Frank Herbert, the author of the Dune series, wrote an essay in the 70’s entitled “Listening to the Left Hand”. In it he poses an experiment in relativity. Line up three bowls in front of you. Put ice water in the one on the left, hot water in the one on the right, and lukewarm water in the middle one. Soak your left hand in the ice water and right hand in the hot water for about a minute, and then plunge both hands into the bowl of lukewarm water. Your left hand will tell you the water of the middle bowl is warm, your right hand will report cold. His main argument in the article is that we miss new ways of understanding, because we cling to ideas of absolute truth, or worse that we will dismiss signs pointing to better understanding because it does not fit into our own preset absolutes. He asserts that all perspectives are relative and therefore equivalent.
While I agree that we should not limit ourselves with ideological strictures, I disagree with the underlying premise that there is no capital T truth, and that the idea of it, or even more so, the pursuit of it prevents real progress in our movement through life. To use his own experiment, whether the left hand tells you one thing about the water and your right hand tells you another, neither changes the fact, the truth, that the bowl of lukewarm water in the middle has a temperature! Our inability to properly describe it does not make it less so. To me this is indicative of an underlying pride in man that makes this idea that “it only matters is we can prove it” far more perilous. It is the equivalent of playing peek-a-boo with a bear. With a willful childlike lack of object permanence, the bear doesn’t exist when we cannot objectively observe it. Peek-a-boo, bearclaw to the throat.
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