It’s Your Show—Run It

Learning can’t take place in chaos or disorganization. It’s just that simple. Learning, one of the most difficult of all human activities, demands an orderly and sane environment. It requires focus, attention, and concentration.

I’ve always contended that the administration and faculty of a school can control any school, no matter how difficult, if the right leadership and procedures are in place. Discipline isn’t the most glamorous subject in teaching, but it’s one we can’t afford to overlook. And before you commit yourself to working for a school, you need to know how that school is run—or how it’s not.

Sensing the Atmosphere of a School

As you interview for a position or simply scout a school out, look around and see what behaviors the kids and faculty are exhibiting. See what kinds of activities the kids can get away with. Specifically, look for these indicators:

--Does the school let the kids wear hats? Are any gang symbols displayed on these     hats?

--Is there evidence of vandalism (graffiti, etc.) on display?
--Are the lovebirds cuddling, hugging, and making out in the halls?
--Are kids running around in t-shirts that display sexually suggestive messages, drug references, or the logos of beer and hard liquor brands?

--Are the kids dressed in revealing or decidedly immodest clothing?
--Are acts of intimidation taking place with impunity?
-- Is profanity being tossed around freely?
--Are the teachers nowhere to be seen in the halls between classes?
--Is there a complete absence of deans or other supervisory figures to watch the kids?

If the answer to at least three of these questions is yes, you may need to reconsider your job application. (If you answer yes to all of these questions, run, don’t walk, to get out of there.) I know you need a job, but you don’t need a school that basically lets the kids run the show. If you are interviewed for a position at any school, you’d do well to ask about the disciplinary procedures and the degree to which teachers can expect the school’s support in maintaining order.

If you have accepted a position at a school, you should immerse yourself in…

Your School’s Disciplinary Procedures

Explaining the school’s disciplinary procedures to the new faculty members should be one of your administration’s first tasks during your orientation period. I happen to come from a school where the disciplinary procedures are very well laid out, and the school has a reputation for firmness. Your school might organize these matters like this:

Principals or Assistant Superintendents. They keep track of the general flow of discipline reports; sometimes they are called in to deal with particularly thorny problems. “Being sent to the Principal” is still a big deal in some schools.

The Head Dean or Chair of the Discipline Committee. This is the person who is ultimately responsible for supervising law and order in the school. (See Chapter 25.)

Deans. These folks are teachers who walk around the school before or after school and at selected times during the day. They also supervise common areas (like cafeterias) and run the detentions after school. They also generally supervise school activities.

Teachers: In charge of classrooms, of course, but also expected to watch the kids in the hallway between classes and come to the assistance of other teachers if the need arises.

In effect, the administration and the teachers in a well-run school form a cohesive and mutually supportive team. To put it more plainly, we all have our disciplinary roles, and we all watch each others’ backs.

An intelligently organized and well-run school lets the kids know the score right from the start. A school should have a handbook that lays out all the rules and regulations. If yours does, familiarize yourself with its provisions thoroughly. The act of giving kids a hard copy of the rules is important; if they violate one of them, they can’t argue they were never told about it. Some schools may even have student orientation assemblies at the start of the school year to remind the kids of what the behavioral expectations are.

Every school with which I’m familiar requires the kids to have an ID card. The possession of such a card is important, especially in these days of heightened awareness of school security. The ID (as you all remember from your own high school days) generally has a picture and the kid’s ID number and year in school. (It may have a bus route number as well.)  Some schools require that the ID card be displayed at all times, which I think is a pretty good idea. (People in the private sector generally do, so why not?)

A School’s Rules and the Philosophy Behind Them

A sensibly organized school generally adheres to rules similar to these:

--Students are expected to respect teachers and other school officials and comply with their (legal) orders. Any defiance of this is considered insubordination.

--Students are expected to conduct themselves responsibly when riding on the school’s transportation.

--Students should dress in an appropriate way for school. This, by the way, has been an area in which the courts have occasionally had to step in. Unless you are teaching at a private school, the kids can pretty much have their hair at any length and wear most items of clothing, within reason. But school administrations do have the right to prohibit clothing that would disrupt the atmosphere of the school, such as kids wearing clothing with obscenities written on it, and there are limits to the amount of skin a kid can display in school. Some schools with severe discipline problems have found it both necessary and beneficial to require school uniforms, which isn’t a bad idea.
-- Students are generally not allowed to eat or drink in areas other than the cafeteria. (In hot weather, a school might—and in my opinion, should—allow the kids to drink water in class.)
-- Students may not at any time possess any controlled substance, alcohol, or tobacco while on the school grounds. They can’t have non-controlled drugs (like aspirin) unless given specific permission. (Personally, however, some of the “zero tolerance” policies of certain schools are absurd. There are kids who have been suspended in the United States for possessing an asthma inhaler, which can be the difference between life and death. I hope your school is more rational than that.)
-- Students may not at any time possess a weapon of any kind, or ammunition for a weapon. (This is a big one.)

--Students may not engage in fighting on the school’s property. (A reasonable proviso here is allowing at least minimal self-defense if a kid is assaulted by another kid.)

--Students may not engage in public displays of physical affection, although different schools have different tolerances for this than others.

--Students must be on time to both school and to class.

--Students may not damage, deface, or destroy school property.

--Students cannot violate a teacher’s class rules and cannot disrupt either their own or any other class.

--Students may not bully, harass, intimidate, or otherwise threaten other students, verbally or physically. This of course includes all forms of sexual harassment.

And of course, all the usual laws that govern our conduct are in effect in the school as well. (By the way, kids do not have the same expectation of privacy that adults do in the area of searches and seizures. Their lockers can be searched at any time, for example. The lockers are the school’s property—not theirs.)

So why all the rules? Your kids will often complain about these restrictions, especially if your school is strict in enforcing them. Here’s what you need to tell them:

--The people of the community are paying for the school. They expect it to carry out its job. In order for a school to carry out its job, there have to be rules that limit everyone’s behavior.
--There are (500, 1000, 2000, 3000 or whatever) kids in this school. Would you really want to go to a school where there were no rules at all? (If you’ve ever read the book or seen the movie Lord of the Flies, this is a good analogy.) Who would run this place inside of three days time if the school didn’t enforce the rules?
--The school is legally obligated to protect your safety. Half the school’s rules are aimed at that objective alone.

--We’re trying to maintain a certain atmosphere here. This isn’t a party, this isn’t your home, this isn’t a social occasion. This is a place for education. We’re here to do something really important, and we need to have everyone focused on that.

You’d be surprised; the vast majority of kids accept this reasoning when it’s presented to them calmly and clearly. Communicate this to them: the rules aren’t here to hurt you or make your life harder—they’re here to protect you and provide an atmosphere where you can learn and get a diploma. And although they’d sooner watch C-Span than admit it, the average kid is grateful for a school that maintains a fair and disciplined atmosphere.

You’ll notice that I’ve emphasized the word fair in the previous paragraph. What are the elements of a truly fair school-wide disciplinary policy?

--Fair warning and information about the school’s rules disseminated to every student in clear and unambiguous terms.
--No favoritism; no prejudice. Popular kids who break the rules deserve no more consideration or leniency than anyone else. Even if a kid is a star athlete and it’s just before the big game, if he breaks the rules, he should get the punishment—including, if necessary, suspension from playing. By the same token, just because a kid is unpopular or short-fused doesn’t mean we should come down on him or her any harder than anyone else. Equal treatment for everyone!
--A chance for kids to defend themselves during any disciplinary procedures.
--Efficient notification of parents and a chance for them to have their input.
--Professionalism in the assigning of sanctions. Discipline should be imposed calmly and dispassionately, not in the heat of anger.
--Reasonable punishments for reasonable infractions.
--A chance for a kid to be considered “rehabilitated” and fully reintegrated into the school community.

Of immediate concern to you is your ability to maintain control of the classroom so as to keep the learning process moving forward. What state of mind is required to accomplish these formidable tasks?

The Attitude You Need to Have

--You’ve got to be determined. You’re there for a reason.

--You need to look and act strong and confident, even if you don’t feel it so much.

--You’ve got to set it in your mind that you have a job to do, and nothing is going to stand in your way of doing it.

--You have worth as a person. You have dignity. You have a strong sense of self.

--You are an adult. You deserve to be listened to and obeyed, and you won’t have it any other way.

--You are worthy of respect. You have earned your teaching position. You are proud of what you have achieved.

--You are in charge. You’re the boss in your room.

You might think I’m engaging in overkill here, but rest assured, I’m not. This is how you’ve got to think of yourself and the situation you’re in. Many young teachers find out the hard way that high school classes aren’t like the friendly, cooperative, academically rich classes of their junior and senior years at the university. Many of the kids in a high school class are indifferent or hostile and, as I’ve pointed out, not really very big on being there at all. Their lack of cooperation and their immaturity are jolting if you’re not prepared for it. (I sure wasn’t my first year.) So let’s look at what it takes to run the show at the classroom level.

In Your Classroom: The First Day of Class is Crucial

I can’t emphasize this enough. You have to take charge of your classroom from day one.  You’ve got to start strong. You need to be organized, efficient, and all business. You must have all the necessary handouts prepared and ready to distribute. You should have already practiced the pronunciation of the kids’ names for when you take roll the first time. (Some of the kids’ names are doozies, by the way, and you want to get these names as right as you can.) You will want to have a seating chart prepared. Above all, you must tolerate no indiscipline of any kind. If someone is talking while you are, or otherwise not being attentive, don’t ignore it. Stop and do something about it. A phrase like, “When I’m speaking I expect everyone to be quiet” or “Young man (woman), when I’m talking, you’re listening”, directed specifically at the offender, in a firm voice, sends a message. You’re not there to befriend the kids on the first day—you’re there to establish the goals and boundaries of the class.

What kinds of activities should comprise the first day of class?

1. Take roll. Insist on quiet as you do so.
2.  Assign seats.
3.  Introduce yourself. Be brief.
4.  Introduce the course; explain what the course’s goals are and what, in general, the class will be talking about this year (or this semester).
5.  Hand out the course syllabus and expectations guide. Go through the class’s rules and procedures item by item. Let there be no ambiguity whatsoever about your expectations. Let it be clear that you expect everyone to adhere to the class’s rules 100% of the time. Let it further be known that you will enforce the school’s rules and regulations to the letter.
6.  If necessary, distribute 4 x 6 note cards and on them have the kids write their name, their parents’ names, their parents’ home phone numbers, and the parents’ work phone numbers. This will send a definite message.
7.   If there is time, have the kids introduce themselves by name.
8.  Even better, if there is time, assign homework. Yes, assign homework on the first day of class. This also conveys a definite message: This teacher is in charge. This teacher means business.

Now I realize that this seems a little overly strict to some of you. I assure you, it isn’t. Later, when things in your classroom are running smoothly, you’ll be glad you started out strong.

A former Superintendent of mine had good advice for avoiding disciplinary problems in the classroom: A well-planned lesson is your best preventative measure against discipline problems. He was right. Have a definite goal and a definite method of getting there. It works wonders, as you’ll see.

Disruptions

Someone may have told you that you deal with disruptive students by ignoring their behavior, by not “reinforcing” them by calling attention to the disruption. This is so utterly and preposterously false that I don’t have words adequate to describe its absurdity. You deal with disruptive behavior by stepping on it immediately. You only have so much time in a period. Students who are being deliberately obnoxious are violating the rights of other students and you cannot—cannot—tolerate that and retain any professional integrity. You run the class because you are the only person in the room qualified to do so. Period.

Disruptions come in all forms. The most common ones are:

--Talking in class while the instructor is talking.

--Talking out of turn or when not called on. (Exception: calling out answers or comments that are pertinent to a discussion may be OK if not overdone.)

--Engaging in some annoying repetitive behavior (tapping, hitting an object, etc.) that interrupts the class’s work.

--Gestures or body language intended to provoke or amuse other kids.

You don’t have to make a federal case out of every minor noise a kid makes. But you do need to take action when someone is interrupting you or otherwise deflecting your class from its vital work. If you let disruptions go, they tend to worsen and spread. When a kid disrupts class, stop and look directly at them, and tell them in no uncertain terms to knock it off (if not exactly in those terms). They may resent it for a while. They’ll get over it.

Sleeping

As I indicated in Chapter 9, a lot of kids are tired all the time. However, you are not obligated to provide nap time for kids. A kid who’s sleeping in class is showing disrespect both to you and the rest of the class, and you can’t have that. Wake any sleeping kid up immediately. If the kid is a repeat offender, a phone call home would be a good idea. If the problem persists, use your school’s disciplinary procedures to get the kid’s attention. This will sound harsh, but a kid’s fatigue and lack of sleep are his or her problem—not yours. Don’t put up with it; if you do, other kids will start to regard your class as naptime as well.

Dealing With Fights

A fight in your class doesn’t simply erupt out of nowhere. A good teacher is cognizant of situations that threaten to get out of control and stops them before they reach critical mass. Sometimes, however, smoldering anger explodes right in front of you without warning, either in the halls (most commonly) or in the classroom. When it does, you need to think fast:

--If the kids fighting are physically small enough for you to break up by yourself, place yourself directly between them immediately and loudly demand an end to the fight.
--If the kids are too big for you to handle (and some high school kids are) get help immediately. Two or three other teachers may be necessary to restore order.
--If a weapon has been produced, call your school’s main office at once. Don’t try to be a hero. If a kid’s life is in immediate danger however, you may have to intervene. (I hope this never comes up for you, but it has on occasion in some schools.)
--Once a fight has been broken up, personally hand the combatants over to a dean or escort them to the school’s disciplinary office. The officials will take it from there.
--You will probably be asked to fill out a disciplinary report on the incident.
--If an injury has occurred to one of the kids, you may be asked to answer questions posed by a law enforcement officer or an attorney.
--And note this: fights between girls can be just as savage and bitter as those between boys. Don’t think you won’t need help in breaking up a female fight.

Dealing With Insubordination

Insubordination occurs whenever a kid refuses to comply with a lawful request on the part of a staff member. It also occurs when a kid insults or otherwise verbally abuses a staff member. The immediate imposition of a disciplinary referral may be warranted, as well as kicking the offending kid out of class. There is no reason on earth you should tolerate insubordination as long as what you have told a kid to do is legally defensible. Period.

When You Have to Remove a Kid From Class

Your options, depending on your school, may vary. Here are some common ones:

--Putting the kid in the hallway.
--Putting the kid in an office supervised by other teachers (but only if they consent to this).
--Escorting a kid to the Dean’s office. (This would be for big infractions.)

I favor putting a kid in the hall, isolated from other kids, if you need to remove them. When the opportunity arises, you chew the kid out for the infraction for which he or she has been removed in a one on one situation. Remember, as a general rule for dealing with problems, the old teacher saying is still valid: Praise in public, criticize in private.

And what do you say? Explain clearly why you’ve ejected the kid. And afterward, let him or her know how it is and how it’s going to be. Here are some examples:

-- “When you act like this, you get me angry and you force me to respond. And I will—every time.”

--“Your conduct isn’t going to be tolerated.”

--“I expect an apology from you before you set foot in my class again.”

-- “We have work to do and you’re disrupting it.”

--“You have one option: straighten up.”

-- “This is my show, young man [woman]. Things in my room are done my way, and that’s that.”

--“There will be detentions because of this; next time, there will be more.”

Common Punishments for Violations of School Rules

Referrals to Guidance Counselors; Warnings. This is the mildest form of giving a kid an official reprimand. This method is usually used for minor, low level, chronic misbehavior.

Detentions. The old classic of making a kid stay after school. If your school’s administration is on the ball, the students all know, beyond a shadow of a doubt the ways in which they can be assigned detentions. Typical offenses for which detentions can be assigned tend to fall into the following categories:

·        Failure to have identification.

·        Using obscenities, either written or verbal.

·        Eating in class.

·        Excessive tardiness to class.

·        Excessive incidence of being late for school.

·        Harassment; categories include physical, verbal, and/or sexual harassment.

·        Insubordination to a teacher or other school official.

·        Cheating

·        Disrupting class

·        Ditching class

 In-School Suspension. A student is compelled to spend a long, boring day working on schoolwork in an atmosphere of complete silence and isolation. Used for more serious offenses, such as fighting or deliberately damaging another kid’s property.

Out of School Suspension. Assigned for several days, this is the school equivalent of house arrest, although personally I think it’s more like a minor vacation for those on whom it’s imposed.

Expulsion. The most drastic of the school’s legal weapons, this requires (in my state at least) a hearing before the district’s Board of Education. Expulsions tend to be automatic for such infractions as possession of illegal or unauthorized drugs; possession of a weapon; repeated incidents of fighting or assault; physical attacks on members of the staff; and possession and transference of stolen property on school grounds. This is a pretty serious affair. The school has to arrange for some form of alternative schooling during the period of the expulsion.  (Some school districts maintain permanent schools for chronically disruptive and nasty kids.)

Really Bad Methods of Discipline

Hitting or otherwise manhandling a student. Corporal punishment is now widely forbidden or frowned upon. In addition to straight out punches, grabbing and shaking a kid, ramming them up against a wall, or otherwise inflicting bodily harm are forbidden. (Exception: self-defense.)

Swearing at a student. Kids can make you unbelievably furious at times, but you should avoid using obscenities when dealing with them.

Public humiliation. A school asks for legal trouble if it uses such methods (for example, having a kid stand outside in the rain for misbehavior, especially in clear view of other students.)

Working or exercising a kid into exhaustion. The risks of inflicting injury from doing so just aren’t worth the lesson taught.

From all we’ve discussed in this chapter, you might conclude that high school is a constant battleground. It isn’t. Most kids are good human beings, and a kid can make a mistake or screw up in class and still not be a bad person. Our discipline must be fair, consistent, calmly applied, and clearly explained. The procedures necessary to provide an orderly and safe environment for the kids may cause them to grumble—but in the end, most of them are grateful that we kept the school a sane place for them.

REFLECTIONS ON HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI

[I originally wrote this on 6 August 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.]

Once you read accounts of what happened or see pictures of the victims, you can never again put them completely out of your memory. They grip the imagination and assault one's sensibilities in a way no other historical evidence can. The horrible suffering and destruction which occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki 50 years ago this month defy our powers of description. Over the last half century these events have become the most written about, analyzed, argued over, and discussed episodes of the entire Second World War. In recent weeks this subject has (naturally) been written about even more so. I do not pretend that I will add anything strikingly original to this discussion. But it's almost as if I am compelled to share my thoughts about the bombings. They powerfully symbolize the twentieth century, representing its violence, scientific and technological progress, political upheaval, and human tragedy. They have gripped me ever since, as a young teacher, I first showed gruesome photographic evidence of Hiroshima's bombing victims to my students. I wanted to explain to my kids what had happened to those people in the photos. I guess most of all I wanted to explain it to myself. 

We sometimes forget that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred within a historical context of increasingly murderous brutality. Recent evidence has revealed that the Second World War cost the lives of more than 80 million people (not the 50-55 million commonly believed). The period immediately preceding the end of the war in the Pacific and East Asia was a particularly grim one. The battle for Iwo Jima had produced shocking losses on both sides; the battle for Okinawa had seen the slaughter of more than 200,000 people. In early 1945 the United States had embarked on a campaign to destroy Japan's cities by firebombing. On the night of March 9-10 1945 Tokyo was firebombed so severely that more than 100,000 people were burned alive or asphyxiated.Water in Tokyo's canals boiled; the crews of the low-flying B-29s which inflicted this bombing could actually smell their victims burning. Seen in this light, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were simply further examples of what author Paul Fussell has called the main "theme" of the war: intensification. All wars are more costly than people think they're going to be at the start; the winning of the Second World War required means which would have been unthinkable in 1939. We also sometimes forget that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not produce the highest number of casualties of any events in the war. That tragic distinction belongs to the Battle of Stalingrad. (Leningrad, Warsaw, and Dresden had also suffered near-total destruction.) 

So what made the atomic bombings so uniquely horrifying? I think it was the economy of effort (or so it seemed) that produced this sensation. In retrospect, after the elation over the war's end had subsided, what terrified thoughtful people about these events was the fact that it had only taken a single B-29 dropping a single bomb to produce the same kind of destruction produced by hundreds of B-29s dropping tens of thousands of conventional bombs. Mass killing had become easy, efficient, almost convenient. I think the fact that the bomb was based on physical principles which were little understood by the public also contributed to the unease which it produced in many people. It was as if some magical, demonic force had been harnessed, a force controlled at first only by the U.S. but later by our mortal enemies the Russians. People could understand ordinary bombs and artillery shells (while fearing them, of course) but how many people could really grasp a weapon which functioned by ramming pieces of metal together to liberate their nucleic energy? And radiation sickness had no precedent in the history of human violence. Who could understand death by subatomic particles? I think it was these factors which produced amazement and sober reflection in the minds of those who studied the effects of the atomic bombings. 

Naturally, an enormous part of the discussion surrounding Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been about whether the bombs should have been used at all and whether they brought about the end of the war. I think the willingness to use these devices on the Japanese is a good example of the dehumanization of the enemy which occurs in wartime. One of the more perverse effects war has on the human psyche is the severing of normal bonds between people. The Japanese hated us and we hated them. To most Americans the Japanese were things, objects, monsters, people who deserved anything we could dish out to them. And they had started it. Given this psychological position, the use of the bombs does not seem unusual. (We must assume the Japanese would have used them on us as well; they had their own nuclear program, and they had hardly shown any disposition to treat their enemies with mercy; just ask the survivors of Bataan, the former inmates of the POW camps in Thailand, or those who saw the massacres in Nanking or Manila.) Further, there was what might be called technological inertia involved in the decision to use the bomb. Billions of dollars and gigantic efforts had gone into the building of the bombs. (Those interested in the details of this effort should read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes for an exhaustive discussion.) There was therefore a constituency for their use. There were those who wanted to see what the bombs would do in an actual situation. While some of the scientists who developed the bombs had serious misgivings about their use (particularly Leo Szilard), there was enormous pressure not to waste all the money, time, and effort which had gone into their development. 

Of course, the key argument for the use of the bombs was to eliminate the need for an invasion of Japan. The sanguinary events on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had convinced many U.S. military planners that the actual invasion of Japan (to take place in two steps, one in November of 1945 and the second in March of 1946) would far surpass in bloodshed anything yet seen in the Pacific War. Accordingly, the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised President Truman that the use of the bomb was essential to forestall a nightmarish battle to the death with the suicidally-determined Japanese. But did the bombings actually bring the war to an end? I was recently fortunate enough to read an article by Murray Sayle in The New Yorker for 31 July which addresses this very point. According to Sayle, there is strong evidence, some of which has only recently come to light, that the collapse of Japanese peace overtures to the Soviet Union and the invasion of Manchuria by the USSR may have been the real straws that broke the camel's back. The prospect of a Soviet occupation of part of Japan and the overthrow by the Communists of Japan's monarchy was so dismaying to the Japanese leadership that Hirohito himself used these arguments specifically when explaining to Japan's armed forces the decision to surrender. Other sources document the fanatical resolve of many Japanese officers to continue the war even after the bombings (about which the Japanese general public had been told virtually nothing). The leaders of Japan's military had no regard whatever for the suffering of the ordinary Japanese; they could not have cared less. The idea that the bombs "shocked" them into surrender is therefore one which is difficult to support. It was perhaps a combination of circumstances—the collapse of Japan's economy, the hopelessness of the nation's position, the American possession of the atomic bombs, and the Soviet intervention—which finally tipped the balance to those in Japan's government who favored peace.

Should the bomb have been demonstrated rather than used on an actual target? Perhaps the fear that a failed demonstration would spur the Japanese to greater resistance precluded this option. Should the bomb have been used on a strictly military target (as General Marshall advocated)? Was the bomb used chiefly to frighten the Soviets? Would Japan have collapsed anyway without the use of the bombs? How many civilians would have died of conventional bombing and shelling or starvation in the process? No one can really answer these questions, many of which are still being argued vigorously. (The New York Times recently reviewed no less than four new volumes on the use of the bombs.) All that is beyond doubt is the suffering of those who were their victims . Even if the bombs were the sole factor in ending the war (which I do not believe) I still have a hard time approving of their use. (Yes, I know many veterans of the war believe the bombs spared their lives. After all, this is what they were told.) I guess my inability to support the bombings is based in part on the image I have of a small Japanese baby lying in a makeshift aid station in Hiroshima, horribly injured and in terrible agony. (This is from an actual photograph.) Try as I might to rationalize the necessity of this infant's suffering, I choke on the words. I cannot--! will not--pervert the English language by calling this child's pain good. Aside from my (useless) sorrow and pity, this picture elicits in me intense hatred (equally useless) toward the adults who exposed this baby (and everyone else in the two cities) to the horrors of the bomb. The people I hate are the ones who, in my view, are most morally culpable. They are the military leaders of World War II Japan who initiated the war and then, with insane stubbornness, refused to end it when it was clearly lost, thus exposing their people to an enemy both willing and able to inflict the most terrible destruction on them.

The wreckage was cleared away long ago. The survivors from both sides are old people now. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have become symbols, even though they are both very much living and functioning cities. The events of 6 and 9 August 1945 will continue to be debated for decades. They have come to represent the terrible twentieth century, when human life has so often meant so little, and war has become so indiscriminately destructive. Yes, I know that war wiped out whole nations and peoples in other ages, but we were supposed to be better. We were modern, we had humane values, our way of life rested on rational philosophies, we had cast off the barbarism of the past. Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and all the killing fields of this century) show us that the chief distinction between the killing perpetrated by our ancestors and that perpetrated by us is that we're a lot better at it. And in the final analysis, when we look at the events of August 1945 and consider all the factors which brought humanity to that particularly hellish crossroad, one question remains above all others:

My God, how did we come to this? 

Everything They Knew Was Wrong (or at Best, Incomplete)

They are the descendants of the utter simplicity with which their reality began. They are the products of the first patterns of organization, the first interrelationships of matter and energy, and the nucleosynthesis that was born in raging stellar furnaces. They came down from the first metabolic processes, the first chemical tests of reproductive success, the mindless chains of amino acids that gave rise to proteins, and the primitive, pre-RNA world. They were born of the remorseless Law of Whatever Works, as free-floating bits of nucleic acid were pitted in a ceaseless death match with each other. They are the inheritors of cells with membranes, and then clusters of cells, and then, after inconceivable lengths of time, of undulating organisms in prehistoric seas, organisms that were rewarded or killed off in a blind contest of sheer survival. They are the offspring of the vertebrate fish, the first gill and lung possessing animals that had pulled themselves onto shore, the synapsids who had become warm-blooded, the first ones who had given birth to live young, and the terrified, hairy animals which fled into the trees, perhaps to escape the ceaseless carnage on the ground, or simply to pursue food.

Their kind was honed, sharpened, and shaped in the terrifying environment of the world a hundred feet above the Earth’s surface, a world where being able to grasp objects with the end of one’s appendages, see dangers in color, perceive depth, and react quickly were the difference between being able to pass on these abilities and unmourned death. Their direct ancestors were forced to live once again at ground level, staggeringly different from those of their forebears that had initially escaped to the trees. They could stand upright. They could manipulate objects better than any other animal on the planet, the legacy of hands that had developed to defy gravity’s death pull. And in their heads was a mass of energy-matter that allowed them to see the world as a place of objects and causes and effects. They were more able to survive in the brutal, dangerous world of the savannah than their less gifted relatives scrounging the plains for food. They were the most intellectually advanced animals on the planet, but animals nonetheless. It was why they had to breathe, why they thirsted, why they hungered, why they felt pain, why they experienced pleasure, why they fought or ran away from danger, why they craved sex, and why they moved.

The world they lived on was an insignificant dust mote, orbiting in space around an utterly ordinary star, a star burning its resources in one of hundreds of billions of aggregations of stars of various sizes, in a physical reality so immense that their own little world practically vanished in comparison to it. The story of how they had come to be standing on that dust mote had taken the equivalent of almost 14 billion rotations of their tiny planet around their somewhat less tiny star. Their world had gone through vast upheavals, where the very continents themselves had split, clashed, been partially submerged, and pushed up against each other in a continuous, slow-motion, unconscious war. Life forms had come and gone in incomprehensible varieties and numbers. Objects from outer space had crashed and raised havoc, temperatures had fluctuated wildly, deserts had receded and advanced, forests had flourished and been wiped out, rains had been torrential and then absent, and sheets of ice had rudely shoved their way through the landscape and then melted away repeatedly. The upright animals had come on to the scene in only the last moments of this epic temporal journey. Their bodies had emerged from and conformed to the laws of physics, the laws of chemistry, and the laws of  biology in succession. They were fully the product of the natural world, and an integral part of it. The energy-matter in their heads was there to help them survive long enough to reproduce, and it played ceaseless tricks on them, hiding as much as it revealed. And how much did these little upright animals, standing on the eastern or southern African plain in small, mutually-protecting clusters, know about all this? How much of their own place and their own story did they comprehend?

Absolutely none of it. None of it whatsoever.

They were left entirely to their own devices to figure out the world around them, and it could not have been any other way. They learned how to take and shape objects from the environment to do work their bodies couldn’t do unaided. They stuck together in the frightening world of predators, defending each other and learning the refined ways of violence. They reveled in the kill of game, and did the ordinary, back-breaking work of gathering plant food. They set up rules to govern the group, and punished those who broke them with death or exile. They fought with or made allies of other wandering groups. They learned to use sounds to convey messages to each other, and they learned to imitate the animals, especially the birds and their enchanting songs. They made babies and watched most of them die. Countless centuries of wandering and fighting for survival made their habits of life bone-deep. One group of them eventually became the genetic ancestors of all who would follow, and their descendants made the epic journey across the seemingly endless landscape, suffering and surviving in dramas that were forever to be unknown in all but the broadest sense. (Did they grapple with or intermingle with other, vanished types?) Their bodies and the minds that were part of those bodies were devoted overwhelmingly to the tasks of trying to get by from one day to the next.

But sometimes, around the campfires at night, they wondered aloud about the amazing world in which they lived, conjuring stories as the sparks flew upward into the darkened sky. Some of them wanted to know where their people had come from. Others asked how the world itself had come to be. Still others speculated about the mysterious world that jumped into being only during sleep, or the strange sights and feelings that came into view when certain kinds of plants were eaten. There seemed to be someone else living inside of them, someone watching more than participating. And there seemed to be something that existed beyond their sight, a world of phantoms and powers and beings that exercised tremendous influence on the world of sight, sound, and feeling.  The impulse behind their questions was powerful and deep—the need for an explanation of why things were. The people who were inquiring into these mysteries possessed the ability to construct narratives and an unconscious propensity to see causation and pattern where none existed. Many of them also craved certitude; they wanted answers to their questions, answers that were definite in every sense, answers upon which they could build their beliefs about the world.

And so, as their languages grew and evolved and their powers of narrative deepened, elaborate stories of creation were constructed. They constructed ideas about the role and nature of the animals and the other objects around them. They devised stories to explain the workings of the mysterious spirit world that seemed to pervade physical reality, and they came up with ways of trying to influence this unseen world through the construction of altars, the painting or drawing of pictures, the creation of chants and songs, deep meditation, and various rituals which would allow them to enter its portals. And explanations flooded out of them, at least out of those who had the time and energy to devote to thinking about such things:

The stars are just beyond our reach and are appreciably closer if one climbs a tall mountain.

The night sky is where the gods live. It is perfect there.

The vault of heaven rotates around us, as does, of course, the Sun.

People get sick or go crazy because they are being attacked by unseen beings.

Illness can be cured by chanting sacred words.

The night is filled with demons, monsters, and all manner of vile, dangerous spirits.

The earth is a disk that is supported on the back of a huge animal, and the ocean surrounds the disk on its edges.

It is necessary to sacrifice things to the gods to guarantee a good harvest.

The world is exactly the way it looks.

And so on. Since they had moved to every corner of the Earth, and had adapted to every kind of environment, they had devised countless individual ways of life, what those who came much later called cultures. Every culture had its own explanations and used its own symbols to express them. But no matter what culture had generated them, these explanations all had something in common:

They were wrong. Every single one of them. We can’t fault our ancestors for this, because they were trying to figure everything out “from scratch”, and we would have done no better were we in their place. But the overwhelming falsehood of all their ideas of ultimate (not proximate) causation remains notwithstanding. The people who had constructed them were very good at the practical arts of everyday survival, and they passed their skills on with surprising effectiveness. They knew how to kill and process animals and utilize their flesh in a dozen different ways. They devised increasingly varied and sophisticated tools. They learned how to build more and more elaborate structures. They devised complex rules of conduct to govern themselves, and began the first large established ways of accomplishing big tasks, institutions. They tamed the wolf-like animals that had appeared at the edge of their camps, and soon learned to tame others. They eventually learned how to make plants grow where and when the humans desired. They found a method of storing information outside of their heads when they learned too many things to remember—writing. They learned first to count, and then to measure, and then to calculate. Hierarchies arose, and true governments were their outcomes. They forged weapons and organized groups of the strongest men into packs of warriors. Some ventured out on the sea and discovered previously unknown regions of the world and their strange inhabitants. They traded with others, fought with others, and formulated ideas about everyday life. Some began to compose and write down stories about the world. In some places true cities were built, and new divisions of labor arose that no one could have predicted. All of these practical arts and achievements were undeniably impressive, especially when measured by the standards of their ancestors, some of whom had kept the same technologies for hundreds of thousands of years.

But their ideas about the nature of the world itself remained just as erroneous and confused as ever. And life in organized societies and cultures had caused other ideas to arise in their minds. Some of these ideas had been taught to them by bitter experience. Others came to be seen as “natural” simply through custom and long tradition. Some of these ideas were:

The way we do things is both normal and right.

Other people must be viewed with suspicion. The world is us vs. them.

Those who look different from us or who speak differently than we do are less than we are.

Our gods are the best gods (even though we might borrow gods from others sometimes).

Men should govern, because women are weaker and therefore lesser than they.

It is right that those who violate the rules should be tortured.

And there were errors that arose simply because people didn’t understand the nature of their own senses, the fallibility of memory, the way emotion inevitably colors judgment, errors of perception, the prevalence of misjudgments, the power of sexuality, the dark origins of hatred and violence, the limitations and errors inherent in language, the extent to which they were ruled by their fears and hopes, and the most important error of all: the failure to understand that their brains were presenting a picture of reality that was not “objective” in the ultimate sense. (In truth, how could they have known such things?) Add to this the unique human understanding of the inevitability of physical death, and the fervent hope that death was not the end of the individual ego’s existence, and it is little wonder humans constructed systems of ideas so utterly at odds with what seems to be reality now.

Most people thought they were in a category apart from the animals, failing to see that they themselves were animals. They thought (naturally enough, in light of its size compared to their own bodies) that the Earth they lived on was immense. They (naturally, again) came to see the Earth and themselves as the center of all that existed. Their great faiths came into being during the period when these ideas were at their height. And when these same faiths promised that they, ordinary flesh-and-blood mortals, could live forever in bliss (or suffer eternally for wrongdoing), their sense of their own importance skyrocketed. God or the gods or the Universe cared about them specifically and personally. Humans were engaged in a great cosmic drama with the Divine, however the term “divine” was understood. Their conduct and their beliefs were of supreme importance to the Divine. They mattered in the scheme of things.

In short, in my view, much of  our historic inability to understand the reality of which we are a part is rooted in psychological gaps, gaps that first manifested themselves in the thinking and expression of our ancestors. There was the gap between what they thought they were and what they really were. The gap between how they believed they had come to be and how they had actually come to be. Their desired place in reality as opposed to their true place in it. The world and the Universe as they seemed to be as opposed to how they actually were. The reality they thought was real as opposed to the reality that was beyond their grasp.

Our pre-modern ancestors accumulated an enormous store of practical knowledge about the world and how to survive in it. But their understanding of why the world worked the way it did was unbelievably inaccurate, as was their understanding of the nature of physical reality itself. Not just some, but ALL of their ideas about the world’s origins, physical composition, mechanical workings, and place in reality were utterly, totally, completely, absolutely false. I do not fault them for getting everything wrong. But I do fault them for thinking they were in possession of answers they didn’t actually have.

They saw the effects; they did not see the causes. They attempted to make inferences about the causes based on their woefully incomplete knowledge, and it led  them astray. They did not understand what they thought they understood. Only in the last few hundred years did some of them begin to understand something about reality as it actually is in the human frame of reference.

And we are their inheritors.

Chains of Unintended Consequences

Reality and the human history that has emerged from it are composed of events. By the term event I mean something that occurs in tangible, empirically-verifiable space-time, something which is observable (or at least observable in its effects). It happens in a particular place and has a particular duration, which is to say a definable (if arbitrary) beginning, middle, and end. It can be linked with innumerable other events happening simultaneously, or it can occur in relative isolation. (I say relative because no event happens in total isolation.) It can contain innumerable smaller events within itself, or it can be fundamental (such as an atomic nucleus decaying at a particular moment). I grant that this definition is extremely broad. However, I would add one other note: an event, in some way, affects the course of reality. Had it not happened, something would be different about the Universe. Even the most ordinary event reflects the unity of reality and the invariant nature of the four fundamental forces that govern that reality.

Some events are enormously huge in scale. The aggregation of gas and dust that created the Sun is such an event. Some events are the product of human volition, such as the decision to begin the exploration of the world ocean. And other events are so small and brief, such as an exchange of electrons, that they are not noticed at all. But all of them have an effect. That effect is to help write the story of the future, to help create the circumstances out of which other events will flow. And all of these events will be part of sequences of events that in some way can be traced or linked to them. I call such sequences chains of consequences.

Driven by the randomness inherent in the Universe’s nature and function, every event sets off chains of consequences that we cannot anticipate. The foundations of the Law of Unintended Consequences, an idea most widely popularized by philosopher Karl Popper,  are the inadequacies of human understanding and comprehension in regard to these chains of consequences. So I have combined these ideas into what I call Chains of Unintended Consequences. It is precisely because humans overestimate their own capacities to deal with such chains that they are invariably surprised or astounded or shocked, or even horrified at how a given action or a given expression will ultimately manifest itself. The complexity and unanticipated nature of events unwittingly make a mockery of human expectations, alter human plans beyond recognition, and make predictions about the coming centuries meaningless. They put the lie to human notions of controlling the future. We can express our understanding of this situation in this way: Everything has such complex origins that the concrete expression or embodiment of these origins will in turn produce outcomes of  roughly equal complexity—a complexity beyond either the human capacity to predict or comprehend.

So how might we understand the origins of events in space-time?

One of the basic laws of physical reality appears to be the law of cause and effect, or more simply, causality. (There are some physicists who have hypothesized that in a total space-time collapse causality would be reversed, but as yet no one can really say.) An initial event occurs; another event or events result from it. In all likelihood our ancestors, however limited in intellectual capacity, understood this instinctively. This is simply how things work. A causes B (and sometimes C, D, and E). What could be more basic than that?

Of course, as I have said, no event truly occurs in isolation. Everything that happens is the result of a chain of events which, if traced back far enough, goes back to the Big Bang itself. Historians generally refrain from trying to trace specific events back this far because it is a methodological error called the use of an infinite regress. While I grant that going back to the Big Bang as the source of all subsequent events isn’t really an example of establishing an infinite sequence, in ordinary human terms it is close enough to it. Historians tend to avoid doing this because it tells us nothing. Those who study the past must decide what the proximate causes of a particular event are, not all of the ultimate causes. It would be absurd, for example, to say that the breaking off of the four fundamental forces of nature from each other in the first moments of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago is the reason the United States of America came into existence. If we were to write that out as an equation, it could be said in fairness that we’d left out a few intermediate steps.

Still, events are the result of many causes stretching back into the past. By what process were these events brought about? To clarify the whole issue of causation, we need to imagine one series of events intersecting with another series of events which will in turn intersect with yet another series of events. The idea of intersection is a crucial aspect of this conception. Sequences of events, at least at the macroscopic level, in a sense create new realities, circumstances that have never been seen before. When one set of unprecedented realities encounters another set of unprecedented realities, they create a synthesis, a new reality that combines elements of the other two in an unpredictable fashion. This new reality unfolds as a sequence of events occurring across space and time that will encounter another sequence of events and create yet another synthesis. (The actual time in which the creation of such a synthesis can occur can vary from virtually instantaneously to many centuries or eons.) To express it in its simplest terms, things cause other things to happen which cause other things to happen, and so on, creating a “history”. When this history meets another history, a new potential history is created. By its very nature, this process is too hidden and too complex to trace, and fraught with possible outcomes too unpredictable to anticipate. This process will also be governed by the rules of probability and the boundaries of the logically possible.

If we could see the action of these intersecting chains in the aggregate, we would notice that numerous small intersecting chains of events would cause the emergence of larger chains (larger in the sense of expanding over greater areas of space-time) which would in turn cause the emergence of even larger chains, and so on. The actions of the chains of intersecting events would form an extremely complex branching-like pattern consisting of chains intersecting with other chains and creating new chains in a continuously growing and interweaving manner. We might see a thousand chains ultimately contribute to a single chain that in turn helps give rise to a thousand others. The pattern formed by these innumerable intersecting chains would be so dense that over time it would become  virtually impossible to follow. And it would be extremely difficult to see in this unpredictable and utterly complex pattern any hint of intent or any discernible plan of organization.

The unintentional nature of this complex pattern can be understood in two senses: First, no human initiating an action can truly predict all the outcomes of that action. Things will happen as a result of a human’s action that he or she did not consciously will or foresee. Second, the chain of events triggered by an initial event, whether of human or non-human origin, does not seem to be governed or guided by any power or agency. Individual human volition may affect it at specific points, but no individual or collective human volition governs the entire sequence of outcomes, nor can it be argued definitively and empirically that any non-human agency is guiding the chain either. (Such non-human guidance is not, however, necessarily ruled out.) There is therefore probably no intentionality at work in the overall process.

So events are made up of sub-events, which in turn are made up of smaller sub-events. Within the realm of classical, fully decohered, macroscopic reality, the various levels of sub-event manifest themselves as events, consequences of events, and chains of unintended consequences. Incredible twists and turns of life flow from this.

Examples of Chains of Unintended Consequences

Who could have imagined where the invention of modern and efficient techniques for making paper would lead? When Cai Lun, a Chinese government functionary, devised such techniques early in the second century CE, he set off a gigantic number of consequence chains, as did every person who adopted, modified, and spread his techniques. The invention of paper-making altered human life on this planet profoundly. Would someone else have eventually figured out how to do these things? Perhaps. But Cai Lun did it first, where and when he lived, and that helped set the terms for what was to come.

Other technical developments unleashed numerous and enormous consequence chains. The ability to create fire helped open up the northern and far southern hemispheres to human habitation. The wheel’s development launched whole empires. Who could have foreseen what worlds would be opened up by the invention of the rudder or the employment of the modern sail? As I will emphasize elsewhere in this work, all truly great technological developments alter human possibility in countless, unpredictable ways.

And one particular technical development has the potential to end human possibility altogether. In 1933 physicist Leo Szilard was living in London and struggling to figure out the equations that would describe the efficient conversion of mass into energy. Frustrated, he went for a walk and in the course of crossing a street, in the words of one author, “time cracked open in front of him”¹ Because Szilard figured this tremendously difficult problem out, nuclear weapons truly became possible, and the consequences that flowed from that incident are incalculable. Would someone have eventually discovered the method for converting small amounts of mass into enormous quantities of energy? Eventually, someone may have. But Szilard did so less than ten years before the eruption of the Second World War. From his discovery flowed the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear arms competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to numerous other states, and all the psychological fear and uncertainty that has attended the existence of a world whose inhabitants have more destructive power than their ancient ancestors could ever have imagined. His theoretical breakthrough, coming when it did, set off a chain of consequences that has yet to play itself out completely, and may yet end up destroying human civilization. Naturally, Szilard’s discovery was not in it itself sufficient to create all the consequences that flowed from it. The chain of unintended consequences launched by Szilard combined with other chains to create the various syntheses that put all of our lives at risk.

Multiple chains of consequences can sometimes converge in ways that cause enormous changes, which in turn launch even more chains. An example of this is the coming of the “industrial revolution” (as it is somewhat misleadingly known). At a particular historical moment, Britain saw the rise to power of a landed aristocracy committed to accelerating the on-going transformation of farming practices. This same aristocracy was also committed to enclosing what had once been commonly used pastures and fields, which had the eventual effect of displacing farm laborers. In that same general era, new methods for the weaving of cloth were invented, the steam engine was invented and then greatly improved upon, investment capital was growing, and the British discovered that the natural resources of their nation were perfectly suited to the new machines that were coming into use. A ready-made labor pool was available because of changes in the economy of rural England. These various elements came together to create a synergy (see Synergy and Feedback Loops) that radically transformed Britain.

Industrialism represented the greatest change in human economic and social life since the development of agriculture. The chains of unintended consequences in Britain that triggered it made the United Kingdom the first nation in the history of the world in which the majority of the working population did not work in food production or food gathering. Britain became the first great industrial power, with all the consequences that unleashed, and had the wealth to expand its already considerable empire. The industrial techniques that spread from Britain to America and the mainland of Europe transformed the power balance of the whole planet. They made possible trains, steamships, factories and mills, and Britain urbanized with amazing rapidity. The new advances also created modern warships, mass produced rifles, huge numbers of artillery pieces, and all the other tools of modern warfare. Singly, the chains that helped bring all this about could not have had such an effect. But their convergence transformed the world forever, for better or worse. 

There have been so many of these chains of unintended consequences in human history. Their eruptions have frequently altered the entire course of human events.

Chains of unintended consequences erupted out of the decision of a German theology professor, disgusted with corruption, to nail a list of 95 of his ideas to a church door.

They erupted out of the decision by a Mongol chieftain in the late 12^th century to subjugate the entire world (and also from his prolific love life, which has caused his DNA to be present in an astonishing number of contemporary humans).

They erupted from the decision in ancient India to start differentiating people by social rank.

They erupted from the conquest of central Mexico by a sun-worshiping tribe that practiced human sacrifice.

They erupted when a group of Japanese military and political leaders decided in the 1860s that their country was backward and had to catch up to the Western world.

They erupted when tribes of people living in northeastern Asia decided to follow the animal herds across the Bering land bridge.

They erupted when an Arab businessman became convinced that the angel Gabriel was dictating to him.

They erupted when the French defeated the last attempt of the English to hold on to an empire on the European mainland.

They erupted when a young South American man was told that his country was ready for independence, but that he was not the man to lead the effort to achieve it.

They erupted when the Songhai empire finally engulfed and absorbed, in the 15^th century, what was left of what had once been Africa’s greatest kingdom.

They erupted when a Chinese alchemist finally got the mixture of sulfur, saltpeter, and carbon to explode.

Everywhere the student of history turns, he or she sees these eruptions and tries to follow the paths of the intersecting chains that flowed from them—with only limited success.

A Detailed Examination of an Unexpected Set of Consequences

A strange chain of unintended consequences that many people have heard about started out in the higher elevations of South America. A brief story, taken from The Cambridge World History of Food:

Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers, who first observed the potato in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador, compared the unfamiliar tuber food crop to truffles and adopted the Quechua name, papa. The first specimens, arguably short-day S. tuberosum ssp. andigena forms from Colombia, probably reached Spain around 1570. From there, the potato spread via herbalists and farmers to Italy, the Low Countries, and England, and there was likely a second introduction sometime in the following twenty years. Sir Francis Drake, on his round-the-world voyage (1577 to 1580), recorded an encounter with potatoes off the Chilean coast in 1578, for which British and Irish folklore credits him with having introduced the potato to Great Britain. But this could not have been the case because the tubers would not have survived the additional two years at sea. All European potato varieties in the first 250 years were derived from the original introductions, which constituted a very narrow gene pool that left almost all potatoes vulnerable to devastating viruses and fungal blights by the mid—nineteenth century. S. tuberosum ssp. tuberosum varieties, introduced from Chile into Europe and North America in the 1800s, represented an ill-fated attempt to widen disease resistance and may actually have introduced the fungus Phytophthora infestans, or heightened vulnerability to it. This was the microbe underlying the notorious nineteenth-century Irish crop failures and famine.²

So a tuber which some scientists believe was first cultivated in the Andes Mountains more than 3,000 years ago made its way to Ireland, where by the nineteenth century it became the staple food crop. The result, as the passage indicates, was tragic. In the 1840s, a virulent plant disease struck Ireland’s potato crop, and more than a million Irish starved to death. Another million of them left for America during those terrible years. Among the number of emigrants was Patrick Kennedy, of County Wexford,  who left Ireland for Boston in 1849. Patrick Kennedy’s great-grandson was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the first Catholic of Irish descent to be elected president. We could end the narrative here. But what lies beneath and all around this story?

Think of all the intersecting chains of consequences represented in this brief account. To choose a reasonable (if arbitrary) starting point, we might begin with the evolution of the potato in a particular region of South America, its discovery by the local peoples, the discovery that it was edible, the development of the techniques that went into its effective cultivation, and the surprisingly high number of different varieties that were developed. We might then consider the impact of the discovery of the Americas on the minds of so many Europeans. We might consider all the ways in which the history of Spain brought it to a point where some of its subjects set out to explore the New World. We might consider the individual biographies of the various Spanish conquistadores and reflect on the complex interaction of their genetic predispositions and their environment, an interaction that helped shape their adventurous and deeply avaricious mentalities. We might think about the specific circumstances that caused some of the Spanish to set out for the Andes Mountains. We might imagine the discovery by the Spanish of the usefulness of potatoes, the transportation of potato plants to Europe, and the first efforts to grow potatoes in soil so distant from their origin. Then there are all the chains of consequences involved in the spread of potato cultivation throughout Europe, and the sequence of events that caused them to be raised in Ireland.

It is at this point that all the chains of causation that created the reality of 19^th century Ireland need to be taken into account—the settlement of ancient Ireland and the evolution of Irish society and culture, the long and unhappy relationship between England and Ireland, the subjugation of Ireland by England begun in the Middle Ages and completed in the 1690s, the circumstances of the Irish Revolution of 1798 and its impact on the thinking of the English, the impact of Ireland’s absentee landlord class on the Irish people, and all the circumstances that led so many Irish farmers to be utterly impoverished and dependent on potatoes for nourishment. And then we would have to consider the evolution and spread of the plant diseases that devastated the potato crops of Ireland in the mid-1840s, a biological detective story in its own right. We would then need to know the impact of the Great Famine on the people of County Wexford and all the variables involved in the decision of Patrick Kennedy’s family to flee the country for America (rather than northern England, as many Irish did). The social history of the Irish in Boston would come into play, the circumstances surrounding the rise of the Kennedy family to prominence, and the particular biography of John F. Kennedy. Finally, we would need to consider the political history of the United States and all the chains of consequences that led to the political confrontation between Kennedy and Richard Nixon. When we consider all the sequences of events that had to intersect to bring this reality about, we begin to understand how it is possible that the evolution of the potato in South America helped lead to the first Roman Catholic president in American history—and for that matter, put him in the line of fire in November 1963. The whole story took thousands of years to unfold across three continents—the true power of chains of unintended consequences in action.

The individual events and the causal chains they comprise are the “particles” of history, to borrow a metaphor from the physical sciences. It is the interaction of these “particles” over space and time, “particles” that comprise and are affected by multitudinous variables, that brings about the emergence of human reality in any given place, at any given moment. Nothing at the macroscopic level on this planet happens in nice, neat, predictable ways. The inherent ability of chains of unintended consequences to alter the course of reality is such that it should give us pause before we embark on any great scheme to transform the world. It might also give us pause when we remember how frequently our individual biographies have been touched by the unexpected outcomes deriving from these chains. In our own lives, countless sequences of events have acted to create our personal stories, such as the chains that led to our parents meeting. All around us unintended consequences are flowing into each other in a blindingly complicated fashion, guided by huge mazes of probabilities, creating a future no one can foresee in any detail, in a process that no one really seems to be guiding (although such guidance may in fact exist), over a scale of space and time that no human can grasp.

And so it ever was. And so it will ever be.