Yesterday’s post was supposed to be about two things but when I reached the end I decided to hold the second bit over until today.
Just in case you’d prefer not to read it, it was about the odd multiple similarities between Celtic and Semitic languages. Up until a few days ago, I’d thought it was just me who had perceived, possibly falsely, that these two completely unrelated language families had many similarities. Then I came across a video which mentioned the various points that I’d noticed and connected them to I think three hypotheses or theories on the issue, and I realised that I wasn’t alone in noticing this. I’d also been assuming it wasn’t significant – just a series of coincidences.
This is similar to another incident, this time involving Biblical interpretation. In Genesis 18, Abraham is visited by three men, presumed to be angels. I first read this incident in about 1979 when I was eleven, and assumed it was a reference to the Holy Trinity. I later dismissed that as overinterpretation. Decades later, in the ‘noughties I think, I learned that this was exactly the interpretation others had given to it. Owing to the fact that I had been so young when I thought of it in this way, I dismissed it as childish, and it still has a childish air to me because so far as anyone can tell, there is absolutely no textual evidence anywhere in the Bible or the New Testament for the ontological Trinity. Although there was a verse which named all three persons of the Godhead, this is now generally considered to have been a later insertion as it isn’t present in the earliest versions of the text.
A further occasion on which something similar happened involved the General Theory of Relativity. I can’t remember my line of thought exactly, but it amounted to concluding that the cosmological constant must exist. This constant, often referred to as Λ, is the energy required by the vacuum to ensure that space won’t collapses in on itself. When I came to the conclusion that this must exist to make Einstein’s theory work, I decided that rather than that being a form of positive insight, it was a brainfart resulting from my immature and uninformed thinking and decided I must’ve misunderstood maths, the nature of the Universe or something similarly fundamental. In a similar experience to the one I had with the passage in Genesis about Abraham, I later discovered that Einstein had in fact reached the same position and become similarly embarrassed at its lack of parsimony. This doesn’t mean Λ actually has any validity of course, and Einstein abandoned it later when Hubble discovered space was expanding, but these are once again three incidents where I rejected one of my own ideas because of their apparent naïveté only to find later that “great minds” thought alike. You might think I found this validating but I didn’t. It actually makes me respect the opinions of the people concerned a lot less, because they had the same idea as the one I’d rubbished.
It also goes the other way sometimes. I once studied James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ as part of my A-level Eng Lit course. The last story in that collection, ‘The Dead’, includes a scene where one of the mourners at a funeral is in a different pew to the others, and I interpreted this as symbolising the synoptic gospels versus the Fourth Gospel. Now I’m sure there is nothing whatsoever in the text that supports that interpretation, but there it was. Dunning-Kruger means that this may reflect my lack of experience at writing practical criticism, but by that point although I may not have been at undergraduate level in that respect, I wasn’t exactly completely ignorant either. It’s something which sticks in my mind even now, decades after I’ve abandoned English Literature, and I do mean abandoned – I haven’t tried to read what might be considered “high brow” (that’s a racist term incidentally) literature since I was seventeen. My confidence took one heck of a hit, and as I’ve said before it’s quite a resounding one because the appreciation of literature, particular poetry, is the acme of the human condition. Our whole being, contingent though it is, is predicated on our capacity for language, and therefore failure to appreciate literature is for me, and I’m not applying this to anyone else, a sign of being subhuman. It literally means I’m worth less than other people because of this.
All of these thoughts have something in common: they’re “aha!” experiences which have at some point been assessed negatively, either by myself or others. In one case Einstein himself floccinaucinihilipilificated it. It’s an important process, to have an idea either valued or trashed by someone else, and it’s one of the benefits of being in an academic community. If you just come up with a conjecture and have nobody else to bounce it off, it might go nowhere or be potentially seminal. I don’t have that option, and in some cases it’s a pretty big problem that most of the people involved in a particular area lack it too. Herbalism, for example, seriously lacks a proper research community.
But it’s not just down to the community to support the individual. It also helps for the person needing the support to have the right attitude to the community, or perhaps to find a community worthy of respect for its methods. There are several prominent examples of communities which support a particular set of ideas which really shouldn’t be supported, and it isn’t even really a matter of opinion. One of these is the Targeted Individual (TI – American spelling) community. These are people who believe they’re being harassed, spied upon and stalked by electronic equipment and stalked by gangs who collectively harass them but which is plausibly deniable when perpetrated by each individual. Their beliefs are delusional but this in itself is not a problem because we’re all delusional. The reason they’ve risen to prominence in recent years is the fact they’re able to contact each other online and form communities which support these beliefs. Psychometric profiles of the people involved invariably show them to fit the personality of someone with a delusional disorder, and this very strong correlation is enough to demonstrate that most of them are not in fact subject to surveillance or gangstalking. Many people would go further and claim that much of CAM is of the same character. In some cases this really has become quite pathological, such as in the attempt to “cure” autism by giving children chlorine bleach. Hence it isn’t enough to have a supportive community and is often in fact harmful.
Often, it’s clearly isolation which leads to “madness” but there’s also the “madness of crowds”. The isolation which could be presumed to lead to delusions did not, however, get resolved by contact with others but was reinforced. This is because of failure of people with different kinds of belief to communicate, which is of course what might be called the “polarisation crisis”. People who disagree are now more likely to be understood as enemies than merely people who disagree right now, and therefore are not likely to be respected or listened to. Opinions seem to have become important badges of identity.
Even so, the problem of overinterpretation and appropriate degree of trust in one’s own ideas remain. A large number of people agreeing on something doesn’t make it true. Truth is, I suppose, not a democracy. Hence gangstalking and TIs. Conversely, even if you’re the only person who thinks something, that doesn’t make it false. There are countless examples of individuals having their own idiosyncratic ideas which have become very productive in the long term but which were roundly rejected by everyone else.
Here’s a fairly trivial example of a kind of geometric idea which could be entirely without merit and cannot be extended, but maybe it can. It’s one of mine of course. A point is an item with no interior, consisting entirely of an exterior, whereas space is an item with no exterior, consisting entirely of an interior. I had that thought I don’t know how many years ago and sometimes I wonder if it’s in any way productive. I’m aware that it doesn’t correspond to any mathematical idea I’ve ever encountered and it may be simply an idle observation, but what if it’s more?
So there are people out there who agree with me that Celtic and Semitic languages share many features. Some of them have acted upon this thought and attempted to explain it, which seems to give the idea some authority, but even if developed this may turn out to be a dead end, just a dead end pursued by more than one person. Ultimately the truth may be unknown in most areas of thought, but the discomfort of not knowing must sometimes be tolerated for the sake of sanity. I think it’s that feeling of certainty which drives people in groups like the TI community to keep believing.
A Box Of Chocolates 