Gerard Cheshire’s rehashed 2017 Voynich theory has been through a full media life-cycle this week. Though the newspapers happily collaborated in an emergency Caesarean (ah, it’s a girl), they then swiftly pulled the plug (it’s for the best, poor thing), with the last (w)rites surely not far behind.
Though you might now expect Cheshire to fade away, his optimistic smile still persists. This is because he sees criticisms of his theory as the mechanism by which the self-appointed / self-important Voynich elite protects both itself and the world from his powerful, destabilizing truths.
The Magic Trick
This is, of course, an all-too familiar modern template. Once Claim X lands on our lap (Brexit, Trump, whatever), we find ourselves pressed to decide whether it is (a) outrageous, bare-faced, self-deluding nonsense on a grand scale, where the evidence is twisted to tell a story that appeals to base prejudices, or (b) a heroic outsider movement battling the Establishment, and whose noble cause is simply to Get The Truth Out To The People.
In Star Wars terms, the (small-c) conservative cadre of existing Voynich researchers is thus The Empire, while Cheshire is plucky Luke Skywalker, trying to destroy the collectively entrenched Imperial position: all of which Mustafarian metaphoricity probably makes me Darth Vader. Which is nice.
The thing we’re not supposed to notice is the headily polarized either-or-ness of it all (are you Empire or Alliance? Brexiteer or Remainer? Coke or Pepsi? etc). This modern magic trick works by presenting us with two crazy extremes that we somehow have to choose between: in Gerard Cheshire’s case, he presents us with a binary choice between his complex (yet oddly erudite-sounding) Voynich theory and siding with the same self-satisfied Voynich establishment at which he sticks two punky fingers up.
Just as with Coke vs Pepsi, this is a fake two-way choice, particularly given that drinking your own urine might be a marginally healthier third option. Allegedly.
Russell’s Teapot
Actually, this binary mode of presentation has been a mainstay of nutty Voynich theorists for most of the last decade. “If you so-called Voynich experts” (the rant goes) “can’t disprove my theory, then that proves not only that I’m right, but also that you don’t know a damn thing about the Voynich.”
It’s easy, when stripped down and taken so starkly out of context, to see what a hugely fallacious argument this really is, like an epistemological parody of Nietzsche: that which does not destroy my theory makes it True.
This is the burden of disproof, that Bertrand Russell famously likened to claims for an impossibly unobservable teapot orbiting in space. He wrote:
“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.”
My point here is that whereas in the Olden Days Voynich theorists dished up their shitty theories with a bodyguard of flies (making it almost impossible not to notice which parts really stank), once modern Voynich theorists have done a ten-minute pre-flight check with Wikipedia, they’re ready to launch their theory into a suitably hard-to-reach elliptic orbit.
As a consequence, it has become almost impossible to disprove nutty Voynich theories: all the Voynich theorist has to do is to finesse their story ever-so slightly, turning the impossible back into the highly improbable. Ha! they cry (and some do indeed say ‘Ha!’ at this point), “your efforts to absolutely disprove my theory have now failed, so I must be correct“. And onwards their theory merrily spins, in its far distant elliptical orbit.
Even a Voynich theory as outrageously nonsensical as the Wilfrid-Voynich-faked-it theory (the one that Richard SantaColoma has been peddling for a decade or so) is hard to absolutely disprove. The closest I’ve got is by getting Richard to admit that for his theory to be true, the quire numbers must have been added to the vellum during the 15th century. Even though this makes no codicological sense at all (why give written instructions to a binder about how you want your blank quires to be bound?), who can prove definitively to Richard that this scenario is impossible, rather than merely utterly improbable? And so it goes ever on.
Royal Roads
Nutty theorists also typically believe that it is their coruscant intuition that has given them a shortcut to the hard-for-mere-mortals-to-believe answer: and that it is thus for other (less brilliant but perhaps more meticulous) plodding souls to do the messy follow-on business of joining the evidential start dots to their insightful end dots.
This was particularly true of Nicholas Gibbs’ Voynich theory: this was the one that popped up in in the TLS a while back. (Isn’t now about the time Gibb’s inevitable book describing his brilliant decryption should be appearing?) Gerard Cheshire similarly claimed to have made his giant intuitive leap to the Voynich’s answer in a mere fortnight.
The thing that is wrong with all of this is the idea that there is some kind of Royal Road that will carry you to a quick and easy mastery of the Voynich Manuscript’s secrets. It was Euclid, of course, who famously told the Egyptian ruler Ptolemy I Soter that “there is no Royal Road to geometry”: understanding the different aspects of the Voynich Manuscript before jumping to conclusions is arguably no less a challenge, and one which fewer people every year seem willing to take on.
Daft Ada
And that’s where we are, really: surrounded by Voynich wannabe theorists who fail to do the work, assume the transcriptions are perfect (they’re not), jump oh-so-rapidly to conclusions, use Wikipedia to avoid outright disproof, and then present their nonsensical theory (often to the media) as if it is some kind of inspiring protest vote against existing theorists’ supposed hegemony. Riiiiight.
Me? I’m not Darth Vader, nor even Daft Ada. What kills these stupid Voynich theories isn’t my Sith death grip, but their own lack of a grip on the basic facts. In Gerard Cheshire’s case, he concocts an entire dysenteric proto-language (i.e. one with no obvious grammar or rules), and a spurious timeline entirely at odds with just about everything else: and yet even with all those degrees of freedom to play with, still none of what comes out makes a flicker of sense. What an abysmal waste of time.
And don’t get me started on peer review. Or indeed ‘Ricky Sheeger’… 🙁