News recently broke about the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. This post is about a different plane crash, Eastern Airlines Flight 375, in 1960. Flight 375 crashed on takeoff from Logan airport in Boston when it flew into a flock of birds. More specifically, in the words of Michael Kalafatas, it “slammed into a flock of ten thousand starlings“.
The starling isn’t native to North America. An American drug manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin made multiple attempts to bring over different species of bird to the U.S. Many of his his efforts failed, but he was successful at bringing starlings over from Europe, releasing sixty European starlings in 1890 and another forty in 1891. Nate Dimeo recounts the story of the release of the sixty starlings in New York’s Central Park in episode 138 of he memory palace podcast.
Schieffelin’s interest included starlings because he wanted to bring over all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare plays. The starling is mentioned only once in Shakespeare’s works: in Henry IV, Part I, in a line uttered by Sir Henry Percy:
Nay, I will; that’s flat:
He said he would not ransom Mortimer;
Forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer;
But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I’ll holla ‘Mortimer!’
Nay,
I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.
The story is a good example of the problems of using causal language to talk about incidents. I doubt an accident investigation report would list “line in 16th century play” as a cause. And, yet, if Shakespeare had not included that line in the play, or had substituted a different bird for a starling, the accident would not have happened.
Of course, this type of counterfactual reasoning isn’t useful at all, but that’s exactly the point. Whenever we start with an incident, we can always go further back in time and play “for want of a nail”: the place where we stop is determined by factors such as time constraints of the investigation and available information. Neither of those factors are properties of the incident itself.
William Shakespeare didn’t cause Flight 375 to crash, because “causes” don’t exist in the world. Instead, we construct causes when we look backwards from incidents. We do this because of our need to make sense of the world. But the world is a messy, tangled web of interactions. Those causes aren’t real. It’s only by moving beyond the notion of causes that we can learn more about how those incidents came to be.
Surfing Complexity 