Treat the symptoms and the cause will go away.

Don't you ever get ticked off by pundits assuming that there are "underlying" or "fundamental" causes for everything? Why do causes have to come from underneath? What if they press down from above?

This unquestioned thought habit is probably rooted (did I say rooted?) in Aristotle or some other philosopher's work, and carried on through the likes of Thomas Aquinas and the fathers of the Church. 

With the advance of science it has taken on new guise with the discovery of the microscopic agents of disease, magnetic fields, cosmic rays and chemical reactions. 

So is a cause underlying because it's too small to be seen? Does it have to be fundamental because you need to probe "deeply" to find it? Or maybe we think it's fundamental because it allows us to frame it as a manifestation of some basic physical "law". 

Opponents of allopathic medicine will tell you that cold medicines should be avoided because they only treat the symptoms, like runny nose and coughing etc., and not the "cause". They ignore the obvious fact that stimulating the production of mucus is the virus's way of creating a warm, moist and nutritious environment for itself, inaccessible to the antibodies ferried by the blood. 

So a pill that helps dry up the mucus makes life harder for the virus. 

Remember when New York mayor Rudy Giuliani had the idea of Zero Tolerance for broken windows as a way of curbing much more serious violent crime? Opinions are divided on whether that was effective, and Malcolm Gladwell preferred the explanation that Roe vs Wade put less unwanted teenagers on the streets fifteen years on.

But you can see where I'm going. 

The hierarchical view of causality has been an unquestioned assumption which underlies (!) so much of our thinking that it generally passes quite unnoticed. It also underlies (!) the illusion of power.

I guess I should come back to that, when I've had more time to think about it.