The news media once again scrambled this past week to find the deep underlying causes of shocking events. We saw this impulse in the rush to explain the tragic murder of six people at a shopping center in Tucson. And we saw it in the rush of stories about mass die-offs of birds and fish across the country.
In the case of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, attention has turned to the motives of the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, whose political ramblings about returning to the gold standard and about excessive control by the government have sent the news media searching for answers in the vitriol of right-wing talk radio, the rhetoric of the “tea party” movement, and the bellicose divide between Democrats and Republicans in Congress and elsewhere.
The mass die-offs of fish and birds have spurred a number of deep causal theories, including suggestions that the apocalypse is near and that secret government experiments are to blame.
We live in a causal universe, so all effects do have causes, but before we turn to grand, overarching causal theories such as political rhetoric or government experiments, we must always remember the clustering effect of randomness and how our brains tend to look for and find meaningful patterns even where none exist. Toss a handful of pennies into the air and you will notice that they do not land randomly on the ground. They cluster into apparently non-random patterns in which some are closer and others are farther apart. There is nothing inherently hidden in such a clustering effect – no concealed forces under the ground cause the pennies to fall as they do. It’s just chance. But our brains abhor randomness and seek meaning.
The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that about 1 percent of the population suffers from schizophrenia, and that more than 25 percent of us have some kind of diagnosable mental disorder. This means that about 3 million people with psychosis are walking among us, as well as tens of millions more whose mental health is askew in some way. And many of those who need treatment aren’t receiving it. Given these statistics, events such as the shooting in Tucson are bound to happen, no matter how nicely politicians talk to one another on the campaign trail or in Congress, no matter how extreme tea party slogans are about killing government programs, and no matter how stiff or loose gun control laws are in this or that state. By chance – and nothing more – there will always be people who do the unthinkable.