Every art form changes, often at rates and in ways that cause discomfort to its devotees. But the arts also have a remarkable ability to withstand and absorb those changes, and to prove wrong the prophecies of their demise.
We begin to die from the moment we are born, for birth is the cause of death. The nature of decay is inherent in youth, the nature of sickness is inherent in health, in the midst of life we are verily in death.
People lucky enough to live in the vicinity of an industrial hog farm are, with each breath, made keenly aware of the cause of their declining property values.
Those who make their living by collecting taxes cause the people to starve; when the people starve, the tax collectors, having no one to tax, starve also
If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.
INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.