Limerick for the Day:
Kamala’s a woman who KNOWs!
What makes flora and fauna grow.
She’s only perturbed
It wasn’t her WORD
That made either one of them so.
– Ligon Law
Full disclosure: Since completing Annals of America I admit to being an unabashed Adler acolyte. I was delighted to find reading his introduction (after completing the twenty volumes of American history) that I gleaned from his work exactly what he and his co-authors intended. I despaired thinking I would not find subsequent reading to match the degree of pleasurable enlightenment provided by the Annals – and that includes some fairly heavy competition (see bibliography). But, like movies, if you want to read good literature follow good authors. Adler’s bibliography will last me the rest of my life. If all we take with us to the next life is Knowledge, Love and unrepented sins then I’m set (at least the first one – assuming the Judge scores on a curve}.
On more than one occasion I’ve heard people say quite confidently “Well, your version of the truth is not mine,” or, “There’s your version and his version. The truth lies somewhere in between.” Adler (and a host of other philosophers) debunks that lie. He describes people who utter those platitudes “Viral Verbalists”* who read to confirm their biases and confidently substitute emotional prejudice for the facts. He explains the requirement for humans to seek the Truth more in-depth in several of his other books including the social consequences of believing such PC BS but he explains in How to Read a Book, Chapter 11 why a reader is required to ask the question Is it True?:
“The question, Is it true? can be asked of anything we read [or hear]. It is applicable in every kind of writing, in one or another sense of “truth” – mathematical, scientific, philosophical, historical, and poetical. No higher commendation can be given any work of the human mind than to praise it for the measure of Truth it has achieved, by the same token, to criticize it adversely for its failure in this respect is to treat it with the seriousness that a serious work deserves. Yet, strangely enough, in recent years, for the first time in Western history, there is a dwindling concern with this criterion of excellence.
Books win the plaudits of the critics and gain widespread popular attention almost to the extent they flout** the truth – the more outrageously they do so, the better. Many readers, and most particularly those who review current publications, employ other standards for judging, and praising or condemning, the books they read – their novelty, their sensationalism, their seductiveness, their force, and even their power to bemuse or befuddle the mind, but not their Truth, their clarity, or their power to enlighten. They have, perhaps, been brought to this pass by the fact that so much of current writing outside the sphere of the exact sciences manifests so little concern with Truth.
One might hazard the guess that if saying something that is true, in any sense of that term, were ever again to become the primary concern it should be, fewer books would be written published, and read. Unless what you have read is true in some sense you need go no further. But if it is, you must face the last question. You cannot read for information intelligently without determining what significance is, or should be, attached to the facts presented.” – p. 146
“The least deviation from the Truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.” – Aristotle, 4 B.C.
* “the bad habit of using words without regard for the thoughts they convey and without awareness of the experiences to which they should refer.” – Adler, How to Read a Book; p. 126 (See Ligon Clan Law Quotes)
** to treat with contemptuous disregard; to indulge in scornful behavior; to show one’s contempt in derision or mockery; synonyms: jeer, scoff, sneer
