The Theory of Root Causes

The theory of root causes often is invoked by critics of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

One thing the war in Iraq cannot be about is root causes, however. Why? Because there is no such thing as a root cause.

And why is that? Because, what are the root causes of the root causes? You cannot arbitrarily start a chain of causation at a certain time in history, after history already has begun.

The root cause of the problems in Iraq often is held to be Israel (but not the reaction to Israel, for some reason); the root cause of all instability in the Middle East often is held to be the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, at least by most American Progressives, European Social Democrats, many academics and others who are sympathetic to the Arab point of view in the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict.

But why was Israel created in 1948? American hegemony? British imperialism? Soviet imperialism (the Soviet Union was, in fact, the first country to extend diplomatic relations to Israel)? World Jewish government?

Some voices more sympathetic to Israel will say it was because of Hitlerism in particular and European anti-Semitism in general (see the Dreyfus Affair for insights into French anti-Semitism, which greatly informed Hitler and the Nazis; see also the Russian pogroms of the 19th century). Sympathetic voices will say Israel was a response to these root causes.

And Zionists will say Israel was actually a response to the Roman conquest of Judea and Samaria (geographic Palestine) in approximately 70 A.D. Israel would not have been created in 1948 had Judea, anchored in Jerusalem, never gone out of existence in the first place. That's the root cause, right?

Where do you stop looking for root causes, in other words?

In terms of logic, the theory of root causes makes no sense because you cannot start the chain of causation somewhere in the middle of causation, and you cannot isolate one agent of change as the cause, and discount all other agents of change, and you cannot have a localized cause while ignoring other localized causes.

Causation as a thing – not just an a priori concept – cannot start in 1948, or 1917, or 1881, or 70 A.D., or anytime after the world itself has started. The theory of root causes says that once the root cause is established, everything else follows. In fact, the whole illusory notion of root causes is just a subset of strict determinism – once something starts, everything that follows is affected.

X caused Y; Y would not have happened without X.

But strict determinism either exists from the beginning of time, or it does not exist. You cannot have strict determinism at Creation, or at the Big Bang, then have an infinite number of new strict determinisms that keep changing earlier strict determinisms. That may be good chaos theory, but it is not strict determinism. The theory of root causes might make sense as a subset of chaos theory, but it makes no sense as a subset of strict determinism.

In real terms, adherents of the theory of root causes are confused between the interconnectedness of things and anything that might be called causation. But they have no theory of causation. In the Arab-Israeli conflict, for example, adherents of root causes see a connection between the creation of the State of Israel and the continuing turmoil in the Middle East. OK, there’s a connection. Most observers see a connection. I see a connection.

But there’s a connection between the lack of democracy and the continuing turmoil, too. There’s a connection between the lack of modernity in the Arab world and continuing turmoil, particularly in terms of the Rule of God versus the rule of law and elected officials. We take the separation of Church and State for granted, but it took the Christian West long enough to separate the two. The separation of church and state was a triumph of Liberalism, one of the competing universalisms.

The theory of root causes fails on the normative level, too. It allows moral culpability and free will to be assigned to certain actors on the world stage, but not to other actors. In the Middle East conflict, the Jews, or the Americans or the British, are held to be culpable, and to have caused others to react in whatever ways they reacted, because these others apparently have no free will, because they are incapable of moral choices, and because their behavior was entirely caused by elements outside of themselves, e.g., the theory of root causes and strict determinism excuse the victims of root causes.

In religious movements per se, the devil is the root cause of evil. Most people who are troubled by that argument are troubled by the notion of blaming everything on the devil (easily accounted for in Zoroastrianism, not so easily accommodated in the Abrahamic faiths). But critical thinkers should be troubled by this notion of the "root cause" of anything.


Abraham Aamidor is the author of “Real Feature Writing” (Erlbaum, 1999) and Editor, “Real Sports Reporting” (Indiana University Press, 2003), both college-level journalism texts. He has taught journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, Butler University, Georgia Southern University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He works in daily journalism in Indianapolis.