Why.
It’s a word I’m rather fond of, and I’ve used it a lot over the years to understand the world around me.
I got my first inkling of the power of “Why?” at an early age. Like most kids, I hit my mother up with standard questions like “Why is the sky blue?” “Why is the grass green?” and “Why are my goldfish floating in the top of their bowl?”
She did pretty well explaining the properties of light, the importance of chlorophyll and the hazards of over-feeding your fish. For a brief period, I thought she was the smartest person in the world. I also thought that “why?” was better than three wishes from Aladdin’s lamp.
Alas, my faith in both her and “Why?” began to fail almost as soon as it was formed. She could not tell me why we use red for stop and green for go. She couldn’t tell me why we flip light switches up for on and down for off. Nor could she tell me why we drive on the right side of the road instead of the left.
Gradually, I began to understand that the problem lay less in her dwindling intelligence and more in the nature of my inquiries. It’s easy to explain facts (they are reasonable, consistent, and they make the same sense everywhere you go). Light, chlorophyll, and goldfish are the same all over the world.
When it comes to explaining choices, however, things get trickier. After all, red and green are arbitrary choices, and purple and yellow or blue and orange would work just as well. Light switches are just as effective if they’re wired to go on when flipped down. And nations like England and Japan seem to roll along quite handily with their vehicles on the left side of the road.
My most recent foray into the world of unsatisfactory-answers-to-why occurred last week. A friend of mine is pregnant. Through the miracle of modern technology, she knows that she will give birth to a boy in a few short months. When it came up that her soon-to-be son was going to be circumcised, before I could help myself, I asked “Why?”
I wasn’t trying to challenge her decision; I simply wanted to understand it. Cutting off body parts has always seemed a bizarre practice to me, and it’s not easy to find people willing to discuss it. Here was someone — a mother — willing to explain the rationale behind it.
She explained that for her secular self, circumcising her son was necessary for health, hygiene and social reasons.
She had been told that having her son’s foreskin removed would reduce the likelihood that he would develop urinary tract infections, lessen his chances for penile cancer later in life and help protect him from sexually transmitted diseases.
She was told that uncircumcised boys often neglected to wash properly, something that could lead to infections of a very unpleasant nature.
And she candidly told me that she didn’t want him to be made fun of in the locker room or feel uncomfortable with his body in sexual situations.
Put like that, it seems logical and reasonable to cut off a troublesome body part shortly after birth, doesn’t it?
Well, I’m not so sure.
Health-wise, sewing our four littlest toes together would significantly reduce our chances for athlete’s foot later in life, but I don’t see anyone proposing that as a minor modification on nature’s design.
Nor do I see anyone suggesting that we pull the teeth of children who are unlikely to brush and floss properly in order to save them from the potential trauma of a root canal.
And, call me cynical, but I have this sneaking suspicion that embarrassment in the locker room and self-consciousness in the bedroom are rites of passage we must all survive to reach adulthood, and no amount of nipping and adjusting will change that.
So, I gently explained my concerns to her with all my usual tact and diplomacy — like I said, my aim was not to challenge her decision, but merely to understand it.
Now, I find myself contemplating a new “Why?”
Why hasn’t she called?