Tales From the Third Lobe - Relatavistic Relativism

About the author: Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird. About his bi-weekly column: Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week. View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...

And now for something completely different: Fairies, giants and wee folk as historical fact—or a lesson in relativistic relativism.

Your great-grandmother tells you a story: There are little brown wee people, half the height of a man or smaller, who help around the house and barn in exchange for a plate of food left out for them overnight.

Your other great-grandmother told stories of the huge brutish people, twice the height of a man, who used to rampage through the villages carrying off goats and cattle on their shoulders.

Another great-grandmother tells of the pale beautiful slender folk, so pale they seemed to glow in the dark, who wore finely woven clothes and had magical armors and weaponry and made bewitching music.

Another great-grandmother says your family has lived where they've lived for a hundred generations as farmers and fishers, and that there's never been anything special about you or your bloodline.

And they're each absolutely right.

Especially if one great-grandmother was dark-skinned and barely three feet tall. And another one was a bulky Eastern European. And another one was a pale Irish waif. And another one was a salt-of the-earth oat-and-barley farmer who kept sheep on the side.

Because if you're dark-skinned, people as pale as I am seem to glow in the dark. If you're a stone-age hunter, people who can forge metal (even if it's only bronze) and weave cloth and distill medicine from herbs and brew wine and beer and whiskey seem magical. And if you're of Norwegian/Germanic stock, the tiny brown people on the islands only come up to your waist. And if you're tiny and brown, those hefty Continental types can carry off one of your puny proto-oxen on each shoulder. And even though you might be a savage that lives in the woods, you can still know that stealing is wrong, and that you should work to repay gifts.

See, even before there was writing, there were stories. Every tribe of human can tell stories to their children. And their children can intermarry. And tell their children stories.

And their children might be a little taller, or shorter, or darker, or lighter as they all interbreed, and the technology starts to seem more mundane (even though the stories swear it was magical), until you're left with one blended people who preserve the stories of all the tribes, long ago having learned each other's languages for trading purposes and, having learned from one another, fell in love with each other. Because that's what happens.

And they had children to tell all of the old stories to.

And factual history becomes myth because we no longer have the (possibly waist-high) perspective of our ancestors.

And as I'm writing, I read this. And scan a nifty link here.

There was a Great Flood—great enough, anyway, to make survival seem miraculous. Islands rise and sink—sometimes with all hands—all the damned time...

...if you think in terms of the right timescale. If you keep in mind that grandmothers tell their grandchildren stories.

Without the right context, though, facts become unbelievable. Facts become myths and legends.

For some reason, we only remember the "Gosh! Wow!" factor of the technology of the more advanced tribes we ran across and became absorbed by. As we come to understand the cultural differences and the technological advances, the magic itself goes away. But the memory of the magic remains in the stories.

Literacy was magic once upon a time, if you recall. And the process is still going on.

Effectively, we are our own cargo cult. When we don'

Not believing in the underlying facts of wee folk and giants and fairies and such is kinda like believing the moon landings were faked. In order to not be suspicious that someone is pulling your leg (and to not fall victim to buying spurious exaggerations), you have to make the effort to understand the hows and whys—and be able to make the stretch to understand how things looked from the perspective of someone with a different background.

Say there's a tremendous plague that wipes out most of modern civilization, and all that remains are a couple of remote South American tribes who are immune to the disease. All they might remember of us might be tales relayed from missionaries generatios back of a ghostly people that lived in huge metal and glass anthills that had regular commerce with the heavens and could destroy cities in a storm of fire, and that, if the missionaries could be taken at their word, vanished when we all were taken back up to heaven in the sky.

Maybe a thousand years go by and we're all myth and legend. Then someone finds the remains of skyscrapers in Rio and ... well, you know where it goes from there.

Is there a moral to this story?

If I had to sum it up, I'd say the point is that we're in just as bad shape if we closed-mindedly pooh-pooh stuff that we think is unbelievable as we are if we're gullible enough to believe just about anything.

Think about everything before you decide anything—and be prepared to change your mind.

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Vidicon has been the buddha, but the pay was lousy .