Open Minds

I took a week long business trip / vacation, and a couple of weeks to recover, but I am now back in blog-action! Without further ado, Chapter 3!

Chapter 3 is quite short, but the gist of it is that Tolstoy is quite lost.

Living as I was then, like any individual I was tormented by the problem of how to live a better life. I did not yet understand that in answering ‘live in conformity with progress’, I was speaking exactly like a person who is in a boat being carried along by the wind and waves and who when asked the most vital and important question, ‘Where should I steer?’ avoids answering by saying, ‘We are being carried somewhere.’

…

In reality, I was still confronted with the  same insoluble problem of how to teach without knowing what I was teaching. In the higher circles of literary activity it was apparent to me that I could not teach without knowing what it was that I taught, for I saw that everyone taught differently and that in our arguments we only concealed our own lack of knowledge from each other.

At this point he only knew that he was missing something important. I suppose some might wonder how you can teach without knowing the subject matter you teach. This is something that very smart people are aware of. A high school physics teacher may teach on the theory of relativity, and I can guarantee you they do not understand it. If they did, they probably wouldn’t be teaching high school physics. I learned calculate things with the quantum wave function, but I did not understand it. I was simply performing the mechanical mathematical steps that I was told to do and I forgot them shortly after I walked out of the final exam.

Interestingly, I got a version of that question evasion that Tolstoy mentions in the first portion. At church they were discussing how to discern the voice of God and how to develop that personal relationship. It was suggested that you need to listen to that inner voice, consider scripture, and seek the council of others. To be sure these are all good things, but there is a more complex question. How do you avoid the group think herd mentality that has ensnared others in the church in the past? How was it possible for so many Christians to hate and treat their black brothers as sub-human? Where was the voice of God in them? How could they be so wrong? I’m sure the inner voice was nothing other than the bigotry they were raised in, and considered only the portions of scripture that might be twisted to support that bigotry, and consulted with others with equal amounts of bigotry. The answer I got from the guys with white hair was nothing more substantial than “we are being carried somewhere.” I suppose I didn’t expect a satisfying answer because a substantial answer would have to consider the reliability of the thing they were teaching. I suspect that they do not know that they do not know what they teach. I suppose that is why they are sane and why they sleep at night.