Causality

When I came to the US in 1963, it was a jewel of a country. But a few years later, the anti-Vietnam war movement and the New Left started up, bringing with them bizarre religious cults, psychedelics, hippie philosophies, and the various Maharishis of Mumbo Jumbo. The outlook swept students and some of the faculty even before it became, and in effect still is, compulsory.

The Vietnam war was lost, and the New Left is discredited, but the rest of the putrid baggage has not only remained, it has spread to all sections of society, like a contagious disease from bacteria spewed forth by the media cesspool.

The contempt for causality and reliance on "concurrency or contemporariness" is now part and parcel of the outlook not only of the media, but much of the judiciary, politicians, lawyers, corporations, and a lot of the new generation in general.

Some veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange (AO) later contracted cancer. The believers in causality like you and me said, of course they did: cancer is the second biggest killer (after heart disease) in the US; some people who were exposed to AO succumbed to cancer just like some people in the communities of tight-rope walkers and piano tuners. The real question is, did the AO people contract more cancers per 1,000 exposed individuals than others? That was easily answered: the navy veterans who served in Vietnam and who lived under similar conditions, but were not exposed to AO, had a higher cancer incidence than those who were exposed to AO. This makes dozens of highly refined statistical tests unnecessary (though they were made anyway) to exclude AO as a cause of cancer.

That is the way you and I think, as do all others who take causality seriously. But that does not include the judges or the Viet Vet's association or the lawyers who handled the case; it does not even include the corporations who manufactured AO, for they settled out of court for an enormous sum. Causality (now often called causation) is unimportant; the AO people served in Vietnam and they got cancer, and any other logical tests are designed to bolster the war mongers and profiteers.

So why cannot piano tuners who have cancer get the same reward from Steinway and other piano makers? Right now there is one and only one reason: they do not have enough political clout. But I should not wonder if in the future Steinway gets sued for their pianos a case that has not yet been taken up by Ralph Nader and equally ethical lawyers for the glory of destroying yet another corporation. And they will win. The reason is that, I guarantee you, there is not one single scientific study in the whole wide world on the health effects of piano tuning in general, and its induction of epilepsy in particular. The believers in causality will lose and the Maharishis will win. Thereafter the performance of Beethoven's piano concertos will be allowed only by remote control of the piano, or on vibraphones accompanied by punk rock; proceeds to be given to AIDS "victims."

There are two issues in the insane thinking of the Maharishis. One, they mistake correlations for causality; and two, they see correlations where none exist.

There is a genuine correlation between the number of churches and the number of epileptics in a city; it is positive, i.e., the more churches, the more epileptics. That does not mean, as the only that the more people, the more churches, the more epileptics, the more piano tuners, and the more fire hydrants. Hence all of these quantities are positively correlated, but only due to (the cause) the size of the population. An elementary test refuting churches as a cause of epilepsy is to note that there are places with epileptics, but no churches, and other places with churches, and other places with churches, but no epileptics.

Far more common is the double booboo of substituting causality for a correlation that does not even exist. That is the case for Agent Orange, alar, cellular telephones, "ozone-depleting" chemicals, and a host of other sick fantasies buttressed with mantras in scientific jargon, and given publicity by Meryl Streep and other overaged litter from the sixties.

None of Orwell's "1984," a not-so-fictitious description of the totalitarian state, has proved more prophetic than Big Brother's slogan "Ignorance is Strength;" at least, if we interpret strength to mean power.