The Elusive Nature of Randomness
Our universe is ruled by randomness. Not that we generally acknowledge that. Most of us believe in a powerful and purposeful divine being who plans events, guides our lives, and has a mission for each of us. It’s hard for us to understand the world any other way, for our minds see patterns everywhere. We naturally create meaning out of chaos. As Leonard Mlodinow explains in his book, The Drunkard’s Walk, randomness and chance are common, yet we still imagine we can predict the future and control events that cannot be controlled. We downplay the way fortune – or misfortune – impacts our lives. [1]
There are good reasons for this. If we didn’t imagine patterns everywhere, we wouldn’t recognize threats or opportunities, so we’d be less likely to survive. Making choices and bringing order to our environment help us feel competent and worthy. On the other hand, the experience of helplessness causes stress, disease, and despair. Residents in nursing homes, for example, becomes listless when their lives are managed by others, but give them choices, provide them with plants or pets to take care of, and they come to life again. [2]
To cope, we need to exercise some control over our environment. When we believe that we – or a god who cares about us – are in control, we feel safer. Randomness, on the other hand, threatens us. “[I]f events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random.” [3] So, we deny the random nature of our lives.
Yet we have so much less control over events that we like to think. In his book, Mladinow documents many ways that successes and failures, tragedy and synchronicity, occur not because of destiny or skill or incompetence or karma, but because of chance.
Life’s Grand Adventure
John Green explores the concept of randomness in his novel, The Fault in Our Stars. Hazel Lancaster, the book’s 16-year-old narrator, is what she calls a “cancer kid.” By the time the story starts, her disease has progressed to the point where she drags an oxygen tank everywhere she goes. She hopes medicine will keep her alive for a while, but she has bad moments when she can’t seem to catch her breath, so she knows death isn’t too far away. When she attends a cancer support group for teens, she meets Augustus Waters who has had his leg amputated to save him from bone cancer. This gives him an 80% chance of survival. The two fall in love.
Knowing her cancer is fatal, Hazel tries to pull away from the relationship. She doesn’t want to hurt anyone when she dies, at least no one other than her parents, whom she cannot help but hurt.
But Augustus is a boy who sucks on unlit cigarettes to help him feel in control. “You put the killing thing right between your teeth,” he tells Hazel, “but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.” [4] He is indomitable, a young man who longs for adventure. He wants to be heroic, and he’s certain that’s possible. Not easily dissuaded, he invites Hazel into his world, to take joy in the bit of life they have, and she allows him into her heart. She comes to accept that although he can’t choose whether or not he gets hurt, for life hurts us all one way or another, he should at least get to choose who hurts him. Although she is unaware of it at the time, she is making the same choice.
Side Effects
This may be something they do have control over. Certainly they can’t control their illness. As Green himself says to a fan of his book, when Augustus uses cigarettes to symbolize his control over disease, he is deluded. We can’t keep illness away simply by refusing to strike a match. The world is far too unpredictable. Green adds that “in the end, much of the fault is in the stars, not in ourselves.” [5]
Hazel understands this. She has an almost nihilistic faith. For her, no god will guide her gently into that dark death. Eventually, all humanity, all existence, will fade into the oblivion that existed before there was anything else. She knows her illness has no purpose. God didn’t smite her because she was bad or give her cancer so she would learn some vital lesson.
No. As she herself says, “Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on Earth possible.” [6]
This diversity is a wonderful thing. Randomness allows for life itself. Without destruction there would be no beauty; without pain there would be no joy. Chance and randomness made this person who is Hazel, and if being alive means she has to suffer, that’s how it is. Which is true, as far as it goes.
Living Fully and Loving Deeply
Yet we all need some way to manage our fear of life’s unpredictability and death’s certainty. Hazel’s retreat into nihilism is only one answer. Addictions are another not-very-good way to cope. Better ways include faith, community, and living life to its fullest.
Augustus chooses that last method: He will live. Not that he will live forever. Indeed, we learn toward the end of the book that his cancer has metastasized. It cannot be treated. Before he dies, however, he gets his wish to be a hero. He takes Hazel to Amsterdam to meet the author of a book they both love, a book about a girl with cancer that ends, as do our lives, in the middle of a sentence.
From the author of that novel with its unsatisfactory ending, they hope to learn what happened afterwards. When they find him, however, they discover he’s an alcoholic, broken by the death of his daughter on whom he modeled the main character of his book. He feels hopeless, alone, filled with a deeper and more cynical pain than Hazel’s. Unable to face life, he dies before his body is dead. It’s just another way to cope.
Yet Green’s book does not recommend such coping. Hazel and Augustus make another stop on their trip. They tour the home where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis. There they discover hope, kindness, and heroism. After a grueling climb to the attic, they their love for one another, kissing for the first time.
Because of Augustus, Hazel learns to love deeply and live fully, in spite of death. Augustus discovers he need not change the entire world. He can be a hero by making a difference to one person. When Augustus dies, Hazel discovers that misery can be tolerated, even transformed.
The Religious Answer
None of this changes the random nature of life and death. Why do these young people suffer so much hardship? Why do others endure terrorism, abuse, and loss, yet still others grow up oblivious to struggle?
Most of the world’s people deal with uncertainty by imagining a god who is in charge. Ever since we have been human, and perhaps before, we have believed in gods and created religions. We developed prayers and rituals to bring rain, to heal illness, and to ensure healthy children. With meditation, we hope to control our thoughts and emotions. When tragedy strikes, we imagine God has a purpose for everything in our lives, even if we don’t know what that purpose is. As science has allowed us to manipulate the elements, religions such as New Thought and A Course in Miracles emphasize our personal power, promoting the belief that everything that happens in life is chosen by us for the benefit of our souls. Along with Hinduism and some other Eastern faiths, these New Age philosophies consider life to be an illusion.
Co-Creation
Process Theology takes a different approach. Rather than ceding control to God, or accepting fate with equanimity because events are illusory, anyway, Process theologians understand that chance not only exists, but they agree with Hazel that evolution is only possible because of the unpredictable nature of reality. [7] God/Goddess is the universe, and the universe is Goddess/God. Therefore, as our universe evolves, so does the Divine, and so do we. This evolving god doesn’t control events. She co-creates them with us.
Goddess/God experiences the unfolding of life as we do. She suffers and celebrates with us. Her desire is for love and goodness. Unlike the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and avenging god of the Hebrew Scriptures, a god who claims power over life and death, the process God/Goddess invites us to create a reality based on care for one another. She offers a relationship of mutuality. In her book, She Who Changes, Carol P. Christ explains that, rather than trying to force us to behave, the process God/Goddess “is always persuading us to co-create a more joyful world for all people and all beings in the web of life.” [8]
Chance, Hope, and Endings
Christ points out that this hope for “the creative process of the universe itself . . . is supported and sustained by Goddess/God.” [9] This deity longs for the arc of time to bend toward the good. Yet for whatever reason, whether because of how the universe evolved, or because God/Goddess prefers freedom to manipulation, She has no control over chance, nor over our choices. Therefore, even those who spread hate and fear, who use science and religion and story for evil rather than good, are also part of the creative process. The universe is indeed a random place, so the ending is not guaranteed. Mutation, chance, and co-creation mean that sometimes we will harm one another in ways more horrible than we can imagine, that nature will turn against us with earthquakes and floods, and that our cells will betray us and make us sick.
In spite of such sickness, or perhaps because of it, Hazel and Augustus created something of meaning and wholeness and beauty from their chance meeting at that support group. They embraced love. Inasmuch as they are co-creators of this universe, these two fictional characters changed not just themselves, but also their friends and families. Their story, factual or not, changes us.
We don’t get to control that which is uncontrollable. We don’t get to make the universe ordered and planned when it is not, no matter what we pretend. On the other hand, we do get to choose how we respond to the tragedies and comedies of our life.
In faith and fondness,
Barbara
Credits
- Mlodinow, Leonard, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, New York: Pantheon, 193.
- See Atul Gawande’s book Being Mortal Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, New York: Metropolitan, 2014 and his story of Chase Memorial Nursing Home or Leonard Mlodinow’s description of a study by Ellen Langer in which nursing home residents were allowed to decorate their rooms and choose a plant to take care of, leading to an increase in life satisfaction and a decrease in mortality.
- Mladinow 206.
- Green, John, The Fault in Our Stars, New York: Dutton, 2012, 20.
- Distasio, Christine, “Gus’s Metaphor in ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ Is Wrong, But We Should Be Okay With That,” Bustle, July 16, 2014, https://www.bustle.com/articles/31774-guss-metaphor-in-the-fault-in-our-stars-is-wrong-but-we-should-be-okay-with, accessed 7/7/18.
- Green 49.
- Christ, Carol P., She Who Changes: Re-Imagining the Divine in the World, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003, 101.
- Ibid 222.
- Ibid 173.
Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash
Copyright © 2018 Barbara E. Stevens
