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In Chapter II of Through the Looking Glass there occurs the following exchange between Alice and the Red Queen:
“I only wanted to see what the garden was like, your Majesty––“
“That’s right,” said the Queen……though, when you say ’garden’, I’ve seen gardens compared with which this would be a wilderness.”
Alice didn’t dare to argue the point, but went on: “––and I thought I’d try to find my way to the top of that hill––“
“When you say ‘hill’”, the Queen interrupted, I could show you hills, in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.”
“No, I shouldn’t,” said Alice surprised into contradicting her at last: “a hill can’t be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense––“
What’s amusing–and instructive–here is the difference between the Queen’s two claims. Gardens contrast greatly with wilderness; but the difference between them is a matter of degree: gardens are more orderly; wilderness is less orderly. So we can easily understand what the Queen means when she says compared to another garden the one they are standing in is a wilderness. It’s a way of saying that that other garden exhibits a high degree of order.
But the difference between a hill and a valley is not a matter of degree; they are contraries that are mutually exclusive. Hills rise, valleys sink; these are among their essential properties. So Alice is right: no matter how much bigger some other hill is, it can’t make another hill look like a valley. A hill that doesn’t rise above the surrounding terrain is simply not a hill.
Of course the Red Queen doesn’t accept Alice’s critique:
The Red Queen shook her head. “You may call it ‘nonsense’ if you like,” she said, “but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as dictionary.”
And with that we are back to mere contrasts rather than contradictions, since Nonsensicalness and sensibleness, are matters of degree.
Running hard to get nowhere
Alice and the Red Queen run as fast as they can for quite a time, at the end of which Alice finds herself sitting on he ground, exhausted.
Alice looked around her in great surprise. “Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree all the time! Everything’s just as it was!”
“Of course it is, said the Queen: “what would you have it?”
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else––if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country,” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
The Red Queen’s description of how one must run fast just to stay in the same place is so often cited because it captures one of the defining features of modern life. When we imagine Lewis Carroll in the 1860s gliding in a row boat on the River Isis at Oxford with Alice Liddell and her sisters on a “golden afternoon” during these “happy summer days,” we perhaps think of him as belonging to a more stable, tranquil era. But in fact the mid-nineteenth century was already a period of accelerating change. The industrial revolution and the advent of capitalism was changing the world in dramatic ways. Karl Marx was one of the first to fully grasp that constant change was the hallmark of modernity. As he writes in The Communist Manifesto:
“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…..”
Carroll’s fascination with the innocence of childhood–he befriended a number of young girls, and loved to photograph them–can be understood in part as a reaction against the fast-changing world he found himself part of. Whether intentionally or not, the Red Queen’s observation perfectly describes a situation we are now all familiar with. If you don’t work hard to keep up with the latest x (e.g. technology, workplace skills, music, jargon……) you quickly fall behind.
Related links
Philosophical humor in Through the Looking Glass
Why philosophers love Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
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Philosophical humor in Ch. 5 of Alice in Wonderland
Alice's conversations with the Cheshire Cat
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