There's a classic psychology experiment that goes something like this. The subject is shown a video that shows two teams of people passing a ball around in a circle, and asked to count the number of passes made by one of the teams.
Most people do fairly well. But in the course of the frantic back-and-forth, someone in a gorilla suit walks into the frame, thumps his or her chest, and nearly disrupts a pass or two. Only about half of the subjects notice the gorilla at all.
In the simplest terms, that when we become obsessed with minutiae, we can lose track of large, glaring facts. This is why political campaigns can seemingly focus on what seem like inconsequential, personal details. Michael Ignatieff spent plenty of time in the United States. Barack Obama is a Muslim, or wasn't born in Hawaii, there is no end of examples.
In the wake of the Aurora Theatre Shootings, I'm reminded of a crucial decision in American legal history - the majority ruling in Printz vs. United States. The decision concerned the interpretation of the phrase "the right to bear arms" and laid the groundwork for the current legal opinion that it refers to a personal right to firearms. Clarence Thomas, a strict textualist, famous for basing his legal decisions on the state of affairs in the late 18th century when the constitution was written, was the most extreme voice in this trial, in fact going further than either lawyer.
In a dense decision based on consideration of sources as far back as the 17th century, he decided the intention of the second amendment, as it was written, was to give an individual the right to own a firearm (rather than the idea, already established by decades of precedent, that it referred to a militia's rights).
It was a fascinating decision, and would have made for fascinating reading for any history buff. And its conclusion, I imagine, might have been hard to dispute. It is entirely possible that the founding fathers of the United States intended to allow private ownership of weapons.
But in the reams of close exegesis of century-old sources, Thomas seems to have missed a critically important fact. Historically, a firearm referred to a musket that could unreliably fire three rounds per minute inaccurately. Nowadays there are legally obtainable weapons that can fire that many rounds per second with deadly accuracy. This isn't to make a point about gun control, just to state that any decision made about gun ownership in the 1700s is hardly applicable in a world where a pocket-sized pistol out powers a legion of flintlocks.
We should always strive to find the gorillas thumping their chests in plain sight. Another group of organizations focused on the passing rather than the gorilla are the many far-right groups trying to eliminate sexual education from school curricula. While they remain on the fringe in Canada, insistence on abstinence-only sex-ed is in vogue in the States. One group in Wisconsin argues that sex education "encourages sexual promiscuity and with it a host of social pathologies including underage pregnancies, chemical and surgical abortions and sexually transmitted diseases."
The solution, according to the organization, is to educate teens about abstinence only. In other words, if teens are not told anything about sex, they just won't do it. One might mistakenly get the impression that sex isn't in fact a basic, natural drive from the organization's stance.
This isn't to say that we should encourage teens to be promiscuous, just that we should craft policies keeping in mind that, along with eating, drinking and sleeping, we have a simple drive to have sex.
I was alerted to another dancing gorilla a few years ago in a Nietzsche aphorism. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks "who will ever write the whole history of narcotica?" adding that "it is almost the history of 'culture,' of our so-called higher culture." The aphorism is, of course, tinged with the usual Nietzschian bluster. But it rings with a nigh unavoidable truth.
There is only one culture in the history of the world (the Inuit) that did not use some sort of intoxicant. And the Inuit did not use intoxicants because they had none available to them. Between Samuel Taylor Coleridge's well-acknowledged laudanum addiction, the Amazonian Shaman's ayahuasca use, marijuana cultivation in the 11th-century Middle East, the mediaeval witches' knowledge of hallucinogenic plants (including the psychoactive toadstool that witches are still associated with), or even the latest issue of Wine Spectator, intoxicants run through our collective history as a steady beat.
I am reminded of my trip to Mongolia. The country is one-third desert and agriculture is all but impossible. For thousands of years, the average Mongolian has subsisted on mutton and horse products: meat, milk and, if times were tough, a small amount of blood. Sugar and grains were only available if they were imported, so fermentation and distillation were unknown. And yet airag, no less than Mongolia's national drink, is alcoholic. Made from fermented mare's milk, and tasting something like thin, sour yoghurt with a hit of vodka, the consumption of airag is wreathed in tradition and custom. Regardless of the taste, it's considered rude to refuse.
So humans have sought out intoxication in the strangest places. But the search for intoxication has influenced our world as well, answering one of the most important questions about human origins.
Briefly, the beginning of human agriculture raises many historical questions. At some point around 10,000 years ago, the first domesticated seeds appear in the archaeological record. Prior to this development, humans had lived almost entirely as hunter-gatherers. What makes little sense about the transition is that domestication itself requires thousands of years and plants that can actually be domesticated. For thousands of years, domestication will not lead to improvements in nutrition. So a tribe domesticating crops will be worse off than one who is hunting and gathering, potentially for thousands of years. So why pursue it in the first place?
It may have happened by accident. But there is also evidence the domestication of the first crops may have happened because of their intoxicating qualities. The use of opium as an intoxicant actually predates written history. And there is growing historical evidence that alcohol was the first product of domesticated grains, not bread, because of how early alcohol appears in the archaeological record (and because alcohol is far easier to make).
Agriculture created the myriad societies that we know today, with only a few around the world still practising hunter-gatherer lifestyles. And, as with the example of Mongolia given above, we have been shockingly good at finding intoxicants. Researching a story last week, I was rather surprised to learn that the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act lists a total of 79 substances in schedules I though IV.
Of course, our search for intoxication is not limited to substances themselves. Children commonly practise spinning or fainting games that produce a dreamlike state, and spinning games in particular have had religious importance through history (as with Turkey's Whirling Dervishes).
As with my previous example, this isn't to say that we should all go out after reading this and get intoxicated. But, as with sex, the human drive towards intoxication seems to be a fundamental one. Whether purely religious (as with the soma found in the Vedas or the peyote consumed by members of the Native American Church), purely recreational (a horrendously overpriced beer at a football game) or something else entirely (the millions of tablets of methamphetamine given out by Axis and Allied powers), intoxication has always been a part of our human history.
Intoxication isn't, in itself, anything to be ashamed of, just as sex is, in itself, anything but shameful. But sometimes, in the bluster of a multibillion drug war and the bevy of fearsome drugs in society today (from crystal meth to the substituted cathionines of "bath salts"), we can lose track of the fact that intoxicants, for good and bad, have always been a part of human culture.
My next column will deal more with the ball-tossing. The petty "sport" (not meant literally, though that is an idea for another column) that we human beings, for various cultural and biological reasons, can become utterly lost in.
The scientists who had conducted the original gorilla-suit experiment conducted another experiment after the first had gained notoriety. People who knew about the study were shown a very similar video with someone in a gorilla suit, and, unsurprisingly, it did not go unnoticed. But when the video involved other unexpected elements, those who knew that there was a gorilla suit were no more likely to notice them. Sensing that deceit is afoot is no substitute for carefulness.
