Blind Man's Bluff

Or the elephant is really more complex than I've imagined

A letter I wrote several weeks ago that was published in our local newspaper.

You all know the elephant on the road with the blindmen story.  They each separately touch four parts of the elephant and then argued what it is.  Very like a wall (side). Very like a rope (tail). Very like a hose (snout). Very like a spear (tusk).

A good story and an example of a common source of confusion.  But what if the elephant was more complex?  And there were more people in front of the enigma, all blind?  What if none of them touched more than a fraction?  How many tales would be told, how many explanations would be given, how many origin stories and warnings might we hear?

If I am very careful not to let me own beliefs intrude, and I listen with care to my many friends whose ideas about reality tip in directions different from my own (you don’t have to get all the way to the letter “Q,” to meet some strange points of view), I find threads of reason, signs of logic, desires for knowing.  Plausibility, I’m trying to say.  Not my reality, but, yes, not foreign to what I see. 

I’m now hesitating to take the easy road and reproach them all for “shallow thinking,” or susceptibility to “conspiratorial” ideas.  We all must take the bits and pieces of direct experience, fit them into preconceived ideas about the world, and work out a cohering “picture” of things, some of us more sure of what we picture than others.  I.e. we all become dogmatic to some degree. 

But I think I’m beginning to see the inner logic of the world view of many anthropologists. The anthropologist tries to suspend her own “truth,” in order to understand “the other.”

In today’s world this is not just a tool to study “distant” peoples.  It may be a way to live peacefully alongside our neighbors.

It’s not “that I see your point of view.”  That’s condescending.  It is more that I see a way for both of us to tone back the rhetoric and to work toward more common ground--if we both realize there are many ways to interpret the evidence of personal experience.