The Ugly Duckling
This is the title of one of Hans Christian Andersen’s best known and most subtle “fairytales”. This complex story about prejudice and rejection should properly be designated a fable. It begins in an idyllic rural setting, where a mother duck is anxiously watching as her brood as one by one they hatch out of their cramped eggs and start to take in their surroundings. “Goodness”, they exclaim, “how huge the world is!”
“Huh!” snorts their mother. “You think this duckpond is the whole world? The world is much bigger than this – it reaches all the way to the edge of the parson’s glebe, or so I’ve heard. Not that I have ever been so far away myself.”
Everyone in Denmark knows this story, yet few Danes are aware that their enthusiastic globetrotting literary idol is making gentle fun of them from the grave in this little anecdote. Of course the people of every nation are aware that there is indeed a wide world beyond their own “duckpond”, and many of them have been there too. Nevertheless, their opinions on a wide range of public issues reveal that they can easily be oblivious of anything beyond the borders of their country. Despite the fact that every nation is closely and inevitably linked by transport connections, trade, tourism and family ties, people constantly behave as if their nation is a closed society, hermetically sealed from the outside world. This is the Mother Duck Fallacy.
Hans Andersen was making fun not just of the Danes, but also of the Children of Israel and all those other earnest people who take literally Moses’s grandiose claim that God created the entire world and everything in it. Moses was the “parson” of the parable, and the creation of his glebe with its “duckpond” was a task of considerably less than biblical proportions.
Ducklings are cute, attractive creatures. However, one of the ducklings in the brood in Hans Anderson’s story turns out to be ugly, as well as a social misfit. It suffers from “integration” difficulties and is ejected from the duckpond. After many adventures, it grows up and discovers that, far from being an ugly duckling, it had been a cygnet all along, and is now a beautiful swan. It was not a real duckling – it was not a duckling at all.
There is a similar subtlety about Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan. He could just as well have told a parable about a good traveller, but His choice of a Samaritan served to emphasise the man’s goodness, because His Jewish audience considered people from Samaria, as a rule, to be thoroughly selfish and untrustworthy.
During World War 2, Denmark was occupied by German forces, and the Danish news media were subject to censorship. The general public were aware of this, but, without reading carefully between the lines in the mainstream newspapers, they had no idea what they were not being told. In response to this situation, members of the resistence printed an illegal newspaper, called simply “Information”, to emphasise that it contained the ugly truth about current events, in contrast with the cute attractive version disseminated by the rest of the press on the orders of the Nazis.
Cross-examined by Pontius Pilate, Jesus (according to the gospel of John) explained that his purpose in life was to testify to the truth. Unlike the priests who had brainwashed the Jews into falsely believing that they were God’s chosen people, Jesus’s words were the real deal. Everyone, Jew or gentile, was one of God’s children, according to the man before him. Pontius Pilate was himself a leader, so he knew all about the deceit and manipulation of power in general and that of the irritating and self-satisfied Jewish leadership in particular. He could have gone down in history as the man who first talked the emperor into making Christianity the official doctrine of Rome – but he blew it. “What is truth?” he replied, fearful of upsetting the Jewish leadership and provoking a bloody revolt in his back yard.
Hans Andersen was making fun not just of the Danes, but also of the Children of Israel and all those other earnest people who take literally Moses’s grandiose claim that God created the entire world and everything in it. Moses was the “parson” of the parable, and the creation of his glebe with its “duckpond” was a task of considerably less than biblical proportions.
There is a similar subtlety about Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan. He could just as well have told a parable about a good traveller, but His choice of a Samaritan served to emphasise the man’s goodness, because His Jewish audience considered people from Samaria, as a rule, to be thoroughly selfish and untrustworthy.
During World War 2, Denmark was occupied by German forces, and the Danish news media were subject to censorship. The general public were aware of this, but, without reading carefully between the lines in the mainstream newspapers, they had no idea what they were not being told. In response to this situation, members of the resistence printed an illegal newspaper, called simply “Information”, to emphasise that it contained the ugly truth about current events, in contrast with the cute attractive version disseminated by the rest of the press on the orders of the Nazis.
Cross-examined by Pontius Pilate, Jesus (according to the gospel of John) explained that his purpose in life was to testify to the truth. Unlike the priests who had brainwashed the Jews into falsely believing that they were God’s chosen people, Jesus’s words were the real deal. Everyone, Jew or gentile, was one of God’s children, according to the man before him. Pontius Pilate was himself a leader, so he knew all about the deceit and manipulation of power in general and that of the irritating and self-satisfied Jewish leadership in particular. He could have gone down in history as the man who first talked the emperor into making Christianity the official doctrine of Rome – but he blew it. “What is truth?” he replied, fearful of upsetting the Jewish leadership and provoking a bloody revolt in his back yard.
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