I’m starting this blog without knowing what I want to write or for whom I am writing. My initial purpose is to think some things through for myself. The blog will consist mainly of two sorts of entries: memoir, including family history and thinking about thinking. For thinking, I will reach back to my study of Michael Polanyi, Norbert Elias, and more recently Daniel Kahnemann, each of whom has influenced the way I see the social world.
I’ve written two versions of my family history. The first was “My Family and European History, or A Mutt and His Forebears or The Roots of My Discontent”. This was a talk I gave to the Morehouse History Club about 25 years ago. More recently I have been writing “My Life Before I Was Born”. Before getting to my family history, I will write a bit about my place in the universe. “Why talk about the universe”, Severn Darden asked? “What else is there”, he answered.
The universe was around for a long time before I was born; it will be around long after I die. The universe doesn’t care about my existence. It can exist without me, or, as it happens, exist with me for a very short time.
My birth was a very low probability event. Don’t gloat dear reader; your birth was about as unlikely as mine. The probability of you or I being born approaches zero. Why? Our parents had to meet; they had to have sex; they had to have sex on a particular day; a particular sperm and a particular egg had to meet. Already the odds are far less than one in a million. But either of our parents was just as unlikely to be born as you or I. That goes for our four grandparents going back to early humans, pre-humans and so on almost ad infinitum. The odds against my existence, and of yours, are almost infinite. But they are not infinite; you and I do exist; we were born. The chance of any particular person being born is very close to zero; the chance of some person being born is 1. For every person that is actually born, there are an absurdly large number of potential people who were never born. It’s like the lottery: the chance of any particular person winning is very very small, but some one person will win. For every winner there are many many losers. For every human there are an unimaginably large number of combinations of sperm and egg that never met.
First Jew: “It would be better never to have been born.”
Second Jew: But not one in a million is so lucky.”
Wrong: most are so lucky; they are never born
