Comment: Effects Precede Causes

Abstract

This dictum can hardly be accepted or rejected on the basis of anything patently obvious. If it could, it would not justify proposal as a topic for serious comment. It requires scrutiny in the infinitely expansive panorama suggested by the Wordsworth quote, is father to the man. To have the right meaning here, child has to include the totality of environment and culture as well as all the activities and formative influence of early years, with a host of intangibles that reach back far beyond the Precambrian Era in time, and in space to the plunging sweep of the outer galaxies. All that and more goes into fathering a man, and makes imperative a rather elevated viewpoint for correctly assessing the present topic. The ostentatiously obvious meanings of cause and effect are accordingly not the main issue. Obviously, to start a car one turns on the ignition and feeds the gas. One does not in some unimaginable way first suppose a started car and then expect it to insert the key and fill up the tank. Here one cannot show the movie reel backward. In these obvious matters one follows the time arrow down a one-way street. The traffic law is strictly enforced. For practical purposes one regards these causes as preceding the effects. But one-way streets are not the only type of traffic arteries. In fact, they are ad hoc devices for convenience in a hemmed-in situation. In a broader perspective the superhighways present long parallel streams moving in opposite directions. So do cause and effect function from a correspondingly higher viewpoint. The construction of one's dream home, carefully planned for years and put down in detail by the architect on the blueprints, proceeds by feeding the designs into brick and woodwork and metal as the workmen slowly bring the house into material being. The house, the final effect, keeps exercising its causality on the work, while pari passu the work produces the house. The streams run parallel in opposite