On microcosm, or the problem of scale

July 10, 2023

ONE of my favorite childhood stories is The Blind Men and an Elephant. There are many versions of this story, but they all go something like this:

A group of blind men is tasked to figure out what an elephant is like. The first blind man touches the trunk and says: “The elephant is like a python.” The second man touches the tail and says: “No, it is like a rope of some sort.” Yet, the third touches the legs of the elephant and disagrees, “The elephant is like a tree!” The last blind man, reaching out and touching the body, proclaims authoritatively: “You’re all wrong. The elephant is like a wall.”

“Blind monks examining an elephant” by Itcho Hanabusa. Wikimedia Commons

Though the story has stuck with me since I first heard it in 7th grade, I clearly failed to take the lesson to heart. As a freshman in college, I was obsessed with the search for ontological truth–fundamental questions about the nature of reality, existence, and knowledge, the whole lot. I felt that if we couldn’t answer basic questions like these, then no one truly be certain about what they know. All academic pursuits would be moot.

To assuage what would become my first experience with existential dread, I thought, quite naively at the time, that taking an introductory philosophy course might help. Predictably, I finished the class with far more questions than answers. Aristotle’s De Anima and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil proved unable to relieve my angst–if anything, they worsened it. Each philosopher seemed to make perfect sense to me when I read them, and I went from one to the other like a child who’s trying to pick his favorite toy in a toy shop. Looking back, I could have reduced my anguish if I’d remembered the simple lesson I learned in 7th grade.

A standard reading of the Blind Men and an Elephant yields two related statements: (1) What is true for a part of the whole may not be true for the whole, vice versa; and (2) What is true from one perspective may not be true for another. These axioms are simple to learn but incredibly difficult to remember–as my own experience shows.

That we frequently fail to realize the limitations of what we can see is the essence of what I call the “problem of scale.” No one can see the whole picture–the totality of every relevant information, context, and background. Even if one could, the amount of information would be so mind-boggling that they wouldn’t have the brainpower to make sense of it. However, the problem of scale wouldn’t be an issue were it not for our habit of forgetting how narrow our perspective really is. Our hubris makes us believe that we see more than we can see and, consequently, know more than we actually know. When we fail to address the limitations of our knowledge and understanding, we commit the same error as the blind men–knowing only a part yet speaking of the whole.

Beyond fundamental questions of reality, the parable of the Blind Men applies equally to other disciplines and life’s daily problems. Heuristically, it is useful to reconcile differences in opinion by considering if there is a scenario where both sides can be at least partially correct. Multiple, seemingly contradictory truths can coexist under an overarching, reconciliatory Truth, and one does not preclude or invalidate the other. The blind men weren’t outright wrong, after all. They used the information available to them and drew reasonable conclusions from that information. In fact, they would have been entirely correct if they qualified their conclusions to the parts of the animal they touched–i.e., if they said that an elephant’s legs are like tree trunks or its tail is like a rope. What sunk their effort wasn’t their sense of touch or ability to use analogies. It was their inability to “see” the whole elephant and understand the limitations of their own perspectives. Similarly, any of us can be right and wrong at the same time, depending on how far we are willing to stretch what we know.

The problem of scale manifests beyond the physical. Scale can also be temporal, social, or epistemological–the latter being the intellectual context a piece of knowledge is situated. Think of the Pandimensional Beings’ quest for truth in The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They waited ten million years for their super-intelligent computer, specifically designed to resolve the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything,” to calculate an answer that made no sense to anyone. The computer’s calculations were correct, but it was useless to the makers–or rather, their descendants–who, for all their cleverness, had failed to define the scope of their question. This oversight condemned them to another ten million years of search for the Ultimate Question to make sense of the answer they got.

Humans, like the pandimensional beings in The Hitchhiker’s, are similarly prone to the kind of epistemological arrogance that makes us jump to the answer before we know the question. Luckily, we can combat this. In some versions of the Blind Men and an Elephant, the blind men realize what was going on and work together to collectively “see” the whole elephant. In confronting our differences, we can do the same so long as we are willing to withold judgement, engage with sincerity, and most importantly, remain humble.

This blog, Microcosm, is dedicated to the spirit of embracing the problem–or the beauty–of scale. For most of my life, I have been a recipient of knowledge. This blog is part of my effort to give back. Just as importantly, the pursuit of knowledge is a collaborative effort. We are like the blind men In the parable, except that the object of our pursuit is far bigger than any elephant, and the tools at our disposable no better suited for the task than the blind men’s hands were at theirs. We must work collaboratively if we hope to make progress.

Microcosm is Greek for “small universe.” It represents the things that we see and experience directly. No one directly experiences the totality of abstract phenomena like the economy or racism; we experience them in myriad, microcosmic fragments—the price of groceries, the interactions we have with others, and the health effects of toxic environments. The microcosm framework demands that we approach issues holistically, conscious of the ways small things are connected with the bigger picture. It also encourages us to think in scale-shifting ways, imagining how our perspective and knowledge might shift depending on our position on the microcosmic-macrocosmic spectrum. Like looking at a chopstick in a glass of water, what we think about things changes depending on the angle we look at it.

I want this blog to be a dynamic space, not least because I am new to blogging and will probably learn as much, and likely more, than you from this exercise. I want to write about my thoughts of things, big and small, articles I read or movies I watched, and my observations in both daily life and during travels. Microcosmic, perhaps, but instructive and thought-provoking nonetheless. As I climb up the steep slope of the learning curve, I welcome any and all constructive feedback. While I can’t say how this space may evolve in the future, I can assure you that I will always strive to deliver the highest quality content I can achieve. So, if I’ve managed to retain your interest thus far, then I wish you a warm welcome to the Microcosm!