Excuse Me

In a newspaper article an autistic woman describes a trip she made to Bologna with her boyfriend. The choice of restaurants so overwhelmed her that they ended up going for a pizza, but she couldn’t cope with the pizza coming in slices so they had to up sticks and find somewhere that served whole ones. She put this down to her neurodivergence, but was she just being silly? I mean, if neurotypical people can be silly why can’t neurodivergent ones? Are they immune from silliness? Do we deny them that ordinary human trait?

If you’ve read this far and haven’t read many of my other posts you may think you know where this is going. You may think I am going to say that people use neurodivergence as an excuse for bad or daft behaviour. In fact I want to say roughly the opposite: we all have an excuse for bad or daft behaviour whether we are neurodivergent or straight. We all have an excuse because what is an excuse but a cause? And something always caused us to do whatever we did. We are blown along like leaves in the wind. We have the same atoms inside us as non-human objects and the same laws of physics govern us. No part of us can stand aside from the laws of physics and direct the rest. After all, the laws of physics also govern the part that would stand aside. We sometimes call the part that would stand aside the ego, but on closer examination this ego disappears as an independent agent.

So an excuse in my sense is a synonym for a cause, and a cause is a correlation. A causes B means that we see A and B together in space and time. We see a correlation between A and B. Does a cat’s body cause its tail to go with it as it walks? It makes more sense to say that the whole cat is a pattern in space-time or a correlation of body and tail. The universe is an intricate web of these patterns or correlations in space and time. It is a cloth woven from an infinity of patterns or correlations or causes or excuses.

An excuse in this sense won’t cut any ice with conventional people. For most people the value of excuses derives from their rarity, and they have engineered that rarity by limiting the application of the word. Ubiquitous excuses have no value, so the word excuse in this sense might as well not exist. There’s an excuse or reason or cause for your stroppiness. There’s an excuse or reason or cause for your dishonesty. There’s an excuse or reason or cause for your criminality. But other people may not like you or even tolerate you. They may avoid you. They may put you in prison. They may shoot you if you run amok with a knife. Because they have their excuses too.

Language footnote When discussing words, I like to look at other languages that divvy up reality in different ways. It feels parochial to base an argument on one’s own language alone. For example the Finnish word for cause is syy and excuse is tekosyy. Teko has the sense of artificial or made-up, so a tekosyy is an artificial or made-up cause. The English word excuse has two different senses. We use it in a pejorative way as in Just an excuse, or in a sympathetic way as in He had an excuse because his car broke down. In the post above I used excuse in the sympathetic way. The Finnish word tekosyy [made-up cause] looks pejorative when you analyse it, but my Finnish informant assures me the Finns also use tekosyy for so-called good excuses. We can learn something from tekosyy: people won’t accept excuses (or causes) they see as made up or artificial. This would apply to ninety-nine percent of excuses in my broader sense of the word. People don’t want to go too far back or spread their net too wide in looking for causes. They will accept an immediate cause such as My car broke down. They won’t accept a remote or abstruse one such as I have bad genes, I grew up poor or Evolution made me aggressive. The word excuse comes from the Latin ex meaning out and causa meaning cause. So it gives us a get-out from blame. Blame, cause and reason are related ideas. In fact the Finnish word syy has all three meanings: blame, cause and reason. Let’s also look at cause and effect (syy and seuraus in Finnish). In English we tend to picture a mechanical linkage between cause and effect. I push the car [the cause] and it moves [the effect]. Indeed the English word effect has mechanical connotations. It derives from the Latin facere [to make or do]. The German for effect [Wirkung] suggests working and mechanics. But the Finnish word for effect [seuraus] relates to the verb seurata [to follow]. So seuraus has the sense of something that follows something else. Applying this to my cat example, we could say that the cat’s body moves and its tail follows [syy and seuraus]. Or we could say that the cat’s body pulls its tail along [cause and effect]. Syy and seuraus suggest a correlation or pattern rather than a mechanical link.