Why We Almost Always Get Stuff Wrong

Let’s say Martin Booby takes a vacation to the Grand Canyon and while there, falls over the edge and bounces to his death, his body ending up in the Colorado River. And suppose the headline in the local Courier News reports, “Local citizen dies for lack of restraining fence.”

·           Cause: State of Arizona doesn’t provide restraining fence for Grand Canyon tourists.

·           Effect: Local man pays with his life.

You might well say, “Now hold on a minute. I’ve been there and I know there are multiple signs warning of danger and multiple ways you can view the canyon safely. Booby was just being his usual ‘devil-may-care’ self!”

OK. So now we have two causes, until someone points out that Martin Booby always wore cowboy boots which would certainly have compromised his footing on the cliff edge, plus, probably, he’d been drinking since he was known to tipple before lunch.

Well that makes, potentially, four causes without even mentioning what led Martin to choose the Grand Canyon as a vacation site or how Martin vetoed his wife’s preference for Puerto Vallarta, etcetera, etcetera.

We prefer to close the book on causes with a single choice. Inflation is the government’s fault, the neighbour’s kid is in jail because his father beat him, the price of gasoline is so high because the petroleum industry is greedy, Grandma died of a broken heart. Generally, the cause we choose fits one or both of two criteria:

• ·       it’s closest in time and/or distance to the event, and
• ·       it reinforces as many of our beliefs and opinions as possible.

As I wrote this, my spouse knocked over a cup of coffee resting on the arm of my recliner. She had just fielded a visitor intercom-call from the street and when no one answered, rushed to the window, passed my chair and knocked over the coffee cup. 

To go back in the chain of coincidences to her great grandparents’ decision to emigrate to Canada seems ridiculous. Although, if they had remained in Russia, she wouldn’t be living in Rosthern, Canada in a Condo on 7^th Street, and would almost certainly not be married to me, who loves his coffee and often rests it precariously on the arm of his recliner. I could with some reason blame her great grandparents for spilling my coffee. Or my great grandparents who emigrated from Russia at a different time. 

Or, I could blame her for allowing haste to compromise her usual level of care. Or, or, or. Or I could explain (not blame) all of many events forming a chain in which the spilled coffee is but one, seemingly-insignificant link, but what an enormous catalogue of contributing causes there would be!

All events occur at the end of a chain of potential causes swimming in a sea of coincidences. It’s sometimes called “Chaos Theory,” and for simplicity’s sake, let’s say that causation has two parts:

·           Initial position: In the case of the spilled coffee, the initial position includes the layout of the room including the placement of the recliner and the window, the mood in the room (relaxed, tense), the degree to which the expected intercom call was important, the possibility that the intercom was acting up again. And that’s just to name a few elements in the initial position.

·           Connected chain of conditions and events: Spouse answers the intercom call (I might as easily have done so). The intercom volume had been silenced for some reason so a caller could not hear a response. We had decided to have coffee on the balcony but I returned to my recliner because it was too hot outside, etcetera, etcetera.

Not providence, not design, but serendipitous coincidences in a chain account for the spilled coffee. So why would I yell at my spouse? Only because she was closest in time and place to the event, and if she’s not to blame, then I must be, and I can’t have that. There is no blame here. It’s why we invented the word, accident. Any seemingly-insignificant variation in any single link in the chain would have had the power to alter the outcome completely.

How many marriages never happened because a statement made at a crucial moment was misunderstood or misstated?

This becomes tricky in criminal negligence law, where for practical reasons we’ve adopted “the last person before the event to have been in a position to prevent the event is most blameworthy.” A chaos view of causation doesn’t do well in an adversarial justice system where “somebody must pay” seems to be the overriding mindset. And when a court resorts to apportioning percentages of blame to an assortment of people and circumstances, it can never really be more than educated guesswork, full of chances for major injustice to happen.  

Because we are addicted to single-cause explanations, we almost always get it wrong. We lay blame and punish based on half-truths and misinformation--or lack of information, we bypass logic and reason and head straight for easy answers. We say America is bitterly divided because of Donald Trump without considering the initial position (including US history, geography, cultural development) or the chain of events that led to his becoming president against the odds. Unfortunately, to analyze the “culture war” realistically, factually, and to search out a remedy requires scholastic knowledge and who has time for that when the single, easy cause is so, well, handy?

Why was the war lost? Well, for lack of care the nail was lost; for lack of nail the shoe was lost; for lack of shoe the horse was lost; for lack of horse the cavalryman was lost; for lack of cavalryman the battle was lost and for lack of a battle victory, the war was lost.

Who’d have guessed that a sloppy blacksmith could carry a share of blame for the losing of a war?

Regarding Martin Booby’s case, what actually happened is that his wife asked him to stop the car at a place where the highway skirts a bend in the canyon, they got out "to take a closer look" and she pushed him over the edge. An extended series of slights and hurtful, rancorous incidents over years, of course, led up to the moment when Mrs. Booby’s tolerance-barrel simply couldn’t hold any more.

Maybe blaming Arizona ends up being the fairest outcome after all? Eh? Too cynical by half?

Please note: The narrative concerning the Boobies is fictional; the story of the spilled coffee is not.

   

Longing for a World that Never Was

 

It’s not that Mounties and soldiers are alone in their propensity for coughing up disgusting sexual interference and assault stories. Doctors, teachers, construction workers, businesspersons, clergy have been known to feature in such dramas. All these scenarios—especially those in which children are involved—disgust us; the tentacles of sexual exploitation reach out and affect so much: family & work relationships; mental health of individuals; loss of dignity and respect; undeserved feelings of guilt and worthlessness, courtroom time, etc. I’m reminded of an onerous clause in Deuteronomy 5: “For I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation of those who hate Me.” Specific in its wording, this passage (repeated in other places and nuanced by Jesus in John 9:1-3) serves as a reminder, both in ancient days and in ours, that iniquities often have far-reaching consequences.[i]

               My revisit of this topic was triggered by a CBC news article on August 1, 2022 in which a case of sexual misbehaviour of a Mountie was the focus. Established as fact was that a fine, upstanding Mountie was drinking with colleagues in a bar after a training exercise, and that he forced a hand under the shirt of a female colleague and fondled her breasts, was rebuffed and then repeated the act with another colleague. (Search “Nova Scotia Mountie sexual” to read the story.) The issue of an appropriate sanction for these acts by this one Mountie is the question the news story addresses.

               Many a misdemeanour has been blamed on alcohol, and there’s good reason to consider alcohol’s contribution in impairing judgment and lowering inhibition. Combine that with the effects of group dynamics in bars, relationships of those participating in the group, the trends in the conversation and you might have a broader, more complete picture of what transpired to allow this Mountie to commit personal sexual interferences on colleagues. (At the least, a “mad dog” rule must be considered: If a dog unexpectedly bites a person, only the dog is to blame. If the dog later bites another person, the owner bears the blame and pays the penalty. You can only blame alcohol for your misbehaviour once; thereafter, excessive drinking at any time is tantamount to wilfully releasing the mad dog inside you.)

               More sinister to me is the creeping myth of an age of chivalry in Western Society and its effect on the general mindset. Medievalism, or a return to the values of pre-Renaissance sensibility, seems to be running rampant, manifesting in a strident defense of inherited male domination (knights) and female subservience (damsels in distress), poisoning even the Christian Church in North America. The Devil’s Historians by Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevan makes clear that this longing for a medieval revival is based on a myth, that the noble knight and the damsel he protects belonged to an elite upper layer of the population and that in society generally, a rape culture was common. Knights were chivalrous to women of their own stratum; peasant women existed for their amusement.

               I would go further and say that our military and the RCMP are heirs to a medievalism that has long since passed its best-before date. The uniforms, the marching in-step and in formation, the implied "knightliness" in the scarlet tunic while mounted on a horse, the male camaraderie, all this is going to be attractive to people with varying degrees of the medievalist mentality, seems to me. The “knights in shining armour” are selected by recruitment’s flogging of an image. That good people, people of conscience and commitment, form the majority of those who find themselves in our “knighthood” occupations is a saving grace. At the same time, the likelihood of stories rising out of the dark side of the myth of chivalry are bound to escalate in frequency if the new medievalism has its way.

               I want to be understood, so let me be plain. The “Devil’s Historians” are exemplified in North American Republicanism, where an ideological elite of medievalist-style thinkers wish the world to again be a binary of knights-lords-and-pretty-ladies elites alongside a vast peasantry, most of whom are easily brainwashed to think it's all in their best interest, while being denied the vote if deemed to be unworthy. We should be grateful for Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, Ted Cruz and Alex Jones and that vast array of wealthy evangelicals who have determined that their future lies in licking the boots of the Lords of the new chivalry. These all give us prototypes to look out for; they’ve already tried to teach us that truth is whatever they say it is—that facts are negotiable. That women must conform to a medieval-patterned, restricted, domesticated role is part of the propaganda and as much and as often as Jordan Peterson wants to preach that this is biologically mandated, and as much and as often as the medievalist church wishes to flog its Biblical basis, neither takes into account that my very competent female pastor, for instance, and Mary Magdalene or Martha Washington are not simply grapes from the same bunch.

               There’s something decidedly distasteful in men pronouncing on women, or in women pronouncing on men as if each were products of a biological or religious template.   

               The RCMP decided through its investigative processes that the individual in question deserved a chance to prove that his indiscretion was a one-off and done. I don’t know nearly enough to make a judgment on that decision, but I maintain that in the structuring, recruitment, training and supervision of our defence and policing forces, there are plenty of reasons to be aware and wary of how far they lag behind socio/cultural evolution, and how little or much their very structures encourage the creeping, insidious nostalgia for an age and worldview that … well, that never actually was.

                

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[i] Merriam-Webster lists these synonyms for iniquity: corruption, debauchery, depravity, immorality, iniquitousness, libertinage, licentiousness, profligacy, sin, vice.