THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 21, 1995 TAG: 9508180601
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Keith Monroe
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
It's a mistake to name hurricanes Al and Alicia, Biff and Barbara. It makes it too easy to imagine they have hearts and minds, moods and desires.
Last week, according to news reports, a hurricane named Felix took aim, proved finicky and feisty, flailed and fumbled, taunted and teased and prepared to pounce - like a cat. Get it?
But actually, it didn't do any of that. It, like such talk, was just a lot of hot air that spun in circles, buffeted by other air. The waves caused by the hurricane weren't angry and its winds weren't vicious.
There'a a name for attributing human characteristics to inanimate, non-sentient objects or processes. It's called the pathetic fallacy and as the name implies it's a sad mistake.
In poetry, the pathetic fallacy makes for some nice effects but in everyday thinking it leads us astray. It's actually a kind of magical or superstitious thinking. If hurricanes are hes and shes with minds of their own, then maybe we can figure out what they're planning. But, of course, they aren't planning anything, lacking minds.
The ancients made rivers and seas, winds and weather, sun and moon into gods with distinct personalities. They anthropomorphized everything. Then they tried to persuade the gods to spare the prayerful. We smile at the scientific naivetee of such notions, and then succumb to them ourselves.
If names were outlawed, it would help. If Felix had been ``medium-size-weather-system A95,'' it would have been harder to suppose it was turning its cyclopean eye in our direction. If we were forced to call a storm ``low-pressure-area J936,'' we'd be less likely to say it was fickle, or toying with us, or stalking the coast with stealth. We might even be forced to admit the storm was just being wafted hither and yon in accordance with the laws of physics.
Yet even scientists can't resist personifying weather. They often talk as if weather systems are being intentionally unpleasant or inscrutable. And we learned last week that climatologists refer to hurricanes as bad actors. In that case, maybe we should give them names like Joan Collins and Jack Lord.
Only one other area of everyday life produces rhetoric filled with so much superstitious twaddle. It, like hurricanes, is powerful and unpredictable and acts as if human - or superhuman. It's the stock market.
Though the stock market is no more alive and acting with intention than the weather, you'd never know it from the prose we apply to it. Leafing through a stack of recent papers, I learn the market has been groping for direction. Then it suddenly gains a new sense of direction. Good, it must feel ever so much better.
One day, the market exhibits ``unrequited lust'' for new highs and another it ``muscles'' higher until it becomes ``exhausted'' and fails to ``push ahead.'' Poor thing! But, really, the market is only an aggregate of millions of individual transactions. It isn't wishing, hoping or praying anything. It can't push or pull, have boisterous enthusiasm or a failure of nerve.
Yet humans can't seem to resist putting everything in human terms, even when doing so misleads them and misrepresents reality. So chairs have legs, needles have eyes and even the greatest living market maven, Warren Buffett, can yield to temptation and warn stock investors that they are in partnership with Mr. Market. And, ``Mr. Market is a manic-depressive.''
At least Buffett seems fully aware that he's making a metaphor for illustrative purposes only, but a lot of the rest of us lose sight of the fact that all such talk is nonsense. So we keep on fearing the wrath of angry storms, worrying that a depressed Mr. Market may turn suicidal and are only too willing to pray fervently to a pair of plastic cubes to come to rest in a position we favor.
``C'mon seven,'' we say, as if the dice were listening and could be persuaded to do us a favor.
KEYWORDS: HURRICANE FELIX by CNB