From the fringes of the Ottoman Empire comes a story about a foolish farmer who was trying to catch a horse in a field and stumbled across a very large and unusual pumpkin. The pumpkin so perplexed the farmer he forgot about the horse. What could it be? He touched it, then he smelled it. Something had to be done. So he took it to the village council for their wise deliberation.
The Mayor, who was a very clever fellow, noticed that it looked like an egg and so therefor that is what it must be. The farmer confirmed it was warm when he found it so it had to be an egg. But what kind of egg? Might it be a dragon egg that once it hatched burn them all down? The farmer then had the wonderful idea that since he had been chasing a horse at the time it must be a horse egg. The council liked this idea and decided the egg should be hatched. Since most horses don’t lay eggs they had a difficult time finding a mare to oblige them eventually deciding that if the local horses were too stupid to hatch an egg they would have to sit on it themselves. Which is what they did, taking it in turns to keep the egg warm.
In the next village the rumor began that the egg had gone bad despite the ministration of the council men’s bottoms. Divisions then emerged amongst the council’s own ranks as to whether the egg should continue to be warmed or whether it had indeed gone bad and should be thrown away. Eventually they reached the compromise of rolling it down the hill onto the village which had teased them and everyone gathered for the show. The egg was rolled but it went into some bushes startling a rabbit which shot out in fright. ‘There goes the horse’, they cried, giving chase. Only the mayor remained at the top of the hill shaking his head. ‘if only they had listened and warmed the egg one more day.’
It’s fun to laugh at the collective foolishness of the villagers forgetting that the story is about ourselves. It holds up a mirror to our own situations. We too tend to operate as though there were nothing outside our own frame of reference with the attitude that the world is whatever I know of it. People are always right and when something comes along to defy our god almightiness we’d rather double down than change our cherished points of view. These are sometimes so rigidly held as to constitute a nucleus of identity which is then defended with all the zeal of self preservation, despite evidence to the contrary.
Likewise, our theories of knowledge are not developed ‘by accumulation’, but tend to be episodic with long periods of accepted facts and theories interrupted by shorter periods of revolutionary change where not only the facts change but so too the paradigms with which we hold them. [Kuhn]. A change in the paradigm is caused by anomalies which the old belief system can’t explain. As these mount up the existing structure comes increasingly under strain; the crisis in the church caused by the discovery that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, the blow to scientific materialism caused by Hiesenberg’s uncertainty principle which says that ‘matter’ defies our ability to describe what it is doing in time and space, further complicated by the concept of quantum superpositions which don’t seem to have a presence in three dimensions at all.
Individually, we experience these seismic tremors of paradigm change as the discovery that Mum is a person, encountering other babies, being left with a sitter, kindergarten, boys and girls, sex and competition, leaving home, having your own kids. Every day is the same until the anomaly hoves into view and suddenly the axis of life is shifted forever into a new configuration beset with perplexity.
For this reason we are bound to resist what is new and unknown. New things have a way of turning our cozy old things on their head, destroying yesterday’s truths rather than augmenting them. The new thing might add to our store of things or it might burn it down. This makes even what we hope for something of a threat. Be careful what you ask for, as the old adage goes. Perhaps such understanding might help us be a bit more compassionate towards our own folly and the seeming pig headedness of others.
As often as we cross new thresholds, new ways of seeing the world as well as all the things in it, so too must we weather the inevitably gauche, ambivalent and clumsy efforts involved. Provable things can still be subject to denial and disbelief which is why asking a neurotic to be reasonable so enflames them. To be sensible attacks his article of faith.
‘The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.’ [Kuhn]
It helps to have a sense of humour, to be able to laugh at oneself, to see both the necessity and the pathos of resistant squirming. Without some sense of tolerable embarrassment for former misconceptions, without letting yourself not know stuff, humbly conceiving the possibility of something beyond your ken, then the new thing has to be subjected to splitting and projection instead, onto the neighbouring villagers who can tell there’s a stink in all our self conviction.
Meantime, the pumpkin goes to waste and drops back into the unconscious. Before long history will recall that this is because it was forbidden fruit.
