Categories: uncategorized
Date: 22 August 2007 15:04:11
I heard of an urban myth.
You know it's said that the eskimos (and I'm not supposed to call them that but if I call them inuits then I'll have lost half the cultural baggage I'm trying to examine) have 32 different words for snow. And you probably know that that's an urban myth. But you may also know that that itself is an urban myth, and that they really do have 32 different words for snow. Well, okay, maybe it's 29, but you get the drift.
I've heard various generations of that assertion (the original statement, its denial, the denial of the denial, etc) so I don't know whether it's true or not. (And, frankly, I don't care. I don't need to know. It's bad enough that I know the words to "Riding the scree" - I don't need esquimaux linguistics filling up my very limited mental capacity too). It's probably not true, but if you tell it to anyone (if you can find someone who hasn't heard it already) they nod as they would to a previously unheard but entirely plausible and reasonable statement. It may or may not be true but it entirely chimes with our understanding of the world.
Which is fine, but the problem, or the start of the problem at least, is that it reinforces that understanding. It starts a positive feedback thing going and as any PA technician will tell you, that's a worrying thing. Because only the slightest notion that the world is like that, after sufficient iterations of the feedback loop, will lead to an utter unshakeable conviction that it is so. It can, in short, make you believe anything. Black is white. White is black. White is cleverer than black. Anything you want to believe, and probably some things you don't. It really doesn't take much of a seed for the process to feed on. An off-hand comment from someone you don't even trust, then another and no matter how you fight it, they coalesce in your mind so that when the next person you don't trust says the same thing, it resonates, and grows, like mould.
And after you've gone through that feedback process things really do become worrying because beliefs, if they really are beliefs and not just wittering, shape actions. I don't suppose any nasty deeds are going to come out of believing that an eskimo thesaurus is rather heavy on the snow section, but then I have a limited imagination. But I can see some nasty actions coming out of other beliefs that have grown in a similarly uncontrolled way. Like the belief that the victim of a crime should have a say in how the criminal is punished rather than leaving it to vastly experienced and objective judges who will take all factors into account rather than just one. Or the belief that, oh no, sorry, I'm not going to talk about the thing that is actually on my mind here. Although that would bring all this down to earth and make it intelligible, it would also reveal too much about the grey clouds floating across my mind these days.
I guess when you hear any proposition you have three possible responses: one is utter disbelief, one is to have heard it before, and the other is to accept it because it accords with what you already know. I've just been expounding the dangers of the third option, and the second makes you look like an arrogant know-it-all. So maybe the first is the only sensible option. But of course you shouldn't take my word on that.