Randomness and the Commonplace

Last week our group discussed, among other things, the existence of individual identities within masses of seemingly identical units. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle proposed that the typewriter - a machine understood to produce uniform transmissions devoid of the tell-tale inconsistencies of hand written script - varied from machine to machine. This led us further to the notion that what is "common is never the same twice" (S.Brook). How often have we, like Doyle's Watson, read the latest news and felt we could glean the whole story from just the headline? "High school teacher charged with assault," "Parent prime suspect in child's disappearance," "Trench-coat teen guns down classmates." Though the details of each case can vary significantly, we tend to focus on the general rather than the individual providing us a kind of big-bad-world mentality. Ironically, such thoughts are more comforting than the realization that events may not be interconnected - that they are random and meaningless. Literary theorist Stanley Fish experimented with the human capacity for making meaning by testing his students at Harvard. Fish wrote a list of names on the board ("Jacobs-Rosenbaum, Levin, Thorne, Hayes, Ohman [...]") and told the class that the list was a poem. The students all found meaning where there was only randomness in the "poem" once they learned of the structure they were to work with.

Creating a cohesive universe of meaning is oh so human. What we are hopeless at is actually recognizing randomness (click here for more on that). But I'm far more interested in what we do within our newly constructed, predictable, and rather boring life cycles. Holmes eluded to one possibility when he said to Watson, "Take a pinch of snuff, doctor, and acknowledge that I have scored over you in example" (courseware 47). No, I'm not championing the use of snuff, it's "oneupmanship" I'm promoting. Stephen Potter (1900-1969), sports writer and satirist, wrote extensively on the topic. He claimed that one need never feel bored or inferior in the company of others as long as one always appears "one-up" over everyone else. In his book "On Lifemanship" (1953), Potter recounts the story of Gattling (a fictional character):

Some of us, though not in fact me, had had some pretty hair-raising experiences on active service; whereas the most dangerous thing that happened to Gattling, I knew to my certain knowledge, was firewatching outside the Sale, two miles beyond the raiding area of Manchester. Without actually lying, Gattling was able to tell the story of this totally uninteresting event, in the presence of three submariners, and a man who had been twice captured by and had twice escaped from the Japanese, and to tell it in such a way that these people began apologizing for their relatively comfortable war. "My God," said Commander Wright, "I never realised it was like that."

"I stamped out the flaming stuff with my foot," said Gattling. Some cinder from a small and distant incendiary had, by a stroke of luck, landed in his garden. "It wasn't a question of feeling frightened, I just found myself doing it. It was as if someone else was acting in my person."

He eventually buried the cinder with a small trowel.

The Devil's in the details....or is he?