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 7th 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.
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