If ya wanna talk about the English archers against the French chevalier at the Battle of Agincourt, Tom’s your man. He can also make a mean Irish stew and can race sailboats. He’s a psychologist and pretty damned smart. He’s one of those guys you turn to when you need an answer to a question.
So, Tom and I were out in my shop working on these little one meter sailboats we occasionally race when non sequitur me asks “Tom, how can fairly intelligent people believe all this weird crap that makes no sense at all in view of the facts?”
Now Tom’s first reaction in much of our conversations is thinking “Now where the hell did that come from? But, he’s used to the way my mind works being a psychologist and all. Its too bad we’re in the post smoking era because at this point he should be drawing on a pipe, considering the question. Instead he asked me a few questions to make sure he understood what I’m asking and then answers.
Here I’m gonna paraphrase Tom’s answer the way I understood it. He said that when people are confronted with new information, their minds try to organize it in view of what they already accept as truth. He gave me an example of “blue-blocker” sun glasses. When you first put them on the sky looks bluer, the trees greener and the word slightly different than normal. After a short time your mind re-calibrates and things look normal again. In other words, your mind alters what you’re seeing to fit comfortably with its existing reality.
One night I was rocketing across Japan in a Shinkansen bullet train with a small delegation of people who were attending the “Come Back Salmon” conference in Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido in northern Japan. One of my traveling companions was Claire a noted environmentalist. We were talking about how people change.
Claire had spent five years in Chad in the Peace Corp. When she finally came back home she had a feeling on “not fitting in” much the same as when Becky and I had when we came back from teaching five years in the Arctic. Being curious, she wondered about this feeling, looked into it, and someone gave her this answer, which I again paraphrase.
When we grow up, we acquire a set of behaviors and understanding with which we use to interact with the world. When we are immersed in a completely different culture one of three things happen. One, you look at your new environment and attempt to retain your current beliefs and behaviors. Second, you accept some of the new culture, and retain some of your existing “set.” The third possibility is that you “go native.” Each one of these choices may be different, but in the end you no longer have your original “set” with which you interacted with the world. The result is you no longer accept the behaviors that you considered perfectly normal before you left. You are different, you’ve changed.
A little over a year ago Becky and I, both now in our 70s did a radical change with our diet. We went totally plant based. Now I won’t bore you with the details of that other than a strange thing that happened along the way. I’ll get to that in a moment.
During my life I’ve killed quite a few critters. Starting at age 14 I was a commercial salmon fisherman and I participated in harvesting salmon from the ocean. I went crabbing with my dad and later went crabbing myself. When we lived in the Arctic I killed caribou and moose which provided our meat for the winter. I remember gutting a caribou at thirty below and warming my hands in the offal as I worked to quarter it and get it in the sled.
So, back to the plant based diet thing. Now, for the first time in my life I’m starting to question the ethics of killing other critters to eat them. I’ve always accepted thats just how things are.You kill things and eat them. Its the American way. I’ve always thought people that were involved with organizations like PETA were a little bit, ummmm, strange, at the very least not manly at all.
Change can be difficult, sometimes funny. Another friend was in the Peace Corp in the Philippines where he was working with the mountain tribal people trying to protect their lands from the encroachment of civilization. He told me the following story.
A Catholic priest had come to the mountains and had ended up going “native.” The kindly father had taken a wife and had a couple of kids. He’d ride around the mountain on a horse in military surplus camouflage with a pistol on his hip, making a modest effort to convert the native people to the true faith.
He and his family lived in a small house that was divided into four rooms with doors between each. His wife would stretch a strand of bamboo across the open doorway upon which she would hang clothes to dry. One day the good father was playing with his son, chasing him from room to room. Not paying close attention, he ran through a doorway only to be clotheslined by the bamboo strand. It gave him a vicious cut on his mouth.
When people would ask what happened to his mouth he would say “I cut it on the Bishop’s zipper.” People loved the story, everyone except the Bishop that is, to whom if was eventually relayed.
The good father was called in for a conversation.
“You’ve been telling people you cut your mouth on my zipper!” cried the Bishop.
“It was a joke. No one cares, relax”
“No one cares? I care!”
The lowly father looked at the Bishop and said “Oh F#@k you”
“Oh F#@k you, Oh F#@k you? I AM THE BISHOP! F#@k you!!!”
Our father was quickly shipped to a facility in Texas to have his demons cast out. God only knows what happened to his family.
I guess you can say change can be healthy or in some cases, like the good father, it can have unexpected consequences. These unexpected consequences can take a lot of different forms, like all of a sudden I’m questioning the ethics of killing critters to eat them. I have to admit this this change of mind set was enhanced by seeing all the videos of animals on YouTube with anthropomorphic characteristics.
In spite of it all I don’t think anyone would let me join the vegan club because I still have leather belts and leather shoes and I don’t have any plans to swap them out any time soon. Still, you never know.
By now you’re probably asking yourself, “What the hell is Richard on about?” Frankly, I’m not sure myself. I think its mostly about the people curious enough to fight their mind’s propensity to keep things defined by their past experiences. Its about people who have decided their past doesn’t have to define their future.
So, this evening, as we’re moored in the inner harbor at Nanaimo on a warm May evening listening to the buskers, performing up on the promenade I lift my gin and tonic in salute to everyone who has ever tried to make a change their “set.” Isn’t it fun not being, in the words of Pink Floyd, comfortably numb?
