Category Archives: Truth Seeking

And the Lies Became Truth

Death of Truth, Freedom to Read, Truth Seeking

 

As Richard Ovenden the Oxford Librarian said in his CBC recorded lecture at the Toronto Public Library:

 

“Libraries and archives provide a diversity of knowledge and ideas. They make it possible to face the present and the future through deepening an understanding of the past. The ideas we encounter, the histories that we understand, and the culture that we engage with help us to make us who we are. But we need this pool of ideas and information to be constantly refreshed if we are to be creative and innovative. This is true not just in the creative fields of art, music, and literature, but more generally. The success of the democracy we enjoy today lies in the free circulation of ideas in order to pour light into the questioning spirit of our democratic processes. This means in part the freedom of the press, but citizens need access to all shades of opinion. Libraries acquire all kinds of content and this resource allows our views to be challenged and for citizens to inform themselves following John Stuart Mill’s insistence in On Liberty, that only through the diversity of opinion is there in the existing state of human intellect the chance of fair play to all sides of the truth.”

 

And we must remember that this is what it is all about—the unreserved pursuit of the truth. In no other way, can we do that. We need the liberty of which Mill spoke to pursue the truth in any meaningful manner. Nothing else will do. We must have that liberty or else the truth will forever be enshrouded and us blinded from it. The task of making the conditions necessary to obtain the truth is a noble task. And, I dare say, a holy task. We must not shrink from it and we must not concede any limitations on our ability and capacity to do that task with all of our power. That may sound overheated. So be it. I think it is true.

 

We should always remember the immortal words of George Orwell from his incredible book 1984: “The past was erased. The erasure was forgotten. The lie became truth.”

Are Libraries Dull and Boring?

Freedom to Read, Truth Seeking

 

Richard Ovenden the Oxford librarian made it his business to attack the stereotypes of libraries and librarians. As he said, “One of the stereotypes of libraries is that they are remarkably calm and safe places. Dull. Boring even. And that librarians have easy jobs withdrawn from the so-called real world.”

 

As a member of the board of the Steinbach Public Library for about a decade, including a number of them as chair, I know from personal experience that this stereotype badly misses the mark. Ovenden said “That stereotype isn’t true and has never been true and of course isn’t true today.” He gave a dramatic example of a personal experience he had as a librarian that showed exactly how far from the mark that stereotype was.

 

I am glad we never had anything as exciting at the Steinbach Public Library as he had when he was Director of Collections at the University of Edinburgh  in Scotland  where they had a manuscript called the Jami’ al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles by Rashid al-Din). This manuscript is one of the finest items owned by the University and one of the supreme masterpieces of Persian book painting and is considered one of the most important medieval manuscripts in the world by some scholars. It was written by the historian and vizier to the Ilkhanid court, Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍl-allāh Ṭabīb Hamadānī (ca. 1247-1318 C.E.), and copied in Tabriz by the author’s own scribes and illustrators. Unfortunately, however, one of the images in the book contained a figurative description of the Prophet Muhammed. At the time such work was not uncommon among Muslims, but later was rejected by some parts of the Islamic world. Hence the manuscript attracted the unwelcome attention of certain fundamentalists of that society.

 

One day Ovenden received a telephone call demanding that he take the manuscript out of the library and burn it or dire consequences would be inflicted upon him and his library. That did not provide him with a quiet or serene life as a librarian. Far from it. He feared for his life and that of his beloved library.

 

Are Libraries Dull and Boring? Absolutely not. They are exciting places where ideas challenge us to be the best that we can be.

In fact some times libraries are too exciting.

 

February 2023

Librarians rescued Western Civilization in Vilnius

civilization, Truth Seeking

 

At the beginning of the 20th century Vilnius was a profound centre of Jewish life.  It was a city filled with learned rabbis and outstanding libraries and cultural life. Of course, that did not live on.  Like so much else of culture and civilization, it was destroyed, in the case of Vilnius by operation Barbarossa launched by the evil partnership of Stalin and Hitler.

 

As Oxford Librarian Richard Ovenden pointed out, the Jewish intellectual leaders of Vilnius were forced each day to cooperate with the axis leaders in the destruction of Jewish archives and historical records. Yet somehow, they managed to resist the occupation and save some of the historical records at substantial risk to their own lives. Civilization was literally hanging by a thread, if that. Those intellectual giants smuggled out books and records and hid them with friendly people in the ghetto, doing what they could to salvage some civilization.  They called themselves “the paper brigade.” We should call them heroes.

 

These intellectual warriors hoped that someone would come after them to retrieve those records and documents, and miraculously they did. How was that even possible? They literally rescued Jewish civilization from destruction at the hands of the Nazis and Communists.

The Communists discovered what was happening and once more sent the documents to the paper mill, but remarkably, they were rescued a second time by librarians who turned the trucks around and hid them until 1949 when it was again safe to release the.

Sometimes librarians are heroes.

An attack on civilization and knowledge

civilization, Freedom to Read, Truth Seeking

 

An attack on a library is an attack on civilization.

On August 25 1991 the library in Bosnia’s capital city of Sarajevo was shelled by the Serbian forces. No other buildings were attacked that day. Just their magnificent library. It was a deliberate barbarian attack on Bosnian civilization by brutes from Serbia. Serb snipers then picked off people who went to try to save the books in the building. One of them was killed. Few rare books were saved. It was too dangerous. Of course, the Serbian attacked people too.  It was the greatest assault in Europe since the Second World War.

According to Richard Ovenden, “the library was a target because it was both the symbol of a multi-cultural community that Bosnia and Herzegovina had managed to preserve and it contained the written culture and history of Muslims, Christians, and Jews all living together.” This really shows that the attack was an attack on civilization and knowledge. That is why I refer to the Serbs engaged in that attack as “brutes.”  It is a hard word, but I would suggest, not inappropriate in such circumstances.

Such an attack shows how the aggressors thought the Bosnians were not civilized, revealing, as such attacks inevitably do, that it is the aggressor who is uncivilized.

According to Ovenden,

“On the evening of August 25, 1992, shells began to rain down on a building in Bosnia’s capital city of Sarajevo. The shells were incendiaries, designed to raise fire rapidly on impact, especially when surrounded by combustible material. The building they hit was the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. No other buildings were fired on this day — the library was the sole target for the shells.”

 

The National Library in Sarajevo reopened on May 9, 2014 — 22 years after the landmark building was destroyed during the Bosnian war, along with its nearly two million books and manuscripts.

Civilization and knowledge rose again from the ashes of Sarajevo.

 

The Big Ideas

Books, civilization, Classic Books, Philosophy/Ideas, Religious Quest in the Modern Age, Truth Seeking

 

The Brothers Karamazov is often called a book of ideas.  In some respect that is an apt description.

In the novel The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky asks big questions.  Does God exist?  If not, can we do whatever we want? And Ivan asks Alyosha the question that is so vital to him, does Alyosha love life more than the meaning of life? Alyosha’s answer is surprising but clear. “love should come before logic…Only then will man be able to understand the meaning of life.” So he tells his brother he should “bring back to life those dead of yours.” He was referring to the great thinkers and artists. And that brings him back to civilization and the eternal verities. The big questions, the big ideas that drive Ivan.

Ivan loves life and loves ideas. He is passionate about both, though usually we see only his love of ideas. Ideas excite him. Ideas drive his life. He doesn’t just want to chase  wine, women and song, but the big ideas, what he calls “the eternal verities.”

Ivan realizes that his younger brother Alyosha, is also driven by ideas, the spiritual ideas, for he too is on a religious quest. That is why he went to the monastery. That is why he has made Elder Zosima his mentor.  He wants to find the spiritual path. As Ivan says, “we callow youths, we have first of all to settle the eternal verities.” Usually, it is often thought, the big ideas must be settled by wise old men, but Ivan disagrees.

What are these big ideas?  He tells Alyosha

“those eternal verities such as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. And those who do not believe in God will bring in socialism, anarchy, and the reorganization of society according to a new scheme…But it really boils down to the same damned thing—they’re all the same old questions, they’re just approached from a different angle. And there are many, many extremely original boys who spend their whole time nowadays debating these eternal questions.”

 

And Alyosha admits to Ivan that these are the most important problems, especially for Russians. But Ivan says what really surprises him is not that they say if God does not exist, they would have to invent God, which is what Voltaire said, but rather that such an idea would have ever occurred to “a vicious wild animal like man. For that concept is so holy, so touching, and so wise that it does man too much honour. For my part I’ve long since stopped worrying about who invented whom—-God  man or man God.” There’s a big question for you.

There is a lot to be passionate about in these ideas. And the Karmazov brothers, are passionate about those ideas and that makes for fascinating reading. And a fascinating life.

 

The Stupid Decade Continued

Decline of the west, Health, Social Issues, Social Media, Truth Seeking

 

Jonathan Haidt makes the astounding claim that starting in the mid 2010s people, particularly young people, but really a lot more than that, starting getting stupid! It’s not just the kids.

Haidt, like me, is a fan of John Stuart Mill who pointed out that if a person only knows his or her own side of a dispute, he knows little of that.  I have blogged earlier about Mill’s arguments on this point.

[If you look under tags  under John Stuart Mill you can find links to these posts] ]

In other words, to really understand a position one must look at it from different perspectives. We need to have opposite cases pushing against each other. That is what used to be done in universities, at least, according to Haidt, until around 2013 or 2014 when universities became places where ideologies were homogenized, and questions about sacred positions became hazardous to professors’ career paths.  It became difficult for professors and their students to challenge conventional wisdom. This was particularly true for a few sacred issues like race, gender, transgender and others. If a professor or even students, suggested there might be a case to be made for views that challenged the conventional wisdom, the challenger would feel the full wrath of social media warriors. And as Haidt said, “when critics go silent, the group gets stupid.”

 

Haidt admits that we have had polarized views in the past, but the new element is that social media supercharges the tendency to require ideological conformity. That of course amplifies polarization and intellectual tribalism.  The “other side” gets ignored. We need critics to make us smarter. If we don’t have them, we get stupider. We need opposing views or we get stupid. As Haidt said,

 

 “What’s new is these new dynamics brought to us by social media and especially Twitter, that we’re not shooting the other side so much anymore, we’re shooting the moderates on our own side. And so, what happened in the early to mid-2010s is the moderates on the left and right begin to go silent and the extremes get super empowered.

 

Haidt points out that as result on the right the Republican Party went off the rails and on the left, it was not so much the Democratic Party that went off the rails, but the supporters of the left who dominate major cultural and educational institutions, universities, media, museums etc. According to Haidt, “Both sides started shooting their moderates…Moderates on the left and right begin go silent and the extremes get super empowered.” Metaphorically of course, I must add.

 

We must remember that polarization has many causes, but social media sure seems to be one of them. Anything that helps to silence our critics helps to make us stupid.  And that according to Haidt is how the west declined—by getting stupid.

 

A Hit List or a reading list

Authoritarianism, Classic Books, Free Speech, Freedom, Truth Seeking

 

Azar Nafisi is a professor of literature now living in America, who originally taught literature in Iran.  In fact she taught American novels including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  She taught this amazing book, whose theme is freedom, to Iranians students in Tehran. Eventually Nafisi left Iran for freedom in America. She loves literature and the works of the imagination as I do. She is just much more eloquent than I am.  She said,

“The way we view fiction is a reflection of how we define ourselves a nation. Works of the imagination are canaries in the coal mine, the measure by which we can evaluate the health of the rest of society.”

 

She learned this, she says. She taught in the midst of a totalitarian society. In the novel Huck had an awful choice to make. He could choose to follow what he called his “conscience.” By that he really meant conventional morality. This is what he had been taught by his family, and his society around him. These were the authorities. If he followed them, he would bring the slave Jim back to his “rightful owner’ the good Christian Miss Watson. Or he could choose to follow what he had learned in his life with Jim—i.e. that Jim was the best of all the people he knew and he was his true friend and he should help him to freedom so Jim could reunite with his family. Huck chose to do what he thought was the wrong thing, the thing that would lead him to hell, but would save his friend. Could anyone ever have a better friend? He literally risked it all to save his friend.

The poet Joseph Brodsky, like Azar Nafisi, had been brought up in a totalitarian society. He in Russia; she in Iran. Both came to appreciate the revolutionary power of the imagination and works of the imagination. Not that they are a panacea. After all, Brodsky pointed out, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were all literate people who read lots of books. Brodsky said, the problem is “their hit lists were longer than their reading lists.”

That is why totalitarian states, and authoritarian leaders are so quick to attack books and the liberal arts. They know that these works are dangerous to the authoritarians.  Both, whether, from the left or the right, want to remove them at all costs. As Nafisi said, “They know the dangers of genuine free inquiry.” Some of these authoritarians even in the west, have tried to ban The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Why? They are doing it for the same reason the dictators did—i.e. to control the readers. They don’t want the readers to think.

 

Mark Twain and Spiritual Slavery

Classic Books, Freedom, racism, Truth Seeking, Uncategorized

 

Mark Twain had a deep aversion to slavery.  That was an unusual attitude at the time. In fact most people in the south of  the United States, and elsewhere for that matter, including many people in Canada, felt slavery was natural. That was just how things worked.  But Twain did not always feel that way. Like Huck Finn he grew into hatred of slavery, because he grew up with it and thought it was normal and therefore right. Only later in life did he realize that slavey was a sin and must be resisted.

Late in his life Twain said this:

“In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery.  I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind—and then the texts were read aloud to us the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing.”

This reminds me of an argument I had once had with a young lawyer. I don’t remember what we were arguing about, but it was an ethical argument about whether or not a particular action or activity was wrong. His ultimate position was that he had been brought up to believe that so he believed it. He was a slave to his parent’s opinions. He was not free.

Frankly, I was stunned that an educated person who had spent 7 years in a university could hold that was an answer to my argument. But really, he was just clearly enunciating a position held by many people in society. They implicitly believe what their parents believed and do not question the authority of the parent to control their beliefs even deep into maturity. This is what I call spiritual slavery.  When we are growing up we naturally believe what our parents tell us, but I believe when we are mature we have a duty to question what we have been  told us, even if we continue to respect the parents.  What Friedrich Nietzsche said about teachers and students is equally applicable to parents and children: “One repays a teacher badly by remaining always a pupil.” Would you want your children to believe as you believe just because you taught them to believe it? I think not. We want our children eventually to think for themselves. Perhaps even to teach us where we went wrong!

I would even hold this position if I were God. I would not want people to believe me only because I said something was true.  I would not give them a Holy book with prescriptions that must be followed. I would want them to think for themselves. Again, I would want them to teach me if I was wrong. I want people—all people—to be spiritually free!

Later in his life Twain realized what he had been taught by his elders was wrong. Slavery was wicked.  As Azar Nafisi said, “his childhood memories left such a mark on him that slavery became to his mind a universal symbol of man’s cruelty, stupidity, and depravity.” This is what I now think about racism. It too has been inculcated in us since the days of our youth by a system of systemic racism that we have not recognized, because we were like fish who don’t see the water in which they swim. At one time slavery was  like that. It is not like that anymore. But racism is still like that. And we must resist it.

If we are not free to think for ourselves we are not free.