Modern Thought vs. Traditional Thought
“Giles and Justin” was one of several assignments that exposed my college-prep and AP senior English students to a welter of questions that promoted self-clarification and personal growth. This particular written assignment underscored the fact that everything they were learning in this humanities course spoke directly to their lives, making them more insightful human beings.
The assignment was as follows: Giles is a man whom most people would call “modern.” Rejecting traditional beliefs, he is a thoroughgoing skeptic, who refuses to grant the truth of anything unless it can be empirically proven. As far as he is concerned, the existence of God, the freedom of the will, and an afterlife are “superstitious notions unworthy of the 21st century.” To him, religion and the eternal verities are simply human inventions.
Justin, on the other hand, believes in traditional thought. Everything Giles rejects Justin believes in and everything Giles believes in Justin rejects.
I then gave students the following list of reasons why Giles might possibly believe in modern thought: he was raised in it; he is rebelling against his parents; he was brainwashed when young; he believes in it blindly; he is afraid of questioning it; all his friends believe in it; he derives emotional advantages from believing in it; he needs to justify his present behavior; he would have to rethink his entire life were modern thought false.
He wants to seek attention, appear different, respectable, fashionable, virtuous, enlightened; judge or condemn others; convert others to his views because he’s unsure of himself; find acceptance or advance himself socially; be rejected or persecuted; fill an emotional void in his life by believing in something new, exciting, or dangerous; frighten or shock others.
Or it enables him to cope with misfortune or lessen guilt and anxiety; gives him comfort, happiness, peace, security, direction, meaning, purpose, identity, or have ready-made answers to the questions of life.
Justin may believe in traditional thought for the identical reasons.
Part A. (1.) Choose any three of the above italicized reasons and show, step-by-step, how you would prove that these are the reasons why Giles actually believes in modern thought. Try to identify with him emotionally to understand his psychology. (2.) Assume that Giles actually does believe in modern thought for many of the above reasons. Would those reasons disprove modern thought? Discuss your answer in detail. (3.) Are fallacies present? If so, name and discuss them. (4.) What insights did you gain by doing this assignment?
Part B. Now answer the same four questions with respect to Justin.
[Please Note: If you want to derive maximum benefit from doing this assignment yourself, read no further and work through the assignment yourself in as much detail as possible. You will make the same kind of discoveries as students did when they spent two days on the assignment. If, on the other hand, you would rather not, please proceed reading.]
I gave students two days to complete the assignment and then talked them through it. As to the first question, most students thought that it was impossible to prove that any of the italicized reasons actually prompted Giles or Justin to believe in modern or traditional thought, although all of the reasons listed were certainly possible.
Students couldn’t even say, much less prove, why they themselves held their beliefs, let alone why Giles and Justin held theirs. So many things affect a person both consciously and unconsciously that it’s impossible to say exactly why people believe what they believe. “It’s like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall” was one simile used. “Everything slips away on you.”
As to the second question, students realized that the reasons given for both Giles’ and Justin’s beliefs had no bearing whatsoever on whether either belief system was true or not. The social conditioning and psychological reasons for believing in both systems and the alleged truth of those systems were two separate issues.
This came as a relief to some students, who saw themselves as either Giles or Justin and identified with many of the reasons given. However, after doing the assignment, they understood that those italicized reasons would not invalidate either set of beliefs. This is why role-playing is so important in attaining self-knowledge because by role-playing both characters you achieve distance from them and oneself by playing them.
This realization led students to discuss another question that struck them as even more urgent: How, then, could one determine whether modern or traditional thought was true? I mentioned that if one wanted an answer to this kind of question, the journey must be undertaken by oneself since no course could provide them with a definitive answer, unless it sought to indoctrinate them into either modern or traditional thought and they wanted to be indoctrinated to find peace of mind rather than remain objective and decide impartially after studying both sides of the question.
We discussed how much time and reflection would be required to deal with such questions and determined that it would depend on the individual. For some, it might take a few months, others a few years, and still others a lifetime. Some might choose to remain with the answers they had been brought up with and be content with so doing because they now understood those answers as a young adult rather than as a child when they first learned them with only a child’s understanding.
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The answers they had and grew up with were now more informed and understood at a deeper level in keeping with their present maturity. Those answers were now their own and freely chosen because they were the fruit of personal struggle and searching. Others might choose to modify or reject their beliefs. Everyone was different.
There wasn’t any set way of going about this inner journey since it was up to each individual to find one’s own path. It could take many forms: college courses in philosophy and religion, wide reading, reflection, discussion, and in some cases even travel, as in W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel, The Razor’s Edge, which had been filmed and released after World War II when the post-war mood was conducive to its message.
With respect to the third question, students saw all the italicized psychological reasons or social conditioning factors as so many ad hominem fallacies if they were used to disprove either set of beliefs. These conditioning factors for holding beliefs and the truth of those beliefs were seen, again, as two separate issues, which was a major revelation to them, since now they were correlating everything they had learned so far in the course.
Concerning the fourth question, students discovered that thinking through these kinds of questions slowly and methodically while typing both cleared the mind and calmed the spirit. Writing out their responses in this way gave them the necessary detachment from themselves and their thoughts to induce constant revision. As they added layer upon layer of continuing commentary, they argued with themselves as devil’s advocate, an exhilarating initiation into the provisional nature of creative and critical thinking and writing.
Their greatest discovery, however, was the need for integrity of motive in fashioning their own set of convictions. Students saw that authenticity of life meant subjecting their beliefs to a searching analysis since the reasons cited for both Giles and Justin seemed unworthy of a meaningful life.
Others were non-committal, as if preferring to keep their beliefs in either modern or traditional thought comfortably in the shadows, not wishing clarity about them even to themselves. Others weren’t sure what to think about the entire two-day exercise. As always in assignments of this nature, the reactions ran the gamut as is only natural. There is no right or wrong way, only one’s own way of responding to this kind of open-ended assignment, and a teacher respects this because whatever way a student reacts is the right way in this process of self-clarification.
It was enough that they had experienced the assignment and were stretched in the process, whereas, for others, it was too soon to understand what it all meant, which is as it should be, for there is no timetable for such introspection and the fruit it will bear. To use an old-fashioned phrase, students had undergone a philosophical examination of conscience as the initial step of their philosophical journey or simply a new kind of reflection that would make sense in time.
In any event, students were intrigued by this less obvious form of ad hominem fallacy, which cited social conditioning and psychological motives for holding a belief system as in the case of Giles and Justin, both of whom were undoubtedly influenced by any number of factors in fashioning their outlook on life.
They also saw in these examples how these same set of factors could condition both Giles and Justin to hold diametrically opposed beliefs and values and to see the world so differently, which only deepened their appreciation about the mysterious nature of the human heart, which the great writers of every literary tradition have always known and tried to share.
It was this revelation above all that especially struck the readers in the class to want to know the names of some of those authors so as to immerse themselves more deeply in this vortex of contradiction. The motivations discussed in their social science courses seemed too one-dimensional, whereas it was this experience of feeling the tumult of multi-dimensional contradictions that drew them to the love of literature in the first place.
They asked for a list of authors I would recommend whose works reflected this inner tumult. I suggested twenty: Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, Stendhal, Kafka, Thomas Hardy, Hermann Hesse, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Albert Camus, James Baldwin, Flaubert, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Kate Chopin, Doris Lessing, Simone de Beauvoir, and Virginia Woolf.
There were dozens of other works from every literary tradition they could explore for the rest of their lives. A vast ocean of meaning was waiting to be discovered that would continue to enrich them for as long as they wished. For those of you who are readers, you may want to read my Escaping Plato’s Cave by Reading.
Frank Breslin is a retired high-school teacher in the New Jersey public school system, where he taught English, Latin, German, and History for forty years.
