Page 31 - The Irony Board

Into the Mind

The empirical’s new clothes

No armor suits
My passing fad,
But I think I’m
In iron clad.

Having achieved some level of philosophical understanding, one
is tempted to call off the search and bask in the glow of absolute
truth. Other epigrams, above and below, warn of this intellectual
hazard. This piece recalls the Andersen fairy tale about the emperor
taken in by tricksters claiming that all worthy individuals could see
the invisible cloth they were weaving. The ruler, convinced he was
wearing a beautiful set of garments, paraded through the streets
naked. All his subjects similarly deluded themselves—all, that is,
except one small boy.
That principle of innocent analysis persists in us all as logic,
applied more or less rigorously to the products of perception and
conception. Once we have hooked a system of philosophy into our
need to believe, we stop looking for the holes in it. As we pass on
parade with our latest “-ism,” its arguments seem iron-clad to us;
our intellectual security is assured by an impervious suit of armor (an
implied optional apostrophe should be read into “suits”, to reveal
the figurative hinge). The imperial outfit may well suit an ego
unavailable to criticism, but sooner or later an unsophisticated (or
uncommitted) observer is going to see through it. No doubt
Gluckman fancied himself able to invoke that inner child to expose
humbug; it might not be going too far too suggest that he developed
this idea partially to justify his own simpleness of mind.

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