by Joe Bennett
The worst thing about these flus, just as with the bogeyman in Orchard Lane, was their refusal to come out of the shadows and put up their dukes. Faced with a horror, people cope. Threatened by a remote horror there is nothing for people to do but feel the preparatory effects of fear.
Also on the bad news principle, the media bring us a constant stream of both geophysical and man-made disasters — a gunman goes berserk in Alabama, a volcano erupts in Indonesia, a tornado sweeps through wherever, floods, fire, suicide bombers and end-of-the-world pestilence. It seems non-stop because it is non-stop. Something is always going wrong somewhere. But the first illusion created by the ubiquitous media is that there are more disasters than there used to be. There aren’t. There are just more video cameras. And the second illusion is that they are worse than they are.
In September 2010 the Canterbury region where I live suffered a 7.1 earthquake. It was a bloody good shake and a few buildings fell, but no one died and only one person was badly injured. The cameras descended and reporters from around the globe took it in turns to stand in front of the Westende jewellers in Manchester Street from which the side wall of the upper storey had fallen to expose a domestic interior. It was a strong image. But had the cameras swung through 180 degrees they’d have shown undamaged buildings and people going about their affairs. The world never saw these things.
In February 2011 we got a smaller shake but it was closer to Christchurch and, crucially, shallower. Almost 200 people died and the damage was extensive. A year and a half later we still haven’t knocked down all the buildings that need to come down. Once again the media arrived and there was more bad stuff for them to feast on, though it was interesting to note how rapidly we dropped down the bulletins of the international networks. Within a few days there was a catastrophic landslide in South America.
More interesting was how people reacted to the disaster. Almost without exception they coped. There was stuff in front of them to do and they did it. Outsiders praised the resilience of Canterbury people, their stoicism, their good humour, their togetherness. But there was nothing special. All people would react the same way. And there was even an element of pleasure in shared adversity. The difference between the fear of an event and the event itself is vast.
The media need to attract our eyes and ears. Fear serves them well. Their stories are necessarily distortions. The cumulative effect of them is bullshit. Thoreau was on the ball 150 years ago.
If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter — we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
By and large the news you need to know comes to find you. The rest is titillatory.
14
Good old Occam
Bullshit takes two. The bullshitter can pump the stuff out but unless the bullshittee buys it, it seeps harmlessly away. As is plain from preceding chapters, in order to seduce the bullshittee the bullshitter generally plays upon some common quality of human nature. That quality does not have to be a weakness.
For example, one of the chief strengths of the human being is our inventiveness, our ability to imagine and then bring into being things that did not previously exist. It is to this quality we owe tools, bridges, clothes, houses, democracy, everything. But that talent, that urge, to imagine what isn’t there can also lead us down the garden path to where the fairies live.
I once gave a speech in aid of a cricketing charity. My reward was to be a guest in a corporate box for a day of test cricket between New Zealand and Australia. Sitting in the window of the box absorbed in the cricket was one of New Zealand’s leading businessmen. He’s seriously rich, so rich indeed that he now lives mainly in Australia. At lunchtime I was told that this gentleman wanted a word with me.
He was old. I knelt beside his chair, not in homage but to ease conversation. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you’re a clever chap.’ (I quote that line merely to show that despite his age he was still very much on the ball.)
I bowed my head and said something suitably modest and dishonest.
‘So,’ he said, ‘what do you make of these crop circles?’
I had heard no recent reports of crop circles. ‘Which crop circles?’ I said.
‘You know, the ones they keep getting in Europe, England especially. What causes them?’
‘People,’ I said. ‘People wearing skis or something similar to tread the wheat down.’
The old man looked at me with serious surprise. ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ he said. ‘Have you seen them? Some of them are unbelievably complicated.’
I asked if he thought they were made by aliens. He said, more or less, that there was no other plausible explanation. At that point I turned the conversation round to cricket. But I should have turned it to Occam.
Occam was William of Occam, a medieval Franciscan friar who proposed lex parsimoniae or the law of parsimony, though it isn’t actually a law, nor yet a principle of logic. But it’s a useful guide in the business of thinking. It proposes that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. In other words if something needs explaining and you don’t need to create a new entity to explain it, don’t.
With crop circles we don’t. We have a known entity on hand to solve the mystery. We know that human beings exist near where crop circles appear. We know that human beings can tread on things and are heavy enough to flatten cereals. We know that they are the sole creatures on earth that consciously invent complex and regular patterns. And we even know that they’re fond of playing practical jokes. So until we can rule out human agency we have no need to hypothesize aliens. And we especially don’t need to hypothesize aliens who cross the universe in vehicles of astonishing sophistication, discover a planet, land on it, and then stay only long enough to do a little decorative damage to a cereal crop before heading home. But irrational aliens, of course, are more exciting than prankster human beings.
The chaplain of a school I taught at could have done with studying Occam. (Actually, all chaplains could. But they would feel obliged in the end to renounce their chaplaincies.) Anyway, on the morning of a big interschool rugby match the chaplain was taking an early stroll round the school grounds, as was his habit. Scattered over the rugby pitch, he found the remains of a freshly killed sheep. Now he hadn’t spent years at theological college for no reason. He immediately concluded that some boy or boys had conducted a satanic ritual. Swift were his steps to the headmaster’s study and urgent his words.
The head, who in all other respects was an outstanding man, was too indulgent of this chaplain. He listened and he was sufficiently concerned to mention the matter in guarded terms in assembly that morning. If any boy or boys, he said, knew anything of ‘untoward events’ on the rugby field during the night they were to report to his study immediately after the assembly.
The chaplain had explained the bits of dead sheep by creating a new and unlikely entity — the ritually satanic schoolboy. (Over the course of twenty years’ teaching I did meet the odd kid I considered evil but I met no practising satanists.) In the process of leaping to this conclusion he failed to consider whether known entities could have been responsible. Specifically he failed to consider an entity that went by the name of George.
George was a giant mastiff. She (George was short for Georgina) had been whelped on a farm but from puppyhood had shown a propensity for sheep-worrying. She would have been shot had not one of the housemasters resident on campus taken pity on her and brought her to the city where there were no sheep.
Or at least there were ordinarily no sheep. But on the eve of the big rugby match some pupils from the rival school chose to paint a sheep in their school colours and smugg
le it onto the rugby field during the hours of darkness. Sadly they performed their prank shortly before George was allowed out for her late night walk. The housemaster had wondered at the time why George had taken longer than usual to come home. Later that night she was sick. And later the following morning he put two and two together and reached the conclusion that perhaps he ought to front up to the head to put things straight.
The Holmes show on TVNZ was ostensibly a news magazine programme, but it was also a pioneer in infotainment. One evening in the early 1990s a substantial chunk of the show was devoted to a live studio performance by a visiting British medium.
Before the show the medium asked the studio audience to nominate dead people they’d like to get in touch with. All she wanted to know was whether they sought a father, or sister or daughter or whatever. She didn’t explain why, given her paranormal powers, she needed that information, nor, it seems, did anyone ask her. When the medium entered the studio she made it clear that she was being pestered by the fluttering spirits of the dead. ‘Not now, sweetheart,’ she’d say, flicking her eyes up to the right, ‘wait your turn’, or some similar guff.
Then, ‘I’m getting a young girl,’ she said. ‘Has anyone lost a young girl?’
And of course someone had. They’d told her in advance.
A hand went up in the audience. The medium would then say something like, ‘I see a past trauma and suffering.’
Of course. Daughters rarely die of old age.
The bereaved mother would connive unwittingly in her own deception. ‘Yes, yes,’ she’d say, ‘Emma passed on in a car crash’, and thus the medium hooked herself a name and some good hard information, which she could use to further bait the hook.
‘Emma wants you to know that the pain’s all gone now. She wants you to know she’s watching over you.’
By now the mother would be crying. And the medium would move on. ‘I’m getting an older man. He’s not got a lot of hair. He’s wearing glasses [while fluttering about the studio?] and he’s, how can I put this nicely, just a little overweight [though fluttering].’
Up goes a hand. Sure enough someone’s dad had been bald (most older men are), myopic (ditto) and overweight (ditto).
‘He’s holding a hand against his chest. Did he suffer from some problem in the chest area, perhaps?’
Well, blow me down, Dad had died of a heart attack. The medium was nothing if not well versed in the statistics of the causes of death.
And so predictably on. She’d use probability to fish for fact. Then she’d adopt the fact as if it had been vouchsafed by the dead themselves. If she hooked nothing, it didn’t matter. She could just turn to another of the spirits clamouring to say their bit. In other words, just another fraudulent parasite making money out of emotional vulnerability and wishfulness. Nothing remarkable there.
I taped the show and used it often in the classroom. (I’ve just thought that I should have invited the school chaplain, he of the satanic ritual, to watch the tape. If he hadn’t seen through her — and I’m not confident that he would have done — I suspect he’d have accused her of dabbling dangerously in the occult. It’s how the clergy invariably describe poachers on their territory. Belief is a competitive business. You seek a monopoly.)
Few boys give much thought to metaphysical stuff. The physical is more than enough to keep them entertained. But when I showed the tape they were invariably impressed. Even the clever ones readily accepted the invitation to imagine something that wasn’t there rather than to scrutinize what clearly was there. They believed the woman was talking to dead people. But it took only a few questions to switch on the boys’ critical faculties. And once they’d got the idea, they enjoyed seeing through her even more than they’d enjoyed being taken in by her. In about five minutes they shifted from medieval credulity to twenty-first-century scepticism.
But they had to be prompted to do so. They had all the tools of rational thought, but even though they had no skin in the game, and even though they were emotionally unattached, their default setting was belief, and a willingness, when prompted, to invent an unnecessary entity.
People do the same with coincidence. ‘I was in the supermarket and I reached for a packet of cornflakes just as someone else reached for it. We looked at each other and who should it be but Joan from next door. Would you credit it? It was spooky.’ Yes, I would credit the coincidence. What I wouldn’t credit is the spook.
The brain has a habit of seeing patterns. It’s one of our evolutionary advantages. It is indispensable to deduction. But its flipside is to see patterns where no patterns are, and to conclude that forces are at work that are not at work. The brain does not register absence of coincidence. On the numerous occasions that the speaker bought cornflakes never once did she remark on her neighbour’s absence. The only spook she needs to invoke already exists and goes by the name of statistical probability. What would actually be spooky is if there were never coincidences.
Were our species ever to adopt Occam’s simple principle we would be a lot better off and legions of bullshitters would be on the dole.
15
Just give them a tune
Music is emotionally potent. Remove the musical soundtrack from a horror movie and whoa, it’s a comedy. Mute the ads on telly and they become absurd. Silence the organ and the wedding feels hollow. Puncture the bagpipes and the Scots lose the battle.
Language struggles to compete with music. Words are our primary tools of reasoning, our means of getting some sort of grasp on the world, but yoke them to music and they become little more than corroboration of the tune. Music bangs a tap straight into the barrel of emotion. By doing so it sedates our critical linguistic faculties. At the opera, only the tunes matter.
The Philippines is a tough place. Its three most popular national pastimes are boxing, cock-fighting and karaoke. The most lethal of these, by some distance, is karaoke. In the hot little bars where they drink Tanduay rum and eat lechon baboy and sing with a gusto that is unstoppably infectious, several people a year are shot dead. One song in particular is the cause of those deaths, a French tune made famous by Frank Sinatra. People get murdered for murdering ‘My Way’.
It’s only a popular song, of course, and a popular song is not a PhD thesis. But imagine you’re having a quiet drink in a pub, perhaps reading the paper or merely staring into nowhere as you allow a glass of something to put out the little fires of dissatisfaction. An old man shambles in. He’s clearly on the point of croaking. You try not to catch his eye, but he addresses you all the same.
‘And now,’ he begins, ‘the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.’
At this point, despite the self-dramatising and the pomposity, you’d cut him some slack. It’s morally right to show patience and sympathy to a fellow in his final days, even if he is foisting himself on you uninvited.
But then he carries on with the lyrics exactly as per the song. He boasts that he’s travelled ‘each and every highway’. His regrets are ‘too few to mention’ but he mentions them anyway. He did what he had to do but he was never one who kneels. When he bit off more than he could chew he somehow managed to both eat it up and spit it out. And so famously on.
Now, at what point would you decide that he was a boaster and a bore? And at what point would you, depending on your nature, either (a) finish your drink, make an excuse and leave, or (b) tell him exactly what you think of his vain, smug, tedious, self-deluding self-promotion?
Put the monologue to music, however, and you have a song known throughout the world, a maker of millions for its author and its performer, and a song that some Filipinos feel so strongly about that they have committed murder in its defence. The reasons are two, I suspect. One is the tune. It’s stirring stuff; it puffs the chest. The second is the emotion that it deliberately fosters, a fantasy of indomitability, the heroic ego, bloody but upstanding, defying misfortune, the self as Achilles, a fearless doer of deeds. It’s an appealing notion. It’s also self-flatterin
g bullshit. The only way you can get away with it is by putting it to music.
Compare ‘My Way’ to Philip Larkin’s ‘A Study of Reading Habits’. Larkin’s adolescent narrator identifies with comic book heroes, confident he can ‘deal out the old right hook’ to flatten his evil enemies. But as he ages the fantasy fades and by the final verse, ‘the dude who lets the girl down’ before the hero appears, or the coward who keeps the store, ‘seem far too familiar’. There’s truth there. There’s self-knowledge. There’s none of either in ‘My Way’. But ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ hasn’t made millions for Larkin. And no one’s been shot for reading it badly.
Music is everywhere: in lifts and the foyers of hotels, in shopping malls and waiting rooms, on telephone answering services and in airports. It provides a sort of amniotic wash, an aural bath of supposedly soothing emotion. It’s hard to escape. And a lot of people clearly don’t want to. They isolate themselves from the world with iPods.
So ubiquitous is music and so potent that it acts as a prompter of memory, a marker stuck in the continuum of time. Hear an old pop song and even though you may not be able to name it or recall the lyrics, it will take you back. ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ by Procul Harum, for example, takes me to a tent in the Dordogne and a standard case of adolescent unrequited love.
Though the tune is seared into my skull I never learned the lyrics so I’ve just looked them up and discovered they are quite without meaning. Though the first stanza, for example, is stuffed with literary allusions, uses a vocabulary everyone can understand and boasts conjunctions that imply coherence of thought (if, then, likewise, so), it is incoherent. It is just sonorous noise, like Edith Sitwell on acid, a sort of pseudo-profundity. That doesn’t make it a bad song. It illustrates only the power of music to put thought to sleep.