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06 March 2007
Entropy.
The father of a friend of mine makes a quite profitable living by finding slight imperfections on the driveshafts of Big Rig trucks. When my friend first told me about his dad‘s job, I thought it a bit frivolous to pay someone a hefty sum to nit-pick about scratches in steel. (I had the good sense not to mention that particular thought.) I realized my error as my friend explained that those trucks are designed to run for almost a million miles. When you’re building a truck for a hundred thousand miles, microscopic defects don’t really have enough time to grow into major problems. Over the course of a million miles, though, the smallest of scratches will become a catastrophic fracture, eventually destroying the entire engine.
I do not think the rest of the universe is so different. Trickling from melting snow pack, a mountain stream becomes a thunderous rapid before it finds its way to the ocean. Just one neutron hits just one nucleus, fractures it, and releases three more neutrons. A trillion neutrons later, you’ve released enough energy to put stars to shame. And just one word spoken in spite, fermenting for decades in the psyche of an angry young man, becomes genocide. Cracks always start small. One sideways glance, a cruel barb spoken in a moment of weakness, one piece of gossip that makes it back to its victim, brokenness rarely starts with drawn swords. It often ends there. Once time has taken its course, those first words can be taken back no more than the rapid can be tamed back into the stream, no more than the neutron can be calmed from the fury of fission. Entropy multiplies our cruel words until nothing remains but rubble.
There is a cycle to cruelty, a cycle to the curse. Venom and rage are something like Tolkien’s Ring of Power, I think. They wait patiently for the moment where they can inflict maximum pain on others. So a high-schooler spits vicious words in passing to the girl in the honors classes who gets on her nerves. Though the sender forgets the words almost immediately, their venom haunts the recipient for a decade, festering and fermenting. The venom finds its moment when she chooses to rid herself forever of a guy who generally gets on her nerves. She spits that same venom at him, along with fifteen years of compounded interest. Like her own accusers, she could not have known how her words would have been taken. So that guy finds himself in positions of authority. Where justice might have been tempered with mercy, he finds that the venom has sapped his reservoirs of compassion, as it had its previous victims. And in his cold, calculating analysis, he passes on the pain he inherited from her, multiplied many-fold. This is how we pass down the fall. Welcome to entropy.
People like to say ‘what goes around comes around.’ Eastern thought formalizes this idea with the concept of Karma. Certainly there are parts of this concept that hold true. Unfortunately for us, it is all the worst parts. You see, Karma makes a critical and incorrect assumption. It presumes that our actions are graded on a curve. The goodness of your actions can be judged by racking and stacking them with everybody else’s actions. Like in the running of the bulls, if you beat the mean you‘ll probably be okay. The problem is that very little in nature is graded on a curve. You need water to live. Your life span would not be lengthened by even one second if everyone else was dying of thirst. The fallen and broken things of our own creation are often graded on curves. Nutrition is not graded on a curve. Gravity is not graded on a curve. There are a few things graded on curves, I suppose. Like war and envy. But I hesitate to use the average amount of war or the average amount of envy as benchmarks for measuring paradise.
Lets do a quick mathematical exercise. 99% is a very good grade on a calculus test. Certainly it beats the mean (unless you are at a grade-inflating Ivy League school.) Say you get three scores in the high nineties. You average out to about a 95%. Not bad. Except for one slight problem: as we have seen, human actions are multiplicative, not additive. My actions are multiplied in you, and yours in me. I do not just take what you gave me and pay it forward; I generally up the ante, as do you. (Fundamental Attribution Error ties in here.) So back to our calc grades. Instead of averaging my three grades, I multiply them by each other. The more times I multiply, the more one simple fact becomes apparent: their product is decreasing, not increasing. Even with great grades, we’re getting worse. Imagine throwing in a 50% into the mix. And here is our problem: we can never climb back up to a 100%. The spiral staircase Karma promised us starts to look more like a twisting slide to a place Dante described quite well. It’s ‘Chutes and Ladders’ in the worst possible way.
You see, we have another problem. We are rarely good judges of our own performance. We have too much at stake. Let’s go back to our calculus test. Imagine that our student attends a highly experimental and highly unpleasant school where poor academic performance is punished by eternal detention, yet pupils get to grade their own tests. Surely our student would always give himself the benefit of the doubt, minimizing any errors and finding all sorts of partial credit for himself in the midst of wrong answers. Under those circumstances, the student can hardly be expected to be objective. And neither can we. We minimize or entirely overlook our shortcomings, while magnifying our perceived successes. We benchmark our actions against the remarkably convenient standard of ‘at least I’m not like X.’ But we only convince ourselves.
Consider the chain smoker. He may himself believe that his vice is harmless, or ‘at least its not as bad as weed,’ or any of a number of things, but Nature is not impressed. At some point, a cell in his lungs will prove particularly susceptible to the chemicals he chooses to expose himself to, and that cell will decide that it needs to reproduce more than it needs to do anything else. The man’s cancer is a consequence of his vices. What is true for individuals is true for societies. A society may decide that in the name of free speech or free expression or whatever, pornography is acceptable. After all, there are rules and restrictions on its sale. And its not as bad as some other things. And, really, its harmless. And a hundred other excuses. But none of them matter when the sexual predator proves particularly vulnerable to the drug, pursuing his addiction without regard for the laws of God or men. His cancer is the consequence of the vice of the society. Mother Theresa of Calcutta once asked how one could expect peace on their streets when there is violence in the womb. Our cancers come from our vices. The Natural Law is a quite objective judge of our actions, and their verdict is guilty.
We need something better. All we can do is multiply imperfections by imperfections. We need Someone else to give us the perfection we can never find on our own. Our hearts are decaying. We need new hearts. We cannot find our way to paradise when there is no paradise within us. We need a Cycle-breaker. We need a Savior.
Christ must breaks our cycles. In the not-entirely-hypothetical example of the girl-guy collision, I remember reading that letter written in venom and rage. As her words burned off the page, I asked Jesus for the strength and love to forgive her. I asked Him to give me words of blessing for her, for I had none. He gave me those words. He still does. I thank God that venom never had a chance to fester in my heart. I thank God that I was freed from inflicting it on another. I would almost sat the cycle ended with me, but that isn‘t exactly true. It ended with Christ. I spat my venom at Him on Calvary’s tree. And it stopped there. All imperfect cycles end with Him, and in Him perfect cycles begin. Praise God that my reservoirs of compassion are still intact, that my desire for justice is still tempered with mercy. It is only by His grace.
In a world of entropy, small actions can have tremendous consequences when given enough time. Words are small things, but so are pieces of fruit, and just one bite landed us in this mess. The fate of a people may rest upon just one word. Ask Hadassah about that. So we must guard our tongues. You never know what you words may become. Words can turn to daggers, and daggers to very real bullets. Kind words cost you nothing. Cruel words, given a hundred years, may cost others their lives. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the tongue is deadlier than both. Insults, then, are assaults with a deadly weapon. If we considered our words in this light, perhaps we would find the patience to give each other words that are a little more loving. Perhaps we would ask the Word who is Love to give us a better vocabulary.
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A number of years ago Saint Clement of Walschauser preached a sermon on "entropy". I have recently been reflecting on the sermon and the subject of entropy in my own life. God gave me a perfect body (the system) and Adam's choice started the entropic decay a long time ago.
Over the years the wear, tear, and friction of life has caused entropy has become evident in my body. Things don't work as well as they used to, my mind is slowing down, an I'm beginning to degrade (wear out) in any number of ways.
My hope for the future is that God will restore my system, provide with an eternal, perfect body, and give me an eternal purpose that goes far beyond the entropy that characterizes this imperfect world.
Posted by: Bruce | 14 March 2007
Oh, that we would have the viewpoint of Isaiah as his life was laid out before the pure scrutiny of a flawless God, saying "woe is me' . Also, it would be a good thing to have just a little bit more of the viewpoint of Martin Luther as he compared the guilty stain of his sinful life, despite living a monastic lifestyle, to the One who took our sins on the cross at Calvary. It seems to me that we get just a little bit too caught up in the busyness of our daily lives to notice what it is that we say in our casual conversation and what we do in our moment by moment actions. We need to be more aware of our impact on those around us and those we live with. We need to remember that each word can either be a blessing or a burden for that person to bear both now and in the future. Words often have a farther-reaching, more injurous impact than any physical wound, just ask any emergency room physician or mental health care physician. We are also going to have to give a full account for every word and deed to a perfect, all-knowing allmighty Judge some day- are we truly ready for that? We need to ask for forgiveness for every careless word and deed from those we've hurt, and from the Lord who is also offended when we have hurt one whom He has tenderly created. Won 't you search your hearts and live just a little more thoughtfully and carefully with your fellow fallen creatures today? Together, we can humbly give praise to our awesome Creator who has condescended to pour out His grace, cover us with His forgiveness, and lavish His love upon us all!
Posted by: LB | 22 March 2007