Love, sex, suffering and the creativity of chaos

Banned book week is coming up soon (September 26 - October 3, 2009), so once again it is time to think about the balance between social stability and individual liberties. Or, as some might say: between the forces of good and the forces of evil. But what many people may not realize is that there are fundamental physical and perhaps metaphysical factors at work behind the scenes. The world is an interconnected system, and because of this, there are natural organizing principles shaping our reality – principles that are fairly simple, but not generally understood by your average political commentator or evangelist. The important point is that these simple principles go to the very heart of all that you hold most dear – including your love life, your desires, and the tears you shed in your darkest moments of pain and torment.

Logically you are free to believe in God, if you are so inclined – science cannot take that away from you – but if you wish to remain logical in the light of scientific and mathematical advances, then you need to come to grips with the fact that your God has created you out of chaos, and expects you to make your way through a chaotic world. This may not sound surprising to you (it seems that everyone complains about the chaos in their lives) but the bottom line is that you probably don't really know what chaos means in the context of science.

In math and science (and in the writings of mystics), chaos does not mean merely "disorder." Chaos, it turns out, is the surprising source of order. More poetically, the mystics will point out that Chaos is the "womb of life" – it is a dynamic realm out of which all of the intricate, beautiful, and painful patterns of life arise. The banning of books, and the writing of those books, can be seen as higher-level patterns that reflect the fundamental principles of a vast order-generating system. Similarly, the socio-political oppression of certain erotic lifestyles, and the living of those lifestyles, can also be seen to fit within this same larger scheme. Why are some people gay, some straight, some bisexual, and some asexual? Why are some of us inclined toward monogamy, while others are not? Why is it that sometimes good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people? These and many other puzzles can be discussed in terms of this scheme of cosmic chaos.

The world is not the mechanical unfolding of a precisely pre-designed machine; it is the messy self-organizing of a chaotic system. We are not living in a "clockwork" world; we are living on the ever-advancing edge of an exploratory cosmic process.

The details are important and truly fascinating, but we shall mostly skip over them here and focus on one key concept, namely, interconnectivity. We are living in a chaotic system, but what makes a chaotic system chaotic is not that it is disorganized; what makes a system chaotic is the fact that it is composed of interconnected parts. The initial conditions may be completely random, but because the elements of the chaotic system are interconnected, the rules that govern the evolution of the system from one state to another are not completely random. Thus the key to the emergence of order from randomness is not the existence of a master-planner who somehow makes specific patterns arise. No, the key is chaotic connectivity. If you have a collection of interconnected elements and a source of energy, then you have the potential for spontaneous pattern generation.

The overwhelming evidence suggests that Mother Nature is not a clockwork designer following a blueprint. She is more like an artist with passion and vision.

Setting aside the endless debates about the existence of God, there is something we can say about the deep nature of the world, and we can say it with a relatively high level of certainty: The world is interconnected, and thus our experiences of the world are all interconnected. The world is a self-organizing system, and thus our experiences of the world are the experiences of a self-organizing chaotic system. Organized experiences are meaningful - that's just what meaning is - it's the natural organizing of experience. The natural self-organization of experience is the self-organization of meaning.

From the fact that our lives spontaneously arose from chaos, it does not follow that our experiences are meaningless – ultimately absurd, maybe, but not simply meaningless.

The universe is an energetic place. Everything is constantly changing. As Heraclitus said, you can never step in the same river twice. But why? Speaking in totally unscientific terms, the answer would be simply this: Reality is fundamentally passionate. Existence is, by its very nature, a display of passion. Chaos is passion. We often associate passion with erotic love, but passion is not always sexual, and it is not always fun. Many forms of passion are painful and lead to death. Passion is all about change, but the result is not always what we experience as "change for the better." The spontaneous self-organizing activity of chaos that we experience as life may have a "vision" of some sort, but it certainly has no specific plan for achieving this vision.

Life always "wants something" but it does not always know exactly what it wants, or how to get it.

With Existence, on the cosmic scale, there is no precise planning, but something more like artistic creativity and an endless sense of adventure. No one (not even God, if there is one) knows where things are going; we arose out of chaos, and the hallmark of chaotic systems is unpredictability.

An important characteristic of self-organizing chaos is that it tends to settle into more or less stable patterns. Mathematicians talk of 'attractors' and 'local minima', but we can just think of a marble rolling around on a hilly surface. Obviously the marble will want to settle into a low area. This is essentially what chaotic interconnectivity does – it creates a "hilly landscape" of possibilities, and the "passion" that I mentioned earlier is the energy of the rolling marble – the "wanderlust" if you will – that accounts for the marble's motion.

An ordinary marble will eventually settle into the bottom of some deep valley and simply stay there, lacking the energy to climb back out. If our universe as a whole ever does this (if, the universe is what called a "thermodynamically closed system"), then it will be the end of any meaningful existence. It would mean there is no energy left – no cosmic passion – no motivation to do anything. Maybe billions of years from now something like this could happen, but until then things are different.

We spend our lives in an open system, which means there is always energy pouring in – fueling constant change and making self-organization possible. The rolling marble occasionally settles into the bottom of a hole, but it does not get stuck there forever. Energy keeps pouring into it, so it vibrates and eventually pops out of the hole and begins a series of new adventures.

Out of endless hubbub, a basic theme arises. This theme can be summed up with a single word: diversity. Without diversity, there is certain death.

If you've paid close attention up to this point, you will notice that we now have a way to think about two fundamental aspects of reality. The constant influx of energy (or "cosmic passion") makes change – and therefore life itself – possible. Meanwhile, the hills and valleys of the landscape provide a sort of structure to this constant change – the hilly landscape allows all of the energy to self-organize, which is another necessary ingredient for life. These two aspects of reality set up a fundamental duality. Since the universe is like a fractal (self-similar patterns within patterns, within patterns…) we can find variation of this fundamental duality appearing in many different aspects life, and appearing at larger and larger scales. Motion/rest, creativity/security, adventure-seeking/nest-sitting, anxiety/contentment, liberal/conservative, radical/traditional, and many more.

The Banned Books website lists the ten most-challenged books. According to the American Library Association, the number-one most challenged book for the years 2006, 2007, and 2008 was a children's book called "And Tango Makes Three" by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell. The book is based on the true story of two male Penguins in New York's Central Park Zoo named Roy and Silo who lived together as a same-sex couple. When zookeepers realized that they were both male, they decided to give them an egg to hatch. Roy and Silo hatched and raised the chick, a female named "Tango". The three lived together as a family. In real life (though this was not mentioned in the book) one of the males later mated with a female, suggesting that "bisexual" might be a more appropriate term for his sexual behavior! In any case, the book created a great deal of controversy, since it was written for children and positively portrayed a non-traditional lifestyle. (The controversy was basically about whether children should learn that successful family structures can be more diverse than traditional heterosexual monogamy.)

Here we see the fundamentally chaotic nature of life coming to fruition on a large, social scale. "As above, so below," so the mystics say. The same patterns play out, like fractals, on every level. In human history, heterosexuality and monogamy became "valleys" in the social landscape. But life refuses to rest in any valley forever. There is always disruptive energy pouring in, causing unpredictable change, and leading to what A.N. Whitehead calls a "creative advance into novelty."

And speaking of Mother Nature's creativity, orgasms are always fun to think about, so let's take just a moment to think about them. Obviously they can lead to biological reproduction. But as Alfred Kinsey was fond of pointing out, nature loves diversity. Most of us have orgasms because we have genitalia. Genitalia and orgasms were designed to always go together, right? Wrong. The combination of genitalia and orgasms is a "stable valley" in the chaotic landscape. But the landscape can change. In a wonderfully fascinating TED video called "10 Things You Didn't Know About Orgasm," Mary Roach points out that some people can have orgasms by, say, stroking their eyebrows or brushing their teeth. (See the video embedded below.) Chaotic systems are truly and deeply unpredictable.

Stability and change are both essential to life which, as we noted earlier, is not the mechanical workings of a machine, but rather, the cutting edge of chaos. Good political systems seek to balance the social good and individual liberty so that neither end of the spectrum gets too entrenched. Those seeking to ban books are seeking the stability that comes with sticking to tradition, while those writing the books and those seeking to keep them displayed on library shelves are seeking the creative advance of novelty.

It is easy to look at all of this and say that we are all just pawns in some vast game of cosmic chess, but that would be to miss the point entirely. Yes, one could say that we are pieces in a game of sorts, but we are not being pushed around on a static surface by competing chess masters. We don't just follow rules, we make them. The hills and valleys of our chaotic game board are not forever fixed in a frozen pattern. As we live, grow, and interact with each other, we change the shape of the metaphysical landscape over which we roam. But most importantly:

We are not just pawns pushed around in the game, we are the game. And the game is not played; the game plays itself.