Chains of Causality

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,—
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!—
It is the cause.
—Othello, Act V, Scene 2

Tracing the origin of any particular event can be an activity fraught with frustration.

Let’s take this example: On February 23, 2025, I attended morning church services at First United Methodist Church in Jonesboro.

I was there at the invitation of Britt Skarda, a retired Methodist minister whom I befriended at the local gym where we both work out. Britt was pastor at Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church here in Little Rock but had been assigned a temporary position in Jonesboro following the majority of that church’s membership voting to split from the UMC over the issue of LGBTQ+ inclusion. Which faction had control over the actual church property ended up being the subject of a lawsuit that was settled in favor of the group choosing to remain in the UMC and support LGBTQ+ inclusion. Britt was up there in Jonesboro for a few months during that time, ministering to the UMC group, until the property dispute was settled and a permanent pastor was assigned them.

And Britt was up there again on that February morning, filling in for the permanent pastor, who was on a tour of biblical sites in Europe and the Middle East.

But that’s not the reason why I was attending services at First United Methodist Church in Jonesboro. Sure, Britt invited me to come hear him preach, but only after I happened to mention that I would be in Jonesboro that same weekend, going up there to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday of my father.

However, this coincidence of two guys from Little Rock being in Jonesboro on the same weekend isn’t enough for us to attach a label of “cause” to it. After all, how did the two of us become friends in the first place?

I don’t know why Britt ended up going to the gym, but I only went there thanks to the purchase of a pair of cheap running shoes. I had regularly jogged a few miles each morning, and good running shoes are expensive. I found a cheaper pair online and decided to try them out and, because I wasn’t paying enough attention to the effect these shoes were having on my gait, ended up damaging my back badly enough that I needed a few weeks of physical therapy to sort things out. After therapy ended, I kept up with many of the exercises my therapist had taught me, and then one day my wife, who regularly went to the gym to swim with a friend, said that I might actually like trying out the weight machines there, as much of what I was already doing was designed to strengthen certain core muscles—and besides, she had already gotten us a family membership. So I tried it out, ended up loving it, and swiftly became a gym rat.

So that’s how I ended up at the gym, where I could become friends with Britt. What about on the other side of the equation? How did my dad happen to be born on February 23, 1950, so that, seventy-five years in the future, I would end up in Jonesboro on the same date that Britt was guest preaching at First UMC? Here, we hit a wall, as I’ve no idea if my grandparents happened to feel particularly frisky in the area of May 23, 1949, or what. We know for certain what they did, but the rest is blessedly lost to history.

We could trace things a little further in my own life, if we wanted. I mean, I ended up jogging in the first place because I had a friend, Jeremy, who, after being diagnosed with brain cancer, started participating in (and recruiting others for) various races to raise money for cancer research, and I kept with it, swapping out my weekly cycling routine for a daily jogging one, after finding that this kind of exercise was great at keeping the restless leg at bay. But I only met Jeremy in the first place because we were at an Arkansas State University Honors College reception at the same time; he, his girlfriend, and a friend of theirs came up to me afterward to ask if I was twenty-one, because they really wanted to make a run to the county line, and so I ended up buying booze for all of us and then helping them clean out the girlfriend’s apartment, as she was moving.

But even moving back further in my life doesn’t establish a chain of causation sufficient to answer the question of exactly how I happened to be in a particular church in a particular Arkansas city on a particular Sunday morning. We also need to find out what motivated the city of Little Rock to establish that particular fitness center in the first place. We would need to do some serious inquiry into the life of Britt and find out what made him want to be a Methodist minister. We would have to do some further research into the recent split within the United Methodist denomination.

We could keep going in any number of directions and further back in time and eventually come to the conclusion that I was at the 9:15 a.m. casual worship service at First United Methodist Church in Jonesboro, Arkansas, due to the state of the universe right before the Big Bang. That is, after all, the only ultimate conclusion, not resting on its own set of priors, that would cover everything.

But the practice of history isn’t just rolling back the chain of causation to the origins of the universe. History is, in part, the practice of constructing a plausible narrative from the data at hand. It will always be incomplete, and it will always be contested, because other data exists that could provide the grist for an entirely different narrative.

Ideologies that posit history as something driven by a rather simple set of principles (faith or freedom or class struggle) fail to appreciate how much chance plays a role in even our smallest choices, and that chance, magnified along the chain of events, must necessarily play an even bigger role in the choices of nations and beyond. The narratives we construct are necessary for our existence in this world, but that does not mean that they themselves are anything but contingent entities always subject to revision.

And, like Othello, what we may think to be the cause, oh you chaste stars, might turn out to be something else entirely—and the reason we are doing what we do rests upon the actions of so many others for whom we failed to account.

Just like the events that led up to me attending church in Jonesboro, any number of events led to me serving as editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA). As I write this, we are well on our way to hitting 8,000 entries this year, and each entry allows us yet further insight into the many, many chains of causality that brought each and every one of us to this point. We’ll never be able to account for everything, but perhaps this website makes it possible to trace some of those events in such a way that we can begin to see our shared history in a new light. Perhaps the EOA and other resources at the Central Arkansas Library System make it possible for new narratives to arise from the randomness of existence.

So let’s trade out Othello for a little Doris Day and sing:

A million times I’ve asked you
And then I ask you over again
You only answer
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

By Guy Lancaster, editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas