Reading History

“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then, and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”
– Clive Staples (C. S.) Lewis
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

When we read the accounts that those who lived before us have left behind, there are three basic possibilities for interpretation, as outlined above by the Professor (C. S. Lewis).

Take the pyramids, for instance.

Either the Egyptians were lying--priests "knew" that their gods were an illusion and that the project of spending most of their civilization's GDP on a mountainous cut stone tomb was a manipulative way to control out-of-work farmers (extrapolated from Charles Beard's cynical "economism").

Or the priests--and their followers--were mad because of rye fungus or inbreeding or some other cause and the pyramids are evidence of collective insanity.

Or they were telling the truth--in that time, at that place, a recognition of the demands on human beings in relationship to the spiritual world and the life after death called for an expression that took the form of an intuitively understood, deeply meaningful structure and symbol.

I choose to believe that, because I try to tell the truth, especially about important things and about my perceptions and thoughts about the world, others generally do the same. That collective insanity or duplicity are not the rule for human behavior and human history (yes, we can find collective manias and such). And so I try to read history giving the benefit of the doubt to those recounting their experiences of the world, their perceptions and thoughts about it.

And if their world is alien from mine, as, in history, it inevitably is, that requires me to broaden my perspective and sharpen my interpretive powers to understand more fully what it means to be human.

Curious that the land of Narnia--a glimps into the spiritual world, or one version of it--requires the same interpretive capacities as understanding history. As Owen Barfield says, one of the correctives to the illnesses of modern consciousness--limited, materialistic, bound by notions of cause and effect, subject and object--is the study of history.