Futility Closet is a podcast where the hosts explore historical oddities, trivia and strange tales. I like it a lot, but they have a fairly specific tone, I guess to increase its mass appeal. It’s apolitical, avoids [IMO] controversial topics and since it’s about whether certain things happened there is a natural focus on objectivity. None of this is necessarily bad, as long as we understand that being apolitical is also an explicit political stance and the frame of objectivity is also an ideological stance. Both of these are –– like it or not –– tied to respectability politics, civility politics etc.
This became really apparent when I listened to episode 34. Episodes usually end with a lateral thinking puzzle which one of the hosts tries to solve. Here it is [a true story]:
Part of the police manual gives instructions in a language that none of the policemen speaks. Why?
It was Greg Ross’s turn to guess with yes/no questions and he determined that:
- These are instructions police give to someone else, out in the field
- The instructions would not be said to a citizen or criminal, or a specific person (would it be a kitty-cat? Greg asks ironically)
- The instructions would be used in a particular situation (which could be people doing something)
- The intent is not to have a person understand the instructions
- It’s a command, but NOT directed to other people
Do you have it yet? I definitely primed you with the image at the top of this post, but Greg wasn’t. The next piece of information he obtained was that the command is directed at an animal. He still didn’t have it. For almost another minute he guessed what type of animal police might be giving orders to. He even asked, incredulously, “and the police use this?”
It’s not a deliberate piece of ignorance. He was not setting out to make a commentary on race, class and policing tactics, and yet he inadvertently did. It’s the nail in the coffin that trying to be objective is somehow not an ideological stance. I’ve also rarely seen such a clear example of white privilege, which was noticeable precisely because he was probably having a brain-fart. It is pretty tough trying to solve a lateral thinking puzzle in real-time for a podcast.
And yet this is not a brain-fart that many people would have been able to have, even if they tried. People in Ferguson can’t. Palestinian teenagers can’t. Protesting Chinese workers can’t. Indigenous Australians can’t. Uighurs can’t. Citizens of Sudan can’t. People living in Pinochet’s regime couldn’t.
Thankfully few would consider lateral thinking puzzles as being a test of some intrinsic, disembodied, “objective” intelligence –– although given the history of literacy tests, even this is in doubt.
0 Comments