Multiple views

AVI has a post up on "Negotiated Truth" and ALL CAPS. I generally took all caps to be trying to say "You've not been paying attention, dummy," though a touch now and then helps the skimmer pick out the vital bit. Which, now that I think of it, may reflect the conservative tendency to think their opponents are stupid, in contrast to the leftist bias towards thinking their opponents are evil. FWIW, I joined Braver Angels (aka Better Angels before lawyers got involved), and that's certainly a tendancy in the groups. So I'd predict that liberal sites would use all-caps less. Just my impression.

I remember when I first tried to read Aquinas. The style drove me up the wall--I much preferred the direct style of mathematical proof. This business of "thesis, objections, argument for thesis, reply to objections" left me a bit dizzy. It didn't help that the words didn't always mean what I expected them to mean: simplicity, for example. The approach makes more sense now. The subject matter isn't suited to mathematical precision.

The notion that there might be different ways of looking at things seemed part of the air at home--not that I always looked for different ways. I remember trying to help a journeyman missionary with some of the logistics of a service he was supposed to lead, and discovering that what I thought was innocuous some others in the congregation would have considered horribly presumptuous. I didn't get around to any kind of detailed comparison of flavors of Christianity until I researched for a book for church youth (and concluded that the Southern Baptist assertion that the Eucharist is simply symbolic didn't hold water).

History textbooks were (and still are) deeply now-centric, but the Will and Ariel Durant history spent the time to describe each era and culture as itself, and not in relation to now. You could love or hate it, but a different culture had its own ideas, and they weren't always crazy. Wicked, sometimes. I wonder if learning Latin had the same sort of effect. The only texts were ancient, so you had to look at a universe of different attitudes. The student would be given other prisms to look at life with--whether he used them or not.

Not that everything is fluid--even Tevye ran out of other hands. I can look at ancient Greek religion and affirm that Christianity is better (and an awful lot of ancient Greeks thought so too), and conclude that other things that derived from the pagan worship are also worse. But even that framework doesn't constrain everything.

Of course if Christianity weren't here, history tells me a lot of the principles our fellow-citizens take for granted wouldn't be here either. They have seized on little bits of the legacy and look at the world through them. Chesterton: "The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone."

AVI distrusts the single-viewport descriptions of society, especially racial or tribal ones--our side good; your side not so good; now and forever amen. So too are economic viewports that define a person by the integrated contribution they make to the economic machine, or how good a warrior he is.

How does one cultivate multiplex views of the world--and still make decisions? Or perhaps I should ask--how do we teach our children that? The nominal grownups who find their value, or perhaps their bread-and-butter, in single-viewports won't be enticed. The current educational approach is supposedly about diversity, but it seems to only result in a single allowed viewport--everything is "this-now-ideology" centered, and the kids don't learn what really makes groups diverse.

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AVI mentions the book of Hezekiah. Dad referenced that one a lot, along with 2 Jezebel. Maybe he picked that up at seminary. Dad went to seminary expressly to become a better layman. He had no call to be a pastor or preacher and he knew it.