If It Ain't Broken . . .

Back some forty years ago, Thor Heyerdahl, of Kon-Tiki fame, embarked on another ocean voyage aboard an Egyptian papyrus reed boat called Ra. The purpose of the voyage, if my memory serves me right, was to do with proving the possibility of ancient contacts between Egypt and South America. The boat itself was based upon ancient Egyptian designs, culled from manuscripts and tomb decorations etc.

In the course of building it, they ran up against a technical problem arising from the design, something to do with the prow. The more they examined it, the more they became convinced that the feature, even though it was part of the historic design, wasn’t an essential one. They called in the marine engineers, who agreed with them. And so they modified the design, leaving the feature to one side.

A short time into the voyage they ran into trouble, trouble resulting from their failure to follow the traditional design. It proved after all that the discarded feature played an important part in the boat’s seaworthiness. After a couple of months the boat had to be abandoned.

We live in a world where increasingly the demand is that everything that exists justifies itself before the court of reason. It doesn’t matter that this ‘reason’ is often a shorthand for special pleading. What it usually means is that such and such a thing is not reasonable simply because ‘it doesn’t suit me’. Such egoism is easily given a universalist spin by changing the phraseology from ‘It’s not reasonable to ask me to do or believe in this’ to ‘It is not reasonable to ask people to do or believe in this.’ And immediately one has a political programme.

Now change is endemic to the world we live in. Arguably, everything changes under the sun—even the sun itself; and so must we in our thinking and in our practice and in our institutions if we are to have any ongoing relevance. It is just as dangerous to lag behind change as to be too far ahead of it. Yet, in normal circumstances, the changes that we choose or are forced to make, if they are not to be counterproductive, should be reflective of the real state of things in the external world. They should not be undertaken merely as a consequence of well-organised fashionable pressure or dissent.

And it should be recognized that there are often ‘dumb’ things out there in the world, seemingly unable to make a case for themselves in the jostling marketplace of liberal opinion, that are (as in the original detail of the Ra) nonetheless essential to our existence.