Once we reach adulthood, there are maybe a handful of experiences that can be described as truly unique. Not unique to the rest of the world but unique to us. You can tell when they’re unique when you don’t know how to describe the experience, because you possess nothing in your memory that elicits a comparison.
But we try none the less. Odds are that some guy named Malachi picked up some manna that had magically descended from the desert sky, took a bite, chewed for a moment while looking thoughtful, and then turned to Esau and remarked that it tasted kinda like chicken.
Because almost without fail, anything remotely resembling meat get’s described as tasting a bit like chicken. I ate alligator in Florida and beforehand even the servers told us it would taste like chicken. I don’t know if manna was meaty though. I think it was probably more bread like but I don’t care enough to look in the google. Still, I’m betting damn near everyone gets what I’m saying about chicken.
But we don’t use comparative reasoning only for foreign food descriptions. We compare every unknown to something known. I was in Europe. I was trying to explain to one of our Dutch hosts how big the Canadian cemetery was I’d just visited. It’s probably about two football fields I said. I was met with a blank look but I realised my error and amended my description to about one and a half soccer pitches. I was understood immediately.
So, we’ve embraced comparative descriptions as a regular part of everyday conversation. In fact, the ability to communicate effectively is based in large part in being able to provide comparisons to something the reader or conversation partner can grasp and appreciate, without that person having personal experience of what you’re describing.
All of our sensory apparatus is designed to detect stimuli. As soon as we experience those stimuli, we then create a measuring devise so we can describe them to someone else. How loud was the noise? Decibels. How far was the walk? Kilometers. How warm was the water? Celsius. And the list goes on and on. Each breakthrough in science is accompanied by a method to measure and compare that breakthrough to other shit we’re on familiar grounds with. Who knew you could measure earthquakes? Richter knew, that’s who. Nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio? Stanley Stevens was all over that shit. Wondering when you can swim at Bikini atoll again? Say hello to roentgen, dutifully supplied by Wilhelm Rontgen.
Comparative measurement is so important to us that if you think of a new way of measuring shit, some academy somewhere names the measuring method after you. Like Wigners friend, which I admit is a measurement that I’m having some difficulty grasping in its entirety.
Anyway.
We like to measure stuff and so we’re good at it. I don’t understand the American tenacity in hanging onto miles and gallons, but that decision aside, as a rule we’re still pretty good at measuring stuff.
The subtler sister of comparative measurement is comparative reasoning. There’s not a defined measurement that you can use and so you’re left with what you can see, hear, smell and feel. After that it’s up to you to apply reasoning to the data your brain has processed thanks to eyes and ears. Unfortunately some people really suck at this process.
Some of the suckage is due to faulty input apparatus. If you have shitty eyesight then it’s difficult to tell how close that rattlesnake actually is to your hand, or if that grizzly with cubs is moving toward or away from you. Thankfully technology has provided glasses and one visit to perle vision and your problem’s solved. But, if your data processor sucks then it really doesn’t matter how good the input is. So, in some cases a person has a glitch in their processor which inhibits comparative reasoning. But what I find truly stunning are the people who have a functioning processor and choose to shut it down. It’s like driving at night and shutting your headlights off because when the lights are on then all the ditch deer you can see are making you uncomfortable.
This is how we get religious people, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, Alex Jones supplicants, climate change and holocaust deniers and Trump supporters. They’ve intentionally disabled an evolutionary app that the human race has been perfecting since our cave man days. Why the hell would someone do that?
Maybe the planet has had enough of our shit. Maybe we have a virus attached to our D.N.A. that recognises when the timing is right for a culling. Perhaps that virus is selectively shutting down our ability to reason comparatively in order to facilitate a thinning of the herd.
Comparison is essential to the success of measuring and reasoning. So, what the hell do we do when we’re presented with a situation that has no precedence? There’s nothing to compare it to in our repertoire of experience and so we react oddly and sometimes badly. Because we’re confused or scared.
I think that social progress changes comparative norms. Experiences that were suitable for comparative reasoning in say, the 1950’s, are no longer acceptable. As a result, most of that generation has had to continuously adjust their comparative standards. It’s hard work and clearly not everyone is performing the necessary upgrades.
Some days I can’t shake the feeling that the virus is doing its job.