SOCIAL CASUALTY
In the physical world causality is a word used to describe a connected dual element process. Those two elements are termed cause and effect. If a glass is suspended five feet over a concrete surface and then dropped it shatters into hundreds or even thousands of pieces. The cause is gravity, and the effect is the shattering of the glass. Sometimes this cause-and-effect result is called entropy, the universe naturally going from an organized state to one of disorganization unless interfered with. The cause-and-effect action is always linear, or one way. A broken glass never reconstitutes itself and rushes back up to a waiting handheld above it.
Immediately, if you treat this illustration of causality as a mind experiment, you can see for yourself that it is fraught with philosophical perspective. Does not the act of a person choosing to drop the glass onto the concrete below constitute a cause all by itself? Could not a machine be invented to assemble a broken glass on the floor below, glue it back together and send it shooting back up to a waiting hand, thereby invalidating linear law? It is these kinds of consideration that cause social behavior to be mixed in with the physics of nature. The human species did not invent physics. It discovered physics as an explanation for what is observable in the universe around it. But in observing this universe the perspective taken by human observers changes everything, not necessarily effecting the physical universe but certainly effecting the species surviving in that universe.
It is an established physical law that time cannot be reversed. We cannot go back in time. But what if a scene or action of the past was recreated seemingly like occurred in the past? This is done all the time in the entertainment industry through the mediums of motion pictures, plays, operas and in the arts (sculpture, painting, etc.). Are not such actions by man a form of going back in time and thereby violating the laws of causality through applied perspective and deliberate action? Are not humans the only known intelligent observers of the causes and effects seen in this universe, and if they are indeed the only mentally aware observers then are not those observations causal in bringing about physical results from human decisions?
The analysis and study of social causality is even more complex. The complex dynamics of humans mixing with other humans (which we will call social interaction here) is seldom as simple as attempting to explain the linear result of dropping a glass to shatter on a hard surface below. For example, some element of the U.S. government sent an ambassador, accompanied by a few mercenary assistants to a foreign country for unknown reasons. The locals in that country rose up, and then attacked and killed the ambassador and a few of his people, again for reasons not fully understandable. Causality. An ambassador traveled to a dangerous place with a very few protectors (they were released from a hand raised above a hard surface) and local militants killed them when they arrived (they shattered into pieces when encountering a hard surface). This is an example of social causality being analogously explained using simple entropic causality as an illustration. The example isn’t entirely accurate, but it serves to explain how linked we are to this causal process.
The arguments about whether the cause-and-effect phenomena of what happened from the events occurring in Benghazi that day all spin around the same philosophical perspectives discussed in our earlier mind experiment are complex. Can the observer causally releasing the glass to fall be taken out of the experiment? Can the observing participant’s release of the glass to terminally fall from that height not be questioned in light of the hardness of the surface about to be encountered by the glass and therefore affect the effect? What did the releasing entity know or intend and what effect did such knowledge and motivation have on the results of what happened? Or does any of that matter?
A small percentage of humans, mostly working in scientific endeavor, have come to conclude that human beings, by their very nature (their ability to connect high intellect with causal action), cannot be separated from the results of physics and the ‘natural’ entropic process. The predictability of the application of physical laws, whether applied to those things of nature or the social order, will never be certain if humans are involved in any way. If humans are not involved in any way, including by mere observation, then that predictability will remain completely unknown. Until our species comes to understand that it is indeed intimately linked into the existence of the universe itself then it can never hold itself accountable, or truly know anything except that life is an unknown and unsolvable mystery.
