AUGUST 6, SUNDAY

WOMEN‘S WORLD CUP AND HISTORY

On Sunday morning at 6 a.m. I watched the soccer match between the American women and the Swedish woman. They have played each other in previous tournaments and have always been evenly matched. On Sunday morning they were again evenly matched and although the USA had several very good shots on goal, the score after two overtimes was 0-0. So this led to penalty kicks. Both teams botched a number of shots and on the final kick the American goalie blocked the shot but it bounced once in front of the goal before she batted it away. It was ruled that it had crossed the goal mouth and Sweden won and the USA was eliminated.

Then the explanations began. Megan Repinoe, the oldest and steadiest American player, missed the goal completely. So did Sophia Smith, the rising star of the team. (Of course so did a number of Swedish players.)

I was disappointed and so must of been many Americans, but of course the Swedes were elated.

But what I wonder about is the explanation by experts of why game went as it did and why the Americans lost. Was it the coaching, the lack of practice, something lacking in the players themselves? Why had those two women choked?

But I have the same difficulty in accepting these definitive explanations that I do with accepting some of the explanations of why events in world history happened as they did. My problem is that with foresight the experts usually don‘t have a clue and yet with hindsight they know exactly why events happened.

An easy explanation is to focus on the two shots that missed the goal completely as being the reason the Americans lost. But during the game there were dozens of times that the ball being just a little wide of the mark would have changed the game if it had been kicked very slightly differently. A goal earlier in the game by either side would probably have meant no goal kicks and the reason the Americans missed would never have happened.

A good example was in the Norway-Japan game when twice the attempt by Norway to block a shot on goal altered the trajectory enough to have it bounce, not wide, but into a different part of the goal, leaving the goalie lunging in the wrong direction. As far as I can see, these two goals went in purely by chance with no expert able to explain why it happened and certainly unable to forsee it. Pure chance and yet they probably determined the outcome of the game.

And the shoot out at the end of any tied game is pretty much chance. The goalie has to choose in advance which side to lunge to and sometimes guesses right. That is pure chance. The fact that the final kick bounced slightly in rather than slightly out was pure chance.

All that mattered was winning, but this could have decided as easily by the flip of a coin as by penalty kicks at the end of the game.

When I look at my own life all of the major events from my conception, my gender, to the social class of my parents, to where we lived, to whom I married, to where I found work, to the conception of my children was all pretty much by chance. I can look back and explain the pattern of my life, but I could never at any point have known what was coming. I still can‘t.

And this applies to a great deal of human history as well, I believe. The great events such as the birth of Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed and what they came to believe and to teach happened by chance. In retrospect it seemed ordained but beforehand the appearance of each of these people was wild chance.

So I am skeptical of rational explanations in a world of chance. And then as I was thinking about this I read an article about conspiracy theorists, people who before MAGA and Trump, were skeptical of one event after another. They were skeptical of the explanations of who killed President Kennedy and the events of the destruction of the Word Trade Center and the explanations for the sightings of UFO‘s and some were antivaxxer skeptics. All distrusted the pronouncement of experts, particularly the pronouncements of government. And sometimes, as with the causes of the Viet Nam war and the Saddam Hussein‘s nuclear weapons this skepticism was justified.

Conspiracy theories and my skepticism are very similar. And if I expand the circle there are a number of explanations of the supernatural with no concrete proof that millions and millions of people insist on. I read an article that said that the American people‘s belief in Satan and in Hell are waning. But why did we ever believe in them in the first place, what is the difference between believing in unprovable UFO‘s and unprovable Satan or Hell?

Part of my disappointment with the American loss was because they are members of my tribe and their winning or losing was connected with me. But the Swedes wanted to win just as badly and were just as good people and had practiced just as hard, and there is joy in Sweden now. So part of my blindness is caused by tribalism, as I imagine many conspiracy theories are.

So I think there is a large degree of irrationality in both explanations by experts and in conspiracy theories and they are harder to sort out than they first appear to be.

Just yesterday I was reading in The Song of the Cell by Bharati Mukherjee that until at least the 1850‘s surgeons, dedicated to saving lives, scoffed at the germ theory of disease, a conspiracy theory to them, and when they dropped a scalpel on the floor picked it up, wiped it off on their apron and kept on cutting leading to untold numbers of deaths. They were the experts.