Man Can't See What He Disbelieves
By Leonard Wibberley
First Published June 19, 1979
3/25/2016
Tony Praga used to be the film critic on the Daily Express in London many years ago and the one thing I remember him for (apart from the black velour slouch hat he used to wear) was his ability to coin a phrase.
I should be able to remember a whole slew of his phrases but at the moment only one comes to mind. Reviewing one of the great biblical epics of the late Cecil B. de Mille, Tony said judiciously, “This movie has to be seen to be disbelieved.” And that was certainly true.
The phrase contains more truth than one gives it credit for on first hearing, for there are many, many things which have to be seen to be disbelieved — and disbelieving what we see is a common human reaction.
Many years ago, I met an old school friend of mine in Los Angeles, Bernard Ledwidge, who was just returning from a stay in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he had been in the British government service.
We had dinner together and afterwards Bernie told me some of his experiences in Afghanistan, many of which had to be heard to be disbelieved.
He said there were a great number of nomads in the country — tribesmen who roamed from place to place, following herds of sheep and goats. They followed a pattern of living which was hundreds of thousands of years old and they had no concept whatever of what a frontier was or what a nation was.
Thus, their migration took them, at one part of the year, from Afghanistan into the territory of the Soviet Union. But, for them, the Soviet Union did not exist.
They had no papers and no passports and they just ignored regulations and frontier guards and took their herds to pasture on Russian territory exactly as their ancestors had through the generations before there was any such thing as the Soviet Union or Afghanistan, for that matter.
“They only see what their forefathers saw,” said Bernie. “They see with the eyes of tradition — with the eyes of the dead. Anything that is not in their tradition is invisible to them and unbelievable.”
“Malarky,” I said, for in the school which Bernie and I attended politeness was reckoned one of the principle products of education.
“I will give you an instance,” he replied. “I happened to come across some of these tribesmen once when I was exploring the back country in a Jeep. They are magnificent fellows — hard as nails, hospitable beyond all expression, cruel as a knife and tremendous riflemen. They use muzzle-loading rifles, which they made themselves.
“I had a Polaroid camera with me and I asked one of them, through an interpreter, whether I could take his picture. He agreed. I backed off, got him in a magnificent pose — sheepskin cloak over his shoulder, eyes squinting in the high sunlit air and his muzzle loader held in the crook of his arm.
“When I had taken the picture, I showed it to him. He was not only unimpressed, he was bored. It occurred to me that he had failed to make a vital connection — he did not know that the picture I had taken was a picture of him.
“I asked the interpreter to explain this. The tribesman looked at the picture again very intently and then shook his head and smiled and said something.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He says he can’t see any picture,” said the interpreter. “He sees only a square of white paper.”
That was it. He could not believe that the box I was holding could take a picture. His father had never told him that such a thing was possible and neither had his grandfather. Nobody in the tribe had ever heard of such a happening.
Therefore, I was kidding him. Though his eyes could plainly see the picture, his brain could not accept it. For him, the picture did not exist.
“Do they have any decent cigars in this place or is Los Angeles still among the uncivilized parts of the world?” Bernie asked.
I rescued the reputation of Los Angeles by getting him a Corona Corona and began to reflect on the human phenomenon of disbelieving what we see.
It is common to us all – and has been through the ages. Everyone knows that the few clerics Galileo persuaded to look through his telescope at the moon and the planets announced they could see nothing. They were, I think, telling the truth. They believed, and mankind had believed for a thousand years, the moon was a silver disk in the sky and the stars and planets points of light circling the earth on the surface of a series of invisible spheres.
They saw the brain of a Ptolemy and that brain could not accept what their eyes told them.
We are not that much better. We can accept Polaroid cameras, television, communications satellites and flying saucers. But there are some things which we cannot accept, plain as they are before our eyes.
Among them are “Wet Paint” signs and those other signs, evident where ever we look, which state that we have lost our way. We look at them daily, yet we neither see them nor believe them.
But then, as you perhaps say, they aren’t really there.
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