Suppose that in the timelines where Frank is born a German he becomes a Nazi soldier. But let’s also suppose that Frank is not as heroically disposed as Joe and Juliana. When placed in a situation similar to Juliana’s he chooses to go home and read books rather than join the resistance, hence we evaluate him as acting neutrally when he has good moral luck.
Lastly we turn to our heroine Juliana. She has the benefit in the show of getting many opportunities to act in good ways, and for the most part she does not disappoint. Let’s suppose that trend towards moral praiseworthiness carries across timelines and that even when she finds herself in morally neutral circumstances she still engages in good actions. For example perhaps in the timeline where she grows up in a boring suburb she spends all her spare time doing charity work. Alas, Juliana is not actually perfect, though, and in the timelines where she’s morally unlucky the most she can muster is neutral behavior.
Equipped with this new (hypothetical) information about our characters we can fill in the rest of the details from our previous chart:
Once we know how the various actors will behave in different timelines, where their moral luck is different, we can give an assessment of them across timelines that is relatively immune to moral luck. By seeing how every acting person behaves in every type of situation we get a comparison of acting persons that is not susceptible to any particular person getting an unfair advantage or disadvantage. Given the values that we assumed for the persons, and the values we originally assigned to the various assessment levels, we can get an average score for each person, allowing us to compare them.
When we compare averages we get a more accurate ranking, with Juliana still getting the highest evaluation and John getting the worst, but we can now distinguish between Joe and Frank. Even though Joe and Frank acted the same in neutral circumstances, they may become dissimilar when we look at how they behave in better and worse circumstances.
With the values we filled in we did not see much change in our original ranking, Juliana was still ranked highest while John was still ranked lowest, but we can imagine situations where our assessment would change more dramatically upon consideration of reel footage. Imagine we check all the newsreels and discover that John devotes his life to building homes for the poor in every single timeline except the actual one, or that Juliana is a high school bully in sixty percent of the timelines, or that Frank is worse than Hitler in eighty percent of the timelines.
This sort of information would cause our final rankings to look very different from our initial single-timelines assessment. How much of this sort of result we should expect may depend on human psychology, on how susceptible we are to our moral circumstances for our actions. How representative my actions in one timeline are of my character across timelines might tell us something about how closely we resemble our counterparts across various timelines.
The Reel Lesson
The characters in The Man in the High Castle exist in a timeline that has significant differences from the history we’re familiar with. National Socialist German and Imperial Japanese control over the United States places people in extraordinary circumstances, leading to situations that are both morally lucky and unlucky for various characters. The existence of the newsreels allowed us to assess the quality of the characters without worrying that our assessments (and their actions) were caused by this luck. In a sense we leveled the playing field for our characters.
Yet extreme circumstances are not limited to fictional worlds. Without the benefit of information about alternate timelines we out here in the real world might be trapped in a situation of incomplete information, unable to separate a person’s character from their actions, and many of these actions may be caused by circumstances beyond their control.
V
A Maze of What-ifs
15
Farts, Butterflies, and Inner Truth
FRANKLIN PERKINS
Frank Frink has decided to quit his factory job and go into business making jewelry. He knows his life will change. He throws the yarrow stalks to get a reading from the I Ching, the Book of Changes. From the contradictory results, he concludes that his decision will not only change his life but will impact all of humanity, leading to the Third World War. He struggles to make sense of this:
What’s happening? Did I start it in motion? Or is someone else tinkering, someone I don’t even know? Or—the whole lot of us. It’s the fault of those physicists and that synchronicity theory, every particle being connected with every other; you can’t fart without changing the balance in the universe. It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh. (Orion edition, pp. 54–55)
Frank raises one of the fundamental ideas of chaos theory and complexity science, more often known as the butterfly effect. The claim is that a butterfly fluttering its wings in some distant part of the world might set off a series of events culminating in a hurricane. While the fart also involves a small movement of air, its implications differ radically, and not just because butterflies are pretty. The butterfly effect emphasizes the complexity of the world around us, showing that it exceeds the grasp of our finite minds. The fart effect places our actions within that complex system. The terrifying point is that the butterfly that causes the hurricane might be me. That the cause might be a fart, an action both trivial and involuntary, pushes the point into the realm of absurdity. It makes life into a joke, but if the result might be a world war, who could laugh?
Living with the Fart Effect
Frank’s worry that his career change might cause a world war seems far-fetched, but The Man in the High Castle shows us that it’s not. The Third World War is precisely what is at stake in the negotiations among Tagomi, Baynes, and Yatabe. What will determine if they succeed? Frank asks this question:
Can anyone alter it? he wondered. All of us combined . . . or one great figure . . . or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.
Baynes (a.k.a. Rudolf Wegener) might be the great figure who saves the world, or it might be the strategically placed Italian Foreign Minister they hope to approach. What we know is that if Tagomi did not have his 1860 Colt .44, the whole thing would have failed. And that pistol came from the antiquities dealer Bob Childan and was probably made at Wyndam-Matson Corporation, perhaps even by Frank. So Frank may be the one who has saved the world. All of history unfolds in this way. We’re told that the decisive event leading to German and Japanese victory was the assassination of Roosevelt in Miami. If that had been averted, as in the alternative history of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the allies would have won. And what might have averted the assassination? Perhaps a great hero or someone strategically placed, but perhaps a late bus, a piece of jewelry, or even an ill-timed fart.
We constantly shape and are shaped by circumstances beyond our comprehension. When Frank is arrested and later released, he can only see these events as inexplicable. Is it a miracle, or a fluke? Is there someone to thank? Tagomi made the decision, but had he not received Frank’s jewelry, he would not have been in the right place or frame of mind to intervene. So should Frank thank himself, or Childan (who gave it to Tagomi), or the Japanese connoisseur Paul Kasoura (who awakened Childan’s appreciation for it), or his ex-boss Wyndam-Matson (whose actions pushed Frank into the jewelry business in the first place)? Human beings occupy an absurd position, compelled to act without knowing why things happen or where our own choices will lead. As Tagomi puts it:
We’re blind moles. Creeping through the soil, feeling with our snouts. We know nothing. I perceived this . . . now I don’t know where to go. Screech with fear, only. Run away. (p. 97)
But there’s no escape, nowhere to run. Even flight has consequences.
What is the mole to do? How do we live with this kind of world? The problem of living with complexity has been central to Chinese philosophical traditions from the start. The basic approach crystallized in the Han dynasty with what has come to be known as
“correlative cosmology.” While specified in different ways by different philosophers, the most fundamental ontological principle is life or vitality (sheng ) as spontaneous growth, generation, and differentiation. The ground for this growth is formless and hidden but infinitely productive. It is labelled as the dao (Tao) , the way or guide. It could also be described as empty, absent, or indistinct, wu , which literally means to lack or not have. As Paul Kasoura says, wu has vitality but no distinct form, intention, or design (p. 170). The dao is described well by Childan:
The Tao is that which first lets in the light, then the dark. Occasions the interplay of the two primal forces so that there is always renewal. It is that which keeps it all from wearing down. The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, to be truly transcendent, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths. That is the Way. When the seed falls, it falls into the earth, into the soil. And beneath, out of sight, it comes to life. (p. 106)
The world that arises is differentiated on many levels, but the most fundamental distinction is between yin (the dark, yielding, soft, hidden, feminine) and yang (bright, forceful, hard, evident, masculine). The ceaseless interaction between these forces is the direct cause of life, renewal, and cyclical change.
Many specific strategies emerged in the Chinese tradition as ways of living with complexity. Some of these appear in the novel. The most central is awareness of the concrete details of our situation, which requires attentiveness, patience, and adaptability. As Childan puts it:
The Moment changes. One must be ready to change with it. Or otherwise left high and dry. Adapt. The rule of survival, he thought. Keep eye peeled regarding situation around you. Learn its demands. And—meet them. Be there at the right time doing the right thing. Be yinnish. (p. 146)
The mutual implication of all things means that sometimes good can only arise from bad and sometimes bad arises from good. We must be ready for that. Realizing that both good and bad are inevitable leads to a degree of equanimity. Frank’s ex-wife Juliana says she learned this attitude from the Japanese: “Imbibed placid attitude toward mortality, along with money-making judo. How to kill, how to die. Yang and yin” (p. 35). At the same time, the darkest moments cannot last. From the fullest yin, there must be yang. That hope appears most of all in the stirring of new life expressed in the wu of Frank’s jewelry.
The Changes: A Guide for Moles
The most prominent element of Chinese philosophy used to deal with complexity in the novel is the I-Ching, more commonly written now as Yijing () and translated as the Book of Changes or Classic of Changes). The earliest layer consists of divination statements that usually include a concrete image and then some indication of whether you will succeed or fail. That is the level quoted in the novel. Another layer consists of brief explanations of these lines, sometimes extrapolated to give ethical guidance. The Classic of Changes is formed with the addition of commentaries that build a cosmological and philosophical system around these divination statements. While the origins probably go back to the early Zhou dynasty (founded in the eleventh century B.C.E.), the classic as a whole represents the correlative thinking that developed later. In that form it becomes a self-conscious manual for living with complexity.
The commentaries say that the Changes mirrors the structure of nature. That requires that the text itself be complex. The basis is the determination of a single line as either yin (represented by a broken line) or yang (a straight line). Grouping three lines forms the eight possible trigrams. Those are then paired to form sixty-four hexagrams. On top of that, any number of lines in the hexagram can be in the process of change, allowing for 4,096 possible outcomes. The complexity of the text goes further, though, as it brings together commentaries and explanations from different periods and perspectives. Aside from those constituting the classic, some of the greatest philosophers in the Chinese tradition, both Daoist and Confucian, added their own commentaries.
Philip K. Dick’s encounter with the text is even more complex. The Chinese text and commentaries passed through the German translation and commentary of a Christian missionary, Richard Wilhelm, and then into English through Cary F. Baynes, supplemented with an introduction by Carl G. Jung. That introduces some distortions, as in Wilhelm’s introduction of God in relation to hexagram fifty-one. Tagomi refers to it as “God appears in the sign of the Arousing,” but the original Chinese makes no mention of God. The proliferation of new meanings, though, is at the heart of the Changes. The classic itself is a distortion, making a profound philosophical system out of a collection of statements that sound like they could come from a fortune cookie.
How does the Changes work as a guide? It is explained the first time Frank uses it:
Here came the hexagram, brought forth by the passive chance workings of the vegetable stalks. Random, and yet rooted in the moment in which he lived, in which his life was bound up with all other lives and particles in the universe. The necessary hexagram picturing in its pattern of broken and unbroken lines the situation. He, Juliana, the factory on Gough Street, the Trade Missions that ruled, the exploration of the planets, the billion chemical heaps in Africa that were now not even corpses, the aspirations of the thousands around him in the shanty warrens of San Francisco, the mad creatures in Berlin with their calm faces and manic plans—all connected in this moment of casting the yarrow stalks to select the exact wisdom appropriate in a book begun in the thirtieth century B.C. A book created by the sages of China over a period of five thousand years, winnowed, perfected, that superb cosmology—and science—codified before Europe had even learned to do long division. (pp. 19–20)
The whole universe is implicated in this one moment and the casting of the yarrow stalks. The Changes gives us a starting point for making sense of that complexity.
What makes the Changes so important in the context of the novel is that it provides guidance through the concrete. That contrasts the madness to which Tagomi almost succumbs. It contrasts the assassin Joe Cinnadella, who admits that “it’s all darkness” and yet argues for decisive action (pp. 158–59). Most of all, though, it contrasts the flight from the real into abstraction. That is the greatest evil in the novel. Baynes tries to pinpoint the particular form of German insanity, coming to this conclusion:
Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. (p. 45)
This move to abstraction attempts to evade our finitude. The Germans, as Baynes says, “want to be the agents, not the victims, of history.” That’s impossible, as we have seen. It’s also destructive. One of the most profound philosophical points in the novel is that meaning can only originate in the concrete. Juliana sees this: “We have no value, she said to herself. We can live out our tiny lives. If we want to. If it matters to us” (p. 35). It can matter, but only to us. The move to abstraction culminates in nihilism, because abstracted from concrete human concerns—looked at from a cosmic perspective—nothing human matters. Humanity is just a temporary stage, the blink of an eye. Dust returns to dust.
If there is to be life, it must be mole-like. When Frank gets the reading he interprets as predicting another world war, he finally concludes:
I should take my tools, get my motors from McCarthy, open my shop, start my piddling business, go on despite the horrible line. Be working, creating in my own way right up to the end, living as best I can, as actively as possible, until the wall falls back into the moat for all of us, all mankind. That’s what the oracle is telling me. Fate will poleaxe us eventually anyhow, but I have my job in the meantime; I must use my mind, my hands. (p. 54)
We will all die eventually, even the whole human species. Yet we must find meaning in the here and now. Tagomi comes out of his crisis in the same way, just returning to work. Baynes gives the same view in ethical ter
ms:
Evidently we go on, as we always have. From day to day. At this moment we work against Operation Dandelion. Later on, at another moment, we work to defeat the police. But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step.
He thought, We can only hope. And try. (p. 236)
Baynes longs for a world in which “morality is easy because cognition is easy,” but that is not our world.
Purple Knee Bands and Falling into the Moat
How does the Changes come in? We might worry that it is a way of evading complexity, a deus ex machina, a divine voice that reveals the truth. It is sometimes spoken of that way, particularly when personified as “the Oracle,” but that isn’t how it works, in the story or in real life.
A reading from the Changes doesn’t just express the complexity of the moment—it participates in that complexity. The meaning emerges from the interplay among the question asked, the statements from the text, and the situation we face. All three are open to interpretation and those interpretations are interdependent. The result is a complex process in which we view our situation in terms of the hexagram but also interpret the hexagram in light of the situation, and in all of that we also come to a clearer understanding of the concern that led us to do the reading in the first place. The entire process works through the concrete.
Consider the reading that leads Frank into the reflections with which we began. His question is straightforward: “Should I attempt to go into the creative private business outlined to me just now?” (p. 53) He receives hexagram 11, Peace (Tai ), with a changing line at the top. The hexagram statement is:
The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy Page 16