I’m low key fascinated by the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world. They’re not myths per se, or actual events, but they circulate in kind of a grey cultural space. Early early on here, I wrote about the boiling frog, something that’s been scientifically disproven, but still has use for us as a metaphor to reference the fact that we often ignore even really awful things, if they take place gradually enough.
Today, I was thinking about the proverb about how each of us has two wolves fighting inside of us, one good and the other evil, and the one that “wins” is the “one you feed.” As I was looking for a version to link to, I learned that the story appears to have originated with Christian evangelists in the 60s, originally featured dogs rather than wolves, and was attributed to Native Americans, to the extent that many folks who share it now directly describe it as Cherokee (as you’ll see if you follow that link above). Which was an interesting rabbit hole to follow.
It’s also not all that different from an analogy that Plato uses in The Phaedrus, thousands of years ago, although he uses horses, and adds a driver:
"First the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome."
For Plato, that noble horse represents our more rational impulses, while the other is the irrational—our desires, appetites, and the like. The intellect or the soul is the charioteer. It’s also inflected differently, given that one horse doesn’t really fight the other or ever “win.” For Plato, the charioteer is the winner if he (and for Plato, it is a “he”) manages to keep the horses working together in the same direction (and for Plato, philosophers make the best charioteers).
And for that matter, we could go back another 100 years or so to Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, which has a lesson or two that might still be of use to us today.
If you overesteem great men,
people become powerless.
If you overvalue possessions,
people begin to steal.
I kind of wandered away from my main point, though, which I’ll return to after a brief observation. The main difference between these older precursors and our faux-Cherokee wolves is subtle—it’s not something I think about all that often, anyway. And that’s the way that opposing forces are framed. This is probably clearer in Aristotle than it is in Plato, but it’s certainly explicit in Taoism, and that’s the virtue of seeking balance. In the two-wolves story, though, the question is "Which wolf wins?"
[I’ve written before about how corrosive the discourse of “winning” has been for our political system, and I can think of no better contemporary example than the unwillingness of Congressional Republicans to act on immigration and foreign aid because addressing the problem would give them one less thing to campaign on in the fall. It’s somehow both shameful and shameless.]
There’s a whole set of assumptions that we smuggle in when we think about an outcome between competing forces solely in terms of winning and losing. One of my favorite discussions of this comes from Lakoff and Johnson’s classic Metaphors We Live By, where they consider how deeply the metaphor “argument = war” is embedded in our language. L&J invite us to “imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently." I have to confess, I’ve always kind of been drawn to that.
I’ve written on occasion about my field, and I was thinking the other day that rhetoric is an interesting disciplinary example of a field with two wolves in it. They’re not good and evil, though; at the risk of oversimplifying, I’d describe them as humanities and (social) science. Many of my colleagues who identify primarily with rhetoric do so in Departments of English or Departments of Communications, and that plays a signficant role (though not entirely determinative) in which wolf gets fed. It’s not something that we’re really ever able to “resolve,” because those departments/disciplines each involve a different set of sources, assumptions, methodologies and approaches to knowledge. There are some places where the two wolves live in entirely separate pens, and others where they live together peacefully in the same one. (At Syracuse, there are at least four departments, including my own, each in their own separate college, that I’d point to.)
When I think about it, though, I believe that most disciplines have those two wolves, even at the far edges of the “two cultures” spectrum. Humanities and science are the disciplinary names that we attach to them, but they might also be understood as stories and statistics, truth and fact, et al. I’ve been toying a bit with Rens Bod’s frame of patterns and principles.
I’ve been contemplating this in the context of the opening chapter of my book. I’m probably overthinking it, but I’m trying to pin down exactly how I’d describe the work that I’m doing. Because I’ve got those two wolves inside of me, too. It’s always a little surprising to other humanities folks when I confess that I grew up a math kid—it was my favorite subject for a long time, and it was the wolf that my schools were better at feeding. But I also grew up a voracious reader, so that wolf got fed outside of school, to the point that, even though it was maybe my weakest subject, I ended up majoring in English in college. I wish that I’d had the foresight to take some statistics and more social science while I was there, but the humanities set my path for me. If anything, the dabbling that I do in the places where the two wolves overlap (digital humanities, e.g.) feeds both, and convinces me that balance, rather than winning, is the nobler goal.
This entire line of thought emerged for me as I thought back about Dannagal Young’s Wrong, which I’ll be posting about soon. It’s a book that has direct relevance to the writing that i’m doing here, as you’ll see, but it’s also the kind of book that I wouldn’t ever write myself. But I mean that in a complimentary (and perhaps also complementary) way: there are some books I read and think, I could have written that (sometimes with admiration, sometimes not so much). But then there are books that I couldn’t possibly have written, but I’m ultimately glad that someone else has put them into the world. Wrong is one of those—as I’ll explain, I’m glad to have read it, even if it’s not really “for me.” (Of course, there are also books that shouldn’t have been written, but I only very rarely read them all the way through.)
One of the distinctions that Young makes/reports is between those who rely on intuition versus those who rely on evidence, and that might be as good a characterization as any for these two wolves I’ve been talking about. In fact, we might say that one of the troubles with conspiracy theories (which is among the topics that Young addresses) is that they feed one (intuition) wolf while starving the other (evidence), and they thrive by preying on folks who are already inclined towards intuition in the first place. I’m not sure that Young would put it that way, partly because her book leans heavily towards the evidence side of communication studies.
But me? I’ve been feeding the humanities wolf for a long time now, and those are the eyes I read with. More soon.