The Flatness Fallacy

Imagine it’s 100,000 years ago. You’ve fallen into a moderately deep canyon. You are unhurt. There are trees and grasses in the canyon. The only way out is up. So steep and smooth are the canyon walls, there’s no way you can climb.

What to do, what to do.

What you need of course is a ladder, but in your world, ladders don’t exist. As you contemplate your predicament, will the ladder concept pop into your prehistoric mind? It better, or your days are numbered down to fewer than the fingers on two hands.

2. Consider the field of vision, what we see anytime our eyes are open. Color (for most of us). 3-D (for most of us). And it is brutally, unredeemably flat, in the sense of horizontal.

We look out into the world through a horizontal slot. Sharp focus at the center, shading to pretty blurred at the edges.

We can move the slot by turning our head—left, right, up, down, behind. Thus we are aware than there’s "stuff" in all directions, but at any given moment we are seeing in only one direction, partially at that because of the limits of the slot.

Cleverly, we’ve learned how to extend the view, both macro and micro, with telescopes, microscopes and such. And we’ve even figured out how to make very realistic moving pictures that show us in the middle of stuff somewhere else.

But, for all our cleverness, when it comes to moment-to-moment interaction with the world, we’re stuck with the view and information coming through the old horizontal slot.

3. Such a constant, overwhelming experience of horizontality, of flatness, surely has powerful, perhaps permanent effects on how our consciousness settles into the world, how it unconsciously perceives the world in relation to itself, how it reacts to and interacts with the world.

We thus, without ever really thinking about it, lapse into the flatness fallacy. Our searches and researches may take us briefly out of this world-view, but the daily, humdrum, accustomed reality that we inhabit and expect to find every morning when we open our eyes remains the slot.

To return to our careless forebear: We’ve fallen into a canyon, but unlike him we’re not even aware that we’re trapped. He may somehow brilliantly think his way out by astonishingly conceptualizing "ladder" and making one.

But us?

Why bother? Canyon? What canyon?