Some...More...Enough

So, what to write about today?
I could write about Dr. Henry Morgantaler being named to the Order of Canada...except that anything that could possibly be written about this has been written seventeen times. I've seen everything from "the man is a hero" to "the man is the biggest serial murderer in world history". That covers a lot of ground and I don't think there's anything I can add.
I could certainly do another (thousand) Peak Oil entries. An attack on Iran looks increasingly imminent. Should that come to pass, you'll see oil jump to $200/bbl almost instantly. Fuel would likely be rationed; widespread shortages would ensue. And I know it's hard to think about this at the beginning of July, but winter's coming. We've already heard that natural gas bills will increase by as much as 45%. (Aside: we were laughed at when we bought this house because it has electric baseboard heating. We weren't even supposed to see this place because, supposedly, houses with electric heat are impossible to sell. Well, who's laughing now?)
I wanted to write an iPod shuffle entry, wherein I'd pick say five songs on my 'Pod and detail what they meant to me. Still might do that, even though I know most people would be bored to tears by such a column.

I'm not indecisive. Am I?

Solution: go redditing.

Hmm. Bunch of Peak Oil articles, a few Obama pieces--I'll get back to him closer to November--ah, here's something. Apparently the Piraha tribe of northwestern Brazil have a language without numbers. They don't even have a word for "one". The language does have terms corresponding to "some", "more", and "enough"...but that's it.

"Hey", I said to my wife, "here's a language without numbers. How alien is that? I can't even imagine a cohesive society functioning without at least a concept of "one", "two", and "many".

Eva has this neat facility for turning my thinking on its head. "What do you need numbers for in the jungle?"
"To count things! How many cuguars have we hunted? How much food do we need? How many weird pale devil-people have you seen hereabouts lately?"
"Some, more, and enough", she said.

A lightbulb went on. In the absence of anything requiring math, what do you need numbers for? And how liberating would it be to live without them? My mind kept grasping at situations where us "civilized" folk would invoke numbers--how much, exactly, is 'enough' of something? But who cares about specific numbers? Any dispute along that line boils down to more versus enough. And, incidentally, a truly civilized society would have an intuitive grasp of enough, and people wouldn't accumulate more for the sake of more; such disputes would probably be exceedingly rare.
Without numbers, time becomes a much more fluid construct. There's now, and then there's some-more-enough later. That, too, is a liberating concept. Again, I'm drawn to the opening of The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) This was probably the first 'adult' movie I ever saw, and certainly one that made a deep and lasting impression on me. (Note: the San do count, but, as this clip shows, they are beholden to neither numbers nor time.)



There are days...more and more days, actually--when I'd like to go and live in such a place, with such a tribe...