A Rabbit Hole to the Sky
As a young child, I remember looking at the cover of the Ladybird Book of Hymns and disappearing down a very deep rabbit hole.
The two rather disgustingly wholesome children on the cover were each holding a copy of the book. The same book that had a picture of them on its cover in which they were holding a copy of … Oh, hang on! Something’s rather wrong here.
I tried desperately to walk myself through the process. Let’s see, you make the book, then give it to the kids to hold and … nope, this isn’t working. It’s temporally wrong. It’s all chickens and eggs. The book must surely exist before the book can be made. However many times we iterate the process, this simply isn’t working. How? How? How?
My five-year-old brain had yet to encounter any notion of infinite recursion but it was starting to form one. This book cover had become one of the most profound mysteries of the Universe.
It played on my mind, incessantly.
Eventually, I asked my older and wiser sister to explain. “You do realise it’s not a photograph?” she asked. Ah, no, I hadn’t realised. That simply hadn’t occurred to me at all. Whilst my mind had leapt into all sorts of deep and interesting places — at least for one so young — it had overlooked one very crucial detail. This was artifice, not reality. The rules had changed. You didn’t have to go too far down the chain before the cover could be happily represented by a dot.
I often wonder how far my thoughts would have gone without that sibling intervention.
Infinity and recursion are notions that have fascinated me ever since. I am forever haunted by Zeno’s paradox and utterly plagued by my inability to think about something other than orange penguins. That, however, is not what draws me back to this early foray into philosophy.
What I was attempting to do was explain something on the basis of a misconception. I’m actually quite impressed that my young mind went to such places without any prompting, but it was led there by a very fundamental mistake. And here we run into a very real problem with all belief systems.
As humans, we have this incredible ability to build truly beautiful towers of thought. Some are majestically intricate; some are sublimely minimal; others are, quite frankly, just a messy pile of bricks. All of these towers, though, have the power to imprison us. Once inside them, we are too busy looking for the beautifully crafted stairway to the next level to even wonder whether the foundations are sound.
It can, of course, equally be argued that if we don’t start from some point of certainty, we’ll never get anywhere at all. Once we reduce everything to “the only thing of which I am certain is that there is nothing of which I am certain” is there really any further to go? At some point, we have to bite the bullet and say that while such-and-such a piece of knowledge may well be inductive, we’ve seen it often enough to be able to take it as read.
That does not mean, however, that we should not all be a lot more sceptical when we consider a foray into a tower. A tower is simply an inverted rabbit hole, at the end of the day, and we are going to be spending an awful lot of time in there.
Simply liking the colour or style of a structure is not enough, we really need to give the foundations a very thorough going over before we sign on the dotted line. Chances are, none of us would buy an otherwise unsuitable house, simply because we find the first-floor bathroom rather enchanting. Why then, are we so often eager to subscribe to a belief system simply because something on one of the lower stories seems to scream common sense?
In a Universe in which we can’t even rely on the basic building blocks being there from one instant to the next, belief is a very potent drug. And like many potent drugs, it’s rather moreish, perhaps the most addictive of them all.
Belief can consume us, it can inspire us, it can comfort us, it can turn us into monsters, but the one thing that it can never do is offer us the genuine certainty that we were looking for in the first place.
We should be very careful about what we believe in because, in so many ways, we are shaped by the towers in which we choose to dwell. And whilst we’re all too keen to point at the rickety structures that others live in, we’re rarely prepared to look below our own feet.
