The Law
Dear Sean,
The following is the story I was referring to.
Sincerely,
John
John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
"The Law" by Robert Myron Coates
This story appeared in The New Yorker in 1947, and was
reprinted in The World of Mathematics by James R. Newman
(1956), Vol. 4, New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 2268.
The first intimation that things were getting out of hand came one
early-fall evening in the late nineteen-forties. What happened,
simply, was that between seven and nine o'clock on that evening the
Triborough Bridge had the heaviest concentration of out-bound traffic
in its entire history. This was odd, for it was a weekday evening (to
be precise, a Wednesday), and though the weather was agreeably mild
and clear, with a moon that was close enough to being full to lure a
certain number of motorists out of the city, these facts alone were
not enough to explain the phenomenon. No other bridge or main highway
was affected, and though the two preceding nights had been equally
balmy and moonlit, on both of these the bridge traffic had run close
to normal.
The bridge personnel, at any rate, was caught entirely unprepared. A
main artery of traffic, like the Triborough, operates under fairly
predictable conditions. Motor travel, like most other large-scale
human activities, obeys the Law of Averages - that great, ancient rule
that states that the actions of people in the mass will always follow
consistent patterns - and on the basis of past experience it had
always been possible to foretell, almost to the last digit, the number
of cars that would cross the bridge at any given hour of the day or
night. In this case, though, all rules were broken.
The hours from seven till nearly midnight are normally quiet ones on
the bridge. But on that night it was as if all the motorists in the
city, or at any rate, a staggering proportion of them, had conspired
together to upset tradition. Beginning almost exactly at seven
o'clock, cars poured onto the bridge in such numbers and with such
rapidity that the staff at the toll booths was overwhelmed almost from
the start. It was soon apparent that this was no momentary congestion,
and as it became more and more obvious that the traffic jam promised
to be one of truly monumental proportions, added details of police
were rushed to the scene to help handle it.
Cars streamed in from all directions - from the Bronx approach and the
Manhattan one, from 125th Street and the East River Drive. (At the
peak of the crush, about eight-fifteen, observers on the bridge
reported that the drive was a solid line of car headlights as far
south as the bend at Eightyninth Street, while the congestion
cross-town in Manhattan disrupted traffic as far west as Amsterdam
Avenue). And perhaps the most confusing thing about the whole
manifestation was that there seemed to be no reason for it. Now and
then, as the harried toll-booth attendants made change for the
seemingly endless stream of cars, they would question the occupants,
and it soon became clear that the very participants in the monstrous
tieup were as ignorant of its cause as anyone else was.
A report made by Sergeant Alfonse O'Toole, who commanded the detail in
charge of the Bronx approach, is typical. "I kept askin' them," he
said, "'Is there night football somewhere that we don't know about? Is
it the races you're goin' to?' But the funny thing was half the time
they'd be askin' me. 'What's the crowd for, Mac?' they would say. And
I'd just look at them. There was one guy I mind, in a Ford convertible
with a girl in the seat beside him, and when he asked me, I said to
him, 'Hey, you're in the crowd, ain't you?' I said. 'What brings you
here?' And the dummy just looks at me. 'Me?' He says. 'I just come out
for a drive in the moonlight. But if I'd known there'd be a crowd like
this...' he says. And then he asks me, 'Is there any place I can turn
around and get out of this?'" As the Herald Tribune summed things up
in its story next morning, it "just looked as if everybody in
Manhattan who owned a motorcar had decided to drive out on Long Island
that evening".
The incident was unusual enough to make all the front pages next
morning, and because of this, many similar events, which might
otherwise have gone unnoticed, received attention. The proprietor of
the Aramis Theatre, on Eighth Avenue, reported that on several nights
in the recent past his auditorium had been practically empty, while on
others it had been jammed to suffocation. Lunchroom owners noted that
increasingly their patrons were developing a habit of making runs on
specific items; one day it would be roast shoulder of veal with pan
gravy that was ordered almost exclusively, while the next everyone
would be taking the Vienna loaf, and the roast veal went begging. A
man who ran a small notions store in Bayside revealed that over a
period of four days two hundred and seventy-four successive customers
had entered his shop and asked for a spool of pink thread.
These were news items that would ordinarily have gone into the papers
as fillers or in the sections reserved for oddities. Now, however,
they seemed to have a more serious significance. It was apparent at
last that something decidedly strange was happening to people's
habits, and it was as unsettling as those occasional moments on
excursion boats when the passengers are moved, all at once, to rush to
one side or the other of the vessel. It was not till one day in
December when, almost incredibly, the Twentieth Century Limited left
New York for Chicago with just three passengers aboard that business
leaders discovered how disastrous the new trend could be, too.
Until then, the New York Central, for instance, could operate
confidently on the assumption that although there might be several
thousand men in New York who had business relations in Chicago, on any
single day no more - and no less - than some hundreds of them would
have occasion to go there. The play producer could be sure that his
patronage would sort itself out and that roughly as many persons would
want to see the performance on Thursday as there had been on Tuesday
or Wednesday. Now they couldn't be sure of anything. The Law of
Averages had gone by the board, and if the effect on business promised
to be catastrophic, it was also singularly unnerving for the general
customer.
The lady starting downtown for a day of shopping, for example, could
never be sure whether she would find Macy's department store a
seething mob of other shoppers or a wilderness of empty, echoing
aisles and unoccupied salesgirls. And the uncertainty produced a
strange sort of jitteriness in the individual when faced with any
impulse to action. "Shall we do it or shan't we?" people kept asking
themselves, knowing that if they did do it, it might turn out that
thousands of other individuals had decided similarly; knowing, too,
that if they didn't, they might miss the one glorious chance of all
chances to have Jones Beach, say, practically to themselves. Business
languished, and a sort of desperate uncertainty rode everyone.
At this juncture, it was inevitable that Congress should be called on
for action. In fact, Congress called on itself, and it must be said
that it rose nobly to the occasion. A committee was appointed, drawn
from both Houses and headed by Senator J. Wing Slooper (R.), of
Indiana, and though after considerable investigation the committee was
forced reluctantly to conclude that there was no evidence of Communist
instigation, the unconscious subversiveness of the people's present
conduct was obvious at a glance. The problem was what to do about it.
You can't indict a whole nation, particularly on such vague grounds as
these were. But, as Senator Slooper boldly pointed out, "You can
control it," and in the end a system of re?ducation and reform was
decided upon, designed to lead people back to - again we quote Senator
Slooper - "the basic regularities, the homely averages of the American
way of life".
In the course of the committee's investigations, it had been
discovered, to everyone's dismay, that the Law of Averages had never
been incorporated into the body of federal jurisprudence, and though
the upholders of States' Rights rebelled violently, the oversight was
at once corrected, both by Constitutional amendment and by a law - the
Hills-Slooper Act - implementing it. According to the Act, people were
required to be average, and, as the simplest way of assuring it, they
were divided alphabetically and their permissible activities
catalogued accordingly. Thus, by the plan, a person whose name began
with "G," "N," or "U," for example, could attend the theatre only on
Tuesdays, and he could go to baseball games only on Thursdays, whereas
his visit to a haberdashery were confined to the hours between ten
o'clock and noon on Mondays.
The law, of course, had its disadvantages. It had a crippling effect
on theatre parties, among other social functions, and the cost of
enforcing it was unbelievably heavy. In the end, too, so many
amendments had to be added to it - such as the one permitting
gentlemen to take their fianc?es (if accredited) along with them to
various events and functions no matter what letter the said fianc?es
names began with - that the courts were frequently at a loss to
interpret it when confronted with violations.
In its way, though, the law did serve its purpose, for it did induce -
rather mechanically, it is true, but still adequately - a return to
that average existence that Senator Slooper desired. All, indeed,
would have been well if a year or so later disquieting reports had not
begun to seep in from the backwoods. It seemed that there, in what had
hitherto been considered to be marginal areas, a strange wave of
prosperity was making itself felt.
Tennessee mountaineers were buying Packard convertibles, and Sears,
Roebuck reported that in the Ozarks their sales of luxury items had
gone up nine hundred per cent. In the scrub sections of Vermont, men
who formerly had barely been able to scratch a living from their
rock-strewn acres were now sending their daughters to Europe and
ordering expensive cigars from New York. It appeared that the Law of
Diminishing Returns was going haywire, too.
[End of message]
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Originally Posted by Sabinus Invictus
) is going to be a clach of civilizations really. Unless you think the Chinese are still a separate civ. It seems to me the Chinese are really just an offshoot now of western civ, as their overriding philosophy of governance is a western concept. (Communism.)
