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The
Sleep of Reason
Ignorance breeds answers, because man is an explaining animal.
It’s what we do. We throw up answers in the face of uncertainty—answers
sometimes deemed ridiculous well after the fact—and hope they
stick. It’s an ongoing and unending process. Aleister Crowley
described it with a typographical metaphor in which an line
of alternating question marks and exclamation marks—hunchbacks
and soldiers—represented the unending inquiries and illuminations
of human cognitive progress. Crowley mused that it would be
wonderful if all our hunchbacks suddenly snapped to attention,
like “presentable soldiers,” but as a skeptic, suggested that
this was unlikely. Crowley then, as a mystic, made an end
run around ad infinitum rational skepticism by proposing an
almost epicurean technique to settling existential dilemmas:
It’s true, he allowed, that he could not prove the existence
of his friend Dorothy and her sausage sandwich, but, he rejoined,
“It’s the taste I like.”
“Why
not be a clean-living Irish gentleman,” he asked, “even if
you do have insane ideas about the universe?”
A fair question, and a pointed one coming from a gent whom
many contemporaries did in fact believe to be insane, however
sophisticated. But don’t take it from the old Satanist, if
he makes you uncomfortable; he was only rephrasing classical
skeptical thought first articulated centuries earlier. The
second-century Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus wrote similarly
of the sweetness of honey, which is an accepted appearance,
based on our senses, but not veridical enough to justify belief:
“Holding to the appearances, then, we live without beliefs,
but in accord with the ordinary regimen of life, since we
cannot be wholly inactive.”
Yes, we can live in accord with the ordinary regimen of life,
and still entertain our insane ideas about the universe. We
can reach aporia, a bemused state, and ultimately ataraxia,
a state of happiness caused by abandoning the evaluation of
good and evil. We can indulge the hunchbacks, invite them
in; because, when was the last time a soldier led you somewhere
fun? Would you rather pound a sixer in a townie bar with a
off-duty noncom in a Hawaiian shirt, or quaff homemade grappa,
squeezed from the dregs, in a bell tower with a twisted romantic
eager to tell you of his latest crush? You know, metaphorically
speaking.
Sometimes answers have a soldierly belligerence, an authoritarian
inflexibility. As when recently, for example, a Cyclops was
discovered on Crete and the scientists tried to tell us it
was an elephant skull.
It’s called Deinotherium Gigantisimum, and it was described
as a “fearsome
elephant-like creature that might have given rise to ancient
legends of one-eyed Cyclops monsters.” This whopping herbivore
is supposed to have swum partway across the southern portion
of the Aegean Sea from Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) to Crete.
It is surmised that remains of these proto-pachyderms were
discovered by ancient Greeks unfamiliar with such animals,
and that the large median sinus cavity beneath the animal’s
trunk was mistaken for a single eye socket.
Cool.
From this confusion, the thought is, came the legend of the
Cyclops race, whose valorous service to Zens freed them from
a subterranean banishment to become the blacksmiths to the
Olympian gods.
Or maybe it was a cave elephant. Which do you prefer?
And then there’s the case of the ancient hominid skull found
in North Carolina, which its discoverer believes “conclusively
proves the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two
million years ago.” Scientists at the Smithsonian Institute,
to which the amateur archaeologist sent the remains for carbon
dating, found the claims dubious and delineated their objections
in a response that can now be found online. Among them:
1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains
are typically fossilized bone.
2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9
millimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest
identified proto-hominids.
3. The dentition pattern evident on the “skull” is more consistent
with the common domesticated dog than it is with the “ravenous
man-eating Pliocene clams” you speculate roamed the wetlands
at the time.
In conclusion, the respondent said that the institute would
have to deny the request for carbon dating, and though he
was intrigued by the man-eating-clam theory, he felt obligated
to point out that “A) The specimen looks like the head of
a Barbie that a dog has chewed on” and “B) Clams don’t have
teeth.”
No, clams don’t have teeth, and that’s no more the skull of
Early Charleston Man than it is the skull of a Cyclops. But
they’re pretty good stories, aren’t they?
In Austria recently, a 700-year-old fresco was discovered
that experts claim depicts St. Christopher in the company
of a number of fawning fauna, including a weasel, which in
medieval times was believed to give birth through its ears.
The fresco, when uncovered, was the subject of much public
debate, but not for its art-historical value or any revelation
about ancient worldviews. The observations made were nowhere
so provocative; they centered pretty much on the distinctive
ears of the weasel. The comments were straightforward and
soldierly:
“Hey,
that thing looks just like Mickey Mouse!”
We can hold to the appearances, and live in accord with the
ordinary regimen of life, but we should not be wholly inactive.
We should still nurture our insane ideas about the universe
because though they may not always be good, it’s the taste
we like.
—John
Rodat
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