Humpty Dumpty

Humanism is in many ways a response to one book, one very old book that purports to have moral message, and this purported message has in truth reached and influenced millions. And the message is wrong, and frankly pernicious, because it’s causing us to live our lives wrongly, build our society wrongly, and we should be angry about this book. Maybe not at the author or even the readers – they know not what they do – but certainly anger at the book itself in appropriate. We need to fight against its message until that message has been defeated. And of course you all know what book I’s talking about, don’t you?

Humpty Dumpty. That’s right, Humpty Dumpty. You know the story; “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.” The End.

There is a Humpty Dumpty mentality that says that the world – be it our personal lives or society as a whole or whatever – needs to be repaired. That things were once perfect and round and bright and shiny like an egg until they fell and broke into million pieces, and now it’s our job to reassemble all the pieces.

The only problem with this mentality is – everything. Because there was never, ever, at any point in our lives or in human history, a perfect egg of goodness to shatter. Why would there be? For fourteen billion years of random, purposeless, unguided evolution, matter floated around, formed stars that lip up and were extinguished, and those stars eventually formed the material that formed you and me, and also lizards, the garbage dumps and concentration camps. Why would we expect any perfection? ~ Pages 142-143 (Good without God – Greg M Epstein)

Comments

Dinesh ^club

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.' Lewis Carroll

4 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

Perhaps it is the paradoxical love-hate relationship we hav ewith words which adds to their fascination, or perhaps it is their schizophrenic character, so tangible in writing and so evanescent in speech. How are we to handle entities wi=hich have such multiple personalities? We let them control us or do we try to control them? Lewis carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, in a famous quotation from chapter 6 of ‘Through the Looking Glass’(1871), was in no doubt:

‘When I use a word, ‘Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less. ‘ The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make a word mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master -- that is all.’ ~ Page 6

2 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

Lewis Carroll would probably claim the accolade of ‘most unusual’ word creator. His ‘Jabberwocky’ poem, found in ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ contains several nonsense inventions:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe. . .

Alice respectfully asks Humpty Dumpty to explain them. ‘Slithy’, for instance, he explains as ‘lithe and slimy’. ‘Brillig’ means ‘four o’clock in the afternoon -- the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.’

‘You see it’s like a portmanteau’, he goes on, ‘there are two meaning packed up in one word.’ He didn’t realize it, but ‘portmanteau word’ would one day become a technical term in the scince of linguistics. ~ Page 69 ~ "Words, Words, Words" ~ David Crystal

Must a name mean something?” Alice asked doubtfully. ‘Of course it must,’ replied Humpty: ‘my name means the shape I am -- not a good handsom shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.’ Once again, Lewis Carroll’s bellingerently fragile linguistic pundit points us towards a psychological truth. We want names mean something. ~ Page 74 ~ "Words, Words, Words" ~ David Crystal

2 years ago. Edited 17 months ago.

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