5. Pandora's closed box

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Have you heard of Pandora's box? Sure you have. Anyway, it wasn't a box, it was a jar, but I'll use 'box' here because it sounds more familiar.

And that's a moot point, because Pandora was a myth. And if she had been male, she would have been a mythter (Enough! Not only is that sexist, it's also a crap joke - Editor).

Oh, I could stop here and no-one would care. But I'm carrying on. There's a point to be made. In the Greek myth, Pandora is warned by Prometheus (a mythter, ha ha - Editor) not to open the 'box', but she does it anyway, because she's curious. Also, she's not going to be pushed about by a convicted arsonist. As Pandora opens the box, sickness, death and a host of other unspecified nasties are released to reek their havoc on an unsuspecting world. She closes the box quickly, but it's too late. The last thing to sneak out of the box is hope. The deed has been done. Once you've fired the bullet, there's no going back.

As with so many Greek myths, Pandora's box is a metaphor*; it's a cautionary tale; it's a warning - that seemingly innocent acts can sometimes backfire, with catastrophic consequences. Pandora, don't open that box! Eve, don't eat that fruit! Billy, don't be a hero! (That's a really crap song - Editor).

But it cuts both ways. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it also led to all of the inventions and discoveries that are commonplace today. In education curiosity can be knocked out of children, because they are told what they can't do, and are often limited by the opinions of others.

Opening the box - or simply thinking outside of it occasionally - may not be such a bad thing at all. There are times when our mistakes cause disasters, and times when they don't. If we fail to open the boxes laid before us, we will never know what's inside them. And there is always hope - which can be trapped, unless we unleash it. If the box stays closed, we'll never know what might come out. And if it's opened, it may give us hope.

*even the word 'metaphor' has Greek origins

Next time: 6. Frankenstein's well-meaning monster

Previous posts in this series
1. Pavlov's drooling dog
2. Chekhov's smoking gun
3. Occam's bloody razor
4. Schrödinger’s undead cat


Pandora's closed box by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's