And the Word Is Two

Hey! What about ancestor worship and the price of beef?

How can I express the connections as quickly and efficiently as possible without leaving gaps for others to insert doubt and objections? How can I gain and maintain the attention of others while also maintaining control of my own thoughts and ability to articulate them clearly?

Even in our own minds at a certain level of considering matters, we engage in a dialogue. We may create imaginary personae to assist us. The ancients of the far West of what we still think of as Western Civilization would call upon the Muses, shamelessly.

Did they believe those were actual entities outside their imaginations? Does the Pope wear a funny hat?

Later the spirits of inspiration, our geniuses, got closer to ourselves. Now we say that a person is a genius; we ourselves embody the spirit and what we express, eloquently or otherwise, we originate.

Of course, none of these are accurate descriptions of what happens either with us individually, as if there is any real individual outside an imaginary concept analogous to points, straight lines and planes in Euclidean geometry, or between and among us, when we are “coming up” with “new” or “original” ideas.

We are mostly not coming up with anything. More precisely, things are occurring to us. Wallace Stevens may have believed, as his poem continues to assert, that that dear she was the maker of the world in which she sang. But neither he nor Sir Philip Sydney had access to the findings of science we now all have literally at our fingertips.

The esteemed historian Yuval Noah Harari writes and speaks of myths. This is shorthand we all can understand. It gets us all easily from the origins of language and skips over factors in evolution such as cooperation versus competition, cheating versus altruism in animal behavior, as well as myriad other incremental causal factors.

We all engage in this kind of oversimplification. Axioms in geometry and observable statistical facts such as the Pareto Principle are examples of Uber words, composite vocabulary we can use to get further along in our dialogues, provided parties to the conversation accept them as a common vocabulary.

Perhaps it is true that it is better not to know how the sausage was made. That depends on the circumstances. If we do not have the luxury of soliloquizing, To eat or not to eat the sausage, we must accept the outrages of the sausage at hand. Give me sausage or give me death?

And then we run up against realities like the causes and outcomes of the 2008 housing crash and think again that while it may not be nobler it might be best going forward to inspect what those voodoo derivatives are all about after all, and pass on sausage altogether.

In short without selling shortcuts in expression short, the price of beef may in fact in some contexts depend on a red wheelbarrow beside white chickens, and we are all well advised to take note of the rain-water glaze, rather than ignoring it at great peril.

For in science with real-world consequences as serious as a heart attack, skipping over facts to get to specious conclusions has historically been the downfall of humanity. We can’t just round things for convenience and not expect our Swedish battleship to flip over in the first few meters (or was it yards?) of its maiden voyage.

In behavior, which includes expression of what we need and want, that is also accurate: If we fail to test the precision of what we are thinking, observing, commenting on even casually, we risk triggering failures and atrocities.

Let’s take ancestor worship. How many of us consciously think about how that is not some Eastern thing? Far from it, Dude! Way out West, we have a pantheon of heroes among the dead, mostly male, ranging from Alexander to Zinedine Zidane.

Our money in physical form bears the likenesses of dead folks. We teach our children inconsistently to respect live elders even among those we consider one of We/Us, and certainly those who favor and encourage admiration of long dead historical persons are likely more numerous across all cultures worldwide.

It should become clear through this, my wily way of connecting things, how the human mind makes sense of experience, of itself, of things and creatures outside itself, including other humans and even its own animal self.

Starting with the words and building on more complex composite concepts, we create a web of understanding, an ecosystem of associated ideas, derived from our lives, which form the basis of our reality.

With that in mind, we should accept that it is silly to talk about false idols, unless it is in the context of “fake news” and mistaken ideas, counterfactual narratives, useful myths, white lies, truths convenient and inconvenient, etc.

Occam’s Razor falls on the just and unjust with equanimity and indifference in these matters of the mind. We are all prone to error in our reflections and ponderings. Descartes was no less a simpleton than science deniers today.

Where we are (or at least I hope you are with me) should not be in danger of slipping into some kind of relativism, which is another shortcut and shorthand of a lazy turn of mind. That is not what I have laid out here at all.

While there is an objective reality, all matters, conditions, and outcomes are context dependent.

It is my sincere desire that, with these lines, you and I have begun to connect the dots between concepts and matters which at first seem very different, but when scrutinized clearly actually derive from the same fundamental processes of our biology and the evolutionary environmental interplay that resulted in this present moment we share.

To be continued