http://www.justiceharvard.org/

It contains some fascinating discussions on morals, philosophy, rights and justice. Professor Sandel has a very interesting teaching style, where he almost helps the students discover right vs. wrong, rather than just teaching it to them. Also, he has an extraordinary delivery style – careful and sincere. It is clear that he is actively participating in the discussion himself; he tailors the material such that it conveys all the crucial points while at the same time allowing the journey to these crucial points to be shaped by the students in the classroom. The class itself is comprised of over a thousand students, hanging on to every word from the teacher, and is a sight to behold.

A must watch. More accurately, a must think.

Dr. K. Ramamurthy (my dad’s uncle) wrote the following in response to this issue.

This gave rise to some thoughts which� I present here.

I agree that educated incompetence is a real phenomenon. I see it at work, at school, and even within our family. Typically, it manifests itself as a minor irritant with small repercussions; however, on occasion, it can bloat into a dangerous phenomenon, affecting life-changing decisions we make.

The people who think that they know (or, more accurately, who have been conditioned to think they ought to know) feel this pressure to pretend that they know. They may not know, but their ego does not let them accept or project their ignorance.

Now, take the case of a person who is formally uneducated. That person may not have any degrees, but may have sufficient common sense and, indeed, an abundant supply of humility. Unfortunately, lack of formal education, brings lack of confidence in addition to the abundance of humility. Abundance of formal education brings abundance of confidence (over-confidence, in most cases) and a lack of humility. The best kind of education encourages the right amount of confidence, and the right amount of humility.

That begs the question, “What is the fundamental problem with formal education?”.

Formal educational arrangements often cannot give one-on-one attention that is necessary to truly explore the limits of an individual’s potential. The result of this fundamental clash between individual potentials and group educational-arrangements is a lowering of the education bar. Further, in order to smoothly impart knowledge to a group, and then to smoothly measure the efficiency of that process, a common canonical framework (the box) must be constructed. All formal education builds within the confines of this framework. This explains why, in exams, typically, all questions have a reasonably fixed answer. Mathematical problems, typically, only provide precisely the data necessary to solve the problem. No unnecessary data is provided. In Chemistry lab, only the reagents and equipment necessary to prove the workings of a certain reaction are provided. To me it is not at all surprising that relying only on formal education as a means to educating yourself is bound to teach you a canonical view of the world and its problems. It teaches you to construct the boundaries of your sandbox of thoughts before trying to solve a problem. It teaches you that when you have a problem you just need to use the resources readily visible within this sandbox. It does not, typically, teach you where to look for resources to solve a problem. It does not teach you how to get rid of the sandbox. And most significantly it does not teach you how to look *for* problems. Problems are assumed to be handed to you, with your job being restricted to looking for solutions. This is a fundamental problem with all forms of formal education. And, if you think about it, this formal educational structure is a direct result of the simplifications that *must* be made for any, large-scale, practical, hand-off of human understanding from one generation to the next. That is, I am not blaming the formal education. I am saying it is doing exactly what it was meant to do. To identify and solve real-life problems, it helps to know how to solve a canonical, artificially-created, abstract versions of the real-life problem. Formal education signed up to distill real-life problems into canonical problems and teach us how to proceed from that point further. It did not sign up for more.

Now, the responsibility of the second half of education – the ability to identify a real-life problem (before it is handed over to you on a platter), the ability to whittle down a real-life problem into a canonical form, the ability to identify parameters that affect the solution to this problem from a much larger selection than you are used to dealing with – lies with the individual. Even if we could, in a perfect society, provide one-on-one attention to each student, human brains are not very good at communication of complex thought. The only brain that can efficiently sift through the deluge of complex thoughts that arise inside it, it the very same brain where these thoughts arise. This ability to learn by looking inwards has been called meditation, self-awareness, reflection, wisdom, and, common sense. This is an ability that cannot be taught by formal educational tools. It is, therefore, a resource available to the educated and the uneducated in equal measure. The uneducated person, probably enjoys it in purer, undiluted proportions. The formally educated person may, unfortunately, end up suspicious of such free-ranging thoughts arising in his or her mind and proceed to quell them. This may explain why educated people often appear to be unimaginative and conforming – thinking “inside-the-box” out of habit.

Maybe this makes a case for a statutory warning to be legally enforced on all formal educational fora – FORMAL EDUCATION, HOWEVER ADVANCED, IS ONLY RESPONSIBLE FOR A SMALL FRACTION OF YOUR OVERALL EDUCATION

(PS: By the way, be careful not to interpret this to mean that everything your maid-servant says is wise.)

I read some more interesting insights form Dr. Ramamurthy a few emails down the chain.

And here is my response:

In fact, rational thinking is a necessary condition to allow out of the box thinking. It is not a sufficient condition though. A bit of inspired (some may even call it non-rational, creative or artistic) thinking becomes necessary as well. This is that spark of subconscious creativity that conscious rational thinking can then give form to.

All this talk of rational vs creative, boxed-in vs out-of-the box thinking reminds me of the following incident which happened recently.

"No, K. The problem is not that I use only my left brain. The problem is that I can only use the brain that is left."

The spark of a creator’s idea, must be weighed and studied for the sustainability and fesibility of that which the idea generates. Once the creative force is assured of the sustainability and usefulness of its creation, it must also analyze the destructibility of the creation. Only when the idea passes both these tests – useful when in existence and destroyable when not useful – is the creation sustainable. To be destroyed does not mean to make it go away or vanish. Being destroyed here means to change form. The death of one is the birth of another. The death of a wine glass when it slips from your hand and shatters is the birth of a hundred pieces of glass. The death of those hundred pieces in a kiln if the birth of liquid silica, which dies to takes up another form when shaped into a glass window.

Sunstainable creation is dependent on reliable destruction, which in turn is dependent on future creation. In our lives nowadays, I wonder if the creator’s dependence on the destroyer is being slowly forgotten. Things are getting created with no concern for its destructibility (and often with no concern even for sustainability). Creation is driven by sustainability and usefulness, which is fine. However, the second part of the pre-creation analysis, destruction, is becoming only a secondary concern.

A case in point is plastics. Plastics are almost irreplaceable in certain situations. However, its usage cycle has overflowed its equilibrium bounds. The ease of creating plastics and the convenience of sustaining plastics have together overpowered the responsibility of destroying them. The durability of plastics, which is often a big positive, makes it equally hard to destroy. And when used in scenarios where such durability becomes a liability, the benefits of plastics are questionable. Wikipedia’s article on Plastics has this, somewhat scary, line. “Due to their relatively low cost, ease of manufacture, versatility, and imperviousness to water, plastics are used in an enormous and expanding range of products, from paper clips to spaceships. They have already displaced many traditional materials, such as wood; stone; horn and bone; leather; paper; metal; glass; and ceramic, in most of their former uses.” Notice that all the things that plastics have replaced are either natural or biodegradable, or both. I agree that there are some organic palstics in nature, and there are some man-made biodegradable plastics; however, the point I am trying to make is not hijacked by either of these. From wall-to-wall carpets to the teacups used by chai-wallahs in roadside dhabas, from ziploc bags to microwaveable idli-plates, plastics have slowly but surely taken over our lives. In this takeover, not only has the senseless overuse of plastics created a dangerous imbalance in the natural world, it has paralyzed us into a state of helplessness compliance. Plastics have destroyed the destroyer.

In many uses of plastics, they are certainly replaceable by other, more responsibly created, products. We, the users and sustainers of plastics, should vote down the creators’ decision to create them by reducing the use of plastics where possible (take your cloth grocery bags with you when you go shopping, use glass or steel dinner ware at home and paper or corn-based plates at picnics). When usage is not avoidable, we can restore the balance somewhat by paying due homage to the destroyer (use plastic that is recyclable and recycle the plastic that you use). A moments thought before consumption can not only help restore some balance in the cycle of creations and destruction, it can also help restore a sense of control over our destiny.

On my part, I make it a point to visit the Shiva temple of Cary once a month. It is a large, airy temple, with the added convenience of a drive-through pradakshina (the act of revenential, clockwise, walking around a Hindu temple’s central structure). Each time I go, the priest walks up to my car, greets me, and asks, “What do you have?”. Upon telling him about my problems, he points me to the correct deity to go pay my respects to. His utterance may seem strange for temple-talk, “Go to number 4″, but what he really means is, “Deity no. 4 will rid you of all your troubles and send you home free and uplifted”. The temple, for some strange secular reasons, likes to identify itself with a small, unadorned, non-ostentatious, green sign with white lettering that reads, “Cary Recycling Center”.

I was looking out of my passenger-side window when I noticed a tall tower with two red lights, horizontally arranged atop the tower, a thin cloud of mist in front of it and a dark night behind. To be more accurate, I only saw the lights, and I imagined the tower’s existence. As those lights were flying past me, I craned my neck for a few seconds trying to keep my sights on those two red lights. In those seconds I realized something. The fleeting vision of those lights behind a cloud of dark, foggy mist and my fruitless attempt at trying to hold on to that view made me realize how I (we all, perhaps) crave focus. We want to be able to hold on to experiences. One after the other after the other. I realized, also, how fleeting the nature of all experiences is. What you experience, what you take in, is different from what you set out to experience, what you probably wanted to take in. The moment that you want to experience, is past by the time you actually are able to take it in. In this constant rush of fleeting images, fleeting thoughts, fleeting sensory experiences, we keep chasing that impossible goal. We crave an experience we can truly and completely call our own – an experience we can hold by the scruff of its neck and do with what we choose to. But alas, it unfailingly slips out of our grasp, always leaving us with a few tattered thoughts and shadowy images – and even these leftovers belong to a different moment altogether, not the one we were trying to go after. And what you take in is really what you want to take in. Can you ever truly experience a moment, when time keeps the scenery ever-changing? What you can hold on to is that which is not changing with time – that which is independent of time. And maybe the only such thing, which is within you control, is that which is within you. That which you can truly experience, necessarily, has to be an idea that is of your own creation – an idea that which you can readily recreate, that which is truly obedient. Does that mean that, that which is outside, that which is real, is really not? And that which is hypothetical, imaginary, and, obedient, is the reality we can experience?

These rhetorical questions apart, one other thing these fleeting lights maybe helped me see is one reason why I like photography. For once, I can hold time nearly still. A shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second is pretty close to being momentary for me – short enough to not allow multiple thoughts to cross my mind. And when I look at that picture later, I can study every detail at my leisure, without the nagging fear of something discreetly changing in the bottom left corner of my view while I was busy breathing in the top right.

“During my management consultancy days, I’d start my classes with “Three Ds”: Discipline, Dedication, and Devotion.

We have to start anything in life, commencing with our earliest education, with the rigor of Discipline: regulated studies in terms of time allocation, understanding of what we study, practicing to become perfect, and humility not to be carried away by early successes (or depressed with early failures). You keep at it in spite of obstacles to reach the goal you set for yourself.

When you’re sufficiently integrated in a disciplined web of working (doing things), you get to the stage of Dedication – a stage where you totally, intrinsically, get merged in what you do and what you want to achieve. You breathe, live, and think all the while of your chosen field and its nuances to be able to excel. That’s how great writers, poets, scientists, musicians, innovators, nation builders, and freedom fighters like Gandhi dedicated their whole life to a chosen cause.

From this stage comes Devotion, where your “life and work” become a Religion unto itself. That’s how Thyagaraja, Purandara, Meerabai, Aurobindo, CV Raman in our life time and people like Einstein worshiped what they chose to do. All the greatest achievers have gone through these stages, knowingly or unknowingly.

Consider the training of today’s top notch players who reach the very top, their journey begins at very early age and goes on unhindered and unfettered for several years to reach the top. Certain failures are inevitable during this long journey but they’ve to trod on incessantly to reach the peak.

Of all who tried, the number who did or did not make the final assault is immaterial. The very process and trial is ennobling – in fact, religious. It’s like seeking the elusive God, but there is bliss!!

In such pursuit, the teacher becomes the most important being in our life. It’s said in our scriptures that one cannot attain the highest pinnacle without a “Teacher.” In our daily prayers, we do give homage to our teacher: Guru Brahma, Gurur Vishnuhu, Gurudevo Maheswaraha, Guru Sakshsat Parabrahma, Tasmai Sri Gurave Namaha! Discipline starts with respect to the teacher – starting from our parents who are our first teachers, to others who have taught us, guided us, helped us, sustained us, given solace in our trials and difficult patches, and remained our “guiding lights” throughout our life.

Unfortunately, the teacher-taught, trainer-trainee, professor-student, employer-employee relationship has become now too commercialized to nurture a meaningful, respectful, disciplined way in life. Without this kind of moral and ethical approach, the society declines. It’s only the few chosen (by whom, I can’t say!), who are able to fuse the 3-Ds to be the Great in their individual life!!

By our performance, we’re not ONE of those.”

His observations on how to simultaneously achieve happiness (selfish motive) while at the same time being productive to the society (altruistic outcome) by following the course of discipline, dedication and devotion speaks to me and I hope to many of us. He elaborated in a later email thus.

“To further elaborate, the first D is the base or foundation on which the second D, dedication, is superimposed. The third D, Devotion, is necessary, along with the other two, for the final outcome, or assault, as it were. That is reaching out to the pinnacle. While the first and second Ds have a continuous nature, the third D could be even ‘momentary or fleeting’ but it’s that fleeting moment – like in deep, prayerful, thought that gives the final ‘push’ and the ‘answer.’

This is referred to in our books of lore about ‘Rishis’ in deep meditation; we see this in our scientists and researchers in their hour of ‘discovery.’ Philosophers of lore were of that genre.

Recently I read of an interview of Dr. Ramachandran, the Neurosurgeon-researcher and author of books on brain structure and functioning. He was alluding to his conversation with Chembe Vaidyanatha Iyer, doyen of Carnatic Music and said that while the music maestro was rendering a raaga and aalaapana, he was ethereal, as if he was in ‘devotional ecstasy.’ At that moment the maestro was not aware of his surroundings, the visitor, or anything else but his music rendition. That is the moment of the third D.“

I agree with this observation. More generally, this observation applies to any kind of decision making. We make many decisions in life – in everyday life and in the grander scale of life. In everyday life, we decide on things like which vacuum cleaner to buy, or, which hair conditioner to buy, both of which were decisions I had to make last week. In the grander scale of life we need to make decisions such as who to marry, or, which profession to work towards.

To make a decision we weigh pros and cons across several dimensions and finally settle on a decision. If we do a good job at making the decision, we have considered all the dimensions and all the pros and cons along those dimensions. We are happy that we have come to a global optimum across the search space of the solution, and we can pat ourselves on the back for it. As the number of dimensions grow, however, the search space explodes in size. The resources and time to do this optimization become overwhelming. We are forced to work with a smaller search space that we can handle within the time we give ourselves to make the decision. Say we have an hour to kill and feel like watching come TV. We sit in front of the box, pick up the remote and flip through channels. We want to decide which channel to watch. We do not want to spend that hour trying to optimize that choice. To make a decision in some reasonable time, we need to make more decisions first. We need to decide which dimensions of choice we want to ignore. This is choice-pruning. For example, we might not care for a show if it is not in Hi-Def. Then the choice-space shrinks by an order of magnitude. However, once we do shrink the choice-space, we have to settle for something that may be a sub-optimal solution compared to the global optimum. And that can take away from the satisfaction you draw from your, potentially sub-optimal, choice.

For some of these decisions there is no way to know the optimality of the solution. For example, once you marry a person, you better make appropriate adjustments and make happiness out of it. There is no point comparing the decision to anything – what if I had married someone else, what if I had taken up that other job offer 10 years ago? In some ways not knowing the optimal solution is a boon. You can rest assured that there is no such thing as an optimal solution in that case. The decision you make is the only decision that matters. No one can prove to you that a different choice would have definitely been better. It is calming to know that your decision is beyond judgment. Still, too much choice can be paralyzing in this case also. The only saving grace is that almost any decision is really a pretty good decision.

For some other decisions however, there is a direct measurable impact. These are the decision that can haunt. The stock you choose to invest your money in may tank, while that other option you were considering just as fervently, does really well. The vacuum cleaner you chose sucks, while the one that your friend bought for just a little bit more money, sucks better. And it is for these decisions that too much choice can not only be paralyzing, but also be humiliating. You blame yourself for the sub-optimality of your choice; after all, you have proof to justify that blame.

I routinely find myself presented with this overdosage of choice. And being mathematically and engineeringly inclined, I tend to at least give choice-pruning and optimization a fair shot. As I wrote to Sandeep in my response email:

“Being an engineer I tend to compare the available choices across many dimensions, and the search space grows multiplicatively. I was looking for a hair conditioner yesterday, the dimensions were – ingredients (should not have any obvious bad stuff), the company (should be something I have heard of), the quantity (should not be measured in gallons), the price (should be reasonable), delivery mechanism (spray vs cream), application time (dry hair or wet hair – further subdivided into needs rinsing after application or not) etc. Comparing all this across the 30 brands in the store left me tired.”

In fact, excessive choice wastes time and energy, and therefore, wastes money. Just by spending 20 minutes to decide on a hair conditioner, I am sure I bumped up the price of the produce by a few dollars. Time is money, and this was time I could have better spent elsewhere.

And the solution to this problem of excessive choice is not communism, or even reducing choice, necessarily. Availability of choice is not the root problem. The problem is the excessive demand excessive choice places on the decision-maker. The decision-making has to continue to be streamlined. The choice has to be presented to the chooser in a structured, standardized, unbiased way. This is really a service, which I like to call “choice pruning”. It can be an industry in its own right. An example of this is epinions.com, where people’s past experiences with their decision-making about buying a product are collected, analyzed and presented to the customer to help speed up his or her decision making process. The opinions are not strictly standardized, and I can spend days reading through the reviews there, as I recently did when trying to decide on a vacuum cleaner; but still, it does help. At least you know that with hundreds of respondents, there is a chance that any biased views and any person-to-person variation in the interpretation of the measurement scale are evened out.

By spending time on what we are choosing, we affect what we are choosing. If I spend 5 years to decide which stock to invest money in, I have already lost more money than a sub-optimal decision could have cost me. In other words, as the time to make a choice increases, by the time you finally choose, the choices available to you might end up being different than the choices you optimized for! Thus anything to speed up the selection, anything to assist with the optimization, anything to reduce future repenting, is a much-needed solution. For me, rigorous, instinctive, choice-pruning, indifference to the actual choice made, and a poor memory, help make this process faster, reasonably optimal, and guilt free.

Mankind is different from all other living creatures, mankind claims. Why? That is the question. And in that “Why?” lies the answer – reason – the ability to reason and the thirst for reason. The ability to reflect, to introspect and to innovate is a manifestation of the same distinction. The introspection that helped us identify this distinction, and the introspection that is the distinction, are one and the same. The question is the answer. And though this kind of an answer seems vaguely incomplete, almost too obvious to be significant and only escapist wordplay, this general principle of self referencing is central to intelligence.  Humans are considered different from other living creatures because they are intelligent – capable of participating in a closed loop of self-evaluation and adjusting behavior to the findings of such an evaluation.

Before trying to experiment with the notion of self-referential answers and self-fulfilling prophesies about the purpose of life, let me go back and try to work on one of the questions that I raised about the need for a purpose of life. We could say that our existence is just a chance happening that rolled out of millions of years of chemical reactions that happened simply because the chemicals were in the right place at the right time. These chemicals were helpless and had no say in the reactions at least until a point when the chemicals became sophisticated enough to preferentially seek out the right place and the right time. Prior to such time, the direction such reactions took were driven by the state of affairs in the rest of the universe, or, in other words, chance. Gradually, the chemicals involved in the chemical reaction became more sophisticated and were able to extricate themselves somewhat from the mercy of chance. The beings, like humans, had the power to identify and appreciate to some degree, their position in the scheme of things, their significance and insignificance with respect to the rest of the universe. Even if they did not have the answers all worked out, this chance chemical reaction had reached a stage where it was curious enough to question the need for that very reaction. The reaction itself started off as a mathematical probability. The direction the reaction took, the continual readjustments to keep the reaction alive, though also not immune to chance, does seem to point towards something more than just survival. The evolution of species, most recently humans, sometimes seems wholly unnecessary. Other animals alive today are perfectly suited for today’s environment. Yet there was something guiding the chemicals to continually keep reacting in a way so as to develop newer species, not necessarily any better suited to the environment, but definitely better suited to think about this question – What is the purpose of this reaction – the reaction which has reached a scale where it can finally identify its existence and think about itself? And when we pose the question thus, the answer seems to scream out at us. The reaction has reached the point where it can identify itself, and is trying to figure out where it is headed. Maybe that is the goal of the reaction, at least for the time being – figure out where it is headed. Put another way, and this is the claim I was driving towards, maybe the purpose of life is to figure out the purpose of life!

I have not established a reason for why there needs to be a purpose to life. I have just tried to argue that there must be some other reason to life than perpetually trying to be best suited to the environment we find ourselves in. But maybe that argument is unsatisfactory. Even so, coupled with the reasoning mind, that argument, at least, nudges us towards a related, yet different, purpose – trying to figure out if there is purpose to life and if so, why. Not what, but why?

Either way, that is whether we say, “The purpose of life is to figure out the purpose of life”, or, “The purpose of life is to figure out if there is a purpose of life”, the open-endedness of this simple closed-loop recursion is similar to the answer to why is man different from other beings.  Stepping out of the mind-warp that this self-referential statement can lead to for the time being, I would now like to think about the similarities that this notion has to the many other answers to the same conundrum. This quest has the quality of being never-ending – an infinite, perpetually uplifting, notion, which is a quality found in any religion and any other answer to this question. The notion of self-referencing has a powerful individual appeal. Each thinking mind can seek to define its own purpose of life based on introspection. This is like each person defining and following his or her own religion, and more importantly recognizing that everyone else has a different, unnamed, religion.  Whether one chooses to figure out the purpose of life or to figure out if there is a purpose to life, they have a purpose in life. This seems better than any rigid doctrine that disallows continual refinements, and is certainly better than the aimlessness of a skeptic who either says, “I will never know the purpose of life”, or “I don’t care what the purpose of life is”. In fact, this self-referential notion allows the skeptic to hold his view as long as it seems reasonable.

I found this relevant quote today (09/24/2008):

“The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one.” – Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents.

I find the notion of religion an interesting subject to think about. Even in this short discussion we have found many points of view, many frames of reference, many notions hidden behind the word “religion”. Thinking of religion reminds me of the story of the 5 blind men trying to understand what an elephant is. I do not see those men, as the story seems to imply, as lacking any specific faculty. I see them as normal humans. I do not see the elephant as an understandable subject that is only difficult to understand. Finally, I do not see the blind men as failures because their “limited” point of view. If those were blind men and that elephant was their large unassailable subject, what makes us, the reader of that fable, special in that we are able to see the big picture? In the real world, we are one among those men, and, therefore, we will not be able to see the entire elephant. Even more importantly, what *is* the “entire elephant” in such a real world? Just because the blind men are feeling around does not mean there is an elephant to be discovered. If there was no one to tell those blind men that they were touching an elephant, how would they *ever* know that it was an elephant they were touching? To me the “elephant” is the ability to be able to simultaneously acknowledge that each of the billions of blind men do have a piece of the view that the others will never have. Further, to me the elephant is the ability to distill those billions of view points into some common, uplifting, purposeful goal. This live interaction between the minds and view points of these billions of people is not just impossibly difficult, thankfully, it is unnecessary. Why should there be one common elephant that all have to agree to have understood?

Search for a common religion is like this search for the one elephant. It is impossible. Again, careful when I say impossible, it is nothing to be dejected about. It is an elevating feeling. It is like the blind men saying, “Hold it off for a minute…why do we *have* to *all* see the same thing?” It is an elevating feeling because you can, finally, let your conscience guide you without the haunting feeling that you are missing something. We have a faculty for thinking. The blind men still had the sense of touch. Let us use what we have and figure out what purposeful goal we see from our vantage. Let there be a billion religions for a billion people. Anytime we *name* a religion we are in trouble. There are not enough names to make it worthwhile. And anytime two people who name their religion the same but are at different ends of the elephant, there is bound to be frustration. Anytime two groups of people name their religion differently, they try to evaluate the better point of view, the “true” religion. They try to *help* the other group out by bringing them to their end of the elephant, while not acknowledging that there is no *reason* why their end is really better, except that *they* feel so. This brings in ego. The problem with ego is that it is the tendency to prioritize your thoughts over another person’s thoughts *without* reasoning through them, that is, without using your faculty of thinking honestly.

Therefore, I am cautious anytime I am asked, “What is your religion?”. If I thought about it long enough, I might be able to convey some ideas about what my “religion” is, but it will not make complete sense to anyone else in the world, because no one else shares my exact same position next to this impossible elephant. Why? Because no one else is me.

Here is the conclusion from a John Saxe poem

So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean;
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

The complete poem is here

Another fable that I think applies to real life is the “grapes are sour” story . That one, as I recollect, portrays a fox that gives up on reaching a grape vine, consoling itself by saying that the fruit is not worth the effort. The way the story was presented to me seemed to imply that such an attitude is laughable and that one should be honest with oneself.

However, I believe that there is much to look up to in the fox’s attitude. The fox was able to weigh the cost and the benefit given the situation it found itself in, and decide the cost is more than the benefit. Such analysis is very important in real life too. It keeps us from getting stuck. Further, the fable seemed to imply that the fox wrongfully chose to “believe” in falsehood. It knew that the grapes would be sweet, but it still walked away thinking and saying they are sour! But think about it. Lots of people are able to live their life without going insane because of such an attitude. If a poor person suffers from a dreaded illness that has a cure but is expensive (or if a poor person, for no fault of his, gets run over by Salman Khan’s SUV), often they or their relatives resign to their fate saying that such is their karma, or saying that they must have done something wrong in their past lives, or that such was God’s plan, or even more tragically, that God loves that person more than others.

Those we call religious and those we call superstitious might actually be very reasoning oriented. They are so starved for a reason for why bad things happen to them that they create, or succumb to, this pacifying fantasy of their being a superhuman controlling their destiny; that there is someone who sees and cares. If you read the book “The Life of Pi”, this is the underlying theme in the book. There is a plain, calculated, probabilistic world where you do have a certain vaguely measuarable probability of dying in a freak road accident. And then there is the world where the accident had a reason behind it. Someone had a plan for why it had to happen. You did not die a meaningless death. No wonder we choose the latter view of the world under extreme helplessness.

The fox could have walked away acknowledging that it was completely helpless and that it would never, in its lifetime, be able to taste grapes, or, the fox could have walked away genuinely believing that grapes are sour. Guess which way the fox would be able to continue living with some sense of equanimity? Afterall, sometimes, we do take life too seriously, And sometimes, these grapes *are* overrated.