I’m as bemused as anybody by the frenzy over “Ida,” the 47 million year old proto-primate whose fossil remains have became an instant global obsession.

However, an entry at Not Exactly Rocket Science, which attempts to debunk the ongoing hysteria through extreme exaggeration, may paradoxically provide some useful hints as to what is actually going on.

“The creature has been named Darwinius masillae, but also goes by Ida, the Link, the Chosen One and She Who Will Save Us All,” writes Ed Yong. “The new fossil is remarkably complete and well-preserved, although the media glossed over these facts in favour of the creature’s ability to cure swine flu. … Businesses around the world are also hoping that demand for Ida merchandise will stimulate an ailing global economy out of recession.”

She Who Will Save Us All?

Of course. It becomes clear now.

It is obvious from various accounts that the wonder-working Ida is simultaneously perceived as (1) a little girl who died at the age of nine months, (2) the mother of all humankind, and (3) a being of unimaginable antiquity.

Clearly, then, she must be an incarnation of Robert Graves’ Triple Goddess — simultaneously maiden, mother, and crone.

If the point needed any further confirmation, “Ida” is also the name of a mountain in Crete where the god Zeus is said to have been born.

I still don’t altogether understand the extent of the frenzy — but it seems undeniable that we are witnessing a modern theogony in progress.

Related:

A listing of all my posts on higher knowledge can be found here.

A general overview of the areas of interest covered at this blog can be found here.

A chronological listing of all entries at this blog, with brief descriptions, can be found here.

The subject of conspiracy theory keeps nagging at me. The more I think about the kinds of situations that give rise to conspiracy theories, the less they seem like matters that we might hope to resolve by establishing clear-cut facts of history or politics. Instead, they present a kind of philosophical black hole.

A year ago, I suggested — at least half seriously — that conspiracy theories may challenge our assumption that there is a real reality out there which we can discover by applying the proper methods. I still suspect that might be true, but at the moment I’m more inclined to see the problem not as one of ontology — the nature of reality itself — but of epistemology — the sources of human knowledge.

We human beings are, on the whole, very good at starting with an inadequate set of clues and squeezing useful information out of them. The more complex and fragmentary the data we have to work with, however, the more likely we are to run up against the limitations of our methodology.

One of our most tried-and-true approaches is to patiently sift through whatever facts are available, looking for similarities and meaningful connections, until we arrive at some sort of conclusion. This method works best in the physical sciences, where the facts are solid and unambiguous and follow simple patterns of cause and effect.

It becomes less reliable when we try to apply it to living creatures, unless we have enough data to look for statistically meaningful patterns. And if our sample includes many rare or unique events — as is frequently the case with human history — the “noise” of individual goals and idiosyncrasies is likely to drown out the “signal” of any coherent pattern.

That is why our history books tend to be strongest on stirring accounts of kings and wars and revolutions and weak on plausible generalizations about how empires rise and fall or why civilizations appear in some places and not in others. With rare exceptions, we just don’t know enough to distinguish the unique from the universal.

This is the same problem that afflicts conspiracy theories. Because events like the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 are unique in modern American history, there is nothing to which they can usefully be compared. No amount of fact-gathering will ever lead to definitive conclusions, and adding new and possibly irrelevant bits of data to the mix tends to blur the picture instead of clarifying it.

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All the great philosophies, in one way or another, offer the same simple message: The reality we inhabit is no more than a thin skin stretched over the substance of true reality.

This skin might be compared to the tenuous films of air and water that sustains life on the surface of our planet. Everywhere above our heads and everywhere beneath our feet lies a vast, unknown domain.

There are many ways of conceptualizing this larger domain, all of them useful to a degree and all of them ludicrously inadequate. We are creatures of the surface and never experience the depth of reality directly. Instead, we infer its existence and nature through the effects it has on our mundane world — and we devise metaphors, drawn from the things we do know, to express our inferences.

Recently, many of our older metaphors — such as “God” and “spirit” — have become decidedly creaky and started to show their age. They were made for a world in which the social relationships and state of scientific knowledge were very different from our own, and they no longer function effectively to attune us to the workings of a greater reality.

Rather than pointing towards higher dimensions of existence, as they once did, those words have become coopted by the mundane world of power and greed. They are used to justify self-promoting agendas and have a largely negative impact on our public discourse.

We need a fresh start — and a supply of new metaphors with the power to challenge these once dynamic but now degraded words and images.

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Of course conspiracies exist. Human beings just *love* to conspire together. It comes as naturally to us as breathing and is as instinctive as two six-year-olds cooking up a secret plan and agreeing not to share it with the five-year-old next door.

I’m more than half convinced that language was invented to make it easier for proto-humans to keep secrets — which is something you can’t do nearly as well when everybody communicates by yelling “oonk, oonk, oonk” across the clearing. Even such basic items as clothing and houses may have originally been devised to enhance the game of “what am I hiding” long before they were put to any more practical purposes. Conspiracy has been a great driver of cultural evolution.

On the other hand, there’s one major problem with conspiracies — and that is gossip. Human beings love to be let in on secrets, but they aren’t all that good at actually keeping them concealed, especially not in the long run. Secrets are a form of social currency, and the rewards to be gained by spreading them around are almost always greater than the rewards for keeping them buried.

So even though I accept the notion that conspiracies happen on a regular basis, I’m pretty skeptical of the stories about vast, complicated, multi-generational conspiracies that are peddled by many conspiracy theorists. Those scenarios just don’t seem to reflect human nature.

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Every era has its defining metaphors — phrases, images, or concepts that begin as references to something limited and well-defined, but that steadily expand and take on broader meaning until they come to express a culture’s entire view of its nature, its values, and its ultimate purposes.

Some of these metaphors start as the names of particular social institutions but gradually come to be perceived as the essence of society itself. For example, the Roman Empire began as a mere improvisation to cope with the failings of the Roman Republic — but over the course of several centuries, it was transformed into an ideal image of stability and accomplishment so powerful that the idea of the Empire survived the fall of Rome itself and haunts us even to this day.

In a very real sense, for example, the Cold War was a result of the United States and Russia both laying claim to being the ultimate heir of Rome. On the negative side of the same archetype, both countries have been accused at times of being evil empires. Once established, universal metaphors retain their power for a long, long while.

Similarly, “the Church” for medieval Europeans or “democracy” for mid-twentieth century Americans were not merely one institution among many. They were the context within which all of society existed and which provided the values by which all of society was to be judged.

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