Farther Along, or, the Accident Chain By David Mamet
“Is it a Good Idea to destroy midtown Manhattan because America had slavery 160 years ago? Or to promote the California wildfires rather than to “artificially” clear brush and create firebreaks? Are we humans capable of a logical and moral understanding of the past (history); or a practicable and rational projection of its lessons (economics)?”
How is it that California, with the highest taxes in the nation, is incapable of managing its forests, dealing with homelessness, educating its young, and, in short, addressing those problems for which its citizens are taxed?
Friedrich Hayek observes that taxes exist to fund those things everyone needs but that no individual can pay for. We all need streetlamps, but no individual can pay to electrify his city. Where did the taxes go, and why have we lost the will to ask the question?
Here we observe the great wisdom of the Prophets’ Tongue. I do not refer to Proverbs, or the Sayings of Solomon, but to the inseparable conjunction, the Hebrew letter vav.
“He came (y’vo)” and “he saw (y’reh)” are linked by the vav: Y’vo v’y’reh. The conjunction may mean and or but, which might cause and/but explain the ineradicable Jewish tropism toward ambiguity.
For in reading the Torah one does not stop to assign a definitive English meaning to the conjunction but absorbs two ideas, which may be conjoined, opposed, or related in some manner that is a distillation of the two notions. What might that manner be? (Jewish answer, “Aha.”)
It’s said that German humor is about excretion, French humor is about sex. Jewish humor is about ambiguity.
We Jews do not mock the functions of the body but those of the mind. A man comes home one day early from his business trip. His wife is in bed, in the middle of the day. The man shrugs, goes to the closet to hang up his jacket. His best friend is in the closet, hiding, naked. The friend says, “Everybody’s got to be somewhere.”
It’s not surprising that we Jews are obsessed not only with the mysteries of cause and effect (see the Nobel prizes in physics) but with their ambiguities: See 5,800 recorded years of trauma, and attendant expressions thereof.
How did California, with the world’s sixth-largest economy and incomparable natural resources and beauty, transform itself into a hellhole? Or must we understand the conjunction here as therefore rather than nonetheless.
Transportation-safety folks talk about the Accident Chain. This is a modern discovery of the old saw, “For want of a nail the shoe was lost.”
The mother was driving her small child to school. She was buckling her into the car seat when she heard the teakettle whistling in the house. She’d neglected it because, when she was making the tea, the phone rang. When she got off the phone she was late, and so she rushed her child into the car, forgot she’d left the kettle on, and went back into the house to turn it off.
She was driving her toddler to school, the kid started to climb into the front seat because the mother had forgotten to buckle her in. The mother turned around to secure the kid and ran into a tree. Where did the accident chain begin?
Army aviators, returning from the First World War, brought back the French affectation of flying with exotic feline cubs as pets. A barnstormer flew with his pet cheetah up front until the creature got too big for his lap, when he transferred it to the rear seat. The cheetah enjoyed flying, as the hum and the vibration put him to sleep. One day the cat, now fully grown, slipped, asleep, off the rear seat and jammed himself against the stick; the pilot, up front, thus had his stick (linked to the rear) immobilized, and flew into the ground.
Why did the pilots fly with exotic cubs?
French law prohibited foreign nationals from service in the French armed forces. Before our entry into the war, Americans who wanted to fly for France were inducted into the French Foreign Legion — a service exempted from restriction.
The Legion saw extensive service in Africa, where its officers adopted the habit of exotic pets. Did the barnstormer die because the French colonized much of Africa? Of course/certainly not.
Is it a Good Idea to destroy midtown Manhattan because America had slavery 160 years ago? Or to promote the California wildfires rather than to “artificially” clear brush and create firebreaks?
Are we humans capable of a logical and moral understanding of the past (history); or a practicable and rational projection of its lessons (economics)?
Here are two supportable views of the Accident Chain. The Gospel song:
Farther along, we’ll know more about it,
Farther along, we’ll understand why;
Cheer up my brother, walk in the sunshine,
We’ll understand it all by and by.
And a Jewish Response: “Yes, but . . .”
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