There Has To Be a Reason

In the Thurlos’ White Thunder, an apparently random attack has been made on Ella Clah’s life. Of this, the Thurlos write: "The dark side of human nature seldom made sense to her. Malicious behavior all too often existed in defiance of logic." That’s the way it often seems. Things just don’t make sense. Often there appears to be no logical explanation for things that happen or the way people are. But, l as we all know, things are not always what they seem to be; appearance can be deceptive; reality can remain hidden from our eyes and our minds.
When my wife, our daughters, and I moved to Texas thirty-five years ago, I began noticing an unusual, but apparently very popular, bumper sticker: There has to be a reason. This both interested and confused me. It interested me because I am a teacher of logic. Logic is the study of reasoning. I readily agreed that there must be a reason. No matter how enigmatic anything may seem to be, there is a reason for everything. Nothing happens without a cause. But the bumper confused me because that was all it had to say. There was no fine print. There were no images. Just the philosophical statement: There has to be a reason.
I doubted that this was a particularly philosophical town I had moved to. Why would cars by the dozen have a bumper sticker that was merely philosophical. This didn’t make sense to me. The day finally came when, in a parking lot, I saw a lady getting out of a car with the ubiquitous bumper statement. I stepped over and asked her for an explanation.
She said it was to arouse curiosity and cause people like to me to ask for the meaning. The answer was that this was an incomplete statement. It required a living person to complete it. She completed it for me: "There must be a reason why everyone banks at the First National Bank." I guess that was good enough for me; I have banked there as the institution has gone through five different names. At present, it is Bank of America. There must be reasons for these changes.
No, Ellen Clah, the dark side of human behavior, malicious behavior, is neither senseless, not does it defy logic. I’ve said there are reasons for everything. Everything can be understood logically. I found, that for me, logic is both simply and comprehensively understood as: "The study of what follows."
The attempt on her life followed someone’s intentional decision. It could be anything from revenge to part of a rite of initiation into a violent gang. If it was not preceded by some intentional decision, then it was an accident. Accidents, however, follow some kind of failure: carelessness, a break in the steering linkage of a vehicle, or a hunter mistaking her for a deer. Something lay behind it the threat to Inspector Clah’s life. Some perverse premises, or accidental premises led to the conclusion that almost caused her death. She understood none of this at the time, when Clah has done enough investigation, she will understand that someone had a logical reason to want her dead.
The main reason we fail to see the logic in things is that we have our own beliefs and ways of seeing the world, ways that cause us to prejudge what can and cannot make sense. Therefore, we find it hard to realize how much difference the experience of reality can be if people have different beliefs and ways of seeing the world than we do. If we can’t see where they are coming from, many things do seem to defy logic.
Everything is logical, but it always depends on where things are coming from, depends on what premises we are prepared to accept. For instance, the mentally ill commonly think more logically that most of us. The problem is not with their logic, but with their beliefs and the way in which they see the world. If we accepted their premises, we would see how all their behavior makes good sense. The rocket scientist has a different worldview from the safecracker; their actions will follow from that worldview.
If you were to ask me what might be the major premise from which malice and evil arise, I must confess that I left in ultimate mystery. I am prepared to consider the entire dialectic of explanations that have been given. Nonetheless, none of our words of explanation will be the last word. There is more to be said than we can understand. The major premise lies hidden in mystery.