Facts and alternatives

I was cycling past a group of tourists when a flash of red below street level caught my eye. I stopped, made sure I wasn’t intruding, got out the camera and recorded a tiny bit of shelter I hadn’t seen before. As I turned to leave one of the tourists was behind me holding her own camera.
 
‘I've just seen what you're photographing,’ she said.
 
I nodded. ‘Shocking isn't it?’
 
For a moment she looked wrong-footed. ‘Well… This is one of the nicer spots I've seen… I suppose it is a bit shocking.’
 
Nicer spot? An alternative fact?
 
Her accent wasn’t the same as mine. Accent, I’ve discovered, is one of the most potent ways we either differentiate ourselves from others or clan with them, so I’ll leave you to guess hers (and think about why you think so).
 
We’ve seen a lot of failure to empathise with people on the basis of ‘different’ characteristics over the last couple of weeks. Some respond to that with glee, some with anxiety, some with action (where I work, with refugees, there’s been a marked increase in people wanting to volunteer although, as an Iranian colleague pointed out, probably nothing like as big an increase as in those joining Isis and Al Qaida), some freeze or decide to keep their heads down and some try to find out more.
 
It’s this last, prompted by Tivoli’s question on my blip last week, ‘If we learn nothing at all from history why do we study it?’, that I’ve been pondering most. History does, I think, show us some of the many things we’ve got wrong. Here’s one, from the new #blipnumberhistory series*:
 
In 1857 the Indian soldiers in the (British) East India Company mutinied. They had many grievances but what set off this rebellion was that their newly-issued rifles required greased cartridges which they had to bite to release the gunpowder. The grease was rumoured to include tallow derived from beef, offensive to Hindus, and pork, offensive to Muslims. The warning that ‘unless it be proven that the grease employed in these cartridges is not of a nature to offend …  it will be expedient not to issue them for test to Native corps’ was ignored.
 
That’s one we didn’t learn, since the new £5 note has outraged some for containing animal fat. But we do sometimes. History has certainly taught us that we need groundrules and it’s gratifying that the Constitution of the United States is selling unprecedentedly well at the moment – 64th of about 1.8 million on Amazon US’s bestselling list (though note: Mein Kampf is 161st).

But perhaps, ironically, ‘alternative facts’ (imagination, wishful thinking, speculation, what if…) have more to teach us. It’s fiction that can tell us what extraordinary scope we’ve got for getting things wrong in the future and it’s probably not surprising that George Orwell’s prescient 1984 is top of Amazon US’s list and having to be reprinted.
 
Still, I don’t recall homeless people sheltering in tents in 1984. (Or 1984, actually…)
 
 
 

There's a long and thought-provoking article in this weekend’s Guardian on this and more, with enough books and films to keep us all thinking for quite a while.


*started by WhiskyFoxtrot and me. Do please join in