According to an article published in the Independent prior to the recent UK by-election, disgraced former Conservative MP Neil Hamilton believes that disaffected voters in the Eastleigh constituency are turning to UKIP because “we don’t have any political baggage”. Leaving aside questions about voters’ memory spans, and whether Hamilton really believes that people won’t remember who he is now that he’s joined a different, newer, political party, his comment led me to ponder the concept of “baggage”.
Baggage isn’t typically seen as helpful. It’s a burden; it slows us up, weighs us down, holds us back. We might allow that baggage may help us to exercise caution when deciding whether people we have only just met are trustworthy. More commonly, though, I think most of us implicitly see baggage as negative. It’s the stuff that leads us to employ an overly-cautious and self-defeating approach to the world. We typically apply the word to people we consider to be carrying an unusually heavy emotional load – so heavy that it may have damaged them, whether permanently or temporarily – for example, someone recently escaped from an abusive or traumatic relationship.
Ridding ourselves of baggage is viewed as good for us. It’s liberating. However, baggage isn’t something you only have if things have gone wrong in your life. Nor, crucially, is baggage something we can choose to do without.
While we might like to believe that we are able to approach each new experience and opportunity with a fresh and open mind, none of us, certainly not as adults, ever enter a new situation without baggage. We remember what has happened, to ourselves, our families and friends, documentary subjects, TV characters. We learn from our own and others’ experiences, actively (e.g., at school) and passively. We construct “cause-and-effect” accounts out of our recollections of events, in order to understand how to do things differently “next time”. Based on the stories, or narratives – personally experienced, recounted, fictional and hypothetical – that we have stored in our memories, we search for patterns, similarities, across these different scenarios, in order to apply these insights to problems and dilemmas we face now.
The narratives and experiences we build on aren’t only negative ones (although we may well develop stronger tendencies towards, and more deeply embedded habits around, avoiding pain than risking some pain for the opportunity to experience joy – but that’s a subject for a whole other post). We build frameworks in order to help us understand “how the world works”. These frameworks are indispensable. They enable us to simplify; to generalise; to classify and categorise disparate things as sufficiently “of a type” to be called “similar”.
Crucially, we do these things all the time, for the most part completely unaware that we are processing such vast quantities of information every day. These frameworks, with their filtering capacity, make the world, in its infinite complexity, manageable. They quite literally allow us to make order out of chaos. As a result, we can come to rely on them far more frequently and more comprehensively than we realise. They become a sort of shortcut, shorthand, even a security blanket. George Lakoff, among other researchers, has pointed out that, when presented with facts that don’t fit our frameworks, we are more likely to reject (the veracity of) the facts, not our frameworks.
This all seems to support the claim I rejected at the top of the page – that baggage is a negative thing and we should all be trying, wherever possible, to unburden ourselves. My point, though, is rather different. If we can’t do without our baggage, perhaps we should try opening up the bags to see what’s inside. In this way, we might come to understand how the things we’re carrying can affect us – how they influence the things we do, say and feel.
Construction Sight 