Love is the Criticality

“All systems,” according to the groundbreaking work of Ilya Prigogine with Isabelle Stengers, “contain subsystems, which are continually ‘fluctuating.’” Fluctuation is both the emergence of chaos and, in its doubling, paradoxically, the order that can arrive from chaos. There are moments, the physicists tell us, in every chaotic system where a fluctuation reaches a threshold. “It is inherently impossible,” as Alvin Toffler says, “to determine in advance which direction change will take: whether the system will disintegrate into chaos or leap to a new, more differentiated, higher level of order or organization.” This threshold is what physicist Per Bak labeled criticality. *

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My wife and I had three fluctuations: a girl and two boys. Each emerged out of chaos and order, initiating their own sequences of chaos and order. Bringing a child into the world is like lighting a fuse––a time-released detonation of wildness stretching into the future.

We had no idea what we were getting into with parenting. Do any of us know what we’re going into with anything? We forecast, calculate, and speculate, but life is blurry at best. And at worst? Terrifyingly unknowable. All systems are replete with changing and destabilizing subsystems.

Around this time ten years ago (late fall of 2012), I received a phone call from our “oldest fluctuation.” I remember her words pouring out in excitement, in anticipation, in anxiety over the possibility of a trip to Haiti over the holidays. It was a long shot, given the short notice, but I quickly recognized a fuse had been lit. When something caught her attention, there was no turning back. She was off and into the wildness.

Sometimes I imagine her journey: the flight, the turquoise waters, the riverbed-roads, the plantains over fire, the shouts and laughter layered into games of soccer, the refracted sunlight in smiles, in waterfalls, in her undomesticated-marine-blue eyes.

She loved that trip.

Haiti is a remarkable place. When Columbus crash-landed there (then known as Hispaniola) on Christmas Eve of 1492, the little island unwittingly became an intersection between the old and new worlds. Though new is hardly the way to describe a place that so quickly came to resemble the old (e.g., indigenous people eliminated, African slave trade initiated.)

Columbus (or Ferdinand, or Spain, or the affluent Global North in general) triggered something there in Haiti. The injustice convulsed and shook up through 1804 when its people enacted the only successful slave revolt in the history of the world. That’s worth repeating… the only successful slave revolt in the history of the world. Imagine that.

And imagine its powerful neighbor to the north, claiming to be a beacon of humanitarian independence, refusing to shine its light upon an independent Haiti. The US could not acknowledge what Haiti had done. The US would not acknowledge what Haiti had won. Can you imagine what the world might have been like if America had been courageous enough to endorse its tiny neighbor to the south?

That would have been a new world, indeed.

Our girl made plans to go back to Haiti… sigh, but certain wires got crossed, lines on roads crossed, thresholds to different worlds crossed. A storm of ice (a weather fluctuation) took our fluctuation and frankly, we’ve never been the same.

It is impossible to determine in advance how, or when, one’s systems and subsystems will disintegrate into nothingness. The reality is once the fluctuation begins, there are no guarantees. Chaos and entropy are inevitable. That might be the end of the story. Also, it might not be the end of the story. Personally, I’m banking on the latter. I’m banking on the possibility of criticality.

As physicist Peter Bak says, criticality might be understood by imagining a child at the beach letting sand trickle down to form a pile. Initially, the pile is flat. Individual grains remain close to where they land. Motion can be thought of in terms of physical properties. But as things continue, the pile becomes steeper. This leads to small sand slides, then more significant sand slides. Eventually, the sand slides span all or most of the pile. At that point, the system is out of balance. The behavior of the system can no longer be understood in terms of the behavior of the individual grains. Something bigger has been triggered. This is the moment of criticality. No one can say exactly what the pile will look like beyond the convulsion, but eventually, physical properties find their order, and something new appears.  

There is always potential for systems to become overwhelmed, for chaos to ensue, but there is also always potential for something new to emerge. Alvin Toffler says, “Entropy itself is the progenitor of order.”*

What a great line: Entropy itself is the progenitor of order.

Might the criticality within the death and resurrection of Jesus be the metaphysical analogue to this scientific claim? Perhaps a love that is “as strong as death” and as “enduring as the grave” offers hope. Maybe the fluctuation known as creation is moving toward death that is moving toward life. 

It’s a risk to think this way, but what else is there? We have no idea where this is all going. We can forecast, calculate, and speculate but life is blurry at best. And terrifyingly unknowable at worst. All systems are replete with changing and destabilizing subsystems, so why not lean into a faith that seems to reflect a measure of science? Or lean into a science that seems to reflect a measure of faith? Maybe your actions, like grains of sand being dropped onto a pile, will initiate a type of sand slide, and in doing so will reveal new possibilities? Maybe there’s hope for you, (for Haiti, for our daughter) beyond the sand slide.

Maybe love is the criticality.

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If you want to learn more about the kinds of things my family has been doing in Haiti, check out the lovehaiti.org and don’t miss my latest podcast.

* For more along these lines, see Alvin Toffler’s introduction in Ilya Prigogine with Isabelle Stengers Order Out of Chaos, and Peter Bak’s How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality