The Evolutionary Psychologist
Why do so many people suspect poor Kate McCann? The answer is that they
resent her hair. Mrs McCann spoke the truth when she complained that the public
wouldn’t have given her so much grief if she had been a bit fatter. She should
have added, if she didn’t have such great hair.
People look at Mrs McCann and wonder if they are seeing the face of a murderous
liar or a bereft mother whose child has been abducted when she glanced away.
Lacking any kind of hard evidence on which to base a real opinion, our cruel
minds, eager to gossip, turn to the slightest clues in the hope of an answer. And
when they stare at Kate McCann, they do not see someone who looks like a
Mum; they see a bit of a hottie. Her tabloid sin is that she has neglected to lose
her looks.
A woman who looks good looks fertile. The reason women obsess over their hair,
although they need not know this consciously, is that it is a public expression of
their fertility: it is the Graafian follicles in the ovary that produce a woman’s eggs;
the health of the follicles on her head allows potential mates to gauge her baby-
making potential. The hair of Kate McCann suggests a woman ready to mate, not
a woman who has given up the chase and settled down with a family. Ironically,
our society-wide quest for youth and beauty has made her seem fancy-free.
Mr McCann has suffered from a different accusation: that Madeleine was not his
daughter but produced by IVF using a sperm donor. Again, the gutter press is
appealing to the latest evolutionary thinking. It has been demonstrated that
natural parents, as against foster, step or adoptive parents, are much less likely
to commit violent crimes against their children. (Of course, any parent is
statistically very unlikely to attack their children.) By suggesting that Mr McCann
is not tied to Madeleine by blood, the press allow us to infer the possibility of his
guilt.
But evolution does not hold all the answers. We can only deduce that the
McCanns have either been disastrously let down by their appearance, or that
their guilt was written there from the start. There is no art to read the mind’s
construction in the face.
The Jungian Narratologist
What comes after postmodernism? The realisation that stories are real.
Modernism thought that stories had to be distorted to make them tell the truth:
think Proust extending his tales beyond endurance; or James Joyce messing with
Homeric patterns while Leopold Bloom takes a lovingly-described crap in Ulysses.
Then postmodernism decided that these quests after truth were just chasing a
rainbow. Truth was a fiction. Writers only existed to play games with one another’
s story elements in an endless round of self-referential narrative tennis: think the
slasher-flick Scream, or the oeuvre of Tarantino; the art of the knowing nod.
Recently, almost without noticing, we have found a third paradigm. Reality
television – and now a news story turned into a novel, as the McCann case
appears to have become – accepts that all of us endlessly live out stories in our
real lives: every romance is a love story, some tragic, some comic; every event is
part of someone’s plot.
Today, when no storysmith can keep pace with the whirlwind of social change, we
have decided to cut out the middlemen and started taking our stories neat. They
are less focussed and take longer to play out, but they are incontestably of their
time, while our traditional novelists are still chronicling their unhappy 1970s
childhoods.
The McCann case is therefore the great novel of our age: a tale of wealth and
fame, parenthood and ambition, state incompetence and the relentless grinding
of the law. We cannot turn to the last page to see how it will end: we can only
follow the narrative at the pace it is lived, and know that whatever the ending, it
will be utterly authentic.
That there are no good endings to this tale should also remind us of the dangers
of our new narrative bargain. For when we make stories out of real lives, we
begin to pretend that real people are only characters. We begin to forget that for
the McCanns, this story has cost them everything. In time, our journey back
towards true fiction must continue; only in the realm of artifice can we interrogate
our being without exploiting private grief.
The Statistician
It’s almost always the parents. Yes, mostly no one does, but when someone
hurts a child it’s generally their own. Most accidents happen in the home, and so
do most murders. It is, after all, where we keep all our knives.
The surprising thing for anyone who studies the numbers is that the public at
large were so unwilling to accept this possibility for the McCanns. Rather than
hold to the statistically likely, we leapt to the remoter possibility of a stranger
stealing a child to order.
Perhaps we were protecting ourselves from our own capacity for evil: easier to
believe in distant (and by no means imaginary) monsters than that people like us
could do something so dreadful, by accident or design.
To be a parent is to bear a terrible responsibility. At any moment your precious
child may suffer harm, and it will be your fault, because they have no one else to
protect them. So we protect ourselves from having to imagine our likely
complicity, in this case by blaming an external threat that no parent could guard
against, an abductor perceived as unstoppable and cunning beyond measure—a
force of nature.
Or we turn against the McCanns, as some have, by claiming that they are
egregiously bad parents; that we would never have left our children alone as they
did. Anyone will do for the villain, so long as it does not have to be us.
But Solzhenitsyn was right. The line dividing good from evil runs through every
human heart. We shy from self-knowledge, which is understandable. Yet that lack
of moral courage means that we see the world less accurately. It harms our
ability to pursue and punish the guilty. It also fails to guard our loved ones from
the nearest danger, our own worst selves.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2007
ALSO SEE
Why do so many people suspect poor Kate McCann? The answer is that they
resent her hair. Mrs McCann spoke the truth when she complained that the public
wouldn’t have given her so much grief if she had been a bit fatter. She should
have added, if she didn’t have such great hair.
People look at Mrs McCann and wonder if they are seeing the face of a murderous
liar or a bereft mother whose child has been abducted when she glanced away.
Lacking any kind of hard evidence on which to base a real opinion, our cruel
minds, eager to gossip, turn to the slightest clues in the hope of an answer. And
when they stare at Kate McCann, they do not see someone who looks like a
Mum; they see a bit of a hottie. Her tabloid sin is that she has neglected to lose
her looks.
A woman who looks good looks fertile. The reason women obsess over their hair,
although they need not know this consciously, is that it is a public expression of
their fertility: it is the Graafian follicles in the ovary that produce a woman’s eggs;
the health of the follicles on her head allows potential mates to gauge her baby-
making potential. The hair of Kate McCann suggests a woman ready to mate, not
a woman who has given up the chase and settled down with a family. Ironically,
our society-wide quest for youth and beauty has made her seem fancy-free.
Mr McCann has suffered from a different accusation: that Madeleine was not his
daughter but produced by IVF using a sperm donor. Again, the gutter press is
appealing to the latest evolutionary thinking. It has been demonstrated that
natural parents, as against foster, step or adoptive parents, are much less likely
to commit violent crimes against their children. (Of course, any parent is
statistically very unlikely to attack their children.) By suggesting that Mr McCann
is not tied to Madeleine by blood, the press allow us to infer the possibility of his
guilt.
But evolution does not hold all the answers. We can only deduce that the
McCanns have either been disastrously let down by their appearance, or that
their guilt was written there from the start. There is no art to read the mind’s
construction in the face.
The Jungian Narratologist
What comes after postmodernism? The realisation that stories are real.
Modernism thought that stories had to be distorted to make them tell the truth:
think Proust extending his tales beyond endurance; or James Joyce messing with
Homeric patterns while Leopold Bloom takes a lovingly-described crap in Ulysses.
Then postmodernism decided that these quests after truth were just chasing a
rainbow. Truth was a fiction. Writers only existed to play games with one another’
s story elements in an endless round of self-referential narrative tennis: think the
slasher-flick Scream, or the oeuvre of Tarantino; the art of the knowing nod.
Recently, almost without noticing, we have found a third paradigm. Reality
television – and now a news story turned into a novel, as the McCann case
appears to have become – accepts that all of us endlessly live out stories in our
real lives: every romance is a love story, some tragic, some comic; every event is
part of someone’s plot.
Today, when no storysmith can keep pace with the whirlwind of social change, we
have decided to cut out the middlemen and started taking our stories neat. They
are less focussed and take longer to play out, but they are incontestably of their
time, while our traditional novelists are still chronicling their unhappy 1970s
childhoods.
The McCann case is therefore the great novel of our age: a tale of wealth and
fame, parenthood and ambition, state incompetence and the relentless grinding
of the law. We cannot turn to the last page to see how it will end: we can only
follow the narrative at the pace it is lived, and know that whatever the ending, it
will be utterly authentic.
That there are no good endings to this tale should also remind us of the dangers
of our new narrative bargain. For when we make stories out of real lives, we
begin to pretend that real people are only characters. We begin to forget that for
the McCanns, this story has cost them everything. In time, our journey back
towards true fiction must continue; only in the realm of artifice can we interrogate
our being without exploiting private grief.
The Statistician
It’s almost always the parents. Yes, mostly no one does, but when someone
hurts a child it’s generally their own. Most accidents happen in the home, and so
do most murders. It is, after all, where we keep all our knives.
The surprising thing for anyone who studies the numbers is that the public at
large were so unwilling to accept this possibility for the McCanns. Rather than
hold to the statistically likely, we leapt to the remoter possibility of a stranger
stealing a child to order.
Perhaps we were protecting ourselves from our own capacity for evil: easier to
believe in distant (and by no means imaginary) monsters than that people like us
could do something so dreadful, by accident or design.
To be a parent is to bear a terrible responsibility. At any moment your precious
child may suffer harm, and it will be your fault, because they have no one else to
protect them. So we protect ourselves from having to imagine our likely
complicity, in this case by blaming an external threat that no parent could guard
against, an abductor perceived as unstoppable and cunning beyond measure—a
force of nature.
Or we turn against the McCanns, as some have, by claiming that they are
egregiously bad parents; that we would never have left our children alone as they
did. Anyone will do for the villain, so long as it does not have to be us.
But Solzhenitsyn was right. The line dividing good from evil runs through every
human heart. We shy from self-knowledge, which is understandable. Yet that lack
of moral courage means that we see the world less accurately. It harms our
ability to pursue and punish the guilty. It also fails to guard our loved ones from
the nearest danger, our own worst selves.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2007
ALSO SEE
The McCann Case Explained
Three "experts" play air guitar with the evidence
Three "experts" play air guitar with the evidence
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
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