For those of us today who are living in modern technological society, the notion of cause and effect is pretty straight forward. There is something, the essence or action or process of which, precipitates a change in the essence or action or process of something else. If there are other influences that contribute to the formation of the second entity, these influences are usually not the subject of a significant focus. Furthermore, just as little attention is paid to lateral influences, no attention is paid to what it is that causes the first cause and what is it, in turn, that the second cause leads to. In other words, a given cause and effect tends to be looked at in both logic and in science as existing in a vacuum without a history going backward and without a future lineage of narrative going forward. The knowledge surrounding a given cause and effect is used as a source of control in the present, even if the cause and effect being discussed refers to something that has already happened in the past or else something that has yet to happen in the future. And almost everything that is relevant to understanding with regard to this particular cause and effect can be understood with regard to what is happening, what has happened or what will be happening between the cause and the effect under consideration. In addition to gaining an even more fine-tuned sense of understanding over a given cause and effect, it is assumed that the cause and the effect are defined discrete entities either through logical suppositions, sharply drawn spatial lines or sharply drawn temporal lines. In other words, there is no overlap between cause and effect.
This is the way cause and effect is perceived in modern technological society. Cause and effect is looked at differently in some communities in West Africa. There, causality has a fan-shaped dimension. At any given moment, we have a given variety of choices that we can use to move ourselves forward into the future. Once we make a choice we arrive at a place where we have a new fan-shaped series of choices. And as we make another choice, we arrive at still another fan-shaped place, from which we go to still another fan-shaped life situation and so on. What is important is that each time we make a choice we leave many other choices behind. So, the effect we create by our choice is not only established by the choice itself but also by all the other choices that we aren’t making. By the way, if along our pathway of choices, we decide at some point to pause and not move forward temporarily, that in itself is a choice that influences our pathway as much as if it were a choice that created movement in some direction.
Another aspect to focus on in this concept of cause and effect is that, as has been evident in the way we have been talking about it, it is intimately tied up with human choice and is grounded in human interaction in bonding with a traditional natural environment. It is not some remote abstract concept that is manipulated for purposes of control in a vacuumized living environment. Within a fan-shaped notion of cause and effect, one is immersed in a cumulative spectrum of stimulating possibilities. The vast range of these possibilities can be overwhelming. And so, a person uses magic to give him some guidance. In particular, he goes to the lateral influence of amulets and charms to give him guidance. Amulets and charms become a means of strengthening his sense of self-definition, surrounded as he is by all the flowing blendable continual organic stimuli that emanate from his traditional natural living environment and that tend to blur the outlines of everything in his field of experience including himself.
As a matter of fact, we can say that not only self-definition through amulets and charms, but also life journey definition through a fan-shaped conception of causality are what some West Africans use in order to hold themselves together in a jungle living environment and in order to prevent themselves from undifferentiating experientially into diffuse organic senses of self. At the same time, to the extent that their magic and their philosophy allow them to hold their senses of self together, their ideas of cause and effect also allow them to ground themselves, to embed themselves in organic grounding so that they are protected against the numbness that results from the modern technological concept of cause and effect. Modern explanations of cause and effect are in their attempts to isolate the processes involved too cut and dry. They leave out lateral influences as well as influences of cause and effect relationships that precede a given cause and effect relationship as well as cause and effect relationships that come after a given cause and effect relationship. Their minimalistic approach means that a lot of the kinds of explanations that are available in a West African approach are missing in a modern technological approach, and therefore make the latter approach incomplete.
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