Art Day: the blind men and the elephant
The classic story of not seeing the forest for the trees is the story of the “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” Each man touches a different part of the elephant and comes to a different conclusion as to what it is. The man who touches the leg concludes it is a tree. The man who touches an ear concludes it is a fan. The man who touches the tail concludes it is a rope. In the last 100 years specialization has accelerated. Making sense of the world is harder and harder when your teachers are only trained to study a smaller and smaller patch of it. This is only exacerbated when the issue at hand is policy-related. There the quest for truth plays second fiddle to partisan spin.
