myth : mackenzian

Close-up of old wrapped letters, a fountain pen, and black ink. — Photo: Joanna Kosinska

Maybe you’ve heard this one:

How many legs does a spider have? Eight? Do you really know? I mean have you counted them? In 300 B.C. Aristotle said that spiders had six legs and was classified as an insect. All the world believed him, until finally in the 1400s somebody actually counted and saw they had not six, but eight legs. Aristotle must have been widely respected for no one to question him for 1,700 years. I am sure he was right about a lot of things, but not this time. Finally, somebody counted the legs for themselves instead of just taking Aristotle’s word for it.” —William Earnhardt

Great, right?

Except that—as far as I can tell in a day—Aristotle didn’t claim that spiders had six legs. He did mention spiders quite a bit in his writings on nature. But I couldn’t find anything at all about spider legs, only modern people talking about spider legs and crediting Aristotle for a mistake easy to resolve with observation.

Why didn’t Earnhardt question this story? Perhaps because he’s not alone in telling it. UNESCO’s geologists and evangelists alike have spread this anecdote over the years, and it seems incredibly resistant to correction.¹

Twenty-three hundred years ago, Aristotle wrote about some legs: the legs of a particular species of fly. Arachnids aren’t insects, but, like insects, are part of the arthropod family.

How many legs does [Ephemeroptera] have? Well, it is standing on four, because the forelegs are specialised simply to hold onto the female during mating in flight (the sole task of the adult mayfly). Aristotle, who counts legs based on their functionality, is in fact correct, if that is the kind of species he was observing. We say it has six legs because the forelegs are homologous with the hindlegs. He said four because the forelegs aren’t used for walking.” —John S. Wilkins

It’s fascinating how easy it is to lean on short, slick stories that reinforce our ideas about the world or about authorities we’re skeptical of. It’s easy to trust our favorite writers when they pass those stories along, to take the anecdotes for granted because of the function they serve.

But do as Earnhardt says (and not as he does): observe, fact-check, and investigate, even and especially when a story satisfies your assumptions.

There’s no reason to let a good anecdote get between you and the truth.

If you have a direct citation for Aristotle’s writings that would clear up this conundrum for me, please let me know!

1. The article by B. Lukács appears to have been written in a non-English language and later translated.

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A shiny orange VW van parks on the edge of a cliff at sunset. — The hero’s journey can’t be our only meta-story.

This week on Civic Hall’s Civicist blog: the story that won’t die returns. Andrew Slack uses examples from popular films and franchises to illustrate a subset of “We will win!”, the tale of the orphan who goes up against the evil empire and, after a tense confrontation, is victorious.

Star Wars.

Superman.

The Lion King.

Jesus.

When you rack up how much suffering empires inflict on our world and how these empires cannot fail (or are often too big to fail), it seems as though no organizing in the world can ever set about the transformations required to create the healing that is necessary for our planet and each other.

But we have one piece of hope: since the time that we were Wizard of Oz obsessed toddlers, we have memorized the story of the Orphan and the Empire. And if these stories teach us anything, ultimately, regardless of the odds, in a battle of Empires and orphans: always bet on us, the vulnerable orphans. Because in this story, the story of humanity—we are going to win.” —Andrew Slack

Myths are stories that we use to orient ourselves in the big, wide world, and to organize our perceptions about the world and one another.

Myths told our ancestors where evil comes from, how to secure the crops and assure a good harvest, how to set up basic family dynamics, why people should pay attention to the community mystics, how old enemies became enemies, and why old friends are still old friends. Myth tells us all of these things, even in our time. And so, Slack argues, it doesn’t make sense to develop organizing patterns that don’t take our dogged story-telling into account.

Passing up Campbell’s Journey of the Hero in our understanding of how to inspire and mobilize is ignoring the core raison d’etre of why we even organize. It’s the equivalent of trying to make the human race better with no regard for what drives us as human beings.” —Andrew Slack

I agree with Slack on the power of story and the value of uncovering and amplifying our most functional myths. I do worry that we can grow dependent on the hunch and hope that success is inevitable—and that dependence isn’t in fact functional.

There are two common paths. On the one hand is the belief that all action is futile because the world is ending and success is not possible; and on the other, the belief that victory is assured and we need not be concerned because “we are going to win.” Humans are ingenious creatures who always find a way, we say, so why stress about social transformation now? It’ll happen. Bigotry will age out. We’ll invent an escape from 2°-calamity.

There’s also a third path, one that involves building the discipline to work regardless of anticipated results. That discipline is essential for any change that’s so big it’s multi-generational: when you begin to realize you won’t see fruit bearing in your lifetime, you still need motivation to build that fruit tree anyway.

More than one meta-story will be necessary.

Error by anecdote

The story that won’t die