Victims of Randomness?
Leonard Mlodinow, author of The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives, was interviewed on CBC Radio’s The Current on May 13 (To listen, go here, scroll down to Part 3 and click the play button on the audio icon. To download a podcast, go here and scroll down to Drunkard’s Walk.) The New York Times published a helpful review when the book came out last June.
Mlodinow’s specialty is probability and statistics and he presents one of the strongest versions of the view that the world is vastly unpredictable, which renders many of our efforts at planning and strategy foolish. Interestingly, as so often is the case, he doesn’t really go far enough.
Leaving aside the complex debate about whether there is any such thing as true randomness rather than simply a mass of interconnected causes and conditions too vast to be encompassed (and perhaps that’s a distinction without a difference in the end), what Mlodinow doesn’t account for is something like shih.
He doesn’t delve into how deep our ability to perceive patterns at a subtle level may be. He doesn’t give much quarter to the power of contemplative mind, to intuition. We are presented essentially as victims. Yet others, such as Norman Schwarzkopf, when faced with vast complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability (randomness if you like) have concluded that character, your way of being, the basic momentum and direction you have developed to date is what you can rely on. Through the deep knowing and cultivation of our basic being that is encouraged by the Sun Tzu, we can turn the tables on randomness and interconnectedness. It’s the basic ground rather than the enemy.
Barry Boyce