Birds and Mosquitoes

I was pushing my three year-old, Yael, in a little red plastic car the other day, the one with the blue handle for the adult to push with, doing lap after lap in her Bubbie’s back yard. Each revolution took us past Bubbie’s birdbath, your standard white pedestal-sinky set-up. Every single time we passed the hammock and came upon the birdbath I had the very same thought, which was that although it was a lovely birdbath that was sure to attract even lovelier birds, it was, with its stagnant little pool, a perfect habitat for thousands of mosquito eggs. It is said that when the English colonists first arrived in Maryland the Chesapeake Bay was so plentiful they could they dip their hands in and pull out a fish; but while the Bay is now on life support, during Baltimore summers you can stick your hand in the air and pull out a mosquito. And while Baltimore’s mosquitoes aren’t known to carry malaria, one does have to worry about the mosquito bite equivalent of death by a thousand paper cuts.

By the ninth or tenth circuit it occurred to me that the birdbath cum mosquito nursery should have its own card in the Tarot, seeing as it encapsulates the inevitability that every human effort to improve the world be fraught with unintended consequences. Look, a cardinal! Ugh, mosquitoes. Writ large, this inevitability goes as follows: Look at the standard of living in advanced industrialized nations! Ugh, climate change.

There is a small but vocal movement, some of whom call themselves future primitivists, which asserts that everything went off the rails when we abandoned hunter-gathering and took up agriculture, i.e. when we established civilization as we know it. I would note that hunter-gatherers were no less proficient at having children than their corn-fed descendants, which, as every parent knows, rendered the hunter-gatherers vulnerable to the greatest source of unintended consequences the world has known: no one ever knows what the hell their children are going to get up to.

The first law of thermodynamics holds that, in a closed system, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just changed from one form to another. The universe is an infinitely large version of just such a closed system, meaning that the total energy in the universe is constant. I’d like to suggest that the amount of good in the universe remains at a similar eternal equilibrium. The idea of such an equilibrium isn’t new, of course, and is at least as old as China’s yin and yang, the symbol for which suggests that there can only ever be as much light in the universe as there is dark. And the mechanism that keeps light and dark, good and evil in balance in our universe may very well be unintended consequences.

This balance is maintained when intentionally bad acts have unintended good consequences. To wit, Desmond Tutu’s remarkable assertion in a speech I heard him give that “Europeans brought apartheid with them to South Africa, but they also brought the Bible. We got a good deal!” But since most people, most of the time, are trying to make the world a better place, even if only for themselves or those they care about, most of the unintended consequences that keep light and dark in balance are, in fact, dark. This goes a long way towards explaining why winning the lottery is almost sure to ruin your life, and why there are so many miserable successful people, e.g. biographers for John Wooden and Bill Walsh, respectively the greatest basketball and football coaches ever, have reported that each was exceptionally insecure amidst and because of their fabulous and consistent success.

What about the unintended good consequences of good acts, when people “pay it forward,” when love spreads, not to mention the unintended bad consequences of bad acts? Perhaps unintended consequences flow out of every single act, whether malevolent or benevolent, like waves from a stone dropped in a pond. The peak of every wave is the crest of the unintended good consequences, and the trough of every wave is the nadir of the unintended bad consequences. Peak and trough mirror one another in length, and the balance between light and dark is maintained. Some quantum physicists hypothesize a universal wave function, i.e. “the wavefunction or quantum state of the totality of existence.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_wavefunction) If the universe is, in fact, an infinite ethereal wave, then maybe the idea of waves of unintended consequences keeping the universe aligned isn’t so very far fetched.

If doing the right thing leads to as much bad as good, whither social justice? I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s famous “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech:

“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Like Churchill, those engaged in the fight for social justice shall never surrender. But, unlike Churchill, we shan’t go on to the end, because there is no end. Victory in one battle only assures the next. Nevertheless, we can, and must, make this better. Even if the law of unintended consequences makes the fight for social justice into a high stakes game of Whac-A-Mole.

I would close by suggesting that if you have trouble accepting the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds, consider the fact that it is a world that can’t be improved upon. And if the yin-yang symbol were a glass, would it be half full or half empty?