Are We at a Tipping Point?

In Can We Have Too Much Liberty?, a post to the blog I maintain as oldstyleliberal, I wrote of my conversion to believing that we as a society may be better off if Sandra Day O'Connor's replacement as Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court turns out to be the last straw for Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion.

Though I think that abortion ought to be legal on paper, in the real world its legalization ushered in an era of extreme personal self-indulgence and hyper-entitlement (see this article, "The entltlement generation," which recently appeared in The Baltimore Sun). It wasn't just a sexual thing, by any means, but a sense of no-holds-barred sexual license was its leading edge. People who can do no wrong sexually — if you goof up, "mistakes were made"; just have a surgical procedure to put things right — typically can do no wrong in any other venue of life.


If Roe went bye-bye, what would happen? I don't mean to ask here about the specific sequence of events that might follow Roe's demise. Doubtless there would be a series of legislative and judicial occurrences that might lead to abortion being more or less legal in some states, more or less banned in others. We'll just have to wait and see.

Be that as it may, what concerns me now is the "macro" effect of making anti-abortion laws constitutional once more. I think it might have an "avalanche effect" throughout the culture, as a result of which the society would move to the right morally and behaviorally.


As I've mentioned in my Beyond Darwin blog, I'm a great fan of complexity researcher Stuart Kauffman and his book At Home in the Universe. Kauffman finds that complex systems such as life on Earth are prone to "self-organized criticality." The research done by Per Bak and others into the behavior of sandpiles(!) furnishes him with a conceptual model. As new grains of sand are dropped on an accumulating sandpile one by one, they may or may not trigger an avalanche. If they do, the avalanche may be a tiny one, a huge one, or any size in between.

There's no way to be sure in advance what size of avalanche, if any, will happen. Yet over time, several things emerge. One, the smaller the avalanche, the more likely it is to occur. Two, a huge avalanche will occur eventually. And three, when the sizes of avalanches are plotted against their frequencies, the curve is a regular one: a power-law function.


After a huge avalanche has transpired, but not before, we can be sure that the "system" — i.e., the sandpile itself — had poised itself at an edge of what has been called "self-organized criticality." Then, as the very next grain of said fell, the system abruptly went "critical." Result: a major avalanche.

To me, this looks to be approximately the same idea as the one extolled by Malcolm Gladwell in a newer book I have not actually read, though I've read about it: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Gladwell writes that, for instance, a major epidemic breaks out if and only if the conditions that might lead to one are exquisitely poised at a certain "tipping point," in which case any seemingly innocuous trigger can play havoc with the public health.


Not all "avalanches" or "epidemics" are bad. If as a result of a reversal of Roe, there were a spate of follow-on changes which would rein in our private egos and their unbridled claims to rule the day, it would be a case of a beneficial "avalanche" or "epidemic" in American society, I believe.

Little things make big differences sometimes. I believe (hope?) that overturning Roe might be the grain of sand that would tip our culture into a kinder, gentler, less self-assertive mode of doing business.