Incomplete All the Way Down

When that you were and a very Christian boy,

You encountered, in a neighbor’s library,

A copy of Why I Am Not a Christian,

The 1920s text by Bertrand Russell,

To which you took immediate exception,

Just barely restraining yourself from writing

Angrily in the margins of that copy.

But you never forgot completely the bit

Where the argument for God’s necessity

As the uncaused cause is compared by Russell

To claiming the world rests on an elephant

That stands on a turtle, that stands on nothing,

Apparently. You would encounter many

Alternative recensions to Russell’s brief

Anecdote later, most of them involving—

Instead of an effort to change the subject—

The variant, It’s turtles all the way down.

One recent book cites the William James version,

In which an alleged little old lady

Came up to Dr. James after a lecture

And asserted the world rested on turtles.

James then asked her what the turtles rested on,

To which she said, Very clever Professor,

But after that it’s turtles all the way down.

Bertrand Russell or William James? This sent you

To Wikipedia, where naturally

The answer turned out to be neither, although

Both had deployed versions of the anecdote.

Also unsurprisingly, the anecdote

Had more than one origin, and both of them

Relied on condescending chauvinism,

The one toward heathen Hindus, the other

Toward uneducated older women.

The business about an elephant holding

Up the world by standing on a turtle’s back

After which, who knew what the turtle stood on,

Came from colonial remarks on Hindus.

The all the way down phrase was apparently

First, It’s rocks all the way down, and not turtles,

From an anonymous fictional exchange

In an 1830s US newspaper,

Not between any eminent professor

And a lady after one of his lectures,

But between a schoolboy and a farm woman

Who refused to believe that the world was round,

Insisting it was dirt on rocks and then rocks

All the way down. This finally makes some sense,

Since why would anyone challenge William James

After one of his lectures to say the world

Rested on turtles in infinite regress?

How would such a topic have ever come up?

It’s a portmanteau anecdote, appealing

To the biases of learnéd Western males,

That heathens and old women are silly fools—

From the former, the nonsense about turtles,

From the latter, the triumphant illogic,

And together they turn up after lectures

By eminent white men, to humorously

Insist on absurdist monsters of regress—

And after that, it’s turtles all the way down.

In every version, it’s clear the anecdote

Is meant to be funny, and the joke is on

The funny Hindu person or old woman.

Near the bottom of the Wikipedia

Page, at least as it existed on that day,

There was a mention of a recent TED talk

By a popularizer of mathematics,

Marcus duSautoy, in which he coined the phrase,

Gödels all the way down, for phonemic fun,

To illustrate how impossible it is

To get out of Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness,

Which made you think, at last, we’re getting somewhere.