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Naming the Devil

Recently, it occurred to me to wonder why we tend to anthropomorphize recurring events or feelings in our lives as if they possessed human, or at least living, characteristics -perhaps even agency. Winston Churchill called his repeated bouts of depression his ‘black dog’; we name hurricanes and storms; Death we sometimes refer to as the ‘Grim Reaper’… In other words, we often award obviously inanimate entities with recognizably animate names.

The older I get in my retirement, the more I question such things. It’s not that I have nothing else to do -well, maybe that’s part of it- but do we really think that awarding something we fear with a name also rewards it with softer fangs? Or are there other, more profound reasons for names? In the words of the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume: ‘There is a universal tendency among mankind to consider all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted.’

So, we tend to anthropomorphize things which might not otherwise make sense: names project a sense of predictability and understanding. But why? What is there about a name? Hume again: ‘Everyday abilities to recognize and infer the mental states of other humans and to represent goals and intentions also allows people to represent, reason about, and in turn believe in, a variety of supernatural agents…’  It’s almost as if, in our desperation to understand what we fear, we populate the world with imaginary beings -demigods with names- and even if they are not created in our own image, demigods unfortunately pretend to stolen agency.

But surely there must be something about a name and its effect on us that shouldn’t require a Philosophy course to clarify, though. I thought it might be time to visit my old classmate Brien on his porch for a searching perspective on the importance of names. He is one of the smartest, albeit the most idiosyncratic of my friends, and a wonderful source of unconventional wisdom.

I don’t visit him that often anymore because I have to navigate his front yard to reach the porch where he always sits. Since his retirement from the university, he has decided to leave the lawn and its attendant weeds fallow to discourage the uninvited. He has also refused to repair the concrete slabs that once constituted a sidewalk to the porch, and they now lie helter-skelter and largely hidden at odd angles and elevations in the overgrowth. He does not suffer fools and so I’ve always felt privileged to see him wave at me from the porch like a monarch. My occasional visits seem like state occasions, and he always has a can of beer ready and opened for me when he sees me approach.

How he ever notices me approaching is a mystery, however. If the day is at all windy, he is usually sitting on his porch totally absorbed in the movements of his favourite cedar tree, Sheda, with the intensity an audience bestows on the antics of an athletic orchestral conductor. In fact, I’m pretty sure he even assigns a degree of agency to the tree, although I doubt he would ever admit it is trying to communicate.

“I thought you might be stopping by today, G,” he said glancing at the tree with the corners of his eyes in case he was missing anything important. He handed me a beer and opened a new can for himself from the cooler he had beside his chair.

I stared at him for a moment wondering how he knew I was going to visit, or if he was just saying that. “How did you…?”

He smiled, and nodded toward the tree; I assumed he was kidding.

I rolled my eyes briefly -it was how we often greeted each other. I had no idea how he used to greet his students, but he had been well respected at the university before his retirement. The students loved his peculiarities; nobody ever slept in one of his classes.

I thought I’d better get right down to my question in case we both disappeared in a haze of alcohol. “Names,” I said. “I don’t understand why they are so important that we use them for hurricanes and other things we don’t really understand.”

He smiled and checked Sheda quickly before he had another gulp of beer. “How else can you identify something if it doesn’t have a name?”

I’d already considered that, of course. “For storms, couldn’t you simply number them?”

“So Sheda is tree number…” -he quickly counted the trees on the far edge of his property- “…number four, I guess?”

I nodded.

“Then what marks her out as different from the rest of them…?”

He had a point I suppose, although apart from Sheda’s proximity to the porch, I really didn’t see why he’d name a tree.

“Anything with which I – and in this case we– have a need to establish a relationship in order to distinguish it from the rest, benefits from an acknowledgement, don’t you think?”

Actually, I didn’t. “Why and who does it benefit, Brien?”

A wry smile suddenly appeared on his lips, and then just as quickly, his face morphed into a merry chuckle. “Well, if for no other reason, it allows me to draw your attention to why I think it’s special -Sheda, despite being a tree, is nonetheless a ‘joint attentional scene’ as Michael Tomasello, a professor of psychology and the neuroscience of social learning calls it.” He regarded me with a grin and had another swallow of beer. “So it’s now an object of shared attention…”

Perhaps he was about to elaborate on that, but I just had to interrupt. “But, so what? Does it require a name to be that ‘object of shared attention’?”

“Do you, G… or do you simply want to be assigned a number, or maybe a nod of my head in your direction?”

Brien has always had a way of diffusing my objections before I can even process them: he handed me another beer and then stared, mesmerized at Sheda.

“I rarely see that branch move, G…” he said, pointing I think, at something near the base of the tree.

“Do you think we should name it too, Brien…?” I said, trying to be clever.

The wry smile reappeared. “I already have, G… Want to guess…?”

You see why I keep going to Brien for advice?

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