In my experience, most people who attack the Faith are attacking something else entirely, which they've mistaken for the Faith, and which I would typically join them in attacking if they would listen to me for a moment or two. We had a friend called Olivia back in the day who once asked me how I could believe that the Pope is never wrong about anything. And when I said, "Liv, honey, that's not what Catholics believe," she objected that her info came from her college philosophy professor. Now, I'm sure that nigh on every teacher who's ever drawn breath has been stuck teaching a subject outside his or her field from time to time. But for mercy's sake, this was in the year 2000. We had the Internet.
Problem is, you can't use the internet, or any other resource, unless you know that you don't know. If I'm writing about (say) the Crimean War, then I'm conscious of my ignorance and I can invest 0.72 seconds to learn that it ended in 1856. But if I'm writing about World War II, then obviously there's no need for me to fact-check because everybody knows that World War II ended in 1944.
We think we know things. We think we know things that we don't, and we base beliefs and opinions on faulty premises, and we end up with dangerous conclusions. In the ancient days, the Oracle revealed that the wisest man in Athens was Socrates: the man who knew he didn't know. 'Course, it's a bit different now that Truth is one of us; there's a few things I'm willing to say I know. And I can't teach a child how to navigate the Earth while constantly qualifying every lesson with, "But remember, this might be totally wrong." Sometimes you just have to take a swing and hope you're not too far off the mark.
I literally, and I'm using a gravely injured adverb correctly here, literally don't know how to tie my shoes. I do it every day of my life, and have done since I was like what, five? Six? But that knowledge is not contained in my intellect or accessible memory. My hands know. When it comes time for me to teach Maggie Rose to tie a pair of shoes, I will first have to sit down and relearn the skill by watching myself do it. I find that absolutely fascinating. Our Sensei used to hide advanced techniques inside of beginners' rote movements, and when it came time for them to learn the more complicated maneuvers, he'd say, "You already know this; you just don't know you know." Socrates in the Meno elicits a complex mathematical proof from an illiterate slave boy with a series of basic questions. Sometimes we know more than we think.
Wait, weren't you just saying we know less than we think? Put down the bourbon, Toner. Ha, joke's on you, I'm not drinking bourbon. It's Jamesons left over from St. Patty's. But anyway, note the denominator. It's when we're prideful—oh, that silly 2,000-year-old bastion of philosophers, I can breezily find holes in their logic that no one's ever noticed before—that we tend to overestimate ourselves. It's when we're being humble—how could I, a lowly blue belt, already have Dim-Mak strikes hardwired into my muscle memory just from practicing First Kata?—that we discover greater wisdom within us than we suspected. That's the really interesting thing about so much of Jesus' advice. It's always, of course, designed to make us holier (you take the lowest place at the banquet because humility is the root of all virtue); but it also tends to conceal surprisingly shrewd pragmatism as well. It's precisely when you choose to start at the bottom that you're likeliest to be told, "Friend, go up higher."
My niece Lily being adorable as usual.
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