Events Don’t Just Happen

“Events happen!” Could any English sentence be more obviously true? And so totally false?

Words can be funny things sometimes, and ‘to happen’ happens to be just such a word. Technically, it’s an active voice verb like ‘to kill’. But ‘killers kill’ sounds a whole lot different than ‘events happen’. 

The sentence, ‘killers kill’, is jampacked with information. ‘Events happen’ tells us absolutely nothing: “Something undefined emerges as a result of something unknown.” It is a pseudo-sentence. It’s the semiotic version of the null set!

This is Edward Lear at his best. “Something happens to something, resulting in something else.” We call it happenstance – something happens to happen. Brilliant! For this I took out student loans! 

Although grammatically active voice, happen dissolves every trace of agency. An event that  just ‘happens’ is a passive result, powered by chance, possibly unintended, perhaps unwanted, of an unspecified process.   

Consider Universe. It’s an event, a pretty big one, but an event, nonetheless. Did the event we call ‘universe’ just happen? Some physicists think so, but what would it mean if that were the case? How can something come from nothing solely by chance? 

Consider my remarks, uttered in my best faux-Etonian, after a late night boozer in a London pub, “As it happens, I’ve left my wallet at home this evening.” When something just happens (like this, presumably), no one is responsible, no one is to blame. ‘It just happened’. What was I to do about it? It’s as if the universe had somehow played a dirty trick on all of us…and gotten away with it. Bad universe, bad!

But of course, this is very far from the case! Everyone at Goat & Griffin knows that I carefully removed my wallet from my pants pocket before I left home that evening. Events don’t just happen! Ok, how do they occur then?

Universe is recursive throughout and on every scale from Cosmic to Planck. Recursion is in Universe’s DNA – it is a fundamental feature of its topology. It’s perpetually aware of itself at every scale. In fact, self-awareness itself is a defining feature of Universe. An ‘event’ begins as the world’s ‘critique’ of itself, conducted from the perspective of eternal values like Beauty, Truth, and Justice. An event ends when Universe physically adjusts in response to that conceptual critique.

In this way, an event satisfies Gregory Bateson’s ontological criterion: It is a difference (conceptual) that makes a difference (physical).

The Gospel of John founds Being on the concept of logos. Often translated, not incorrectly, as ‘Word’, logos can be understood more broadly as anything that facilitates the communication of meaning.   

Every ‘word’ has a truth value as well as an aesthetic quality and a political tone. Every word is itself a pattern of meanings, but each word acquires its full meaning only in the context of its position in a ‘well-formed formula’ (sentence). 

We recognize eternal values like Beauty, Truth, and Justice. They are manifestations of Good. In fact, most of us experience Good primarily through these manifestations.

Events then are a really big deal! They don’t just happen. Every event is ‘East meets West’, ‘North meets South’, Past meets Future. An event is a real life, flesh and blood application of eternal values to present circumstances.

The World is a disorganized multiplicity of elements. Through universal recursion, an emerging event orders those elements and judges the whole through the prism of Value. Based on that assessment (critique), the emerging event is a praxis intended to enable Universe to better reflect Value.

At conception, the event instantly organizes its field into a World (Past) which it then judges (Present) against the standard of the Good (Eternal). Guided by Value, the event proposes, modifies, and executes a concrete ‘fix’. That fix now becomes an element in the World of every subsequent event (Future).

According to Alfred North Whitehead, the World consists of events and nothing but events. These events cannot emerge randomly, evolve chaotically, or happen accidentally. There is method in their madness…and that method resides in the Universe itself.

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