Idon’t know about you, but ever since I can remember – from my early teens – I have been bemused about the endless rituals we humans perform; and even more so about what can and can’t be said about these rituals, especially when the rituals involve obvious hypocrisies or are illogical.

Do you see what I just did with my opening paragraph?

Obviously, through a brief personal reflection, I tried to give you a general sense of what much of Steven Pinker’s book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows is about: namely, that we often perform perplexing rituals for the sake of harmony, and if we draw attention to the quizzical aspects of those rituals – if we make these aspects common knowledge – we can get into trouble.

But I also did something else. I started with the innocuous, “I don’t k

See Full Page