Abuse of Belief Junior - the Home Game

Blogging with Lorraine about truth and lies, and whether we have the wisdom to know the difference, I commented that moms understand how children construct meaning that is both truth and lie, or to be more accurate, meaning for which the labels "truth" or "lie" have little or no meaning!

. . .just ask a child who ate the last cookie, or why his dog suddenly has a bald patch and where are the scissors?! The answers will depend (most passionately!) on what the child believes you may believe, and what he or she WANTS to believe, and not much on evidence, objectivity or looming jurisprudence.

Then this morning, I came across a book review of "Real Kids: Creating Meaning in Everyday Life" in which Susan L. Engel apparently pleads with us to be at least as interested in the ways that children think, their thought processing if you will, as we are in their outcomes or achievements.

(And JJ pleads with citizens everywhere to reject the lie that society's Job One is to label the natural thinking processes of children as some unnatural problem or other, the better to impose years of professional intervention in the name of national security and all that is holy.)

Engel argues that children’s play
and storytelling provide clear evidence that children’s thinking is not a simplified version of adult thinking, but rather reflects a qualitatively different way of interacting with the world—a way of interacting in which the boundaries between fantasy and reality are highly permeable.

To which a liberally educated British dad now living here and homeschooling his own, added a snatch of T.S. Eliot -- "humankind cannot bear very much reality" -- and some pithy comments:

[quote=Paul D.]I think that anybody looking around after 9/11 has to agree that "the boundaries between fantasy and reality are highly permeable" for all of us.
To give other examples, there's the drive to impose Intelligent Design and the Strict Construction approach to the Constitution - two attempts to deny change and progress by imposing an arbitrary barrier. [/quote]

So I'm beginning to think this could be the cultural conversation of our times.

Although speaking just for my own truth, before I could muster much scholarly attention for the Constitution today, I was as usual seduced by a powerful whiff of story, wafting my way from Eliot's own "highly permeable boundaries between fantasy and reality."

Was he American poet or British poet, I mused. Off to check. Ah, both are factual but neither is true alone - these facts are dependent on each other for their truth, either is misleading stated as absolute and isolated fact. Was he a poet? Yes, BUT also schoolmaster and professor as much as brilliant artist - what does that inconvenient complexity do to the falsely dichotomous "truth" that
those who can, do;
those who can't teach;
those who can't teach, teach teachers?

(More snarling, never mind me - I come from a long line of professors, teachers and omnivorous intellectuals with extremely porous boundaries between fantasy and reality, not to mention between thinking and breathing.)

Summing up the power of story in today's lesson, then, it seems likely to be true of Eliot that we don't know much of what's true about Eliot, not even supposedly simple facts of the type with which we love to fill reference books and test mental mechanics in schools everywhere.

"Never compromising either with the public or indeed with language itself, he has followed his belief that poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry."

So like a child's mental constructs, lots of what we're unsure we understand about Eliot is because he didn't plant it in neatly labeled little standard rows of true-false and multiple choice, controlled to the nth degree by social common denominators and heavy pesticide applications.

Time Magazine in 1988 said Eliot "produced a body of work -- poetry, criticism, plays -- that permanently rearranged the cultural landscapes of his native and adopted lands. Exactly how he created himself and his era remains something of a mystery, the topic of continuing debate."

And it is certainly true (but will you believe me? You'll have to take my word for all this, unless Smoking Gun is having a VERY slow day) that I laughed aloud upon reading this puzzled yet gamely authoritative declaration, explaining what we know about what we don't know -

[quote]It is rather difficult to find much information on T. S. Eliot, which is quite hard to understand, considering the profound impact he had on American and English literature. However, it can be explained that since Eliot was a very private man and also forbade in his will an official biography, the dearth of information on Eliot is justifiable.[/quote]

Is this the way the world ends, not with a lie believed but truth disbelieved?

Ask MisEducation!

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