On Reading Carefully

 by

Eddie MacCausland

 It is said that we are what we eat.  I believe it would be more accurate to say that we are what we read.  Since Gutenberg launched the modern book craze around 1440, it can safely be said that millions have been enlightened concerning the world around them through fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, serious and not so serious works.  As with most things, there is a good side and a bad side.  Solomon reminds us (two thousand years before Gutenberg) that, "the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body." That's bad.  But he does use the word "excessive" implying, I believe, that some devotion to some books is not wearying and therefore could be considered good.

 Another point to remember is an old saying from some unknown source that of all the books ever written only a very few are worth reading.  Most of us intuitively believe this though we can't prove it mathematically.  After all, how many books on library shelves are consistently checked out, and how many rest there with nary a finger ever disturbing their peace?

 Now, of course, with the computer we have access to "everything" which has given rise to the phrase, "information glut."  Add to this the recent theory that free speech somehow incorporates the idea that all speech can be forced on us in multitudes of ways, and one begins to realize how this overwhelming wealth of “info” can be turned against the general population.

 It does so not in its complexity but in its size.  Most people haven't the time, the wherewithal, or the training to sort through all that is out there (though most of it may be next to worthless).  They find themselves, like the frog in slowly heated water, coming more and more to depend on the so-called experts and those of influence.

 To a degree it has always been so; there have always been followers and there have always been leaders.  The difference is not simply talent and intellect, though these certainly play a role, but also circumstances and desires.  Being in the right place at the right time affects history more than most realize.  Undergirding it all is what has been written or taught and how these ideas have swayed the beliefs of those who read or learned of them.

 The past is sprinkled with men and women who have, for good or ill, moved cultures and nations in part because of what they themselves had learned through books or teachers. Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle, and the voices of Cicero, Plotinus, Virgil, Plutarch, Augustine, Voltaire, Rousseau, Darwin and Karl Marx all were influenced by those that came before them and in turn influenced those that came after them.  Thus we have been cultivating our field of knowledge for thousands of years. Sir Isaac Newton well understood this principle: In a letter to a friend he said, "If I have seen further (than you and Descartes) it is by standing upon the shoulders of Giants."

 But we have not been carefully tending the crops as of late; we have let the weeds grow to abundance, and they are choking out the wheat.  The past also had its share of foul growth, but careful winnowing mostly kept a check on its advance.  The field, though not pure, has generally produced a good yield over the centuries. Then along came the likes of Horace Mann, Darwin, Marx, Dewey and a host of others who have skillfully and carefully sown foul seeds that have been slow to take root thus making them difficult to detect.

 While the American people have been working themselves half to death, the above-mentioned cadre of intellectuals and supposed leaders of mankind have been busy in the school system making sure (as much as they are able) that the next generation thinks and acts the way they want, notwithstanding what the parents want.  The sowers of these foul seeds have been so slowly doing their work that their labor is appearing more normal by the year.  Soon, if they are successful, the older generation will have passed from the scene and these intellectuals’ precepts and ideals will indeed be the norm.

 Keep in mind that the parents of today's children are the first to come through a public school system that has since the late fifties and early sixties become nearly immersed in the psycho-babble of modern education theory.  Too many of these young moms and dads haven't the faintest idea of what might be wrong; they were brought up in it so they know nothing else. Think about this for a moment: these young parents have never experienced a time without pornography being free and open, a time when movies, television and music did not dare use the language they use today.  They can’t imagine a time without television; they have never known a time without government welfare services or a time when they could spank their child for wrongdoing without the fear of being arrested for it.   Today’s parents cannot assume that when their children graduate from high school, they’ll be able to at least read their own diploma.  They have never known a time when the worst violence in school was a fist fight, and they certainly don't remember a time when God was thought to be relevant to all of life.

 Those in their twenties and thirties can't conceive of how different things were just fifty years ago.  Some of the elite do know, however, and they are the ones steeped in thoughts, ideas and books written by like-minded people in an effort to change the course of our culture.  Thomas Jefferson said, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."  A survey commissioned by the Department of Education in the early 90’s found that nearly 50% of adults in this nation are functionally illiterate.  Beyond this, many of the literate are too preoccupied working 50, 60, or 70 hour weeks (boosting their egos with high-paying, time-consuming careers) to give the proper attention to raising the next generation.  Since children are never raised in a vacuum, what parents have forsaken, others have taken up.

 Ideas have consequences.  They are spread, for the most part, by the written word, either in book form, pamphlets, white papers or, in modern times, on the internet.  Too many of these ideas stand against tried and true methods of history and give us instead loony experiments on cultural manipulations that do not bode well for the future.  These ideas, and those who foster them, are in your schools, your boardrooms and your government.  Reform will not be easy, but it will be impossible if the American people to not take to heart the old Latin phrase, "Tolle Lege: Take up and Read."  Only the American people have the numbers, and ultimately the power, to stand against the ideological onslaught that is being perpetrated against our children, particularly in the public school system.

 There are many good books on the market with which one can become more fully educated concerning this cultural war.  One that I have been reading lately is, "Cloning of the American Mind" by B.K. Eakman.   I hope to have a review ready for the next issue of this newsletter, but I can already recommend:  Get it, read it, and join the battle for your child's heart and mind.  The elites have not yet won; we must make sure they never do.

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From IVBE's newsletter Voices -- Fall, 2000