First Contact
Monday, 14 January 2008
I have been covering the topic of critical thinking and reasoning with my ToK (Theory of Knowledge) classes this week. As a diversion from the ‘normal’ work on deductive and inductive reasoning, validity and invalidity, correlation vs causation, and so on, I looked at a real historical example where reasoning was used in an attempt to make sense of a completely new and unfamiliar situation.
In the early 1930s, the Highlands of Papua New Guinea were one of the last unexplored regions left in the world. This situation changed when a group of Australians ventured into the mountains in 1930 searching for gold. What they encountered amazed them - they discovered a number of wide, very fertile, well-watered valleys running through the elevated parts of the Highlands. In those valleys lived almost one million people whose existence the rest of the world had never suspected. It was the last large-scale ‘first contact’ encounter between indigenous people and the outside world.
Unlike earlier ‘first contact’ experiences in Africa, the Americas and elsewhere, the Australian gold explorers in New Guinea took cameras, both still and movies, to record their remarkable experiences. 
About 25 years ago, this archival footage was made into a feature-length film, called First Contact, which also included interviews with men and women who remembered those first encounters with outsiders - they were children at the time, but of course they remembered their strange, almost alien, experiences very vividly.
Before the intrusion of the outsiders, the Highlands people assumed they were the only living humans. That was a reasonable assumption based on sound inductive reasoning - they had never encountered anyone else - and so their unique existence was accepted as a basic assumption of their worldview.
Within that framework, they used reasoning to make sense of the arrival of the outsiders. At first, the white-skinned people were thought to be spirits. When Highlanders died, their bodies were smeared with white clay and placed in the river. So when white-skinned beings started sifting through the riverbeds searching for gold, the Highlanders naturally assumed the dead spirits had returned to look for their bones. It was assumed they could not be “of the living” because they wore trousers, and they were wrapped up so neatly that they could not possibly have any body wastes to excrete. They spoke in a language that could not be understood, they had “fire sticks” (guns) that could kill a pig without 
touching it, and they brought “boxes full of ghosts and spirits that made the music of the dead” (i.e. gramophones).
In time, the truth became known (yes, there IS such a thing as truth in this context, even if some of the details and interpretations are disputed!). In the movie First Contact, an old man tells of the time when, as a young boy, he watched one of the “spirits” defecate. He was so excited by this discovery that they must be human after all that after the white man departed, the boy immediately went over, collected the excrement and ran home to show it to his excited parents. As his father said “their skin may be different, but their shit smells just like ours”.
In 1983, I was delayed for several hours at Goroka Airport (in the Highlands), and having just seen a pre-release of the film First Contact, I used the opportunity to approach some of the old men to ask if THEY remembered any personal ‘first contact’ encounters. The old men were delighted to be asked, and they proudly gave me their stories of how they too took samples of white men’s ‘manure’, or bravely plucked hairs from 
the backs of their legs, or took home their garbage for their fathers to turn into head-dresses (see image to the right). I got the impression that these old men had never been asked for their accounts of First Contact before; sadly, I suspect that most of these eye-witnesses to history have since passed away.
The point of all this is that the process of reasoning used by the Highlanders was both valid and sophisticated. Deductive reasoning is like a mathematical proof - it can provide us with 100% certainty IF the logic is valid and IF the assumptions are accurate. In the case of the Highlanders, it was their assumptions that were flawed - quite simply, they were NOT the only human beings on the planet as they presumed.
Untold numbers of arguments and conflicts arise between people because of different underlying assumptions. Rational arguments become almost impossible (and certainly unproductive) when basic assumptions are not shared or agreed. And yet, most people are actually unaware of the assumptions they make, as they are so close to their basic view of the world. For most of us, our personal assumptions are almost impossible to identify without the help of others, and perhaps even more difficult to change.
The experience of the New Guinea Highlanders, and they way they applied valid logic and reasoning to arrive at an absurd conclusion can be a lesson to everyone. Assumptions matter! As G K Chesterton (1874-1936) said “ You can only find truth using logic if you have already found truth without it”.
Or, as I sometimes say (much less eloquently than Chesterton), if you want a definition of water, don’t ask a fish!
I captured this image of local people at a “sing-sing” near Minj in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, May 1983
