One of the signal benefits of a conventional liberal arts education (in distinction from most education today) is it liberates from the tyranny of the present. To use Martin Heidegger‘s metaphor, all of us are “thrown” into a world we had no part in devising. What we experience for our first 20 years or so is what seems normal to us. If reared in poverty (and that hardly happens anywhere on the West these days), we aren’t aware we’re poor until we’re old enough to start comparing with somebody else. To an even greater extent, we tend to share the assumptions of our family and friends, and more broadly, the assumptions of the world around us, and the most unexamined assumptions are the least evident to us. Like a seven-year-old who doesn’t know he’s poor, we don’t know our basic life assumptions could be wrong because we have nothing to compare them to.
A liberal arts education or even wide historical reading can show us that the past was very different from the present, and its leading assumptions are often not our assumptions. For example, during much of the history of the world, slavery was considered ordinary and normal. When Aristotle defended it in the very first chapter of his book Politics, he occasioned no controversy. Historically it was the abolition of slavery, launched by Christianity and Christian presuppositions, that was abnormal. The current normality of anti-slavery in the West is based on Christian assumptions. But if you were born over the last 50 years, you might believe that the widely precedented assumption of the validity of slavery was venal and corrupt. Nothing could be further from the truth. Virtuous, bright, and responsible people supported slavery. Better: they assumed slavery. Awareness of this fact does not lead us to excuse slavery. It does lead us to recognize that we cannot simply dismiss its multitude of earlier adherents as hateful rubes. It was simply their normality.
And what is true slavery is true of many other assumptions. Learning about and even getting into the skin of our predecessors is helpful in understanding our own world as well as theirs. This is why in his famous essay on reading old books, C.S. Lewis said the advantage of reading old books is not that they were always right and we are always wrong, but they are very unlikely to be wrong in the same places as we are. They won’t flatter us in our unexamined assumptions. Here are Lewis’ exact words:
People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.
Striking examples of this historical naiveté abound, but I’ll mention one.
Sexual Egalitarians and the French Revolution
Our world is deeply committed to egalitarianism. It is for almost everybody a plausibility structure: operating outside its lines seems not only wrong but unthinkable. The goal is the equality of everyone – forceable equality by state power if necessary. Economic equality was the idealistic but punishing goal of Marxist societies, but when it failed spectacularly, a deeper form of equality was enlisted in the West: sexual equality. This wasn’t thought to mean men and women are both created in God’s image and should be treated with dignity, as Christianity has always held. That’s not what modern sexual egalitarians are thinking about at all. Rather, for today’s egalitarianism sex is virtually a biological incidental or even an accident. The “transgendered” take this to an extreme, assuming that gender is socially structured, and biology itself must perhaps be overcome with genital mutilation surgery. But even those willing to leave sex organs intact are not willing to recognize creational differences between men and women. Everybody just “knows” these ideas are retrograde and wrong.
The intellectuals guiding this revolution are well aware of its historical precedent, but most of its otherwise intelligent defenders today don’t recognize that this all has roots in the French Revolution, which hated social hierarchy and stratification of any kind. It all had to be ripped down on pain of the guillotine, if necessary. But the vast majority of today’s most cutting-edge egalitarians are blissfully unaware that their unexamined thinking traces to that violent historical turning point.
This blissful unawareness, which is almost always buttressed by a moral component, is part of what J. I. Packer once called “the comfort of conservatism.” We’re comfortable in our sexual egalitarianism because almost everybody “knows” that’s just the way the world works, and those who don’t are immoral impediments to the smooth progress of history. If you believe the husband is the head of the wife, that women are natural nurturers, that men and women are not interchangeable, you’re not simply wrong; you’re venal. Awareness that sexual egalitarianism is a historical novelty isn’t the cure for the disease, but it does help with the diagnosis.
Conclusion
We live in a historically ignorant time, and this ignorance generally begins in grade school or high school. It is only reinforced in most higher education. Obsession with social media and meme-making rather than reading books, even long books with sustained arguments, puts the nail on the coffin.
But as long as we assume the contemporary is normative we will never escape its enslavement.✞
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