The Invention of Origins: III. When Consequence Becomes Purpose

Something happens.

Something else follows.

We can therefore say that the first event contributed to the second. This is ordinary causal explanation.

But something changes when we describe the first event as leading to the second.

The phrase sounds harmless. Yet it can carry a direction that the events themselves did not possess.

A consequence can be mistaken for a purpose.

Evolution provides a familiar example. We can trace the conditions and processes through which humans emerged from earlier forms of life. But once we know that humans emerged, it is remarkably easy to retell the history as though it were a movement towards humanity.

Earlier organisms become ancestors of us. Earlier capacities become steps towards us. Earlier environmental changes become conditions for our emergence.

The causal relations may be real.

The direction may be retrospective.

Nothing in the process required humanity to be its destination.

This distinction is easy to lose because human explanation is naturally organised around outcomes. We begin with something that exists and ask how it came to be. We then construct a chain of events connecting the present to the past.

The chain runs backwards through our explanation even though causation ran forwards through time.

And the further we move backwards, the more tempting it becomes to turn contingency into necessity.

If A contributed to B, and B contributed to C, and C eventually contributed to us, then A begins to look like the beginning of a process whose destination was us.

But the same history could have unfolded differently.

The importance of an event depends partly on what subsequently happened. Its causal consequences are one thing; its historical significance is another.

This matters because purpose is stronger than consequence.

A purpose explains something by reference to what it is for. A consequence explains something by reference to what happened after it.

Confusing the two turns history into a project.

And once history becomes a project, its endpoint begins to look like its reason.

This is perhaps the deepest temptation in the language of origins. If humanity is treated as the endpoint, then the history preceding humanity can be read as though it were a preparation for humanity. The result becomes the explanation of the process.

But an outcome does not become a purpose merely because it occurs.

A tree does not grow in order to become the particular tree we later observe. A species does not evolve in order to occupy the ecological niche it eventually occupies. A universe does not acquire a purpose from the fact that observers arise within it.

The consequence is real.

The purpose may be something we have added.

Perhaps, then, one of the most important disciplines of historical thinking is to keep two questions apart:

What did this make possible?

and

What was this for?

The first follows history.

The second gives history a destination.

And sometimes the distance between them is the distance between evolution and teleology.