The Perfect Storm

In the eponymous movie (and book), a group of fisherman goes out in some big storm and some of them die or something. Apparently the original definition of the term must have been a hurricane that causes the maximum amount of damage possible, and extrapolating from that has given us the same practical meaning as the stock phrase "a whole that is more than the sum of its parts." And it really grinds my gears how overused this phrase has become.

The situation has been especially dire with news coverage of the recent midterm elections. Some writers have tossed the term around indiscriminately, and some at least have had the grace to put quotation marks around it. Sometimes reporters are just reporting that some idiot used it, while sometimes they have apparently picked it from amongst many competing nautical metaphors. However, overuse during the midterms has been an extension of the usual journalistic corner-cutting, as there have also been recent mentions in articles on topics as varied as the music business, privacy regulation, and heavy industry.

This example, from my hometown fishwrap, has an outstanding example for analysis. The author desribes the situation thusly:

What we have is a perfect storm which combines the GOP's desperation to tarnish their opponents, the Democrats['] obsessive defensiveness over being branded as soft on defense, and the media's fixation with conflict.

Oh. My. God. More than one thing happened at once? Something was caused by more than one thing? This is so weird it needs a special term. How about perfect storm?

This is precisely the type of nonsense George Orwell decried in 1946 in his famous essay Politics and the English Language, a classic about the lazy degradation of said language for political purposes.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

Step #4 is what is clearly being ignored by the guilty reporters, but to a certain extent this example of misattribution of causation is simply emblematic of some more or less common shortcomings in the human capacity for reason.

When determining cause, people often make the so-called fundamental attribution error, which consists of giving too much weight to an actor's personal characteristics at the expense of his situation. A simple example is seeing someone slip and concluding that he is clumsy instead of taking into account that there was a spot of ice on that part of the sidewalk. Research has also shown that people are frequently content to find one explanation for a phenomenon they observe, no matter how many causes actually contributed; people also expect a cause to look like its outcome and will often discount potential causes that don't look like the observed outcome.

David Hume had even more trouble pinning down causation than research subjects, although he at least gave it some more thought.

One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seemed conjoined, but never connected. And as we can have no idea of any thing which never appeared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connexion or force at all, and that these words are absolutely without meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings or common life.

Other philosophers have given it a go, and they have come up with some incredibly detailed explanations of causation. Non-Western philosophy has taken a crack, although we ought to be able to come up with something that doesn't rely on metaphysics. Perhaps the answer is that life imitates art, as those in the important philosophical tradition of intellectual powerhouse Tipper Gore have suggested.

But getting back to the point, if it's beyond the capacity of David Hume to solve causation, I don't know why I should expect anything more from newspaper reporters, let alone newspaper readers. None the less, I'm siding with Orwell here: I'm tired of hearing how two things happening at once constitutes a perfect storm, and I hope that the fad of describing things as such will soon pass.