Fairy Tale 1 - Anatomy Lessons

A short introduction

I've been finding it harder and harder to know what to say.  Covid-19?  Anti-vaxxers?  Prime Minister Johnson?  Climate change?  Facebook?  Elon Musk?  iPhones?  Brexit?

Eventually I decided - fairy tales.  Eleven of them (of course).

I'll be posting them at regular intervals between now and Christmas.

They're all short.  As fairy tales, they're intended to be read more than once. I hope you'll want to.

(If you do find one or two you like, please share the link with friends.) (The time has come, it seems, for some self-promotion.)

OK, that's all by way of introduction, apart from a quotation to set the tone: 

“I have been lying here since the time when I—the still living hunter Gracchus—was pursuing a chamois to its home in the Black Forest and fell. Everything took place as it should. I followed, fell down, bled to death in a ravine, was dead, and this boat was supposed to carry me to the other side.”

The Hunter Gracchus, Franz Kafka, trans. Ian Johnston

Anatomy Lessons

One day there was news of seven parts.  Some of us thought there were six parts, and others said eight.  Most of us believed seven was about right.

Some people believed they were ‘components’, not parts.  Others reckoned that they were ‘pieces’; still others preferred ‘ingredient’ or ‘portion’.  Another group entirely insisted that the parts in question were actually roles in a play, and a sub-section of that group had established a separate controversy about which play.

It was difficult to know how best to respond.  The news came initially from a reputable source.  Well, it certainly seemed that way.  The more that we heard, the more we wondered.  Where, precisely, did you first hear about the seven parts?

Some of us had heard from our friends. We all prefer to believe our friends, and when we are asked by the nice people from the survey companies to say who we trust the most we usually say ‘friends and family’, but that’s an easy thing to say and a much harder thing to substantiate once you look into it a little bit.  Do you really believe your mum?  Your brother?  That chap you see regularly at the club?  The woman who lives on your road who always seems to know what’s going on?

And if you believe them about the weather, or cricket, or insects, what about cucumbers, or holidays in Scotland, or the Seychelles, or sorcery?  How long a list like this would you need before you could say for sure which things you believe and which you don’t?

And doctors?  Nurses?  Firefighters?  They tell you there are seven parts and you believe them?

The newspapers told us, the television told us, the radio told us: there are seven parts, they said.

Social media told us – by which we mean, of course, that people we sort of know and/or feel we have some weird connection to, they told us.  They said: there are seven parts!  And we believed them.

Except that some of them – some of the people on social media, some of the newspapers, some of the television channels, some of the scientists, some of the mega-corporations, some of the think-tanks, some of the farmers, some of the supermarkets, some of the drug companies, some of the representatives of foreign powers, some of the people who are influential because they are reported as being influential, some celebrities, some of the people who live on the new estate, some of our loved ones – some of them said there were six.

And some said there were eight.

Very quickly there were factions, and there was shouting.  Threats were issued.  There was a marked escalation in the intensity of the language used and soon enough there was abuse.  Efforts were made to calm the situation and we were all invited to try to think through the issue for ourselves and to be respectful of other positions.  This merely infuriated some people because they thought there was little room for nuance or ‘a position’ in the matter of numeric specificity: there were either seven, or there weren’t.  It wasn’t the sort of thing about which one could realistically have an ‘opinion’.

The difficulty here was that there was no consensus as to the referent: what was the thing to which the parts (or components or ingredients or roles) applied?  In some quarters arguments raged as to the means by which Bayesian inference could be used to estimate the most likely referent, an example of which could then be used as the basis for some actual counting of the parts.  Further meta-arguments (which took place mainly in the real world rather than on-line, for some reason) contested the validity of any counting built on a castle of estimated sand.

Somewhere, a community of empiricists (who specialise in counting things) and analysts (who of course specialise in taking things to pieces) began a systematic review of the literature.  Very hard they worked, and months later they published a definitive report on the matter.  Sadly, everyone else in the whole world had moved on by then and was busy shouting about something else entirely.

It was all most vexing.