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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 17, 2010
Just so
The "just-so" story was defined by Rudyard Kipling, in his magisterial and exemplary work, Just So Stories for Little Children, published in 1902. I remember it well as a formative masterpiece of my own early childhood -- after the Pookie books, and before the all-but-scriptural Kim. It is the work in which Kipling explains e.g. How the Whale got his Throat, How the Camel got his Hump, How the Leopard got his Spots, How the First Letter was Written -- the sort of basic briefing any child needs, to confront a world that might otherwise appear senseless.The account of the Beginning of the Armadilloes, in the High and Far-Off Times -- and on the banks of the turbid Amazon -- is especially instructive. It supplies a theory of the convergent evolution of the clever armadillo, from the Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog and/or his friend the Slow-Solid Tortoise, under the ministrations of the Painted Jaguar. Consulting it today, I realize that my skepticism toward the dogmas of neo-Darwinism might well originate from that story. It is not that I prefer Kipling's account of the origin of species, which was a quite intentional (and very amusing) farce. Rather, that it spared me from developing a taste for quite unintentional farces. In logic, a "just-so story" is known as the "ad hoc fallacy." The Latin means "for this," and it applies to any "pourquoi" explanation of things, given for the express purpose of supporting an otherwise unprovable hypothesis. The perfect example would be the whole pseudo-science of "evolutionary psychology," which seeks to explain why man is the way he is, by means of evolutionary plausibilities. We start from the hypothesis that everything in nature, as Darwin says, adapts exclusively to the end of survival. And then we return to the same place, by a logical circle. This hypothesis necessarily excludes the good, the beautiful, and the true from consideration. Those are "illusory," survival is "real." Religion, art, and science themselves are "explained" by means of sociobiological just-so stories. Today we have any number of these standard entertainments, flashed at us through the covers of all popular science magazines, in which authors of cruelly limited imagination, but with advanced college degrees, declare this or that human trait or ability originated in the environmental requirements of our cave-dwelling ancestors. At the moment this topic is very much alive as academic banter. A recent book by psychologists David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton may have got it started. In an article they wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education two weeks ago, they were defending the proposition that "just-so stories" are the beginning of all science and human reasoning, and ought to be paid some respect on that account. This, I must say, gets everything backward; and on Rudyard Kipling's behalf, I should like to decline their condescending flattery. For unlike an evolutionary psychologist, Kipling would never afflict his readers with concepts as intrinsically absurd as "reciprocal altruism" (which, if it is reciprocal, cannot be altruism, and if it is altruism, cannot be reciprocal.) That is just one example. Kipling -- perhaps our greatest 20th-century prose author in English -- was a satirist of the deepest kind. I say "deepest" because on the surface he is hardly a satirist at all, except in some rather overtly political verses; and even those are subtly loaded with paradox, under the surface. In the Just So Stories he was not merely trying to enchant young children, as adults think he was doing. He had a mind too knowing for that kind of play. He was instead arming his young readers to defend themselves against the faithless simplicities of their adult keepers. No modern writer is quite so subversive as Kipling. And at the heart of him you find, in Just So Stories, the Jungle Books, and everywhere, this shining truth: that faith, good faith, good loyal faith, transcends all "explanations" of the unexplainable. * My Wednesday column, on "unmanning the barricades," seems to have stirred considerable controversy among my hockey correspondents. My assertion that the game remains, relatively at least to the world outside the arena, a little frozen oasis of common sense, objective law, rewarded merit, and manliness, free of political correction, has been challenged. Several who follow the game more closely, noted increasingly "girlish" or soccer-like behaviour on the rink, and all were agreed about the trend in that direction of new hockey regulations. One of my Catholic correspondents writes, in summary: "While I agree with the point you're making in the article, I should warn you that recent changes to the hockey rulebook are all aimed at penalizing physical play, thus rewarding the growing number of soft, visor-wearing European players, or Chicken Swedes as Harold Ballard so rightly identified them. My brother calls it post-Vatican II hockey." No columnist likes to make corrections, but on inquiring into the facts of this matter, I fear that I may have given my readers too rosy a view. Yes, even hockey is going the way of other once-proud national institutions, and becoming answerable to Big Nanny. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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