most populous Muslim country in the world (Indonesia) and another Conservative (though not generally extremist) Muslim country (Malaysia) and indeed a large portion of Singapore is Muslim.  The amazing thing here isn’t the fact that someone from Singapore suffered from an attack by a Muslim extremist group, but that SHE WAS THE FIRST Singaporean to suffer death from such an attack.  I want to be clear here.  I don’t believe that Muslims are dangerous—there are only a few who are and there are Christian, Atheist, Etc. extremists who are dangerous also, but the Muslim countries of the world have had more than their share of extremist violence in recent years (more than the U.S.!) and it’s truly remarkable that Singapore has remained exempt from those problems.  I hope this good “fortune” continues, but I’ll be surprised if it does…

In conclusion, there are two concepts that are being called “Cause and Effect.”  One is simple cause and effect:  One thing happens and it results in another thing happening.  The other concept is a different thing:  call it luck, maybe.  Luck is a magical-seeming perception that occurs when you are close to a statistical result.  And there are millions (BILLIONS) of statistical results happening every day—you’re bound to be standing next to some of them…

Luck is an emotional mirage—a fluke of the evolutionary wiring of our brains.

Bonus Link:  Very interesting discussion of a common spelling error.