Beyond Coincidence (6 page)

Watts's experiment is an effective demonstration of the smallness of the world, but when incredible-seeming correlations happen to us outside of a scientific experiment they feel eerie and magical. There are many reasons why we might
want
them to be magical. The best is summed up by Richard Dawkins, a scientist famous for debunking the paranormal, who says, rather generously, given his standpoint, that we have a “natural and laudable appetite for wonder.”

That appetite for wonder rekindled Joyce Simpson's faith in God. Joyce, of DeKalb County, Georgia, saw a sign in May 1991 that changed her life. To everyone else it was a Pizza Hut advertisement, but Joyce, who at the time was disillusioned enough with religion to be considering quitting her church choir, saw only salvation. Shining forth from a forkful of spaghetti was the face of Jesus.

A skeptic will say that if you look closely enough and with enough emotional motive you can see the face of God in any picture—spaghetti, chicken nuggets, deviled eggs—but there'd be no point telling Joyce Simpson that, nor the rapturous Georgians who lined up in their cars to see the billboard miracle for themselves once the news got out.

Wonder engages the emotions. Wonder changes lives. Wonder makes you sit down and write that long postponed letter to Herbert Krantzer. “Dear Herbert. You won't believe this. I was washing my old VW Beetle, prior to finally selling the damn thing, and I found a note from you, dated June 1986, inside one of the hubcaps, wishing me a ‘long and happy journey!' You must have slipped it in there on my wedding day all those years ago.…” It makes you feel especially blessed when Herbert writes back to say how good it was to receive your letter, particularly at that moment, for he is in the very process of finding an old VW Beetle for his son.

What made you take the hubcap off, for the first time in seventeen years, at that particular moment? To clean it, the skeptic will say. The letter finding event was acausal; in other words, you didn't find it
because
it might be propitious to contact an old friend at that particular point in time.

To most human beings this is a pretty bland interpretation. It's the word “acausal” that rankles. It renders what seemed full of wonder flat and dull. The letter writer may consider himself to be a rational thinker, but his mind is more interested in indulging the possibility that a guardian angel is smiling on him, or that his relationship with Herbert is so significant that some kind of telepathy is in play. He would rather take the agnostic “who knows?” position than consign it to mere chance.

Acausality doesn't do justice to the experience, especially when the experience is very personal. If a man dreams one night that his friend Moriarty is dying and then wakes up to be told that Moriarty has actually died, the notion that he may be psychic is extremely hard to resist. As is the notion that God sent him a warning to soften the blow, or that there are parallel universes in different time dimensions to which he might suddenly, because of the strength of his emotional compact with his friend, have gained access, or that the emotional right-hand side of the brain, containing a primitive intuitive consciousness suppressed by centuries of evolution, has woken up during his sleep, or that an event has come about because of the motivating power of his own thought process (on second thoughts, scrub that one).… There is no shortage of such explanations and every one of them is more interesting than arbitrary, impersonal,
acausal
chance. What makes them utterly irresistible is the way they engage the dreamer emotionally with the fact of the death: they impart a sense of having been present, or somehow consulted, at the end.

Statistician Christopher Scott has worked out the odds in the UK of dreaming of a friend's death the night it happens. Basing his calculation on fifty-five million people living an average of seventy years and experiencing one friend's death dream per lifetime, and then factoring in a national death rate of two thousand every twenty-four hours, Scott reckons there'll be an accurate death dream in Britain about every two weeks. It's human nature to recall only interesting stories, so accurate dreams are widely reported and frequently retold, while millions of dreams about dying friends who turn out the next day to be on the mend are routinely discarded from memory.

“How do you know,” the dreamer might say, “that all the dreams that didn't come true weren't of an inferior quality to mine? My dream about Moriarty had
authority.
It was so vivid it had to be true. It was as though the gods were intervening in human affairs—it was a
deus ex machina!
”

“Why would Zeus have confided in you?” asks the skeptic.

“Well, you know … we're pretty close.”

“What about that time you dreamed you were being chased naked through Starbucks by Julia Child waving a cleaver? Has that come to pass?”

“Not exactly … though it
could,
of course. Anyway, not
all
my dreams are prophetic.”

“How many have been?”

“Well, there's the dream about Moriarty … and I once dreamed I was going on a long journey and soon after I won a weekend trip to Paris…”

Out comes the calculator again. “So … two prophetically accurate dreams in thirty-six years … let's say you have three dreams a night … that's one clairvoyant vision in every 19,710 dreams, or put another way…”

“No you're wrong, Clever Dick, because there's something I haven't told you. None of this—Moriarty, the dream, your calculator, the whole of existence and every skeptic who ever set foot in it—actually exists. The universe is actually a figment of my imagination. I made it all up! In fact I'm making you up right now. Work that out on your calculator!”

You see how coincidence sparks the imagination! Note also that all explanations except chance grant the observer a starring role. Nowadays most of us tend to accept the skeptic's rationale, at least outwardly, but privately we like to at least flirt with the center-stage glory coincidence gives us. It's a natural enough desire that goes hand in glove with the need for an explanation for the universe that makes us feel less like a speck of random space dust and more like a cosmic player. Even the most skeptical probability mathematician, on finding a bottle washed up on a beach in Madagascar containing a note addressed to him, might be tempted to entertain that awesome possibility.

Yet if this event is meaningful, what exactly does it mean? He can only pitch a guess at that. Or he can seek the advice of a New Age counselor or shaman, if he can find one who is trustworthy and reliable and not given to irrational flights of fantasy.… The realization at this point that he is stepping into a supernatural rocket ship fueled by high-octane superstition and without a qualified pilot might remind him that he is a skeptical probability mathematician. Those who abandon empirically testable evidence as a basis for important life choices in favor of the subjective interpretation of random events, follow a convoluted and perilous path, as history has demonstrated only too often.

Two and a half thousand years ago, when Sophocles wrote
Oedipus Rex,
nobody was backward about predicting the future. They could research their destiny as readily as we can research our history and everyone had a direct line to the gods. Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos sound like members of the Marx Brothers, but to the average man they were very real, and not a bit funny. They were the three Fates, the indifferent celestial beings that meted out the thread of life apportioned to each mortal, decided on a few choice life qualities (tragedy, illness, etc.), and efficiently snipped it off at the due date. This thread was a man's
moira
(allotment). He couldn't erase the best-before date, nor could he escape his
moira
's negative elements, though he could, if he was foolish, make things much worse for himself.

Comets and other natural phenomena were obvious augurs; not cosmic coincidences these, but harbingers of specific events on Earth, usually disasters. The fall of Jerusalem, the death of Julius Caesar, and the defeat of the English by William the Conqueror were all said to have been augured by comets. King Harold's defeat was mapped out by Halley's comet. It came around again in 1986, presaging what evil this time? The explosion of the space shuttle
Challenger
? The assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme? The invasion of the United States by Crocodile Dundee?

It's unusual to make such associations today, yet a minority of people still do. It's not hard to find clairvoyant sites on the Internet asserting cast-iron connections between historical events and comet appearances that preceded them. The astronomer Carl Sagan, who waged a war against “baloney and pseudoscience,” said that since human history is intrinsically unhappy, “any comet at any time, viewed from anywhere on Earth is assured of some tragedy for which it can be held accountable.”

In the time of Sophocles, such things as comets seemed more authoritative, and the oracle was recognized as providing an insight into the Fates' deliberations, a sort of advance preview of your life. Just how dangerous reliance on such a system could be is demonstrated in many stories of the Delphic oracle, in particular that of poor Oedipus who, if we believe that his fate was preordained, as Sophocles appears to have done, was doomed before he was even born. It wasn't enough that each tragedy Oedipus had to endure had been written in the stars, it was also pointed out to him before it happened by well-wishing clairvoyants! Wriggle though he and his family might to escape their fate, nothing they did could prevent the predictions from acting themselves out. In fact it was the very act of wriggling, also foreseen by the cunning immortals, that set in motion the events that had been predicted.

To a modern skeptic, Oedipus's tale is nothing to do with fate; it's all about coincidence. It's just very, very bad luck. Coincidences do tend to cluster—any statistician will tell you that—and Oedipus had the misfortune to be the point where all the bad luck congregated that particular eon.

Oedipus's story is as predictable as an episode of
The OC
and almost as depressing. His father, King Laius of Thebes, was told by the oracle that the boy would grow up to murder his father and marry his mother.

It was an unusually unequivocal response from the Pythia, the Delphic priestess who, in mystic trances, garbled the prophecies. Normally the Pythia's pronouncements took the form of riddles that lent themselves to more than one interpretation, a common enough play of clairvoyants, astrologers, and psychics both then and now (the blanket prediction enables them to say “I told you so” whatever the outcome). When King Croesus of Lydia was contemplating making war with Persia in 550 BC, he sent emissaries to the Pythia with lavish gifts of gold and silver, three hundred cattle and a gold bowl weighing a quarter of a ton. They were told, “You will destroy a great empire.” Pleased with the prediction, Croesus attacked Persia and destroyed a great empire—his own.

There was no such leeway for interpretation in King Laius's oracle. No matter what slant he tried to put on it, the future was already pretty bad. Laius tried to sidestep fate by instructing that the baby should be left on the slopes of Mount Cithaeron to die. The baby was saved by a shepherd and taken to Corinth, where by an incredible coincidence it was noticed and adopted by the childless Corinthian king, Polybus. Oedipus grew into a golden child, but he, too, consulted the oracle, which glibly repeated that he would kill his father and marry his mother.

Believing Polybus to be his father, Oedipus left Corinth at once for Thebes. On the way he met his real father at a crossroads, fell into an argument with him, and, in one of the few road rage incidents recorded in the ancient texts, killed him. All that remained was for him to marry his mother, Jocasta, and, wouldn't you know it, by a bizarre combination of fluke circumstances this duly came to pass.

So far so bad. But it gets worse—Oedipus and his mother eventually found out the awful truth. Jocasta hanged herself, and Oedipus, not bearing to look on the unhappiness he had caused, took pins out of her clothes and gouged his eyes out with them. Oedipus must have wished he had lived in a more scientific age, though according to the logic of the story he wouldn't have been able to escape his tragic
moira
even then. In a sense, the fact that he tried to skip his destiny marked him as a “modern man” before his time, with heretical delusions of self-determination. Sophocles thought Oedipus was wrong to try to resist what the deities had decreed, though by their rules neither rebellion nor submission would have affected its occurrence. The uncompromising and inhuman insistence of the ancients that chance utterances of oracles and coincidental alignments of
omens
could define events yet to happen damned the fictional Oedipus as a loser. Not even time travel to a skeptical future could have prevented him from murdering his father and marrying his mother.

His story had been around a long time even when Sophocles got hold of it. Interestingly, one of the reasons the writer may have chosen it was to reassert the values and worldview represented by the old gods in the face of new modes of thinking that were being developed in some of the Greek city democracies. Here and there groups of philosophers were rejecting old superstition-based beliefs and beginning to assert rational theories of existence based on empirical evidence—formulating, had they known it, the basis of the modern scientific method.

It was to be a long time before science would take over as the principal means of examining natural phenomena. Until it did history was to provide numerous examples of how dangerous superstition could be as a means of interpreting the world. Perhaps the most tragic is the Aztec Empire of Central America. In 1519, when the ambitious Spanish adventurer Hernando Cortés landed near modern Veracruz and burned his ships, effectively cutting off his tiny army's escape route, the Aztecs controlled a civilization of millions of souls that was extraordinarily sophisticated by the standards of its day. In some obvious ways it lagged behind Europe, yet it had advanced mathematics, astronomy, and agriculture, it controlled five hundred vassal states, had an efficient social organization and raised cities that rivalled in size, architecture, and organization anything Europe had to offer. Yet this empire was destroyed by around five hundred Spanish soldiers, its population murdered and enslaved, its monuments and culture trashed, because of its failure to see a coincidence for a coincidence.