On Guilt, Innocence and Stuff that goes Bump in our Heads

 

Suppose a mother takes her four-year-old to the playground, that he runs ahead of her, begins to climb on the jungle gym before she catches up, falls awkwardly onto a bar and breaks his spine. And suppose the following years for her are largely consumed by the caring for a paraplegic son … and probably repeatedly blaming herself for his disability.

“It’s my fault,” she’d probably say when people she meets ask about the lad’s condition.

My grade school shop teacher repeatedly told us that, “There are no accidents; every injury has a cause!” This set the stage in our minds for thinking, whenever an injury occurred, that somebody had to accept blame. Another effect was that we began to see blameworthiness singly; to get by the problems of multiple causes, courts may execute the harshest penalty upon the last person in a position to prevent an “accident." We haven't figured out how to deal justly with multiple causes. 

Chaos theory is a mathematical construct, its description embedded in the jargon of that discipline. It’s generally illustrated with the butterfly-in-Brazil-causing-a-tornado-in-Texas paradigm. The butterfly fanning its wings sets up a small air current, which in turn alters the force and direction of a larger air stream, etc., etc., until it becomes a tornado in Texas. You wouldn’t be faulted for assuming that “that would never happen; the odds against it are far too great."

Tell me a story, GGE (copyright)

The fact is that virtually everything that happens on earth happens like that. “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; for lack of battle victory, the war was lost.” Who’s to blame for the loss of the war? The question seems absurd, because at any stage in the sequences that lead to outcomes of note, natural forces of earth, sea, life and sky may intervene, redirecting the air current, the battle strategy.

Just for fun, think about chaos theory and write a story tracing the sequence from an initial position (As they sped down the highway, a seagull shit an enormous blob onto the driver side windshield) to this ending: (That their son should find himself on death row was something they’d have to face.)

My shop teacher was ill-informed; there definitely are accidents because despite our wish that there always be straightforward, single answers explaining events, chaos theory warns us that “there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.”

So back to the woman who opened this discussion by “causing” her son to lose the use of his lower body. But let’s have her trip over a backpack that had been left on the footpath, enabling her son to get ‘way ahead of her. And let’s have the owner of the backpack be eleven-year-old Edwina Stornaway. Is she partly to blame for the accident? And what about Edwina’s mother, who has always been lackadaisical about her kids care of their …

You get the drift.