Micro- actions, macro-karma

I’ve been thinking a lot about karma recently, largely because I can’t seem to keep my hands on my own stuff. A little while ago I lost my phone and got it back, to my own delight and utter surprise.

I know people who would have kept my phone and flogged it. Heck, I have friends that would have kept it. Even if they’d found it with their mum watching. It’s a good phone, worth a little cash, and I probably have insurance (wrong, hypothetical phone thief!). It’s a few steps away from a victimless crime, but I doubt you’d wake up breathless about it a decade later.

But I got my phone back, from a nice young man names Stuart who kept it for me. I got him eight Stellas in return, because I was grateful, but also because I felt the need to balance my karma.

I’m an atheist. I do not believe in any kind of guiding or interventionist God, or indeed any sentient presence with a controlling stake in the cosmos.

I don’t really have any great leanings towards spiritualism either. I think my general spiritual view of the universe could be summed up as follows:

Stuff just happens. It happens because it does. Just because it happens, doesn’t mean it’s anything other than stuff.

It sounds quite simple, probably because it is. I find my spiritual understanding of the world is easier to manage if I keep it within terms a moody teenager would be familiar with.

I do believe in karma, though. It sounds like a bit of doublethink again, but I promise I’ve got a bit of thought behind this statement.

The universe is not random. Everything that occurs has been preceded by a myriad of events that shaped the fundamental matter of existence to allow it to do so. In the same way, any particular event is also the next step on an even longer chain of occurrences that stretch off into theoretical infinity. Events only appear random because the universe is really, really, really really really complicated. Each step on the chain is so ludicrously insignificant as to be unobservable to you and me (we’re talking about atoms bumping into one another). Not only that, they occur at a blistering pace and are subject to the interactions of billions upon billions of other chains of events, all effecting one another in inconceivable ways.

The universe is not random. But it is far too big and far too complicated to interpret on any meaningful scale. Any complex design might seem like utter chaos if you can’t see the whole picture.

This is not to say, however, that human beings cannot interpret the world around us in a meaningful way. Luckily, we don’t actually need to have a fundamental grasp on the nature of the universe in order to make predictions about events. This is largely because the events that affect us are perceived on a macro, as opposed to micro, scale. The things that touch our lives are a conflation of millions of other smaller events, the workings of which are too complicated to measure, but the end results are perfectly observable.

For example, I decide I want to punch you in the face. Once I make my decision electrical impulses flash down my nerves to stimulate the muscles in order to extend my arm and smack you. For your part, the light reflecting from my body enters your optic nerve and is decoded by your brain as the beginnings of an attempt to smash your face in. This leads to further electrical impulses being sent to prepare your muscles for movement, as well as countless chemical changes occurring all over your body to prepare you for sudden action (adrenalin release etc). These tiny steps number in the millions.

But we don’t need to be in control or even aware of all these events. You have no perception of the things that are occurring above. But you see I’m going to punch you, you smoothly move aside, and you kick me in the nuts (you jerk, it was only an example).

For me, karma operates in an area between these two extremes. Say you do something nice for someone else. You might be able to predict that they’d do something nice for you. You might even be able to guess how they’re attitude towards you might have changed, and be able to use that in future to inform how you act around them.

Beyond that, you’re a bit out of the loop. You have no idea how that good deed makes them act towards other people. You have no idea who they might tell about it. Human lives, like the universe, are incredibly complicated, and there are simply too many interactions going on all the time to make any educated guess about the effect one event might have beyond a few steps in any direction.

As we’ve seen, though, a lot of ‘big’ actions are actually made of an amalgam of millions of smaller ones. So your one, ‘small’ good deed might be a tiny part of something bigger. The more good deeds you do the more likely it becomes that you are influencing systems beyond your awareness.

It is absolutely impossible that Stuart knew anything about me when he found my phone. We have never met, and are unlikely to ever do so again. It is also highly improbable that any good deed I have ever done for someone has found its way towards Stuart. I have had absolutely no influence on his life.

Someone sure as hell has, though. There’s a reason that Stuart was ‘nice’ enough to return my phone: he had been successfully socialised into that way of thinking by repeated exposure to similar good deeds, done for him by others. Again, it is utterly unlikely that I affected any of those people either.

But that’s not really how I choose to see it. As I’ve hopefully demonstrated with my punch in face example, just because something is impossible to measure doesn’t mean it’s insignificant. I consider my own positive actions to be a tiny pail in a vast sea. They might appear useless, but without their fundamental presence then the object would be different. No pails = no seas. No atoms = no apples. No brain impulses = no me getting planted in the goolies.

Every good action could be an influencing factor in another good thing somewhere, sometime. Likewise, every random act of casual tossbaggery could be an impossible minor contributor to an act of greater nastiness.

My point is, just because it feels like your actions are insignificant, doesn’t mean they are. They might just be a contributing factor in a system too complicated to really grasp. But if you keep doing it, and invite others to do the same, eventually those micro actions might end in macro results. And you might get your phone back. But probably not.

***EDIT***

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