Cause, Effect and the Theory of Coincidence

According to the Theory of Very Large Numbers, there’s no such thing as coincidence. Were we but privy to all the other bytes of information that connect two synchronous events, mathematicians say, we’d see there was no serendipity, just ordinary, everyday cause and effect.

The trouble with us non-mathematicians is we look to make links even without the interlinking bytes. On Sept. 5, for example, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about the new fad in America: men shaving their chests. Six weeks later an unrelated story in the very same newspaper informed us that Muslim men ritually shave their body hair.

What links these two stories? Is Al Qaeda sending agents to infiltrate the “in” watering holes where the youthful trendsetters hang out and casually mention that shaved bodies are “cool”?

Such torturous connections are, I know, demented. On the other hand, when I read that President Bush had issued an executive order enabling him to bar publication of the records of the Reagan administration--an administration in which, coincidentally, Bush’s father was vice president--I wonder if there is something in those papers that makes George H.W. Bush look bad. When the government doesn’t trust me, I don’t trust the government.

Self-censorship is likewise harmful. It prevents us from expressing ideas, opinions, feelings--those bytes of information whose accumulation will one day (the Theory of Very Large Numbers tells us) show cause and effect. We are now, as a nation, in the process of creating a story that will one day make sense of Sept. 11 and become part of our history. For our history to teach us lessons for our future, for the connections to resonate as true, for the story to unite us as a nation, it must contain all the interlinking bytes of information. Every voice needs to be heard. Every Barbara Lee and every Lynn Cheney. Every Susan Sontag and every Jerry Falwell. Every Bill Maher, every Ann Coulter. Yes, even Osama bin Laden.

We’re in this crisis in part because we didn’t know what people in other parts of the world were thinking. To get into another crisis for the same reason would not be a coincidence.

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Emily Levine is a Los Angeles writer and comedian.