Focusing on the psychological again

The University of Chicago Press, which published Joshua Blu Buhs' book, Bigfoot the Life and Times of a Legend, also published a book last year about wildmen in China by author Sigrid Schmalzer, called The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth Century China. The press runs a blog called The Chicago Blog. (Which I can't help noting makes the claim of "intelligent commentary" right under their masthead.. and that makes me want to say, if you have to tell your readers that your commentary is intelligent, then someone in the line of information delivery must be trucking a short load of bricks..)

Oh yeah, zing! Score one for the blogger!

Now where was I? The two authors had a conversation about the similarities between bigfoot and the yeren which helps to reveal the psychological hypothesis, though, as is common with the hypothesis, it isn't stated directly. I think one of the halmarks of the hypothesis is how it is used in just this way. The question of whether this is the correct interpretation of the way of the world is simply begged. (Actually, later Buhs says that the idea the creatures are real "starts to beggar belief," but that's another idiom..)

Allow me a quick digression to talk about that phrase, "begging the question." A lot of folks think it means "to invite a question," but it actually means to suppose something true without proving it true, when that something is rather crucial to an argument. You will note throughout the conversation that Buhs and Schmalzer will simply assume that bigfoot and the yeren are imaginary creatures without going to the trouble of making a good case that this is so. For those who have actually seen a bigfoot (or a yeren) this will no doubt make what they have to say seem a rather unintelligent commentary..

But back to business. If you read the authors' conversation, you will see that they take the psychological hypothesis as granted. They see bigfoot and the yeren as mythic ideas around which human beings are working out their feelings about civilization and wildness. There is within us, the argument goes, an ambivilence about civilization and a corresponding urge/fear about returning to the wild. Here is author Schmalzer:

I, too, am struck by how many similarities there are both in the yeren and Bigfoot stories themselves and in the stories about the people who search for them. In both cases the wildness of the monsters is crucial to their cultural significance—and this wildness is something to fear but also to embrace. The fear of the "savagery" of the wild runs through stories about wildmen who kidnap—and often rape—humans; these stories have old roots in China. But the wildness of Bigfoot and yeren also emerges in these stories as an antidote to the corruption of modern society. Some of the specifics of what that corruption is understood to be differ between the two cases (e.g., in China, it includes the inhumanity of Mao-era political campaigns), but in both places there is a strong environmentalist theme—a romantic notion that Bigfoot and yeren represent "endangered species" and that they (like Goodall's chimps or Fossey's gorillas) offer the hope of reconnecting with our primeval selves and returning to the more pure world of nature.

For Buhs and Schmalzer, bigfoot or yeren is a mythic symbol that represents the ambivalence and urge/fear I mentioned above. I grew up on the writing of Joseph Campbell so I'm familiar with this line of thought. What I don't know is whether this has ever been shown by experiment.

On the one hand, certainly people have created myths throughout time immemorial, but I won't say that I know what these myths represent or how they are constructed. I think it's possible that there are a variety of ways they are constructed. But I do think that I can make a showing of how myths can be created as a response to a fear, and I can do it without resorting to experiment. I'll have to beg certain obvious questions but you'll let me know if you think I've gone too far, I'm sure.

I think one of the primary myths human beings use on a daily basis is the myth of themselves. This is part of what Buhs and Schmalzer are talking about. If we call ourselves "bigfoot hunters," we are engaging in some myth making, taking upon ourselves all those things that have clung to the phrase "bigfoot hunter" over the years. One thinks of Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, or René Dahinden, or some other well known bigfoot hunter. Maybe we unconsciously adopt some of the mannerisms or ways of thinking of these earlier giants in the field. And perhaps we adopt, or take as a given, certain ways of thinking about things because these earlier pioneers thought that way. To become a bigfoot hunter, we make ourselves more like our heroes. Fair enough?

Now there's another personal myth I'd like to poke with a sharp stick and see if any hot air comes out. This is the myth of "I'm intelligent." Some of us probably remember the kids in school who based their entire identity on being intelligent. What I always thought I could detect was a corresponding fear of being thought unintelligent. I think it's that sort of thing which leads one to post the words "intelligent commentary" on one's blog. But allow me to get author Schmalzer to help us out here again (bolding is mine):

An earlier example of this not in your book is Karen Minns's novel, Calling Rain, published in 1991: it's a lesbian romance about a Bigfoot researcher and her graduate student inspired in part at least by Dian Fossey's work with gorillas. (Years ago when I first started the research on yeren, I had fun reading some of these North American stories, an activity I justified because they were "directly related to my dissertation.")

It seems to me that Schmalzer is here betraying her fear of being thought unintelligent. The myth of the intelligent person is a stern taskmaster.

I pointed out before that Buhs' thinks the idea that bigfoot might exist "starts to beggar belief" -- a genteel way of saying something along the lines of "that's too stupid to believe."

Certainly, it's possible that there are wildmen in both places that give rise to the stories—but this starts to beggar belief when one looks at wildmen stories from elsewhere, because then you'd have to posit—as Ivan Sanderson did—that there are several species of undiscovered apes, all over the Earth. The only other option I see is that the image is universal—or, at least, ubiquitous.

That's two theories that explain bigfoot sightings there -- the psychological theory and the flesh and blood theory. If only we had another theory..

But as I said, the myth of the intelligent self is a stern taskmaster. One cannot afford to be seen reading books that take bigfoot seriously, and one cannot possibly delve into the transdimensional or paranormal, because intelligent people don't do that.

NOTE: the conversation between Buhs and Schmalzer continues in two further blog entries which you can find if you navigate the site link I posted above.