The stubborn belief that one is right remains a common theme in most arguments. Yet this belief often proves faulty because one lacks the perspective to see the whole picture and is doomed to know only a part of the truth.
On a certain roadside, six blind men sit together each day to beg. One day, an elephant happens to pass along the road near them.
None of them knows what an elephant is and has never encountered one. They ask the handler to stop on the road. With the elephant standing still before them, the blind men approach the grand animal to experience for themselves what an elephant is.
This is a problem for all of them. Each stands near a different part of the animal and feels only that particular body part. Since the elephant is so large, they cannot even grasp the enormity and the fullness of the creature before them.
The Elephant in the Room
The first blind man only touched the elephant’s side. With such limited experience, this blind man claims that the elephant is “exactly like a wall.”
The second blind man only ran his hands along the elephant’s hard tusk. He rebukes the first blind man and says: “He is round and smooth and sharp. He is more like a spear than anything else.”
Hearing this opinion, the third blind man objects, for he only experienced the elephant’s trunk. He tells the first and second blind man that they are both mistaken; he says an elephant is “like a snake.”
This opinion riles up the fourth blind man, for he only touched the elephant’s leg. He rejects all of the previous opinions and states that an elephant resembles a tree.
The fifth blind man, who only felt the elephant’s ear, opposes these descriptions. He states that an elephant is like a large fan.
The sixth blind man questions all the others, for he only grasped the elephant’s tail. He claims that an elephant is just like a rope.
The six men continue to argue on the roadside, each thinking that he knows more than the others. They continue on and on, each arguing their point with stubborn determination.
Through this story, Baldwin demonstrates that when people argue, they tend to cement their opinions and stubbornly believe they are right. Yet this stubborn grounding can lead to a lack of perspective. Even if a person has only a part of the truth, his or her lack of perspective and willful ignorance blinds that person to the fullness of the truth.
George Eliot perfectly sums up the issue in “Middlemarch” when she says: “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”
Thus, only by seeing something from several points can one see rightly. When one sees rightly, the whole beautiful truth can be seen to perceive the elephant in the room.
