Shell game

When I asked my students yesterday to introduce themselves with something about them that the other students did not already know, the first few reported on their dietary lives - "I'm a vegetarian," "I like grilled cheese sandwiches" - but then we got derailed by pets. In fact it was the grilled cheese lover, for she told us "I like grilled cheese sandwiches, and turtles." "Not together," I asked? "No," she smiled, unsure of what I was implying. But the turtles won out after all, for no fewer than three more students (out of twelve!) proved to have turtles in their lives.

What to make of it? I suppose I've myself to blame - of course they weren't going to risk anything less than unthreatening about themselves, so we ended up with kittens, turtles and tofu. But maybe there's more than meets the eye. When I recounted the turtle infestation to my office neighbor E, he thought it significant - a way of saying that one was timid and might quickly withdraw into her shell if confronted. V, our office manager, was dismayed - she had a turtle one, she told me, and he couldn't do anything, couldn't jump or race, wouldn't even play. (She then got a 6-foot iguana, apparently.) [Source of the cool picture above.]

But I've thought of a way (maybe) to turn the turtles into a teaching moment. You've surely heard this story:

There is an Indian story — at least I heard it as an Indian story — about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave) what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? “Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.” (Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 28-29)

Or maybe you know Stephen Hawking's version in A Brief History of Time:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

Other versions exist but "turtles all the way down" is the punchline, and - I hope - will prove an interesting challenge for a course on religion and secularism. I might give the students both versions. For Hawking, "turtles all the way down" shows the reductio ad absurdam of faith claims. But for Geertz, it shows the wisdom of ancient cultures, or at least of the naive fatuity of the wish to get beyond culture. As he goes on to say: Such, indeed, is the condition of things. ... Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. (29)