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The world can be strange and
confusing place, populated with all manner of non-existing "things". It may
well be that most of what we so casually refer to as real, is merely a
linguistic convention. We may know that what we are talking about does not
actually exist but we talk about it anyway simply so we have something to
talk about. I think myths are like that. We intend them to be explanatory
in some way, to inform or enlighten yet without taking the myth itself
seriously. Even so, we get confused sometimes and forget that the myth is
only a means to some other end.
I could, for instance, talk at great length and in excruciating detail
about Unicorns as if they actually existed. In fact there people who have
written entire books on just that. Yet I know that I'm talking
about
something that does not exist and probably never has. The non-existence of
"things" is no real impediment to conversation and certainly not to
scholarship. Yet there are those who will understand a Unicorn as not only
a symbol of something else, but as having actual existence, if not now then
in some long lost Golden Age at the beginning of time. I kind of like the
imagery. It describes a world that I would enjoy far more than this one and
it would be so much easier to determine the rightness and wrongness of
things. Alas, the universe is supremely indifferent to what I like. The
imagery is all I can have.
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While I feign a kind of superiority here, as if I, at least, am above being
seduced by my delusions, I don't believe it. I am just as tempted as anyone
else by the lure of a perfect world and the strength of my desire for
escape is powerful. It's just that I've become cynical. I can't let myself
believe in much of anything however much I want to. It's an odd dichotomy:
on the one hand I know that most of what I most want to believe is just
frivolous nonsense and, on the other, the desire to believe is a deep compulsion
of great power. If little kids can do it, why can't I?
I think I like the idea that dragons are really a dim memory of dinosaurs
but I'm told that the great beasts were extinct long before there were
people to fear them. Being familiar with the arguments put forth for that
view, I can find enough holes to at least admit the possibility of our
co-existence with the Thunder Lizards. Besides, it's enjoyable to imagine a
world that is incredibly alien and strange.
Did our most ancient ancestors
just make stuff up to amuse themselves or were their tales a clumsy
attempt to describe their reality? If these first humans were truly human
then they would have possessed the same raw intelligence as humans today
and that would imply that they were capable of thought. If reason is a
necessary component of thought, they must surely have understood the
difference between empirical reality and mere fantasy. In fact, inventing
strangeness and fear in their intellectual landscape would be counter
productive; the world would have been scary enough without making stuff
up.
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While I remain mostly cynical and am skeptical of every assertion of every
kind about everything, I still enjoy the possibility that the
certainty we are so certain about may be yet another self-delusion. Our
smug pretense of knowledge may nothing more than our remedy for a fear of
the unknown. Wrapped in our security blanket of omniscience, we whistle in
the dark, hoping the dark doesn't whistle back.
Most of what we claim to be certain of is a transitory mythology. We hold some
description of events and things to be "true" for a while and then we move
on to some other, more complete description. The old descriptions influence
us in our decisions and then are replaced by new ones and forgotten. We
then adapt the decisions made on "flawed data" of the earlier description
to agree with the new, improved descriptions. Our mythology is in constant
flux and can't endure for even a single generation. If we stumbled across
an Absolute Truth we wouldn't have to resort to mythology at all but the
fact that facts are infinitely malleable ensures that there will always be
myths. Myths fill in the gaps and provide explanations until replaced by an
upgraded version. Not a very stable trajectory for an increase in
knowledge.
The reason I mention all this is not to diminish your confidence in the
knowledge you believe you have acquired; that knowledge is
real after all. The point is that the "things" we think we know may not
exist so that knowing about them doesn't gain us much. Additionally, our
knowledge is mostly about what others have said about what they think they
know. The knowledge we claim to possess is not even our own and is so far
removed from the object of study that we are wholly dependent on the
competence and integrity of the original investigators. We have to
believe someone else to tell us what is real. We have to
trust the whole apparatus of education and have faith in
those who teach us. This seems like fertile ground for the creation of
imaginative myth and empty knowledge. While your knowledge does really
exist, it may well be without empirical content.
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