It’s a rum business

Imitation is a rum business. Even that first sentence is imitation. – can’t get away from it. My father used the word ‘rum’ and my phrase ‘rum business’ is imitation too. Even though I can’t recall a specific instance of him saying ‘rum business’, it’s certainly the kind of thing he would have said. Maybe his father did too. And his father…

We do not have to grapple with abstractions of the free will debate, it is enough to consider the daunting ubiquity of imitation. We know imitation very well indeed. Reflect on it for a moment or two and notions of personal autonomy become ghostly and insubstantial. Take it a little further and individuality may be reduced to specious defiance against the bleak winds of reality.


Scientific psychology is a part of physics, or the study of nature ; it is the record of how animals act. Literary psychology is the art of imagining how they feel and think. Yet this art and that science are practised together, because one characteristic habit of man, namely speech, yields the chief terms in which he can express his thoughts and feelings. Still it is not the words, any more than the action and attitude which accompany them, that are his understanding of the words, or his sense of his attitude and action. These can evidently be apprehended only dramatically, by imitative sympathy; so that literary psychology, however far scientific psychology may push it back, always remains in possession of the moral field.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)


We vary in our inclination to imitate attitudes
We vary in our inclination for imitative sympathy
We vary in our inclination to imitate bad ideas

We must imitate to live, but it also feels like one of the great divides. Talking to yourself is what we know as thinking, so when we imitate language we imitate thinking, including bad ideas we aren’t aware of as bad ideas. To become aware of them as bad ideas we would have to acquire Santayana’s imitative sympathy with more sceptical language. Not something we do readily.

The point to be made about imitation is that it’s easy and universal. It’s the default response. It’s the great elephant trap of life, far easier to fall in than avoid by creative thinking where we put pieces together like a jigsaw. Creativity is somewhat unusual and even odd, but imitation isn’t.

Belief is the imitation of something specific in language and/or behaviour. Scepticism is both withheld imitation and the imitation of sceptical language. Even as a sceptic there is no escaping the essential need to imitate. Life would not make sense without imitation but the obvious problem is that it doesn’t necessarily make sense with it.

Imitation is fiendishly complex of course. We imitate the mores of family, friends, social class, profession, institutions, sports, celebrities. We imitate abstractions such as erudition, magnanimity, honesty, integrity or physical behaviour such as emotions and even illness. It’s vast and vastly complex and necessary. It usually works but can go horribly wrong.

It’s a rum business.