Why?

Addendum #21

The teacher of United States History (official title of class, 11^th grade requirement) is explaining the Louisiana Purchase. Some members of the class are listening in a vague, time-is-mercifully-passing way. Some are doing homework for another class. Some are doodling. The teacher is trying to give a sense of the extent of the amount of land involved and how Napoleon needed money. A boy in the back of the class raises his hand. After being acknowledged by the teacher, he asks, “Why didn’t Napoleon ask the people who already lived on the land whether he should sell it? Some Indians lived there, right?” The teacher is used to this boy. Partly he likes the boy because at least he is listening enough to ask questions. Partly he’s sick of the boy because his questions go nowhere and take up time. The teacher has to do all of American history in one school year. Usually, he’s lucky if he gets up to the Korean War. Anyhow, he answers that Indians were there but no one thought the Indians needed to be consulted.

The boy won’t let go. “Why did they think that? I mean, the Indians were people. Shouldn’t that have mattered?” The teacher comes right back. He almost knows what the boy is going to say and is prepared. “Yes, it should have mattered but it didn’t. Now as I was saying.” The boy realizes the discussion, which was not a discussion, is over. He looks out a window at the sky. Same sky that Napoleon and the Indians and Thomas Jefferson looked at. Same silence coming from the sky. Same human chatter below the sky. The girl seated next to the boy passes a note. It says, “You’re a jerk but I like you. P. S. If you show this to anyone, you’re an even bigger jerk.”

Sometimes those who ask “Why?” are tolerated, sometimes not. Athens reached a point where the citizens had their fill of Socrates and his questions and, so, convicted him of corrupting the young. Various dictators have murdered poets and writers whose writing was rooted in a sense of why, a wonder on the part of the poets and writers they could not squelch, however expedient that squelching might have been for their health. The question, though it may seem mere perversity, a stubborn refusal to accept the status quo, is rooted in the wonder about why anything exists at all, to say nothing of why human beings act the way they do. The question resists the daily expedients that grease the wheels of routine, whatever the routine may be. The question doesn’t respect the authority that says, “That’s the way it’s always been – masters and slaves, winners and losers.” The question comes from frustration, too, as in “Do we have to keep banging our heads against the wall of ignorance?” The question comes from idealism and hence can be dismissed easily. Idealism doesn’t understand reality.

To ask the question in contemporary circumstances, to ask, for instance, why the events in Israel have unfolded the way they have or why Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine or why the leaders of the world don’t feel any urgency about the extinction of species or the prospect of nuclear war or why nations that are powers feel they have to maintain their power at any cost, is to risk being labeled a fool or troublemaker, someone who “doesn’t get it.” To suggest, for instance, that if you humiliate people bad things are bound to happen or that if you devote more and more money to armaments it creates a logic that demands the armaments be used or that the only species that matters to humankind is humankind, is to bring up matters that are, in their simplicity, bound to be brushed aside.

To ask “Why?” is to slow down the works. It may even bring the works to a standstill, since the question probes the essence of motives that often would rather not reveal themselves. Why one person should be entitled to own another person is a fair example. Gradually, a good deal of the world came around to consider that question, though by no means everyone. If something is sanctioned, whether in a religious text or in an edict or as a folkway, then the question seems to have no place. Schools do not offer a class in “Why?” Any wit, like the boy in that classroom, would reply, “Why should they? Things are fine as they are.” Indeed, the bells ring and the buses discharge students in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon. Lunch comes each day at 12:10 P. M.

Childhood gradually vanishes into youth and youth vanishes into adulthood. The amount of “Why?” that lingers in any person varies. Typically, some fraction remains and may come out at idle moments or not-so-idle moments: “Why did she leave me? Why am I still working for this corporation? Why did I pretend to care when I didn’t?” The questions are personal but they can be social and political ones that very much involve others, as in why one group hates another group. Instinctively, why wants to untangle the unhappy yarn and see how it came to be. Instinctively, why wants to act as though people are something more than automatons. Instinctively, why feels that the grief of thoughtlessness doesn’t have to rule life quite so thoroughly. Or maybe such a feeling is merely a hope, the sort of thing a boy who by the 11^th grade already has read too many books might think.

Once upon a time, some kings had fools at their courts. One of the fool’s tasks was to subvert the king by asking riddles that challenged conventional wisdom. Shakespeare loved these fools and gave them marvelous words to use in their sallies and quips, words that smacked, at once, of whimsy and acuity. We have no licensed fools now. Commentators, pundits, and the residents of think tanks are not fools nor are the leaders whom they advise. Everyone is serious as they put forward one certainty after another. Often they are deadly serious. Life, the boy concluded long ago, is not a play.