The Butterfly Effect

This is a gift book and it should be judged as one. Large type, heavy stock, illustrations, and perhaps twenty minutes of reading. Judged by weight it is nothing, and it has sold enormously because the argument inside is one people want to hand to somebody else.

Andrews built a speaking career on this material before it was a book, and the structure shows that origin. It is a talk with pictures, and it works the way a good talk works, which is by arriving at one idea and stopping.

What is the argument of The Butterfly Effect?

That a person’s effects continue past their ability to observe them, and that the arithmetic of those effects is not calculable in advance.

The device is a chain traced backward. Norman Borlaug’s wheat research is widely credited with preventing famine on an enormous scale. Andrews works back: who created the conditions for Borlaug’s work, and who created the conditions for that person, and so on, until the chain reaches somebody who had no idea what they were setting in motion.

The Chamberlain material at Gettysburg is the strongest example. A colonel on the far left of the Union line, out of ammunition, ordered a bayonet charge down a hill because he could not hold and would not retreat. He could not see past the next hour. The argument is that a great deal of what followed rests on that few seconds.

Why does the device work?

Because consequence is normally invisible in the direction that matters.

You can see what caused you. Parents, teachers, the accident of where you were born, the person who gave you a job. The causal chain running backward is at least partly legible.

You cannot see what you have caused. The chain runs forward past your death, through people you will never meet, and there is no mechanism by which you could observe it. So the natural assumption is that your effects are small, because the ones you can see are small.

The book’s whole function is to make that asymmetry vivid, and a chain traced backward from an enormous outcome does it in a way an abstract statement cannot.

Is the history reliable?

Chains like this always simplify, and it is worth being clear about how.

Every link in a causal chain had thousands of other inputs. Borlaug’s work depended on institutions, funding, prior research, and the labor of many people, and selecting one antecedent and calling it the cause is a narrative choice and not a historical finding.

Historians would object to most of these attributions and they would be right to. The Chamberlain claim in particular has been argued about for a century, with serious historians holding that the significance of Little Round Top has been inflated by exactly this kind of retelling.

Andrews is not doing history. He is doing rhetoric with historical furniture, and a reader should know which one they are getting.

Does the objection ruin The Butterfly Effect?

No, and this is the thing worth understanding about the book.

The underlying claim does not depend on any particular chain. Your effects continue past your ability to see them, and that arithmetic is not calculable in advance. That is true whether or not the specific Borlaug sequence is the right one, and it would still be true if every link in it were wrong.

The chains are illustrations of a claim instead of evidence for it, and the claim is not the sort of thing that has evidence. It is closer to a way of seeing, and the book is trying to install it.

Verdict

Not a book so much as an argument in a nice binding, and it knows that. Buy it for somebody who needs it instead of for yourself, which is what it was designed for.

The idea is sound and the history is a story about the idea. If you want the history, read about Chamberlain and Borlaug properly, and you will find both are more complicated and more interesting than the version here.

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