Just Ask If You Want To Know Why  

By Jeffrey M. Bowen

 We are much better at answering questions of who, what, when and where than answering WHY.  Pinning down the first four queries may be a challenge, but usually doable.  In fact, asking WHAT someone thinks is usually a good way to uncover the more obvious reasons why people think as they do.   However, motives and interpretation lurk beneath the question why and this can muddy the waters for everyone.  It is utterly human to constantly seek mindfulness and reason in the acts and ideas of others.  Also it is chronically human to lie to ourselves and others when we try to explain our own actions or beliefs.  The real answers can be deceptively simple or amazingly obscure.   If science is applied, why can be hypothesized and proven, but romance and religion may shroud the answers in mystery.

Consider the whys found in the 1951 song,  "Tell me why the stars do shine, tell me why the ivy twines...."  The composer gave credit to both love and God in his lyrics, but as science fiction writer Isaac Asimov pointed out, nuclear fusion and tropisms provide more grounded but less exciting answers.   Whatever your perspective, for me, asking why with just a touch of childlike curiosity has become a lifelong adventure.  

For instance, as a teenager I used to hike with my dad over mountains in search of game birds. In New England, we discovered miles of stone walls running over the tops of hills.  Why, we wondered, would colonial farmers go to all that trouble?  Was it just a way of getting rid of big rocks to make the soil more tillable, or a way of keeping cows in and everyone else out? Questions like this kindled a lifelong interest in early American history.

As I grew older, I realized that when we ask why, mostly we expect and get simple, specific and possibly superficial answers.  But when contentious problems and policy decisions arise, the why question produces not only philosophical disagreements, but sometimes war.  Listening actively to answers while remaining open-minded can help reduce risks.   

In my first week at college, a philosophy professor half-seriously told us how he marked two different students' final exams.  Asked simply "Why", one student wrote a one word answer, "Because", while another wrote, "Why not?".  Our professor said he failed the first student, but gave the second an A.  To this day, I avoid giving simple answers to big philosophical questions.    

My most frustrating collegiate encounter with the scholarly question of why occurred in a  course where I had to come up with a term paper question no historian before me had already answered. I spent a whole semester wrestling with President Woodrow Wilson’s lofty rhetoric about the League of Nations, but never figured out why he avoided specifics.  I survived, but painfully gained a new appreciation of political reality.  

Later on when I taught high school history, I urged my students to think long and hard about developing questions without easy answers so their research might stimulate complex, original thinking.  

Then much later, as a school administrator, I advised teachers to ask their students essential questions that lead toward deep understanding.  Asking why may provoke blank stares at first but with guidance the students usually wade beyond simple yes, no, or could-be responses.  I surely wish today's standardized state tests were designed to do this.

   

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Persistently asking why can drive people to distraction and tempt them to rationalize.  Have you ever heard of the five-whys rule?  Participating in root cause analysis as part of long-range school district planning, I was told to apply the rule of five whys. Answer the first simple question by asking another derived from the first, and so on until we reach the root cause of a problem or issue.  This was more like root canals than root causes.  It proved less painful to rationalize with little proof, or by insisting that state mandates were the real villain.   

In his book about why we misunderstand each other, titled Mindwise, author Nicholas Epley describes how easily we deceive ourselves by dehumanizing others.  With disastrous implications given today's refugee exodus from Syria and Afghanistan, we try to answer why by assuming large groups of unidentified people have no minds at all.  We say they lack emotions, needs, or awareness like ours, and therefore may be no more than savages who could harm us.  However, when we meet and talk with them individually, a more sympathetic relationship comes to light.  We discover they are human after all, and they have thoughts and feelings just like us.  

I experienced this revelation when I attended a multicultural education workshop some years ago.  The facilitator brought a culturally diverse group of individuals to the stage, and then, with their permission, she asked each person to state their name and tell the audience about the origins of their family.  Thus we became vividly aware of both their diversity and their universality.  

Another self-deceptive route for why askers is to find ways to give human characteristics to inanimate objects like car engines, especially when they act up, or other living things to which we can infer thoughts and feelings like ours.  Epley and the dictionary call this anthropomorphizing.  Here is one way it works.  A large photo of a silver-haired gorilla hangs over our Jacuzzi bath.  A resident of the Buffalo Zoo, he seems to be smiling mischievously at anyone passing by. Actually not.  After taking a picture of him lying down, I turned his position vertical, which had the effect of making him seem to smile.  I like to think he really is, but it's just as likely he had gas. We want to make things human so we can explain them in our own terms.

Unless very basic, indisputable facts are involved, the answer to why is seldom unqualified.  A couple of graduate courses in statistics convinced me that correlations, in essence the likelihood that one measurable variable may vary systematically with another, mean one can actually quantify a degree of "whyness" based on hypotheses.  I wanted to explain in my doctoral dissertation why educators hold differing beliefs about student discipline, and ultimately I was able to prove that about 30 percent of the differences could be explained by their work motivation.

Often more intuitive than scientific is the startling extent to which we reduce what we see to an average.  Given a hundred variations on a theme, when asked to summarize them, our minds move us to average them.  Similarly when we try to characterize any group of people who seem to bear racial, ethnic, religious, economic, or political similarities, we opt typically to describe them in stereotypes we have developed from learning or sometimes blind prejudice.  Averages and stereotypes can lead us way down a garden path where disastrously wrong answers may jump out to bite us.

Personal observation of others' behaviors may not answer why either.  Author Epley suggests that neither watching nonverbal gestures nor inferring motives from isolated actions without background or context can produce grave misunderstandings.  To illustrate, I have cloudy vision from nearsightedness and eye floaters, along with modestly reduced hearing when in a crowd.  At parties there must be those who find to their dismay that I ignore them.  I appear to be an antisocial grump who persists in staring at the wall.  

Epley recommends a logical solution.   Approach directly and ask.  Usually people will give an honest, direct answer unless they feel threatened.  In my own case, it might be, "Oh my gosh, I have lousy eyesight and hearing and just missed you altogether!”

By embracing the worlds of why, we can become depressingly negative if we focus just on ourselves ("Why me, God?"), or challengely upbeat ("Why can't we do this?").  I happen to believe that asking why is a direct route to learning.  It signals a curious mind, solves mysteries more than just creating them.  But it has its dangers when it tempts us to think we are right and others are stupid.  Perhaps the best general rule for why-askers is to pose the question and then be ready to stop, reflect, and be honest about what we hear or see.   

12/21/15