When the Container Breaks

How Growth Begins Where Certainty Ends

Image: freepik.com

Science: Semmelweis

It’s no secret that revolutionary ideas take time to be absorbed into the collective consciousness. My favorite (tragic) example of this is the case of Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis. He was far ahead of his time in identifying the cause of puerperal fever—a deadly infection affecting women after childbirth.

He noted that doctors often performed autopsies on dead bodies before delivering live ones. He surmised that some kind of “cadaveric particles” (what we would now call germs) remained on the doctors’ hands, infecting the women. In 1847, he introduced a radical solution: requiring medical staff to wash their hands with a chlorinated lime solution before examinations. It was as simple as that, yet the results were dramatic—mortality rates plummeted.

For his lifesaving insight, Semmelweis was scoffed at and shunned by the medical community, some of whom claimed that hand-washing was beneath their dignity. He struggled to publish his findings, and his ideas were largely ignored or ridiculed. In the end, his mental and physical health deteriorated; he was committed to an asylum and died, ironically, of an infection.

One way of describing the medical world’s emotional and spiritual state at that time is immature: their container—their capacity to hold novel ideas and work with them—was small. Psychologists and mystics alike have used the metaphor of a container to describe the psyche’s ability to hold complexity and contradiction. Semmelweis’s discovery was an unwelcome wrench in the accepted intellectual order—one that had been centuries in the making. It seems ridiculous in hindsight, but imagine someone coming along and asserting that invisible entities were killing people.

The confrontation itself became the crucible in which medical science—and our collective container—was forced to expand. When the old framework cracked, something larger had room to emerge. That pattern of resistance—and eventual integration—is not unique to science. It plays out in politics, too.

Politics: Adams

The framers of the American Constitution had another radical idea. Rather than governing through monarchical diktat, which ensures a closed and tiny container, they would structure the government in such a way that the other side is constantly exposed to arguments and ideas that might, at first, seem very distasteful. Both in the framework of checks and balances and the two-party system, if an idea cannot survive the legislative meatgrinder, it dies. In theory, this forces those who propose ideas to come up with better ones.

As John Adams wrote in his “Thoughts on Government” (1776), “Government is instituted for the common good; for the happiness, safety, and prosperity of the people... It should be so constituted as to produce the best possible effects from the collision of interests and passions.”

In an ideal world, in the same way that a business person might be very pleased that a flaw was uncovered by a potential investor, in a host of arenas in life, from philosophy to interpersonal relationships, the friction of dissent, paradox, and critique should be welcomed with open arms. Once exposed to the mistake (the falsity) of the position, you have the opportunity to take a step into a bigger world. Your container expanded.

Religion: The Ultimate Container

Image: stockcake.com

Taking this idea to its logical extreme, philosophy and theology work to push the boundaries of our collective container ever further. How can the finite exist alongside the infinite? Small container thinking says it can’t. A bigger container can hold both ideas simultaneously and recognize that they are both, remarkably, true.

Are you a doctrinaire member of a political party? Do you find that there appears to be no commonality at all with the villains from the other group? The character training that most theologies at least pay lip service to would suggest that there must be a flaw in the way you are evaluating those with whom you contend. Could it be that there are a couple of good ideas that come from the other camp? Could you, theoretically, make room for them in your soul?

Who is the wise person?

The one who can learn from everyone.

— Pirke Avot

Despite the bad rap that religions get for supposedly being closed-minded, many of them encourage this big-picture thinking. The Talmud is replete with disagreement (machloket), and the dissenting opinions are preserved and cherished. The only consideration is whether or not a disagreement is “for the sake of Heaven” or not—is it genuine and pure or merely a preprogrammed political position that has more to do with ego than truth.

Christianity’s call to “test everything” and Buddhism’s emphasis on critical inquiry also reflect a belief that engaging with competing ideas is beneficial when done with sincerity and respect.

In recent times, we have witnessed a steady contraction of the container. As the shrill intolerance of our public discourse testifies, there is very little space for anything other than what has been sanctioned by our particular camp. This phenomenon cannot help but produce a host of negative consequences. If our container is small in one arena, it is much more likely to be in others. Ego-driven (small container) contention in politics tends to spill out into the interpersonal and will also occlude the spiritual.

One commonality you will always observe in truly spiritual people (whether religious or not) is their ability to love people of all kinds—even those with whom they vehemently disagree. Disagreement itself is not the issue. As we’ve seen, when deployed properly, it’s a vehicle for expansion. But when done, “not for the sake of Heaven,” it is self-serving, tribal, and tiny.

Every expansion begins with discomfort. The question isn’t whether the world will challenge our container — it’s whether we’ll have the courage to let it stretch.