Sliding Doors And My Fear Of The Butterfly Effect
I like the 1998 movie “Sliding Doors;” within the confines of a romantic comedy, it does a good job of demonstrating how small events can have an outsized influence on the course of a life. The heroine, played by a pre-Goop, fresh faced Gwyneth Paltrow, follows two markedly different life paths that depend on whether or not she can catch a train in the London Tube before its doors close.
In one scenario she gets through the train doors and finds her live-in boyfriend in bed with another woman. In the other scenario, where the doors slide shut on her, she remains unaware of the infidelity. The two versions of Gwyneth then spin further and further away from each other.
I was reminded of my own “Sliding Doors” moment this weekend when we had my old friend Steve and his wife Sue as houseguests. Steve and my thirty-seven-year-old daughter Lauren were enjoying a friendly, teasing conversation. At one point Steve said to Lauren, “You know, you wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t dragged your father’s ass out of bed to go to that event.”
Steve was correct. He was referring to the event in 1984 where I met my future wife Debbie. And Steve did have to convince me to go. He can be very persuasive. He gave me a choice between going out as he suggested or continuing to listen to him indefinitely explain that not going would be a mistake.
The Butterfly Effect
In 1972 a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz gave a talk he titled “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas.” His talk helped to popularize the phrase “The Butterfly Effect” meaning that a small change to a complex system such as weather or the course of a person’s life can sometimes have transformative effects over time. The result is that the complex system starts out the same but evolves to two extremely different endpoints.
In the 1950s, long before Lorenz’s talk, Ray Bradbury wrote a story called “The Sound of Thunder” in which hunters take a time machine to go back some sixty million years to hunt a Tyrannosaurus Rex. One hunter panics at the sight of the T-Rex, goes off the protective, elevated path, and steps on a butterfly. When the group returns to their present day, everything has changed for the worse. The changes are attributed to the dead butterfly stuck to the sole of the panicked hunter’s shoe.
Of course not every small event is going to lead to big changes. Our lives are set in certain patterns and grooves (a “rut” if you’re unhappy) that can’t be so readily altered. The event of meeting Debbie and all the interactions of the first week after we met were life altering. Had one of us during those first seven days, however, decided not to be immediately “all-in” to each other, things probably would have turned out differently. But now that the complex system of our marriage is forty years old, it would take a major event to set us off course.
By the way, Lorenz’s answer to his provocative butterfly question was essentially “I don’t know.”
Chaos
Chaos is the connection between my fascination with counterfactuals and how small things can have big effects. I’m terrified of thinking of those choices in my life where I might have acted differently and ended up as a different person. So many random contingencies led me to meeting Debbie that night that it seems like the “me” of today was the result of the most random, unintentional, disordered actions. In other words, chaos.
On that particular night, make me just a little more tired or have it rain a little earlier or give me a cold or have Steve and me arrive at a different time, and the current me and my children (and now grandchildren), would simply not exist, and that thought is hard to handle. Perhaps it’s my terror of the counterfactual that makes me drawn to movies like “Sliding Doors,” just as someone scared of the supernatural is drawn to horror movies.
Day of infamy?
All of us, including me, tend to look at the past with a false sense of inevitability in part because if we imagine that some variable has changed, the counterfactual possibilities can overwhelm us. Our mind can spiral down myriad sets of hypothetical pathways not knowing which counterfactual pathway might turn out best.
For example, the decision to attack Pearl Harbor was made by men in charge of Japan. It was their human choice. Until it happened, it was not inevitable. Different leaders might have decided differently. For the Japanese people it was a disastrous choice for the next five or so years. But a few decades later Japan was on a path to greater prosperity and political stability than any other time in its history.
What if
My mind can’t comprehend all the permutations if the leaders of Japan had decided not to attack. The United States might have stayed out of World War Two or at least delayed its entry. The war in Europe would have taken some different unknowable course. I can imagine some horrific consequences. What if America had not entered the war, and Japan instead decided to join Nazi Germany in attacking the USSR?
Pearl Harbor was a national tragedy with some 2,400 American servicemen killed. But no one can disprove that in the long run the attack was necessary to the creation of a postwar world of greater peace and prosperity than if the attack had not occurred.
When Winston Churchill heard about the attack and America’s entry into the war, his reaction was mostly jubilation. In his memoirs of World War Two he compared the military might and will of America to a “giant boiler” that once lit had no limit to the power it could generate.
This is what Churchill felt the day after Pearl Harbor:
“United, we could subdue everyone else in the world…I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”
Sliding Doors in history
In the movie “Sliding Doors,” whether Gwyneth makes her Tube train or not is determined by whether she has to evade a child playing with her doll on a stair railing. In the “she makes it” scenario, the child’s mother pulls the child aside to give Gwyneth free passage. In the doors slid shut scenario, the child delays Gwyneth. Gwyneth’s two different lives are based on the timing of a mother’s tug of her child.
For much of the movie we think one version of Gwyneth is better off. At the end we’re not sure. Twists and turns leave us pondering which version really turns out “best.”
A grisly Sliding Doors moment took place exactly one hundred and eleven years ago today on June 28th 1914. Shortly before noon that day, a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, one of a group of conspirators, shot and killed the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand while the Archduke was in a motor car in Sarajevo. The assassination was the inciting event that set in motion a series of events that led a few months later to the start of World War One and the beginning of three decades of previously unimaginable human slaughter.
But the assassination itself was built upon a series of improbable and improbably connected circumstances. Earlier that morning, a different conspirator made the first assassination attempt by throwing a grenade at the Archduke’s car. His throw missed. As a result of the attempt, the driver of the car changed the planned route and eventually got lost, ending up near a delicatessen called Schillers. Gavrilo Princip, nineteen years-old, had wandered there by chance, probably convinced that their assassination plot had failed.
Princip took advantage of his “good luck.” He had a pistol and used it to kill both the Archduke and his wife with two shots at close range.
It's not quite the flapping of a butterfly’s wing causing a tornado, or a boy and a girl falling in love at first sight, but there’s a chance that the history of the entire 20th century rests upon the confluence of a driver’s wrong turn and Gavrilo Princip’s random wanderings.
Haha. Three things:
-You did not mention the great Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken.
-There's a terrific book by a physicist, Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkards Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. It's a great read.
-Finally, there is the old bit of profound Yiddish wisdom. "If grandma had a schlong, she'd be grandpa."
Love this piece, David. I'm currently reading the book Fluke, by Brian Klaas, which explores these phenomena—with some different but equally startling examples from WWII and his own family history. I think you'd enjoy it.