Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
No Royal Roads
June 9, 2021
Pride goes before destruction,
and a haughty spirit before a fall.
--Prov. 16: 18
We know very little about the historical life of Greek mathematician Euclid (c. 300 BCE), other than that it was he who wrote the Elements of Geometry, still used as a textbook in that subject. In one story that remains, Euclid taught many students, including Ptolemy I of Egypt. Ptolemy, frustrated at the amount of time and effort required to master the basics of this branch of knowledge, asked whether geometry could not be made easier for him, a king. Euclid famously replied, “There is no royal road to geometry.” This saying has come to be used to express the general truth that there are no shortcuts in reaching something truly worth attaining, and that it takes a lot of effort to gain control of an area of knowledge.
In our democratic age, this era of
self-publication and “alternate facts,” many of us seem to have lost sight of
this truth. Because we believe that everyone
is entitled to their own opinion on almost everything, we mistakenly think that
all opinions are of equal value. Worse,
we may think that opinions on technical matters reinforced from things outside
of the technical area are of greater value than classic “peer-review”
consensus.
Some think that their religion and reading of the Bible discredit the hard science behind understanding the diversity of life on the planet as the product of evolutionary change and natural selection. Others think that religious doctrines about when life begins somehow invalidate the medical science that sees the beginning and ending of life as a complex of multivariant spectra that would allow some personal and medical discretion in such matters. Many would be loathe to use modern biblical criticism as a point of departure for understanding the Bible itself. And militant atheists like Richard Dawkins believe that their understanding of science requires them to reject all religious doctrine, theology, and theistic philosophy out of hand even though they have not spent much effort in mastering any of these fields, with the result that they often woefully mischaracterize and misunderstand the fields of knowledge they are rejecting. On the left, we see people who reject root and branch whole areas of knowledge and considered legal opinions simply because they do not conform to the orthodoxies of their partisan commitments, are not sufficiently “woke,” or are seen to work against their particular interest group. Currently we have people who reject received medical science regarding virology and immunization either because of a left-wing knee-jerk rejection of vaccination writ-large on the one hand, or a right- wing cult of a former president who decided to deny the science as a way of stoking his political base.
The basic problem, here, I think is hubris, or over-weening unhealthy pride. Thinking that our partisan or interest group commitments, or our personal preferences and whims, can outweigh the expertise of people who have spent their lives studying and researching specific areas is just plain folly. It is arrogant. It is a sin. And in the current environment, it is proving deadly, both to individuals and to our common life. Just as there is no royal road to geometry, there is no royal road to sound medicine, science, history, or religion. Just as there is no royal road to expertise, neither is there a republican or democratic one.
Grace and Peace.
--Fr. Tony+
No comments:
Post a Comment