Ignorance can dance in the absence of fire

 

British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) suggested “We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”

Murdoch’s novels—the only eminent novelist to publish serious works of moral philosophy—illustrate her strong belief that, although human beings think they are free to exercise rational control over their lives and behavior, they are actually at the mercy of the unconscious mind, the determining effects of society at large, and other, more inhuman, forces.

The Apostle Paul intimated something similar centuries earlier. In his second letter to the church of the Thessalonians he writes, “…men deliberately forfeited the truth of God and accepted a lie.” Paul goes on to suggest, “they soon didn’t know how to be human either.”

Pioneering English Bible scholar J.B. Phillips paraphrases the Apostle Paul’s correspondence this way, “The lawless man is produced by the spirit of evil and armed with all the force, wonders and signs that falsehood can devise …he will come with evil’s undiluted power to deceive, for they have refused to love the truth which could have saved them. God sends upon them, therefore, the full force of evil’s delusion, so that they put their faith in an utter fraud and meet the inevitable judgment of all who have refused to believe the truth and who have made evil their play-fellow.”

Another Biblical translator, Eugene Peterson, continues, “Since they didn’t bother to acknowledge God, God quit bothering them and let them run loose. And then all hell broke loose: rampant evil, grabbing and grasping, vicious backstabbing. They made life hell on earth with their envy, wanton killing, bickering, and cheating.

“Look at them: mean-spirited, venomous, fork-tongued God-bashers. Bullies, swaggerers, insufferable windbags! They keep inventing new ways of wrecking lives. They ditch their parents when they get in the way. Stupid, slimy, cruel, cold-blooded. And it’s not as if they don’t know better. They know perfectly well they’re spitting in God’s face. And they don’t care—worse, they hand out prizes to those who do the worst things best!”

Forceful words. But words that absolutely reflect our present world.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) believed, “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

I would suggest we are presently migrating through the first and second stages in our struggle for truth.

American poet William Stafford (1914-1993) published a poem in 1986 titled, Burning a Book (Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN).

In his poem, Stafford describes book burning, a common method of censorship in which people set fire to books they object to on political, cultural, or religious grounds; a present day practice employed by social media censorship and hurriedly reinforced by major networks under the overweening guise of protecting us from ourselves …as only they—presumptuously— know what is best for us.

One should ask, since when is freedom of thought exclusive?

On the one hand unbridled radical rants are canonized. On the other, learned, lived experience and well-reasoned thought is willfully censored for monetary gain or political power.

“Woke,” a slang term that has invaded the mainstream media and social networks—as in “I was sleeping, but now I’m woke”—certainly applies. Wake up! We are not being “protected,” through this selective use of language, moral platitudes and statistical falsities employed to encourage a specific way of thinking, we are being endlessly “prodded!”

Stafford reasons that it is easier to live in a world of comfortable lies than a world of disturbing truths. He charges humans are guilty of creating a world full of easy lies, and electing to burn truths.

“Truth, brittle and faint,
burns easily,
its fire as hot as the fire lies
make—
flame doesn’t care. You can
usually find
a few charred words in the
ashes.
More disturbing than book
ashes are whole libraries
that no one got around to
writing—
desolate towns, miles of
unthought in cities,
and the terrorized countryside where wild dogs
own anything that moves.
If a book isn’t written, no
one needs to burn it—
ignorance can dance in the
absence of fire.”

Let me repeat that: “Ignorance can dance in the absence of fire.”