At least an informal one…

I’ve gone and bought a new Superman T-Shirt. It’s basically a licensed, imported jobby that’s a blue t-shirt with a whopping great red and yellow “S” on the chest.

The last time I bought one of these was in 2001 and my intentions are pretty much the same now as back then. The one intention relevant to this post is that of a bit of informal social inquiry and subsequent speculation. I’ve been curious to see people’s reaction to the T-Shirt.

I though that given people’s reaction to people in uniform, they would respond similarly to the “S” logo or at least have some kind of knee-jerk response.

Back in 2001, I noticed a few typical responses. Boneheads calling out from cars being one, although not overly common. While the response of young children has been the most interesting.

Once I was performing some (very) heavy lifting around some pre-school kids (around 4) wearing my t-shirt under a black jacket. I got a little bit hot so I unbuttoned and took the jacket off, co-incidentally facing the kids. Without the penny dropping right away as to what was going on, I was confronted by the kids suddenly staring at me with their eyes popping-out.

Now these littlies didn’t actually think I was Superman. At least not after the first moment before they caught themselves. But there was a brief moment of awed recognition and stimulated imagination that went a bit beyond “Cool! He’s got a Superman t-shirt.”

Similarly, around the same time it seemed that I also got semi-involuntary reactions to the uniform from women. Basically it induced blushing, cooing, tracing lines on the floor with the tip of a toe and similar responses in otherwise confident young adult women who while not being overly close to me, were too familiar with me to be shy or giggly or showed little interest in flirting with me beforehand.

I chose to pretend not to notice and just acted myself and with subsequent wearings the behaviour seemed to attenuate. Given that the recognition of uniforms is at least in part an exercise in operant conditioning, one would expect that some attenuation would occur.

Anyway, like I said, I’ve got a new t-shirt. This time around, I was doing some shopping when a little lad, this time either two or three, urgently tugged on his grandmother’s clothing yelling “Look! Look! Superman!” This time, not only wasn’t it a “Cool! He’s got a Superman t-shirt!” kind of thing, nor a momentary flight of fancy, but the kind of full blown, urgent, excitable recognition you get out of adults who should know better when they think they’ve seen a celebrity.

You’ll understand when I say I ducked down an aisle pretty quickly, before Grandma could spot me (indeed, my back was turned towards them before the kid even shouted out, so if Grandma looked around in time, she didn’t get to see the “S”).

I should probably pull out some Piaget or something and mull this over, but at this point, I’m suspecting that there are stages of development in one’s categorising of “truths” wherein in later development fictional characters such as Superman are merely ontologically true within the context of fiction (i.e. real in comics, which in turn are a real part of the world) and the stories true more broadly allegorically or metaphorically (i.e. social commentary). Earlier in development, these categories would be blurred and perhaps entirely non-distinct at the earliest stage, leading to either complete run-away imaginings or at least emotional responses to the imagined.

I am after all, just a guy wearing a t-shirt. If the t-shirt is on or off, I can leap over precisely the same amount off tall buildings in a single bound: None. Nor in the case of the older, female responses*, does the t-shirt alter the way I will treat them. I’m not suddenly more chivalrous nor does the t-shirt improve my sexual prowess.

It’s just a t-shirt!

This brings me to what I think is a related topic, although I’m going to try to conclude without too much elucidation.

On the matter of religious “truths”, how many times have you heard an argument along the lines of “I feel the love of Jesus, therefore God must be real”? How often is this accompanied by reinforcement through ritual such as communion?

Cognitively, different people develop at different rates, to different levels and in divergent ways (see Gardner’s multiple intelligences). What if the categorisation of truths were itself something that developed at different rates, to different levels and in divergent ways? What if Madeline Bunting’s “emotional truths” (in discussion with Richard Dawkins) weren’t purely word salad, but rather a somewhat inarticulate epistemological assertion resulting from her simply being wired differently to Dawkins?

In light of this, consider three possible adult responses to my t-shirt.

1. It’s just a t-shirt!
2. Oooo… Superman. Tee-hee-hee.
3. OMG! It really is Superman! Can I have an autograph?!?!

The first, you could expect from the Uber-rational, or indeed, the average rational person in the street. The second, you could also expect from the average person in the street (of the interested gender/persuasion), be they particularly rational or not. The third clearly has problems in as far as telling fact from fiction.

For the first, to borrow Bunting’s cringe-inducing phrase, recognises no “emotional truth”. The second recognises to varying degrees, an element of “emotional truth” but doesn’t necessarily translate this directly into an ontological Superman, at least not a literal Superman. The third for whatever reason, recognises a literal Superman, which while in a young child may be endearing, is quite unfortunate in an adult.

I think that similar reasoning could probably be used to analyse various claims about the nature of Jesus and the cognitive disposition (and development) of the people making the claims.

I’s also be interested if it ever eventuated that something like this was associated with the infamous God-Spot.

~ Bruce

* Actually, I got a couple of responses from a couple of guys in the local gay community as well back in 2001: I was living in Norwood at the time after all!