Lately I've been writing about those things people do because they've been told to. I've been calling them "Lies to Children" and as I cast about looking for examples another type of ritualistic and unquestioned behaviour keeps coming up. They could best be described as "behavioural relics" and I find them as fascinating as the Lies.
Consider the military salute. Why do soldiers raise their hands to their temples when acknowledging a superior? It's widely understood that this is a relic of the middle ages when men wore armour and their helmets had visors. In order to identify oneself to a trusted person, or pay obeisance to a superior, it was necessary to lift the visor with the hand. This physical action is the salute; it's just that now there's no visor to lift. This action has evolved and diverged over the years and amongst its descendants we find the action of a man doffing his hat, and the further remnant of that in the form of simply touching the brim to acknowledge someone.
One of the the first expositions of the concept of behavioural remnants that I can recall was in the televison series "Dr Who" episodes entitled "The Face of Evil". In it he encounters the survivors of a lost planetary expedition that have split over time into the "Tesh" (technicians) and the "Sevateem" (survey team) tribes. When members of the Sevateem greet the Doctor they perform a salute that he immediately recognises as "the sequence for checking the seals on a Starfall Seven spacesuit".
Here are actions that once had an immediate, important physical origin. Over time the physical need has long vanished and been forgotten whilst the action has remained in use. The tribe names themselves echo the concept of a specific meaning lost over time.
Hardly a day goes by when I don't find myself shaking hands with someone. Why do we do this? It's apparently because in order to shake hands we had to have dropped our weapon - a spear, a knife, a gun - and in doing so we prove our friendliness and lack of aggression towards the person we are greeting. Baden-Powell, when he founded the Boy Scout movement acknowledged this meaning and inverted it by advocating a left-handed handshake. The reasoning was that the warrior who freed his left hand had dropped his shield and thus sends the message that he trusts the other with his life.
Until recently I would have told anyone who stayed still long enough to listen that the "two-fingered salute" had its origins in the Battle of Agincourt, when the archers on the losing side had their first and second fingers removed so they couldn't cock their bows any more. Showing that you still had those two fingers was a virtual "Nyah nyah nyah - ya missed me!" to an enemy and a powerful demonstration of defiance. I was going to include it here but a little further research strongly suggests that this was not the case and that the gesture has a far earlier origin that has yet to be satisfactorily analysed.
Damn. I really liked that explanation.
