The Problem of History

It's interesting how much our perception of history seems to have changed over the years. The latest indication, I think, is probably The Da Vinci Code. The book is fictional, of course, but that hasn't stopped two things: (1) People thinking that it might not be, and (2) the church from getting rather upset about it.

Now I can't claim to be an historian by any stretch of the imagination. But the reason the first point is frightening is because the book is not very historical or factual in many of its main points (ignoring, for example, more likely reasons for the Council of Nicea, Gnostic elements of the Gnostic gospels, and the fact that the Priory of Sion started in 1956).

What is disturbing is that evidently some people are willing to believe that the book is historical without examining history to arrive at their own conclusions. This is the thrust of the conspiracy theory, though—that history is unreliably reported. There is no longer a solid, reasonable foundation for making conclusions about the past.

The result is that we start molding the past, present, and even future, to our own liking, disregarding objective fact. We lose perspective, passion, and hope (for history teaches us to hope), courting instead brainless hypotheses.

Rank

A few different ideas have been percolating in my head lately, but this stems from a quick discussion after a karate class the other night. Our school is highly populated with children, some of whom have achieved their black belt. This is not a trivial thing to do, but it really represents the beginning of training, not the end of it, and that lesson is difficult to teach. It's especially difficult because the wait between tests is longer and the amount of material to learn is smaller.

But by the time you've achieved black belt, it's time to start thinking about giving back. It's hard to comprehend unless you spent a few hours in the thrall of Ralph Macchio, but this isn't exactly what you signed up for when you started paying for lessons. Most of us had visions of beating up the school bully and winning the hearts of women everywhere, not teaching others.

One of the principal lessons, though, to be learned in the martial arts is that rank is to be served, not to serve. Most of the rank-conscious intend to use rank for their own ends, whether legitimate or not, so we have a lot of kids lording rank over others (and more than a few adults, of course). They forget that one of the reasons to aspire to black belt is because of the people who made it worth it. It wouldn't mean anything good if black belts were traditionally criminals.

The application of this lesson is tremendous when we look at it from a wider angle. The Realist in me agrees that it should be the goal of leadership to make their office honorable.

In other words, there is a Moral attachment to authority that is inescapable. If we hamstring the ideal—on purpose or otherwise—we find leaders reduced to power-hungry, money-grubbing men and women whose desire is for rank to serve, rather than to serve rank. And we all know where this leads—we read about it every day in the news.

Freedom and Junior High

If we are willing to believe that freedom is expressed in the power of contrary choice, we naturally run into a rather perplexing problem. In order to express our independence from the circumstances, we are driven to choose the worst of the choices to demonstrate that we may choose freely. (Our wills are otherwise constrained by the choices we have to make.)

There is a curious inversion here; the worst choice is suddenly the best because it expresses the ultimate good of freedom. But rather than expressing freedom, making Wrong Choices reduces it instead. We are no longer free, for example, to enjoy the consequences of our choices, unless we enjoy returning to our folly.