One occasionally has the unsettling sense that truth - in addition to its other and more obvious defects - is biased, partisan. That may seem a contradiction with nothing said, so let me adjust the adjectives: the fear is that, often and in important segments, truth may have a thrust. I occasionally went to a daft but amusing Christian riff on the Boy Scouts called AWANA growing up and they had an hymn-like anthem whose last line was "Truth, on the March!"
And that is the fear: that some truths are inherently martial, and that one who disciplines oneself into a neutral, ballasted, detached frame of mind - whether by temperamental predisposition, aesthetic preference, or precisely a love of truth - that such a person is rendered incapable of receiving certain truths.
A symptom of the reality of this nightmare: not my near certainty that John Brown knew things I don't know, but my equal confidence that some of those things he knew I am incapable of knowing.
No comments:
Post a Comment