The Law of Unintended Consequences

By the Rev. Dr. Forrest Church
Unitarian Church of All Souls
New York, NY
February 9, 2003

Some years ago, undecided on which path to follow at a major junction in my life, I came up with what I subsequently have called "the 60% solution." You have a decision to make. It may be an important decision. Should you marry him or not? Should you quit your job? Adopt a child? Come out of the closet? Move to Vermont? Though I would counsel against doing all five of these things at once, even a single momentous decision can paralyze us. What if we do the wrong thing? What if we make the mistake of our life?

This is where the 60% solution comes in handy. The 60% solution is to act on 60% convictions. Once you reckon that the odds for things turning out well outweigh the odds for their turning out badly, on a 60/40 decision you go for it, remaining mindful that you may be making a mistake. Presuming an average capacity for judgment and a balanced apportionment of luck, if one acts regularly on 60% convictions, 60% of one's decisions will tend to turn out pretty well. As for the other 40%, you can either write them off as a cost of doing business or-the spiritually finer approach-add them to your balance of humility.

Contrast this with the 40% solution. With the 40% solution, dreading the consequences of doing the wrong thing, you don't lay a bet even when the odds are in your favor. Unlike Yogi Berra, when you come to a fork in the road, you don't take it. You only dare to act on a lead pipe cinch or with a money back guarantee. Because real life is far from cinchy and tends not to come with money back guarantees, over time you venture (and venture out) less and less often. You are completely safe from failure, of course. No one has ever missed a shot he didn't take. But absolute safety has its consequences. It's like practicing being dead.

A few dangerous souls escape this problem entirely. Unlike 60%ers who act on their faith and 40%ers, who, by temporizing from one expiration date to another, act instead on their fears, these folks are 100%ers. 100%ers trumpet and act on their convictions with absolute certitude. Obviously they are right, and anyone who thinks otherwise ought to have his head examined. As my erstwhile All Souls colleague (and past president of the Unitarian Universalist Association) John Buehrens said the other evening during the course of a report on his visit to Iraq, "Whenever someone I agree with is 100% sure that he or she is right, I am tempted to run in the opposite direction."

To complicate matters, in coming to a decision we must weigh in one more thing, which 100%ers never take into account and 60%ers too rarely factor into their odds making as well. I speak here of the law of unintended consequences. Put in a nutshell, the law of unintended consequences teaches that the result of our actions is almost never what we intend. However bright or strong we may think we are, life is not that mutable. Whenever we act-especially when the stakes are high- surprising things go wrong. And surprising things go right. We can have our way and later regret it, or not have our way and later be thankful we didn't. To paraphrase Emerson, considering that our prayers may indeed be answered, we must be careful therefore not only of what we pray for, but also of those things that we pray to avoid. You may prefer calculating cause and effect to the workings of prayer, but the same paradox holds true. Life doesn't check. Rational actions can trigger irrational results. Adding further to our humility, among both the fine and also the twisted things that happen in our lives, most spring-some obliquely but others directly-from the law of unintended consequences.

All of which leads me to Iraq.

In hindsight, we can certainly see the workings of the law of unintended consequences at work in US foreign policy in the Middle East. In Afghanistan, for instance, for a full decade the United States government armed the radical Mujahideen, while offering extensive CIA intelligence backup for their efforts. We even helped construct Osama bin Laden's storied high-tech caves, designing and installing his air-conditioning system, all in an effort to dislodge the Soviet Union from its foothold in the region. At the time, one CIA operative admiringly described Osama bin Laden as "a man with a vision, who knows precisely how he wants to convert that vision into reality." A decade later, when the Soviets finally conceded defeat and withdrew from what had become their own Vietnam, in their place our erstwhile allies quickly became our most implacable foes, with their nation the base camp for a pan-Islamic fundamentalist Jihad. Yesterday's "freedom fighters" became today's "terrorists." Mary Ann Weaver evocatively termed this reversal, "blowback." You could also call it the law of unintended consequences.

Not all unintended consequences are bad, however. The same law was at work when we bombed Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 to avenge the Taliban for harboring Osama Bin Laden and Al Quaida. Only after thousands of Afghanis were singing and dancing in the streets-women throwing off their burkas in exaltation-did even our own government begin to recognize (and quickly claim as its intention) that perhaps the major consequence of the invasion of Afghanistan was the welcome liberation of an appallingly oppressed people.

Iraq itself offers another case study for the law of unintended consequences. For years the American government, including Secretary Rumsfeld in an earlier incarnation, supported Saddam Hussein as a secularist anti-Shiite hedge against the mullahs of Iran. We supplied him with logistical and military assistance. We turned a blind but knowing eye to his use of chemical weapons. Today, in part due to Osama Bin Laden's elusiveness, Saddam is the central focus of our anti-terrorist attentions and those same weapons perceived as of critical importance among many such threats to world peace. Yet, waiting in the wings for Saddam to fall are the Iraqi Shiites, the spiritual cousins of Bin Ladan and the Taliban, laying the groundwork perhaps for the next Iraqi chapter in the history of the law of unintended consequences.

Of course, it wouldn't be called the law of unintended consequences if we could predict what the consequences of any given action might be. And there are as many potential unintended consequences for not going to war with Iraq as there are for an invasion. Even as those who champion a war to disarm Saddam Hussein could unintentionally be stoking the breeder-reactor of international terror, those who preach peace at any cost could equally well and just as unintentionally be offering cover for the next World Trade Center bombing or something even worse.

I have my own views as to what we should and should not do in Iraq, based in large measure on the conviction that building a backfire when the atmospheric conditions are unstable may spread the very fire one is trying to contain. With 60% convictions, I shall continue to express and publish my opinions, knowing (and even hoping) that I may be wrong. Since the law of unintended consequences complicates things even further, however, I have been looking beyond the newspaper headlines in search of spiritual bearings for the days ahead. One place I have found such bearings is, I hope not too surprisingly, the Bible. "We see through a glass darkly," the apostle Paul confessed in his letter to the church in Corinth. For this very reason, he suggested a clearer light to help guide us through our days. Paul's light is both illuminating and chastening. Against the claims of prophecy, boasts of knowledge and even of faith itself, Paul applies the test of love. Without love, Paul says, even if we possess the gifts of prophecy, knowledge and faith in abundance, "we are nothing."

With reason, realists argue that one cannot cobble together a foreign policy on the basis of love, especially the love of one's enemies. Winston Churchill advanced this argument with customary directness: "The Sermon on the Mount is the last word in Christian ethics," he said. "Still, it is not on those terms that Ministers assume their responsibilities of guiding states." Perhaps not. Christ and Caesar are in many ways intrinsically incompatible. But, with Armageddon today looming not for cosmic but for all-too-human reasons-our technology now sufficient to end history even without divine intervention-it certainly is not frivolous to introduce love into the equation. Besides, on an individual level-and world leaders too are individuals not merely representatives of their respective nation states-the spiritual aspects of love are both redemptive and instructive. They are redemptive given the odds that one's actions may prove wrong, and instructive given that the law of unintended consequences bedevils everything we do, however noble our motives may be.

The love of which Paul and Jesus speak is not a sentimental construct. Nor is love passive. Far from it. In the world as in our lives, tough love is almost always preferable to co-dependence. In a time of international terror, the 40% solution-not to act lest our action prove wrong-may be the most dangerous course of all. When we do act, however, love's spirit can and should inform our actions. As Paul said, "Love does not insist on its own way. It is not jealous or boastful. It is not arrogant or rude." That is to say, love always listens before it speaks. Love is other centered, an instrument not of possession but of gratitude. We cannot impose love in the same way we impose our wills. Expressing love, we give it away. Our love becomes another's or is no love at all. Accordingly, love has no room for pride. Pride, in the theological sense, estranges us from others by placing us above them.

In the case of Iraq, given the vagaries of history, the law of unintended consequences alone should mandate humility. But the law of love requires it. When life and death are hanging in the balance, from a religious point of view arrogance is never a supportable posture. The counsel of love enjoins us to act with humility, welcoming and honoring the opinions of others, open always to as much information as we can muster for the weighing of our decisions, especially our most fateful ones.

Another thing about love is that it never separates ends from means. Here again, the law of unintended consequences ratifies love's wisdom. Some Christians oppose all war for this very reason. I am not among them. I hope I would have broken from many liberal preachers in the early 1940s whose Christian pacifism led them to advocate American isolation and neutrality in response to Hitler. But I do join with those who counsel, should our leaders deem war necessary, that the act unequivocally be ratified by just cause and the prosecution of the war be carried out with just and proportional means. Is this completely possible? Of course not. According to classical just war theory, a war to prevent war (in today's argot a pre-emptive strike) may not qualify as a just war in the first place. Apart from the theological niceties, however, given that the outcome in Iraq will no doubt be different than anyone can imagine, the means must certainly be measured with great care, lest this nation be wantonly responsible for an overwhelming sin.

To date, far too little attention has been paid to the loss of innocent life that must be figured into the cost of protecting our own lives-if in fact we are doing this-by going to war. Three thousand people were not killed in the terrorist attack on America. One human being was killed three thousand times. Each one of them had a name and a unique story and a circle of loved ones whose hearts were broken into pieces. So it will be with those Iraqis whose obituaries will not run in the New York Times. Each one of them has a name, unique story, and circle of loved ones whose hearts will be broken into pieces. For this above all reasons, war must be the last resort, today as always. The lives of those we kill are just precious as the lives we presume to save.

The same Bible that I quote this morning is open for inspection in the White House, and often cited by our President himself. It is difficult to love our neighbor as ourselves, as Jesus asks. It is even more difficult to love our enemy. It may even seem hopelessly idealistic. But with the world on a tinderbox, the old realism may today be a recipe for murder suicide. Following, as Paul did, in the spirit of Jesus, might help insure that even should things turn out differently than we imagined they would (which almost certainly they will), we will nonetheless have acted to the best of our ability in accordance with a higher law. In love, the means must justify themselves.

This said, it is important for all of us to remember that those with whom we may disagree on the best approach to disarming Iraq don't disagree about the paramount importance of establishing world peace. In this regard, I trust that within this congregation we too will all do our best to follow the law of love in the days ahead. I trust that we will not advocate our respective views of peace with an attitude of belligerence toward our neighbors. And I trust that we will not impute hateful motives to those with whom we disagree. I trust these things even as I pray against both evidence and hope that this nation will not conduct war, should our leaders feel we must, in a spirit of vengeance or with the arrogance that so often accompanies power, leading others rightfully to question our entitlement to it.

One final thought before I close. Whether we invade Iraq or not, and whether our decision turns out on balance to have been right or wrong, the crisis we find ourselves in will continue. We will be living on yellow or orange or red alert for a long, long time to come. The terrorist threat that for years was contained in a balance of terror between two superpowers, today imperils not only Western civilization, but civilization itself. Given that, one way or another, weapons of mass destruction will certainly find their way into terrorists' hands, whatever happens or doesn't happen in Iraq, our faith, fortitude, and wisdom will be tested time and again in the months and years ahead.

With this as our prospect, the logic of love becomes all the more persuasive, not alone as our only hedge against the poison of hate, but also as the one true antidote to fear. In the easiest of times, love is hard. But in hard times, love is sometimes all we have left to give meaning to our days. The meaning love gives is timeless. As I said immediately following 9/11 and have repeated many times since that fateful morning, the only thing that no one can take from us, not even death, is the love we have given away over the course of a lifetime. That is not the law of unintended consequences. It is a higher law. It is the law of the heart.

Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all.

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