Chapter Twenty-One (One of Those People) takes place in the Student Union’s pool hall when Andy raises the topic of Communism’s Historic Inevitability, something certain to happen one day, given the patterns of the past.
Or, as Andy himself puts it:
The advent of revolutionary change is as fundamental as the principle of cause and effect… …Any which way the dice tumbles, a new and better world will inevitably be born. It’s as certain as that number eight falling into the pocket when the white hits it.’
Karl Marx hoped to uncover laws that govern the manner history unfolds, via a process known as “Dialectical Materialism” – where society’s internal contradictions and conflicts arise with sufficient regularity to allow general statements about their causes and consequences to be formulated. Just as a skilled chess player might foresee an inescapable route to an opponent’s checkmate, so do some Marxists foresee history inevitably leading to Communism, via logic as rigorous as the Newtonian physics governing the interaction of balls on a pool table.
If the 18th-century philosopher David Hume had been in that bar, he might have responded that the only way we can infer how the second ball will move once struck is via our prior experience and that there is nothing in a cause that will ever imply an effect in an experiential vacuum. He would then have proposed that reasoning alone cannot reveal the effects and causes associated with a particular occurrence; that our ideas of cause and effect always originate from experience, and that no demonstrative reasoning can assist in justifying future predictions.
Hume’s “nothing is certain” skepticism remains a maxim in the empirical sciences, particularly at its investigative frontiers, such as experimental physics laboratories. No equivalent to the physics laboratory exists in academic disciplines such as social science; few equivalent trials exist to render an “A causes B” proposition to be treated as not far short of certainty. For STEM sciences, “uncertainty” conveys the degree to which something is known. In political augury, the only abiding certainty is uncertainty.
Later on, Julian offered Eddie a layman’s explanation that even Hume might have appreciated:
“Every day of a hen’s life, it had run out with the other birds to greet the farmer’s wife as she scatters grain about the yard. For years this pattern held true, right up to the fateful day when the farmer’s wife wrung the hen’s neck and cooked it for supper.”