It’s a big question for four words. Some things we know – like gravity pulls downwards – and some things we can feel – like loving someone feels good. But some things are less certain; amorphously occupying the divide between the empirical and the sensual, they can only exist if we believe. And questions about the shared, communal qualities of that belief have occupied philosophers, scholars and social scientists since time immemorial. ‘We’ is another big word.
Sometimes the evidence is shaky or suspiciously second-hand, and sometimes what we’re asked to believe runs counter to the secular common sense of our age. But the power of belief lies in its power to ignore or reject what skeptics might see as evidence or scientific proof. And that power should not be underestimated.
In the brilliant Don’t Sleep there are Snakes, the linguist and missionary Daniel Everett describes his experience with the remote Piraha people of the Amazon rainforest. Everett recounts a litany of incredible insights and experiences from his time with a human civilization that has proved to be uniquely uninterested in what we might see as ‘development’, ‘modernization’ or ‘progress’. Barefoot, naked and wholly at one with nature, the Piraha seemed to Everett to be the happiest people on earth. Yet exposure to their way of life caused him to lose, by turns, his marriage, his family and his Christian faith.
At one point Everett describes the villagers’ great excitement at a visitation of spirits cavorting on the far side of the river. They were, according to Everett, delighted and highly amused at the spectacular spirit show they were lucky enough to witness. But from Everett’s Western point of view, there was nothing to see but water, sand, and jungle. One way or the other, he simply couldn’t believe his eyes.
Half a world away from the Amazon, deep in the rural English countryside, my mother tells a similarly bewildering tale from my teenage years.
Sanding down an old skirting board running across a blocked up fireplace in her antiquated country cottage she was lost in the sensations of the moment. A radio was playing in the background and while kneeling, reaching and rubbing away rhythmically at the old woodwork she was, as she puts it, ‘away with the fairies’. Then something odd happened.
She felt a firm but gentle grip take hold of the back of her denim dungarees and begin to pull her slowly but steadily away from the old fireplace. She reckons she was dragged backwards about six feet across the bare floorboards.
“Oh for goodness sake Will, stop messing about!” she squawked – still on her hands and knees – before turning to see nothing behind her but the bare plaster of a recently stripped wall.
I was fifteen miles away at a friend’s. There was no one else in the house.
To this day Mum insists that she felt as though she was being looked after, that she was being steered away from that old fireplace like a child being eased towards safety. But just like Daniel Everett, she couldn’t believe her eyes.
Ordinarily I’d count myself as a skeptic. I might argue for the Piraha having enjoyed a smoke or a sip of something stimulating. But I believe my mother; I know her drinking and smoking habits. She’s never reported anything like that since, and she’s never sought to make a big song and dance about it. As far as she’s concerned, it was just something that once happened in that big old room.
Just like the Piraha, she believed absolutely in what she experienced. In my mother’s case she didn’t have much choice, she was dragged backwards on her hands and knees across the floor. That doesn’t happen if you’re just a bit tiddly.
That is why I can believe there is something to the enduring popularity of psychic readings, tarot cards, ghostly apparitions, and all things mystical and mythical. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I do know that I can believe in it. And I’m convinced that within that capacity for belief is the potential to change the world. That’s quite a big thought.
Daniel Everett’s ‘Don’t Sleep there are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle is published in paperback by Profile Books Ltd.
Image Credit
The Song of Hiawatha by Frederic Remington – Wikimedia Public Domain
Guest Author Bio
Will Turner
Will Turner is a writer and broadcaster. He has a PhD in linguistics and he shares a quiet and happy life in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales with his wife and two teenage boys.
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