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Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson, (1932-2007), the American author of 33 influential books, became at various times of his life a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, futurist, polymath, civil libertarian and self-described agnostic mystic.
Wilson was born in Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn, and lived in New York for most of his early life. He contracted polio at the age of 4 and was cured by the Kenny method, developed by Elizabeth Kenny, at a time when the American Medical Association was announcing her as a quack, a charlatan and a witch doctor – it was about 6 years after he was cured that the A.M.A. finally admitted the method worked.
When asked about his childhood, the main thing he remembers was how frightened he was of the nuns that ran the Catholic boarding school that he attended. “They never gave a straight answer to a child about anything; there was so much mystery and ambiguity about everything which is why there is so much in my novels. Everything was lies, evasion and hypocrisy. I knew they were hiding something and it used to scare me, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was.” He was regarded by everyone as a very obedient schoolboy but began rebelling in his teens when he switched school to the Brooklyn Technical High School, to remove himself from the Catholic influence. However, he remained thankful for the role of his first school in his own personal development, “Here’s to the good nuns for telling me what books not to read.”
Throughout the rest of his life he dealt with the various effects of polio, mainly manifesting as minor muscle spasms, causing him to use a walking cane, until 2000 when he experienced a major episode of post-polio syndrome that would continue till his death in 2007.
“Dealing with the post-polio syndrome has given me a greater self-esteem, as they say nowadays. I’m dealing with it very well and I feel pretty good about myself. And I still have time to think about other people, which is very important. The worst thing about illness is it makes you self-centred. I don’t know…maybe you can get a lot out of an illness.”
Wilson described his work as an, "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth." His goal being to try to get people into a state of generalised agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
“The German philosopher, Husserl, said that all perception is gamble. Every type of bigotry, every type of racism, sexism, prejudice, every dogmatic ideology that allows people to kill other people with a clear conscience, every cult, every superstitious religion, every kind of ignorance in the world are all a result of not realising that our perceptions our gambles. We believe what we see and then believe our interpretation of it, we forget that we are even making an interpretation of it most of the time and we think that this is reality.”
In philosophy this is called the theory of naïve realism, ‘whatever I perceive is reality,’ and has been refuted by philosophers for the last 2500 years, starting with Buddha and Plato, and yet most people still act on the basis of naïve realism and it seems thoroughly embedded into our language, psyche and culture.
The argument that follows on from naïve realism is that of scientific realism, i.e. although our perceptions may be inaccurate, somewhere there is accuracy, the scientists have it with their instruments and that is how it is possible to determine the real reality.
However, with advent of quantum physics and relativity, it has been demonstrated that what you find out with instruments is only true relative to the instrument itself and where that instrument is located in space-time. So there is no vantage point, from which real reality can be seen, we are all looking from the point of view of our own ‘reality-tunnels’.
Wilson advocated that to the extent we remember that we perceive the universe through our own reality-tunnels, it becomes far easier to understand where other people are coming from.
“People who don’t share the same reality-tunnel as we do no longer seem ignorant, or deliberately perverse, or lying, or hypnotised by some mad ideology, they just have a different reality-tunnel. And every reality-tunnel might tell us something different about our world…if we are willing to listen.”
Wilson’s viewpoint on language was that while we cannot really go beyond words, we can get more cynical about our words. He was not the first thinker to recognise just how much we are bound by linguistic constructs, Alfred Korzybski, founder of General Semantics, proposed that we should abolish the ‘is’ of identity (taking the form X is Y e.g. John is bad; Peter is a Communist) from the English language. A student of his, David Bourland Jr., formulated ‘E-Prime’ - a form of English where all uses of the verb ‘is’ or ‘to be’ are removed from the language.
Wilson considered E-prime an effective tool to add clarity to your mind, to ‘serve as an antibiotic against demonological thinking’ and as a possible solution to many arguments and problem which seems otherwise problematic. Take for example the scientific paradox about the nature of light: in certain experiments a photon can be demonstrated to travel like a wave, while other experiments show it to travel like a particle. This immediately puzzled the scientists of the 1920s – particles and waves are entirely different structures and have completely different properties that are mutually exclusive – how can a photon be a wave and be a particle?
Some theorists joked about ‘wavicles’, some proclaimed in despair that the universe is not rational while others are still waiting hopefully for the definitive experiment (not yet attained nearly a century later) to clearly prove whether photons ‘are’ waves or particles.
Here are the puzzling findings, presented first in Standard English, then in E-Prime:
The photon is a wave. The photon behaves as a wave when constrained by certain instruments.
The photon is a particle. The photon appears as a particle when constrained by other instruments.
While the contradiction created considerable trouble, if we take a look again at the translations into E-Prime, we see that no contradiction exists at all, no paradox, no irrationality in the universe. In the E-Prime we are referring to what was actually observed in space-time and we have included the measuring instruments, rather than engaging in an argument about the ‘isness’, ‘whatness’ or ‘essence’ of a particle (something that has never been observed). The case for using E-Prime rests on the simple proposition that ‘isness’ sets the brain in a framework of “Newtonian physics and Aristotelian logic” which makes it impossible to understand modern problems.
Well that’s all good and great for the scientists out there, but what about the rest of us? Let’s take a look at some more examples; first the original English and then a possible E-Prime alternative:
1. John is unhappy and grouchy. John appears unhappy and grouchy in the office.
2. John is bright and cheerful. John appears bright and cheerful on holiday at the beach.
3. That is a fascist idea. That seems like a fascist idea to me.
4. Beethoven is better than Mozart. In my present mixed state of musical education and ignorance, Beethoven seems better than Mozart to me.
5. The first man stabbed the second man with a knife. I think I saw the first man stab the second man with a knife.
In our first and second example, we find a pair similar to the wave/particle duality – considering the translation we notice another metaphysical contradiction has disappeared. It is worth nothing that remaining in the reality-tunnel of Standard English, one might find it very easy to decide that John ‘really is’ a manic-depressive.
In the next example, the Standard English implies that idea contains an indwelling essence of some sort, does not describe an event in space-time and deletes the instrument used in measuring the alleged ‘fascism’ in the idea. The Standard English also implies some sort of distance between the sentence and the speaker, whereas the E-Prime reconnects both the observer and the observed into seamless unity.
Let us leave the fourth example for your own personal consideration, after which, regardless of whether or not you enjoy classical music, you might choose to reflect on how many quarrels open with statements in the form ‘X is better than Y’.
The final example is particularly subtle – no explicit ‘is’ appears in the Standard English. This case is particularly relevant for eyewitness testimony and actually refers to a famous psychological experiment. Picture the scene:
Two men rush into a psychology class, struggle and shout, one makes a stabbing motion and the other falls.
Whenever this experiment has been repeated, the majority of students report a knife in the hand of the man who made the stabbing motion. In fact, there was no knife. The man used a banana.
Wilson wrote full books in E-Prime, as well as other notable authors, including Dr. Albert Ellis and Dr. E.W. Kellogg. It is no easy feat to write in E-Prime after so many years of conditioning, removing it from speech is even harder, but it is likely that people trained in E-Prime will grow more cautious about their perceptions, not rush to judgement in the manner of most us throughout history and they might even see a banana instead of hallucinating a knife.
“That every perception is a gamble seems to be so obviously true that I am continually astonished that I can forget it so many times in the course of 24 hours…but to the extent that I remember I find it difficult to stay angry at anyone. So maybe it’s a thought worth keeping in mind.” – R. A. Wilson
Article and Copyright Hubert Greliak 2011
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