The tricycle phenomenon

I have a friend who is a Catholic priest. He’s a sanctimonious, arrogant prick of colossal proportions, but there’s no need to worry about my soul: I’ll say ten Hail Mary’s and all will be sorted.

About twelve years ago, while under the grip of my three-year long flirtation with atheism, I was locked in mortal intellectual combat with him over the whole religion vs atheism affair. For a reason I could not fathom, he was uncharacteristically calm and quite dismissive of my arguments. He’s normally quite an excitable fellow. And then he stopped me mid-sentence and said something that has always stuck with me.

“Imagine that you are a parent and you have a year-old child. Let’s say you buy a tricycle for him/her. After a while the child will learn how to ride it and be naturally very excited. Because it’s a completely new experience to them, chances are, they will come to you all excited to tell you all about this wonderful new discovery called a tricycle. Your job is to nod and be excited with them. Because of their age, pointing out that tricycles do not excite you would be foolish.”

He then went on to make his point in his usual condescending way; atheism is an idea that was the brainchild of theologians back in the second century or whenever it was.

Apparently they came up with these ideas as thought experiments to amuse themselves in monasteries. You’d be surprised what men will do for entertainment if they can’t sit in pubs and rate waitresses’ arses. The idea fell in the hands of “weaker minds who took the whole thing too seriously”. You can use your imagination to fill in the rest.

My fascination with this analogy is the whole notion of watching people in the throes of a paradigm that you have also gone through and experienced before moving on. And then, because they have no way of knowing that the idea is old hat to you, they feel the compulsion to tell you all about it excitedly. Someone is probably reading this and yawning.

They may even have written a post-doctoral thesis on the tricycle phenomenon — complete with the correct, fancy Latin name. To them, I sound just like the one-year-old who has just discovered the wonders of a tricycle.

This thought always comes to mind when I read articles, columns and blogs.

Especially in an interactive setting such as the world wide web.

Let’s say that a columnist is tackling the subject of people who drive under the influence of alcohol and comes to the conclusion that such people are dangerous for everybody. It’s quite amazing how many times an excited reader will respond with a lengthy comment, pointing out the bankruptcy of the writer’s arguments because the writer failed to point out that alcohol affects the dendrites of an individual’s neurons thus causing a disturbance on the synaptic connection. (I look forward to hearing how this description is actually scientifically inaccurate.)

It’s even funnier if the writer of the column is a neurologist or has read extensively on the subject of the effects of alcohol on a person’s synapses. But the writer has 1 000 words in which to express her views (lest we forget, the writer wants to talk about the dangers of drunken driving). Even if she might have wanted to dazzle people with her impressive knowledge of synapses and dendrites, it didn’t seem necessary at the time. So she sits there and basks in the dim glow of a mini-dissertation about neurons with a silly grin on her face. Of course the converse holds true. Sometimes a reader is yawning loudly by the time he hits the second paragraph. It is a universal phenomenon that works both ways.

In most instances, the problem is often that the observer reaches different conclusions from the writer’s, after processing the same facts about neurons. The reader might have come to the conclusion that driving drunk is completely safe. And he might assume that since the writer never mentioned neurons, it is because the writer does not know about neurons that he reached different conclusions. And it’s understandable too, why the reader might think this.

From the point of view of the reader, one article is a snapshot of where the writer’s mind is at. It’s like switching on the telly and seeing footage of Formula One’s Lewis Hamilton engaged in what seems like a titanic neck-and-neck battle with someone … mmm, turdish like David Coulthard. The perspective you might be missing here is that Hamilton is the race leader on lap 45 and that he’s trying to lap Coulthard, who is still completing lap 43. But the snapshot only tells you where he is physically at that particular moment.

But I still find the whole question fascinating. Is it ever a prudent course of action to point out to someone who is passionately expounding on the principles of, say, black consciousness that the concept is one that is more than just a little familiar to you? Is it even wise to point out to the individual that you may or may not have drunk from some of the original wells of said concept and may or may not even have written extensively on the subject?

Or should one just sit back and let the one-year-old enjoy the false sensation of the discovery of the tricycle?

[To my regular readers who have sent me emails expressing concern at the more-hallucinatory-than-usual note to my posts, do not despair. I’m still trying to see how deep I can dig — I don’t think I’ve hit rock bottom yet. That’s bloggerspeak for “I really thought it was a good post but I’m now going to pretend I was going through an experimental phase to save face”. Fear not; I’ll be back writing about things from planet Earth soon. My apologies.]

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