Speculating wildly
I’ve been talking a bit lately about the issues of shoddy history, and crazy interpretation, which comes up a fair bit in the new book, Druidry and the Ancestors. I’m being careful not to replicate content, so whatever comes up here is not in the book, for purposes of keeping life interesting. I don’t actually have any problem at all with wild and creative speculation. It is, after all, the foundation of much fiction writing. Wild speculation can lead to testable theories, new interpretations and other good stuff. It can also create confusion, spread misinformation and generally mess people about.
The first rule of good speculation is to be clear what you are doing. Offering interpretation of facts is fine, but it needs to be said that you are giving an interpretation, not ‘obviously this is the only way of reading the data’. It won’t be. There are always alternative stories available. One good way of keeping your speculation under control is to do a lot of it, ironically enough. Postulate half a dozen interpretations, and then talk about which one you like the most or which ones seem the most plausible.
Giving a bloody stupid interpretation alongside your pet theory and suggesting this somehow demonstrates your theory is the only good one that can fit the fact, is bullshit. Don’t go there.
Be mindful of the stories you already have an investment in. The odds are good that you will interpret in line with existing beliefs and will have blind spots around things you either do not know, or believe. I have an axe to grind about how we interpret human sacrifice into archaeological data, for example, so there’s every chance I will deliberately go the other way, perhaps more than the evidence supports. I am positive about historical pagans and therefore unlikely to give critical theories the same weight as celebratory ones. At least I know this. Many of the people who have written history books about pre-Christian folk had an agenda – to prove the superiority of both Christianity and the more industrialised and colonising culture they came from. As I commented on recently in the post about the trouble with animism, so much of this thinking is still ingrained culturally. Perhaps a little bias the other way is a necessary counterbalance for the time being.
Many of us have work or life experience that calls upon us to interpret information. That may be formal data analysis, but more likely about deciding what someone else’s behaviour means, or who to trust, which expert to follow, which political party to vote for. We are all unavoidably in the business of turning raw information into stories. Sometimes it is the wild speculations that take us forward. Could we…? What would happen if…? Radical things can only come from wild and original thinking. Include Green movements, feminism, new technology and modern paganism in that list. We need wild speculation. Without it, we stagnate.
There is also the wild speculation of politicians who want to make us afraid of the wrong things to keep us pliable. There are the wild speculations of creationists, and the incredible theories of people who can imagine rape as part of God’s Grand Plan. Think about it and you will see some interesting differences. The most dangerous, sick and deluded of wild speculations assert themselves as unassailable truths.
Where there is even a small margin of doubt and uncertainty, there is hope. We need uncertainty. A wild speculation that is not complacent about its own merits will be tested, explored, and only taken forward if it starts generating some kind of evidence. The sick and mad speculations automatically assume their own veracity and will mow down anything that fails to agree. Thus when a misguided vision in the hands of the right people turns out to provably not work, it gets dropped, while those who have no grip on reality keep peddling their madness. People who cannot tell between what is real and what they have imagined can get things right – by accident, if by no other means. But an argument you do not know how to back up or verify is not a very useful thing to take out into the world.
The Pagans I’ve met have all tended to be speculative people, and we do like our wild theories (Atlantis, aliens, dolphin priestesses, the burning times, conspiracy theories etc.) There can be a lot of fun to be had playing with ideas, but we need to keep our feet on the ground and make sure we can test what we think is true, and not rely on our beliefs to reinforce our beliefs.
