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.

Everything May Be Relative

I had a student in a doctoral program in education at Teachers College who was a former police sergeant, a Catholic educated by Jesuits, and a passionate defender of the idea that if we want to value anything we must simultaneously acknowledge a spiritual world as a ground for our values. Without a spiritual ground for values, the concept of value is meaningless. I didn't feel in the class that I could express a personal opinion--I was moderating the discussion--but he was right.

It’s fine for Richard Rorty, Richard Dawkins, my dad, and any number of other highly intelligent persons to claim that we can choose our values through deliberation and conversation and without recourse to any notion of a spiritual world or creator, but, of course, they’re wrong. Any values chosen in this way are, in fact, valueless. Or the value they contain is real but its source is invisible and unacknowledged. As the rabbi said to the atheist, “the God you don’t believe in, I also do not believe in.”

We live, it’s said, in an age of relativism. From Einstein to Derrida and beyond, everything is relative. But to say this is to make an absolute statement, a groundlessly absolute statement. So what we really need to say to each other is that everything may be relative. And it may not be.

Geometry as Spiritual Discipline

Art is too materialistic—all that charcoal and clay. Science is too materialistic—all that glassware and goo. Geometry is the most spiritual of all school subjects. Point, line, and plane are pure ideas; only their representations and approximations can be found in the material world—wall meets floor, and we “see” a line. But it is rough, imperfect, tile and wood. It suggests a definition, something of one dimension, length.

Definitions lead to postulates or axioms, propositions that cannot be proved or disproved, but must be accepted as true—parallel lines never meet, for example. And postulates lead to theorems, statements that can be proved to be true by deduction. Present a simple proof of a few steps to a class of tenth graders, however, and some will “see it” immediately. Others may labor over it for days before light dawns.

Because proofs cannot be taught. A teacher can demonstrate, explain, repeat, offer examples… but students must make the intuitive leap, see the pure idea, grasp the truth of the proof for themselves. For that split second, they are entirely on their own, in an undeniable and objective world of ideas. (This makes geometry the perfect subject for fifteen year-olds, who begin to feel entirely on their own but buffeted by the deniable and non-objective demands of a grown-up world for which they are not quite ready.)

Intuitive objectivity? Perhaps for this reason Plato prescribes fifteen years of geometry for the education of the Guardians of his Republic. How common it is, too, that what was holy and reserved for the leading minds of an ancient society is commonplace and mastered by children today.