Many of you are now familiar with the so-called “butterfly effect”. Complexity theory and chaos dynamics squeezed out this memorable nugget to amuse the world with Nature’s antics. It states that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world can have profound effects on the weather in another.

Now, there are two “spins” on the butterfly effect. One I reject; one I embrace.

Typically, the butterfly effect — and chaos theory in general — is used to define limits: limits of human knowledge about nature, about the results of our action. “Sensitivity to initial conditions” is the applicable term here, and popular science takes that to mean that the best laid plans of Mice and Men are subject to the leeching blight of CHAOS. In its basest incarnation, this attitude shows meteorologists throwing up their hands, exclaiming, “D’oh! We just can’t predict the weather more than two weeks in advance!” The Empire sighs. Business as usual continues, its prison walls a tad more visible.

Well, that’s pretty lame. Say, what does a fractal mean to you? Sure, you’ve seen them on posters at the mall, and on rave flyers. Pretty colors. Druuuugz, man. And maybe you’ve heard that fractal math is used to generate trees and landscapes in computer films. Well, that’s kind of neat. Why is that? Fractals provide models of lots of natural processes, such that it’s easier to simulate the branching of a tree with a few simple formulas than by tediously computing every leaf and twig.

So what? What about the second interpretation of the butterfly effect?

I’M GETTING TO THAT!

A fractal is generated by a recursive process. So are landscapes and trees. DNA replication, population flux, heart fibrillation, the stock market — all are based on iteration (cyclicity) and feedback. So are you. And how about language? And, sorry to jump the gun here, but consciousness — self-consciousness — is now presumed to be a recursive process. Capiche?

The butterfly effect is due to a small change in one cycle getting fed back into the process, amplifying itself each time until it is quite significant.

On boundaries there is life
Life is a boundary condition
Like the shape of flames
Like farms along the Nile

Another gem from chaos math is that fractals are often found along boundaries. Or more accurately, many boundaries are fractal. That means that between two seemingly discreet regions there may be a zone of chaos, swirling filigrees wherein one cannot tell what region one is in. Is a tidal pool land or sea? What is the edge of a cloud? Where is the line between Right and Wrong? What is the nature of altruism? When does a historical period “end”? How can one describe the transition between waking and sleep? Between life and death?

These fractals, these patterns of randomness, are found throughout the universe, on all scales, at all times. Perhaps they are saying, “Wake Up!” Perhaps you begin to see why they are more than just techno-fetish talismans with pretty colors. The mathematics of chaos hint at some fundamental Mystery that lies at the center of the universe. A Pattern has been found, which suggests that all levels of being are inherently interconnected, infinitely reflective of one another, vicissitudes of the eternal Tao.

Or maybe you’re too busy to think about fundamental Mysteries. Worse, you’re too mature, too practical, too goddamn grounded. Oh well.

Chaos is the Enemy only if you are terrified of Freedom. If your hidden agenda is to salvage determinism, reductionism, and mechanism from the jaws of the eroding Void, then you will see little difference between chaos and entropy, and fear both. You will struggle to control chaos, to become lords of matter, but in the end, Chaos will devour you.

And hopefully feed you back into the mix as something more benevolent.

The Payoff Zone (Where I really get goin’!)

Let the Empire tremble at the flapping of the butterfly’s wings, for its message is one of hope! Whatever else it means, it means that no system of control is complete. Somewhere, in a shack on the outskirts, or in the basement of the Central Planning Office, a free agent, acting alone, has the potential to shift the whole damn thing into a new orbit.

Power, like climate, is a dynamical system, and as such is subject to the forces of feedback and iteration. Male-dominance hierarchies tend to centralize power, to simplify the channels of feedback so that further iterations further centralize power. And they try to minimize the “noise” — that pesky hiss of human freedom, like escaping steam…

The fractal is a symbol of freedom. It is infinite within a finite space, sprouting Form as waves rise from the sea. It is the abstraction of Energy as it is enfolded by the material plane. It hints at realities previously reserved for mystical visions.

The assumptions under which nationalist agendas proceed are crumbling. Technology and the insatiable expansion of capital have brought cultures together in irreversible and increasingly complex relationships. And though assimilation and imperialism are real concerns, it may soon be true that the term “global culture” is redundant. We can now anticipate, and work for, a planetary context for the full unfolding of human potential — a context of mutual and nonexploitative exchange.

The tools for change are here, but they will not do well in the service of archaic power games and control fantasies. The universe will not submit to total control. (You are part of the universe — would you?) The exuberance and vitality of nature, which reaches its highest expression in mankind, is incompatible with such an agenda. Chaos will not bow to the yoke, but it is more than willing to dance.

The Active and Passive principles dance to the pipes of Pan, and between them spin the spiraling strands of life.

It has become fashionable in recent years to indulge in public displays of resignation and to celebrate history’s darkest moments. The magnitude of today’s culture crisis has produced a particular spectrum of despair which, in its worst formulations, has become the justification of further grave-digging. I am referring to the smug celebration of any number of toxic futures which Western military-industrial excess has made possible. This hip resignation takes many forms, from the punk Luddite who welcomes apocalypse as the termination of collective misery, to the capitalist whose tacit cynicism gives him license to rape and plunder until the well runs dry. At least the former might base upon his or her despair a creative exploration of human freedom, dancing and singing on the deck of a sinking ship. The latter is the most dangerous. He takes what he sees as a hopeless situation, and uses it as an excuse to make it worse. The cynicism which permits the ongoing evisceration of the biosphere threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy if unchecked.

Perhaps more dangerous still is the acceptance by “ordinary” people that All Is Lost, human nature is inherently self-destructive, the damage is done, and if we don’t blow ourselves up in a paroxysm of primate territoriality, we’ll suffer a far worse fate at the hands of environmental collapse, cancer, AIDS, ebola, or general widespread barbarism. The best one can do in such a situation is try to grab hold of whatever shreds of the Good Life remain available, to get what pleasure one can from existence, and to die in one’s sleep. A form of quietism emerges, a feeling that one is powerless to change anything, so “Why try?” This outlook, on a large scale, invokes Narcosis — habitual pharmaceutical sedatives, both legal and illegal; promotion of increasingly vapid “activities” and “distractions” as tonic for hectic lifestyles; and, of course, television, the Great Silencer of both inner and outer dialogue.

A more active despair is to be found in the dredging up and cataloging of various human pathologies and excesses. Here is the mass murder fan, the collector of fatality statistics, the connoisseur of human cruelty and stupidity. This phenomenon bears the unlikely stamp of intellectual justification; it presents itself as a critique of the existing order, a brutal reminder that Things Are Not Right. Well, I agree, but celebrating the Sneeze does not cure the Disease. What disturbs me more about this cult of depravity is that it self-righteously proclaims that there IS no cure, that human self-destruction is inevitable. It points to the Holocaust, declares all striving to be a bankrupt endeavor, bangs its gavel and cries “Case closed!” Thereafter we are expected to sit around collecting Charles Manson T-shirts, reading depressing eighteenth-century literature we don’t understand, waiting for Society to finally dissolve in some abstract scenario wherein only the people with the most tattoos will survive.

Validating po-mo despair on the most fundamental level is the mechanistic scientific model of the universe. From this world view we get at least two reasons to give up the ghost. First, the sun will expand in a few billion years to engulf the Earth, vaporizing the last traces of humanity’s naive bid for immortality. Beyond that, the universe is winding down, dissipating towards an interminable heat-death in which everything will be frozen, inert, forever dark. Thus, even if humans survive technological adolescence, and escape the earth before the sun goes nova, we’re only prolonging the inevitable. (This is the case also in the Big Crunch scenario, wherein a sufficient universal mass will draw everything back into the singularity from which it presumably sprang.) Unconsciously or not, this cultural theme sets the tone for many individuals’ private philosophies of life. If one does not approach it creatively, it is a tacit sanction for despair. (Some intelligent — and explicitly optimistic — alternatives include the transhumanist and Extropian philosophies.)

What most cosmologists and many physicists fail to consider is the phenomenon of biology. The emergence of life on at least one planet in the ocean of space-time is seen as incidental, a curious sideshow to the Big Top of dust clouds and stellar evolution. And yet biology, as experienced on Earth, can be seen as a major development in a series of increasingly brief, increasingly complex epochs. It is the dynamic conservation of pattern against the tidal pull of entropy. (Creationists who see this as a refutation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics are, however, misguided. Biology doesn’t contradict the SLT. However, it doesn’t seem to follow inevitably from it. Biology is the deferral of the SLT in isolated pockets. This needs consideration, but it is not a contradiction, I think.) One might start with the condensation of the solar system out of primordial hydrogen. Eventually planets form, and much later one of them sprouts simple biological systems. Life then undergoes a series of evolutionary leaps into successive layers of complexity. Human culture lies at the near end of this chain, with the progression passing out of pure biology and into the cyborganic realm of global computer networks, robotics, and other human-machine syntheses. The point to understand is the acceleration of the process. A possible future epoch of this sort will begin with the development of self-replicating, self-maintaining machines.

Biology as a fact of the universe does not prove that there is a God, or that human intelligence as we know it is inevitable. What it and more recent epigenetic developments suggest is that there is more going on than mechanistic materialism would have us believe. Specifically, it suggests a teleology of sorts, which is anathema in Western science. If the epochs of complexity I have mentioned are accelerating, what are they accelerating toward? There are at least three options. One scenario, the one anticipated by the despairing intellectual, is that at some point the whole system will become so top-heavy that it will collapse in on itself, the speeding train of human culture will slam head-on into the brick limitations of the planet’s resources. The other two options are potentially more optimistic. There is the idea that the tightening epochs of evolution point towards some sort of asymptote, where the gradual accretion of novelty we have been passing through shoots abruptly towards infinity, towards unlimited freedom. The third possibility here is that this eruption of novelty is somehow limited by physical constraints, but unlike the first scenario, this limit is a threshold and not a wall. (Think of a neuron collecting synaptic stimulation until it reaches a threshold and discharges.) The second and third scenarios are almost identical in their end results, except that in the latter novelty does not increase forever, but rather reaches a point of maximum saturation or equilibrium.

The millennialist outlook which the last two scenarios promote stands in stark contrast to the tired schadenfreude of postmodern shock-jocks and armchair slackers, who self-righteously dismiss as futile any attempts to improve any situation, and whose boring confessional poetry fills volumes which even their own therapists refuse to read. The human race is on the brink of cataclysmic transformation, but whether that transformation will snuff us out forever, or usher us as children back into the Garden, is far from clear. You do not have to give up too many basic assumptions to be optimistic, and you certainly don’t have to embrace New Age extravagance. There is another path, positive, determined, but not falling into the talk-show polarities of militant rationalists and channeling housewives. If you truly think there is no hope, if you are unwilling to investigate the full breadth of possibilities, please kill yourself now. At the very least, shut up and let the rest of us get to work, because there’s information to be gathered and ideas to be spread. Whatever happens, you won’t have to wait much longer to see who is wasting their time.