Author: Steve Scott

I was around 7 or 8 when a teacher showed us how to make a version of an origami dragon head. It has just occurred to me that I did pretty well to make it, as just over a year before I had an accident that has meant that I can’t use my right hand properly. That aside, origami has been with me since and the most frequently made piece has been the water bomb in the picture. Something appeals about a piece of flat folding that you then blow into and make swell.

Another trick I learned at some point in my life was to raise my arm up, bent at the elbow, so that the palm of my hand was facing upwards just behind the line of my ear. I would then balance a pile of coins on the elbow, fling my arm forward and catch all the coins in my hand. Pretty impressive eh? Actually, like most things, all that is involved is a little natural ability, understanding some ‘tricks’, and some practice.

It is tempting to say that these skills have no value whatsoever but I have entertained people (especially very young people) with them a lot. Also I have seen origami used to demonstrate all sorts of things, such as teamwork, production planning and other business practices. In one such session I noticed that someone who was not naturally skilled at the folding still provided an insight that the more speedy of us could use to get even faster. I have even managed to get a large group of flighty drama students to sit quietly working in groups of four to produce origami swans for a performance piece.

Still, when it comes down to it, these skills are still not that useful. Which brings me to the real point of this. Sadly much human reasoning, and the education practices that support it, are bit like origami. It is a set of skills that can be used in a useful way, but can also be used without real purpose and even quite destructively. One example is what I call Angels on the Head of a Pin reasoning. I don’t know if people have actually debated how many angels you can get on a the head of a pin but a lot of intellectual debate has ben underpinned by such questionable starting points. I would argue that the origami also has more value than much of that debate.

I hope that makes sense.

There is a strong tendency in science to disapprove of anthropomorphism, meaning attributing human characteristics to animals. There is good reasoning behind that, but I suspect there is also a great deal of species snobbery involved as well.

It is true that we can’t tell what is going on in animals minds. Sadly that is also true of other people’s minds. With other humans we do have more clues because of shared experiences and the use of language but all sorts of things interfere with the reliability of the inferences that we make from what we observe and what people tell us. Modern technology, such as brain scans, can help in the rigour of our studies, but our understanding is still very fragmentary.

So why do I think the ‘avoid anthropomorphism’ stricture is also snobbish. Well we have a history of believing that we are totally unique and superior. It is even built into many religions. Many more people than now also used to think that women and children were also on some lower level and that reasoning about their behaviour was difficult. Most of us have moved on from that.

Avoiding comparing animals with humans risks missing out on vital clues about behaviours. If an animal looks embarrassed, then it is possible that they are experiencing something similar to our own reactions in a comparable situation. After all a very significant proportion of our own daily behaviour is controlled at a sub-rational level. To assume that animals can’t be reacting like us is just vanity.

Elsewhere I have said that I think that animals have some form of ‘artistic’ impulse. That is a two way assumption: that, in some way, the animal is thinking about what they are making or doing in terms of what it looks like but also that when we make or do things we are operating with impulses that are not entirely unique to us. That is zoomorphism.

I am just reading ‘Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It.’ by Janina Ramirez. Coincidently I am also watching ‘Art that Made Us’ and also ‘Nature and Us: a History Through Art’ on BBC iplayer. All these cover some similar ground, weaving their own story around similar times, people, place and objects.

It is important to remember that all history stories are selective, interpretive and sometimes even polemical. Also that the writers operate within the realm of their own knowledge, beliefs and the paradigms they have inherited from others. In addition they have to operate with the evidence available and this can vary considerably and sometimes speculation is the only real option. It is important that we recognise that speculation and also look for the questions that are not being asked.

In the above histories some time is spent looking at the different tribes and peoples moving through the landscape of the British Isles from the arrival of the Romans to the end of, say, Elizabeth 1’s reign. There are Picts, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and more, all coming into and going out of different parts of the islands, fighting, raiding, settling, mating but also, very importantly, trading. Nobody knows exactly what happened or all the movements from one place to another.

As I was taking all this in, I started to think about language and went off on a trail looking at Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Anglo Saxon English, Norse, Latin, French. When you add in barely mutually understandable dialects, you realise that all of these and more were co-existing and influencing people’s behaviour and interactions. When you listen to the history stories there is a tendency for them to assume that Latin and French, for instance are being used by the ‘educated’ few, or that the fact that Welsh now exists mainly in Wales means that all the Welsh speakers were driven out of England when other groups came in. While this drift is true, it hides a more complicated day-to-day situation. At any one time many people would just have stayed where they were and adapted to the changed circumstances.

One of the glues in this complicated situation is trade. Among the objects found in archaeological digs in these islands are elements that come from all over the then known world. Between their origin and their final resting place there is a continuous chain of more ordinary people exchanging goods, passing on manufacturing techniques, discussing and copying designs and haggling over prices.

These exchanges are not carried out exclusively in mime. Bits of all sorts of languages would be used, drawings might be scribbled on archaeologically useless scraps of whatever was to hand, and different coinages would be assessed and traded. This doesn’t just happen at trading centres, but between ordinary individuals across disputed territories, who are just getting on with their daily lives.

There is no one standard English language to day and there never has been, but we all manage to communicate more or less successfully. When I was young there were no regional accents on radio or TV, so it was often harder for some to understand some others. The irony of the current fusion of accents is that local differences are rapidly disappearing. When I visited family in Cumbria, I would hear broad dialect/accent that I rarely hear today. At the same time, if I watch a Norwegian program with subtitles, I can still hear some of those dialect words used in Norway. Similarly, when I was young a lot of my friends were Jewish. At school they talked the same as me, but at home they would often be surrounded by Yiddish, Hebrew and quite likely at least one other European language. I still have random Yiddish words floating about in my brain. Similarly there were Muslim families who were regularly using at least three languages at home. All people and living languages have always been, and still are, complicated mixes.

I mentioned mating somewhere in there and this clearly has an effect on how people interacted in history, but I think we’ll leave that for another post.