Griper Blade: Tlön, Iraq, Orbis Tertius

I've always been a fan of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Many of his stories are metaphors for religion and God; by taking these structures and beliefs and placing them in different contexts, Borges showed their absurdity.

Two stories have come to my mind lately -- Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and The Babylon Lottery. Both show how a weird -- or even false -- idea can take over a culture or even the world, changing it forever. And not always for the better. In Lottery the idea is an unseen lottery that guides people's lives -- a lottery which may no longer exist, but people see messages from it in the random events that surround them (i.e., omens and prophecy), while Tlön is the story of a false encyclopedia entry for a fictional country (i.e., heaven) which eventually becomes so important to people that Borges tells us that "English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön."

These stories are about the absurd -- and dangerous -- power of religious belief. But they can also be seen as being about something that surrounds us every day. They can be seen as a metaphor for ideas that get away from us. These are the human inventions that grow beyond human control -- economies, for example. The concept of currencies and markets has created something so complex, so outside our control, that people who devise ways to affect them get nominated for the Nobel Prize. It's not like chemistry or physics, it's not a part of nature, but it's become an organic thing that people study. It's become as much a part of our world as the weather -- complete with forecasters who try to determine what it'll do tomorrow.

Yet, to a large extent, it only exists as a concept. All currencies really are are slips of paper and shiny metal disks. Economics is both earth-shatteringly important and absurd at once.

But, as I say, economics is only one example. Nations and borders are another. Nations exist as legal fictions in the most realistic of terms and borders are arbitrary lines drawn on maps. Viewed from space, the world isn't really a multi-colored patchwork of nations, like the globe on your desk. It's obviously one place, not a collection of places. Yet the idea of nations, like economies and The Babylon Lottery, can destroy lives and ruin cultures...

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