In part i. we talked about HOW humans construct the simulation of the “real world” that we carry around in our heads. In part ii. we talked about how LANGUAGE creates “reality” within that selfsame head by virtue of our fundamental social nature. In part iii. we will talk about how language is used to create FALSE facts. Otherwise known as “lies.”
Which brings us to the comfluence of parts one and two: we perceive and knit together a subjective reality that we call the “world.” Using language, we process that world to others to form our “objective” reality, but that mapping of language creates its OWN worlds.
I was listening to an author interview on Jefferson Public Radio the other day, and the author was a blind man — not blind from birth, but blind — and he told a story of going to Nepal on a spontaneous search for a woman, and of being robbed blind (excuse the expression, since it’s literal) within ten minutes, and having all of his stuff returned to him within an hour and his sojourn in India and Nepal before returning to the United States.
And the rest of this clicked into place. The question is, how does a blind man travel the world? The partial answer is that he rides on the mesh of civilization: of all those conventions, including the fact that you can nearly always find someone in India who speaks English, and knowing the language is having the keys to the kingdom.
But there is another critical element here.
The question never asked, is HOW THE HECK did he adjust to being blind?
How? He did what we all do: he formed a “simulation” of the room in his mind, just as my description of a room would be a verbal simulation. Then, he operated in that simulation.
Watch yourself when you have lost something, and see whether you look for it physically, or look in your mind to “remember” where you put it.
Because, in a sense, we are ALL blind. The writings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are a continual celebration of the fact that we don’t really live in our constructed world of the five senses, as Sherlock Holmes is able to look at the world and see the clues that are there, but hidden in plain sight from everyone else, seemingly.
And, not only do we not really LOOK at the details of the world around us, but, rather, we live in a CONSTRUCT within that world. A construct not that much different from the world that that blind man on the radio lived in.
Let me give you an example. One of my favorite games as a child was a little game we called “hide in plain sight.”
An object would be chosen: an incongruous object, usually a brightly colored crayon. And the hider would attempt to confound the seekers by putting the object in the room in plain sight.
And it was an incredibly tough game.
Because, you see, we all caricature the room. We don’t REALLY see it, so an out-of-place item like a crayon doesn’t really look that out of place, because we’ve never really LOOKED at the room. We know there’s a window, and some drapes, maybe. Carpet. A chair or two. Some books.
But we had never really LOOKED at the room, and hiding a bright lime-green crayon was an easy task. And we learned something about the way that people hide things, and the way they seek hidden things.
First rule: don’t put it at eye level. We usually don’t look up or down. Etcetera.
Second rule: there are no rules. Just put it in plain sight. If it’s incongruous as hell, it will be all the more difficult to find.
So: a blind man makes a kind of “caricature” of his surroundings: his apartment, his rooms. The street where he lives, and he tests that “picture” with his cane, but with familiar “mapped” territory, he can get along just fine.
For the larger world, he depends on media, as we depend on media, but not visual media. In fact, if you will listen to most news and information shows, very rarely do you actually need to WATCH to know what is going on. And that is the world in which language constantly struggles for an “objective” worldview.
And, we carry around a political “narrative” that fills in the great box of the outside world that we’ll never see from Pig’s Knuckle, Arkansas, or Caspar, Wyoming, or Tucson, Arizona or Terra Haute, Indiana.
Or, rather, we see America in two entirely different manners, according to the stories you’re listening to.
It’s like books about Napoleon: you can tell whether it’s an English or French historian who wrote the book just by finding out whether Napoleon was a villain (English) or a hero (French)*.
[* Yeah, I know, Russians and Germans and Spanish, etc. You take my point.]
Growing up during the Cold War, I was — as were all my classmates in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico — inculcated, indoctrinated and force-fed a steady diet of Jeffersonian Democracy and Communist-hating as a typical American. We were, from the time I was in grade school until I graduated from high school, fighting COMMUNISM in Viet Nam.
All of the above was probably hooey, but that was the generalized consensus (or, with Bonaparte, duelling consensuses).
How surprised we all were to learn that it was a war of national independence and NOT a gigantic Communist Plot to take over the entirety of Southeast Asia in order to invade Australia! But those who had fed us this monstrous hooey as a verity as surely as mother’s milk is good for you were nowhere to be found and not talking much if they did, and pretended not to know anything about it.
But those two consensuses — pro war and anti war — blew the late 1960s and early 1970s apart.
In the clear light of 20/20 hindsight, the ability of any era to accurately see itself is hilariously LIKE a blind man in a room in which the furniture has all been moved.
If you like that kind of cruel humor, that is.
We are generally wrong, and if you have a minute, go back and read the newspaper accounts of great days in a war, and notice that none of the major newspapers are covering THAT. They are covering some meaningless battle that nobody has ever heard of. Which is, I suppose, why I bought a Pendleton shirt last winter that has a little tag in it that says “Made in Viet Nam.”
We have the duality of two parties arguing furiously about a future and a present that they are BOTH completely wrong about, and that’s generally the nature of our American brass knuckle verbal politics.
Right now it is at its most extreme (and dangerous) edge.
But, we have always had two warring “consensuses,” be it Federalist, Democratic Republican, Democratic, Whig, Republican or any of a thousand third parties that exist as perennially as dandelions but nowhere near as successfully. We’ve had the Know-Nothnings, the Greenback Party, the American Party, the Reform Party, the Progressive Party, the Socialist Party and, yes, the Communist Party. We’ve got Greens, Lbertarians, Constitutionalists, Peace and Freedomers, and anything else that you can think of. But their ideas are invariably absorbed by one party or another. Our constitutional form seems to create the automatic duality of a two party system to oversee a three branched government.
What matters is forming “consensus” — no matter HOW many ‘oparties” which are only consensus blocs anyway. We must have consensus to function and consensus is achieved — if only by default — virtually every day of our existence as a society and a republic.
And that consensus is continually changing. The notions that we take for granted were hard-fought at some point in our evolution as a society, and that “consensus” is continually changing profoundly.
Let me give you an example: George Armstrong Custer.
When I was a kid, Custer was a great hero and movie star. Today, he is a villain and a scoundrel. He has been dead the whole time, so I don’t think that Custer was the one who changed.
In fact, he had been a sort of “cottage industry” throughout the near century following his military misadventure in Montana. His wife and then countless others were able to sell various souvenirs of the fallen “general.” Etcetera.
When I was a kid, everybody thought that smoking cigarettes was just swell.
The consensus had completely shifted in a manner that has seen enacted countless laws, seen endless litigation, endless new places to keep smoking legal but make it impossible to legally engage in.
In fact, the only “cash crop” the English were able to originally bring back from their Virginia colony was tobacco, for which a brand of cigarettes was eventually named after Sir Walter Raleigh. Later, they grew cotton and all kinds of other stuff. Consensus has changed over five hundred years.
In fact, “consensus” itself points to what our language-derived “simulation” represents. “Consensus” comes from the Latin words that mean to “feel together.” When a sufficient majority “feel together” then action is taken at whatever governmental level: family, extended family, clan, tribe, state, nation. And the process by which we “feel together” is inextricably linked to words.
So: we caricature the world that we can perceive (which is only a small slice of the actual world of the Electromagnetic Spectrum extended down through matter, which is only a sort of frozen vibration, after all) and we encompass it within a “narrative.”
Which is why everybody has their “creation story”:
In the beginning there was a turtle; there was a great fire in the sky; there was a deep canyon, whatever. And various supernatural beings do supernatural things, and finally the animals are created, but the coolest one of all is humans … *
[* Probably because it's a human narrative. In an aardvark narrative, the supernatural beings would prefer aardvarks over all other creatures on the planet, etcetera.]
Which brings us back to reality.
We have our “picture of the world” that we carry around in our minds, woven together from our five sense and our four “reality” filters (time, space, cause and effect). And we have our linguistic picture of the world that we carry around in the SAME minds, only we have to adjudge that which we are told without the reality principle that we call the “concrete world.”
We have to be skeptical of everything that we are told, no matter how sincere. But without falling into the two great traps:
First that we become literalist “realists” who proudly boast that if they can’t see/hear/touch/taste/smell it, “it ain’t real.”
Well, as I said, the portion of the world that we sample is a small slice of a very large universe, and it is foolish to hold that there are no “invisible” forces, when we live in a world of radio waves, microwaves, digital transmissions, long waves, short waves, AM and FM, VHF, UHF, cell phones, satellite phones, GPS and etcetera.
And the United States Government, which fails all of the tests of reality, since you can never actually “meet” it, but only see vehicles, buildings and people wearing uniforms with logos. The “government” is only an idea. And, if we stop believing in that idea, things fall apart, not the least of which being “money” which immediately reverts to worthless paper and plastic the second that a society stops believing in it. Confederate money, for instance.
But the money is “real” and the goverment is “real” in every sense of OUR lives.
You see? There is no dividing line in our thinking between hit on the head with a brick reality and being TOLD that you were hit on the head with a brick reality. But it is a vast gulf.
The second trap that I told you about?
To be so analytical that you know NOTHING. To “analyze” means to “break down.” And, if you analyze anything you can literally analyze it to infinity and end up by knowing NOTHING about the object of your analysis.
You can be skeptical and still know stuff, in other words.
It’s ALWAYS inductive logic and best guess is the best you can do in a universe that you don’t see as much of as an iceberg pokes up above the water. It’s that stuff you don’t see that is profoundly affecting our “reality.”
The great assumption that we either make or don’t make is that the world is the world is the world, and reflects itself at every level, INCLUDING in our own construction, since we are products of its process.
If you just look at the world that you can see, it will reveal itself to you, because for some reason, the world doesn’t lie. People do. Politicians do. People living in the same household do. It’s a popular pastime.
But if you watch what is happening in the “real” world, and listen to what you are being told in the semantic world, the real world doesn’t lie and the talking heads never tell the truth.
Mostly because they’re just plain wrong, but sometimes on purpose, like Fox News and Newsbusters.
One last story:
My father was a Forest Service engineer, and every summer, he was in the field supervising surveying, projects and usually a road they’d designed that winter from the survey of the previous summer. One week every summer, I and my brother, separately, would go to work with dad.
And he was a woodsman, and a hunter, and he would walk us into the ground and show us animals, and he taught me the most important lesson of all early on:
Just sit down and be silent. In a couple of minutes, all of the animals who hid when they heard you coming will come back out and you will be amazed at how alive the forest actually is.
When I went to New York City in 1987, I took the subway between Brooklyn and Manhattan quite a bit. And I did what all subway passengers do and kinda waited to hear a train coming.
But being from the forests, I had been watching for ANY signs of natural life in Manhattan and something caught my eye.
I started murmuring under my breath: ”Train’s coming.”
A teenage kid turned to me the second time and said “How you know that?”
“Magic,” I said. And then: “train’s coming.”
And it did.
“It’s impossible for you to hear that!” he said.
The train pulled up. It wasn’t either of our trains. It pulled out.
“Look down there,” I said.
I pointed to the track floor.
“Yeah? So?”
“Keep watching.”
Then they came out.
“Rats. Watch.”
“So what?” he said. “Rats. Big deal.”
But this is what they had done: after the train had left and about fifteen seconds had elapsed*, as regular as Old Faithful, rats would pop out of their hole and start munching down on whatever food had fallen on the ground. They would poke and taste and glean. The humans above were oblivious to them.
[* I'd actually learned the rat trick a day before, and you could TIME them at 18 seconds. People stopped paying attention ... 18 seconds: Rats came out of their holes, which is MORE faithful than Yellowstone's Old Faithful which varies ten minutes on two different eruption schedules.]
But then, all of those beady eyes and pink ears and whiskers would pop straight up at alert, frozen for a split second, and they’d casually slink back into their holes.
“Train’s coming,” I said.
And the train could be heard about five seconds later.
He grinned. He got it.
Magic.
The subway showed up. I got on. It wasn’t his train.
Courage.
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