How do you eat an elephant?

Answer: One bite at a time.

Fellow Noshers,

As I watched the other customers' order being delivered, my appetite really revved up. Sizzling plates, delightful aromas, silverware clinking greedily on their plates...

That's why I was so disappointed when the waitress got to my table. I tore into the steak before she had a chance to walk away...and it was COLD!

"Excuse me, miss, but this steak is cold."

"That's okay, sir. Usually people like their steak hot, but it's okay if you want it to be cold. We don't mind here."

"But, it really is cold. I'm not making this up. I don't want it cold."

"If you don't want it cold, then just drink some ice water. The difference in the two will make the steak hotter. Glad I could help, let me know if you need anything else."

So there I sat, not knowing what to think. Was I really the reason the steak was cold? ________________________________________

Try a little experiment: Next time you grow weary of the vapid chatter about the price of gas, the latest guest on Oprah, Trump and Rosie, and the merits of cable versus the Dish, try this the next time you’re in a social setting: Ask, “Who believes in truth?” After the room revives from the dead skunk you’ve tossed on the carpet, continue, “No, really; who believes that truth exists and that it is knowable?”

(In my experience, whether you do this with co-workers, neighbors, or church members, the conversation will proceed something like this:)

"You’re talking about absolute truth?"

Yeah, that’s what I mean.

Depends on what?

"On your viewpoint. Have you seen that sketch—the one that looks like a hag or a beautiful girl."

Yeah.

"Well, which is it—a picture of a girl or a hag?"

"Exactly! It all depends".

Can we get off this gerbil run? Depends on what?

"Okay. We’re all products of nature and nurture which causes us to see things differently. As to the sketch—I may see a hag, but that gives me no right to claim that it is a hag, or that others are wrong if they see something else. In the end, who’s to say what it is, or if it’s anything but a poor artist’s scribbling?"

The responder reflects the prevailing sentiment of the day: truth is not an objective, overarching statement about reality; it is personal perception shaped by our genetic makeup and experience. Among sophisticates and intelligentsia, such relativistic thinking is all the rage. Yet few realize that their fashionable ideas are really quite old.

Like the modern-day hag/girl drawing, a favorite illustration of yore was the parable of the wind: One person feels the wind as cold, while another feels it as warm. And since the wind can’t be both warm and cold, it’s the individual--not external reality--that determines its properties. In fact, maybe it’s the individual that determines the very existence of the wind.

Maybe.

Relativity theory and quantum theory form the backbone of modern relativism. Together, they validate the “truth” about truth that the Eastern mystics had been telling us all along: objective truth is an illusion.

Then East met West in “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” In the famous fable, six blind investigators examined different parts of a pachyderm to conclude that it is like a tree, a rope, a wall, a branch, a fan, a spear. The lesson? They were all right. The application? We, too, are blind men with no privileged position to judge the perspectives of others. The conclusion? If all we have are the experiences of our diverse fumbling in the dark, practically speaking, there is no elephant!

But if truth cannot be discovered and, in fact, does not exist, it is our creation.

Even better than creating the new "truth", are the reasons we've created for giving up on the old "truth": “We don’t know the whole truth” (So I guess we just make something up?); “It’s good to raise questions” (Maybe we should also question whether 2 plus 2 really equals 4?); “It stimulates critical thinking” (About as much as wasting thought on Holocaust denial theories). But my personal favorite, the American Bandstand answer, is: “It's a catchy, hip idea, with a cool soundtrack.” That oughta do it.

Resist the siren song of the modern-day Relativists: Truth is independent of us. Truth is true regardless of our perceptions or beliefs no matter how sincerely we hold them. Neither is it something we invent. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, “We can no more create truth than we can create a new law of nature, like the law of gravity.”

Busy creating my own truth,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Infidel,

~Bill