fpb | (no subject)

With the passing of years, I become more aware of the faults in my character; and especially of that savagery that enters my speech and behaviour every time I face something that is, in my view, really unacceptable. That I become, at such moments, quite offensive, is something of which I am more and more conscious; though I do not grow, unfortunately, more capable of controlling it in any way. And this bad habit of anger has a particularly vicious twist: that as it comes on at times when I really do feel I am in the right in opposing certain things, it leaves me unable to make an apology that would go to the core of the disagreement, for I cannot honestly alter my mind about the issues. In many cases, the likelihood is that some sort of estrangement was inevitable, and that my temper only sped it up; but I do wonder from time to time that I have any friends at all.

rfachir is a friend, she is dear to me, and I have just treated her quite badly. Typically, I feel I am in the right about the issues; indeed, it is sheer astonishment that anyone should not see the point of what I had posted, that led to the abuse. I was astounded that a supposedly Catholic institution of higher learning should hire an atheist, not just as a professor of theology - that would be bad enough - but as subject director; and I was even more astounded that someone could not see the point. My view was, and I have to say that it remains, that

rfachir was, in this instance, misled by common but false notions about education. The answer I returned, however, was dismissive and - I suspect - contemptous-sounding; which is entirely wrong. Just because her ideas are common, if they are false I should at least take it on me to discuss them and show why they do not apply to the situation in hand - or to any situation at all.

What

rfachir said was this: "Do you expect a college, especially a Jesuit one, to endorse anyone who did not encourage students to question their assumptions?" And I still believe that the primacy of "questioning [one's] assumptions", which this implies, is a mistaken notion. So let me try and show what I mean in a more civil manner; pausing, first, to apologize to

rfachir for my lousy temper and bad manners.
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When I think of the pleasure and the good that I got out of school and university, I am not conscious that "having my assumptions challenged" played any great part in it. To the contrary, what gave me delight was finding out more and more things; facts; confirmed, established, truthful statements and descriptions. I pored over maps, accounts, descriptions, dates, and images. I sought out textbooks and went through dozens of entries in encyclopedias; I read collections of old magazines; I even collected stamps for the bits of things that they could show me of other countries and times. I absorbed data like a sponge. I still do. From elementary school to middle age, what has never changed for me is that the pleasure of learning is the pleasure of finding things out, and the pleasure of explaining.

What this has to do with the famous quote "the wisest of them all confirmed that he knew only this, that he knew nothing", is that the widest learning, if taken with a sense of proportion, only shows us how little we know. The men who reach furthest in study and investigation only become aware of how much more there is to be still found out - and how much more never can. The human race, for instance, has been on Earth for some 170,000 years, according to estimates I heard not so long ago - yet I know that the earliest traceable history goes back to less than 6,000 years, and that is over a very small territory. The vast majority of human history can never be known; a sufficient demonstration of how permanently small and provisional our knowledge is bound to remain.

Nonetheless, permanently small and provisional though it may be, knowledge is itself the ultimate authority. Reached at the price of enormous efforts from generation upon generation of people whom, if we met, we would rightly kneel to, it is not to be lightly rejected or discarded. The people who are most keen on "challenging assumptions" are cranks - flat earthers, six-day creationists, and the like. Sane minds accept what they cannot prove, on the authority of those who can prove it; they accept the description of the cosmos from scientists, and of the past from historians. If nothing else, they know that they do not have the tools to mount a serious challenge; they know that superior knowledge brings superior authority. Every one of us has some of that in his or her own field. I would not presume to challenge a plumber's knowledge of hydraulics, or an accountant's way around figures, or a mother on child-rearing. On the other hand, I love to hear from them. Have you noticed how, whenever a person is speaking about something s/he is competent and experienced in, their conversation always becomes more animated and interesting?

The sane position, then, is a general expectation that knowledge is provisional, coupled with a specific confidence in those who have specific knowledge. The crazed position is the presumption that we have to "question authority" - that is, ultimately, competence. We are not competent to do so, except in our own fields; and in our own fields, our concern ought to be, if we had any sense, not with any position, but with truth. As a historian, I do not give a damn if the most prestigious scholar disagrees with my interpretation of a text, so long as s/he cannot bring an argument that trumps mine. (I have been proven wrong dozens upon dozens of times; it is a very educational experience.) It is not because of any attitude of "challenging assumptions", but because of a reverence for the ultimate authority of truth - which is what s/he, I and every other historian ought to be devoted to - that I will disagree with anyone, from Dumezil on down, if I feel their interpretation of facts is insufficient or downright misleading. And I will do so with due respect for their knowledge and insight - but... "Athenians, I love you and respect you; but if I have to choose, I will follow the God" (that is, truth) "rather than you."

You are unfortunately all too right in saying that Jesuits teach their students to "question assumptions" - especially those of the Church. That is why that order is declining in numbers and prestige. They have set themselves on a sterile road of worldliness, pandering to modern cliches, and destruction for its own sake; not unaided, so it is said, by a rich appreciation for the pleasures of anal sex. Unfortunately, the Catholic Church is about authority - the authority of Jesus Christ, the authority of 2000 years of succession, of generations of debates which came to definite conclusions and excluded one proposition while accepting another. The notion that all doctrines are of equal value, that all may and should with equal propriety be "challenged" - with no reference to their status with respect to truth, or even only to their position with respect to the teachings and life of Jesus - is of all things the least Catholic; as well as the least scientific, the least historical, and the least rational. Knowledge proceeds by exclusion; if you cannot declare one thing false and another true, you do not have knowledge at all, but groundless opinion.

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Well, admittedly I have not read any of your other posts/comments pertaining to this particular issue, but I would like to say just one thing.

While I suppose you are correct in stating that to many people "challenging one's assumpitions" means challenging without regard to knowledge, truth, competence or authority, I did want to raise the point that this is NOT true for everyone.

I would say that my learning--in school, then homeschooled and reading widely, then university, and more reading--has depended *greatly* on challenging my own assumptions about life, the universe, and everything.

Not debunking them, necessarily, but challenging them to see if they hold up to what I am learning; if facts, truth, and the competence of those who have specifically studied areas I cannot or have not, support what I already think or have learned from someone else.

You said: What this has to do with the famous quote "the wisest of them all confirmed that he knew only this, that he knew nothing", is that the widest learning, if taken with a sense of proportion, only shows us how little we know.

Yes, abosolutely. That's what I always figured "challenging my assumptions" meant. Challenging what I thought I knew, by learning more. Challenging assumptions I may have come to without enough knowledge, by learning more, and by realizing how much I still have to learn.

Unfortunately, in modern Jesuit circles, "challenging the Church's assumptions" means being rude about the Pope. I have evidence of this, among other things, in a couple of books written by authors from Heythrop College, the Jesuit-run college of London University.

What I am trying to say, above all, is that "challenging assumptions" is, at best, an epiphenomenon or secondary result of looking for the truth. Often it is the opposite that is the case: the truth reinforces your assumptions. In modern Biblical and historical studies, there is a genyuinely nasty academic fad called the "hermeneutics of suspicion", which I described in my "History of Britain 407-597" as "a nearly universal will not to believe. Documents are doubted on principle; objections are raised on the thinnest grounds; horrifyingly complex schemes of development are proposed; and above all, the evidence is examined to pieces, each item being challenged separately rather than seen in context." I was speaking of the way every document that might help us to understand the figure of St.Patrick better was ripped to piece in interpretation. I did the opposite thing, took the documents seriously, and I think I came up with what is at least a very defensible and very coherent account of the Saint. I have known of people who, on the same ground, denied that such a person as Muhammad existed, or that the town of Mecca existed in his day; and we all know about the freaks of so-called scholarship about Our Lord. But the most personally pleasing instance of this kind of attitude, and its ruinous effects on the search for truth, came when I was discussing the research of my old Oxford professor, Richard Gombrich, with him. Professor Gombrich is a world authority on Buddhism; Buddhist monks come from all over the Far East to learn about their own religion from him, and he is regularly called to Japan or Korea or Taiwan to lecture. He has, among other things, taken many steps forwards to a description of the historical Gautama Buddha and of his doctrines, and he has managed a corrected dating of his life. And when we were discussing the matter, he told me, quite without any input from me, of how his work contradicted the practitioners of the "hermeneutics of suspicion", a superstition he associated mostly with America. He was quite surprised when I held my hand out and said "shake!" - for I had just had the same experience with Patrick.

Yikes. I know all to well what you mean here. I run into it constantly, on topics ranging from history to religion to politics to, well, every damn thing. Suspicion for its own sake. The slogan "Question Authority" began, as far as I know, from an urge to question government, not to question absolutely everything to the point of absurdity, but it became, as so many great things and ideas have fallen to, fashionable.

It's easy for some people to be "intellectual" when all they have to do it claim such authority on the delusional basis that there is no authority. It's insane, but people fall for it, always looking for "experts".

Okay, I see more clearly now where you're coming from with this. There's something similar in literary theory, which used to make me furious with some scholars, because if you're going to take the work to pieces in that particular fashion, what on earth is the point?

However. What I am trying to say, above all, is that "challenging assumptions" is, at best, an epiphenomenon or secondary result of looking for the truth.

I still disagree. It's not secondary, it's part and parcel of the search. Unless one is willing to measure what one knows or thinks one knows against what one is learning, there is no search for truth happening at all. It may well be the case that there is no disruption, that one can simply add more detail to what one already knows (I've been reading Brian Greene's The Elegant Univers, on string theory, and it has felt like that). But it's also true that some conclusions (not necessarily talking about theology here, but other things) may have to be abandoned once one learns more. If one is unwilling to consider that, then how can one learn anything?

Of course, it's possible that I see things this way mostly because I was raised to think things through in a little ignorant white-trash town where people make absolutely insane assumptions about things. *shrug* "Challenging assumptions," to me, is a necessary habit of thought to make sure I don't fall into sheer stupidity.

Well, I am part of a movement that is trying to avoid the poisoning of the Catholic Church. To me, taken, as the Jesuits of Boston college take it, by itself, rather than putting truth first - and not only first, but second, third, fourth, and fifth at least - it is a royal road to egotism, vanity, schism, heresy, and folly. Have a look at the Episcopal Church in your country if you want to see what I mean. And do not think that that sort of thing is restricted to moneyed suburban Episcopalians with memberships in the local country club and Rotary's. Similar temptations can be found among Evangelicals, Southern Baptists, Orthodox, people of all and no faiths. The Church has an old name for it. It is called Worldliness, and it is one of the three great tempters: the World, the Flesh and the Devil. The minds that seeks for the Truth first will have, to paraphrase the Gospel, all these other things given to them; but anyone who puts any other intellectual gift, endowments, target for achievement, standard, or value, before truth, will infalliby ruin him/herself.

Can I make a little suggestion about the anger issue? It's probably totally useless, but there is a slight chance you haven't thought of it.

When you see something online that makes you angry, don't respond immediately. The web as a medium allows us some distance, some time to consider what we want to say and how we want to say it. It's not like being mad at someone who's in front of you - the net allows you to pause, consider, or even walk away.

Depending on how long it takes you to calm down, wait a few hours or even a day before responding. Perhaps even write a response, but don't post it. Unplug your modem if you have to. I can remember an incident where you got pissed off at something I'd posted, and wrote two very nasty responses, both of which you deleted, before posting a slightly less nasty, but still, in my opinion, somewhat over-the-top response. Unfrotunately, since LJ comments get sent to my email address as soon as they're posted, I got both the rude responses before the slightly less rude one. And half the issue was a misunderstanding anyway - once I'd clarified what I'd been trying to say, all was well again. A lot of trouble could've been avoided if you'd unplugged your modem for a few hours before responding to my post. Just a suggestion. :)

There are too many disciplines I just "don't get," and I value people like you who are kind enough to try to explain them to me. Sometimes are more painful and less fruitful than others, but I appreciate the effort.