Escaping Plato’s Cave by Travel as Story
Once upon a time in a faraway land, there dwelt a people who never succeeded in quite growing up. From the time they were children until they bade adieu to this world, they were told that the Big Questions of life were so profound and mysterious that no mind could reach the bottom of them.
They were also informed that they were so steeped in corruption, so wayward, benighted, and prone to temptation that they could never be trusted to arrive at the truth. They could only depend on their sages, for they alone could unravel life’s cosmic enigmas.
So all-pervasive and ingrained was their need to obey that the greatest wrong was to think for themselves. Error lurked everywhere, and only by hearkening to their Tribal Elders could they hope to keep to the One True Way. The highest wisdom was to distrust themselves and to trust those Venerable Authorities, their hallowed Wise Men.
Cultivating one’s mind was expressly forbidden, and the reading of books was especially dangerous since it fostered introspection and a critical mind. What was the point of reading since they already possessed all the right answers in this sojourn called life?
The time-honored way to prevent such behavior was to always keep busy. Their lives were so consumed with trivialities that many forgot The Important Things, so practiced were they in escaping themselves.
There was much hustle and bustle and buzzing about, and a stranger would have mistaken their busyness for a beehive or an industrious colony of worker ants.
Yet they could approach their sages to learn the answers to whatever perplexed them during their lifespan of threescore and ten. One had simply to listen to these oracles and depart refreshed and enlightened.
Now, I wouldn’t want you to rush to judgment about this curious folk. You have only to know what happened that had reduced them to this pitiful state. Just imagine that from the time you were young, you were always told that your mind was darkened and your will was weakened by some primordial calamity.
You weren’t really sure what all of this meant, but it filled you with such dread and foreboding that it cast a shadow over your youth. When you’re always taught that your mind is twisted and your will diseased, it is only natural that children take these lessons to heart.
You could never understand why the adults never wanted you to have an inner life, a life of the mind, but, instead, stuffed you with inscrutable answers to questions you neither understood, nor asked.
Even at school, you were always made to think as a group, forbidden to question or think for yourself. What mental life you had kept you on the surface of things because, you were told, there was nothing else.
Nor were you allowed to ask a question that started with “Why.” You were made to feel that this was a sinister, loathsome word, one that struck terror in everyone, except children, of course, since “why” was always their favorite word.
Especially horrendous were questions like: “Why must I believe whatever I’m told?” Or “Why must a story have only one meaning?” when every child knew that there were as many meanings as children who heard it.
Now just imagine that all of your friends were raised in the selfsame manner with no “Secret Garden” where you could escape to and wonder and dream, fathom the Infinite, or commune with your soul. You had only to look at the faces of these children to behold their burden of sadness.
Now, lest you might think that their parents were ogres, you should know that they, too, had a similar childhood, and that they were only reaping what their parents had sown. In fact, had they departed by one jot or tittle from the ancient ways, they would have been remiss in their duties of raising their young.
In a word, you dwelt in a paradise of loving, sincere, and well-meaning robots. You learned the same mistrust learned from their parents that was passed on like a plague.
Never would they permit you to venture beyond their world’s circum-scribed limits that kept you from the Lands of Contagion that would only endanger your fealty to The Traditional Ways.
Yet, you and your friends were most eager to see them, since there were whisperings of a mysterious Tree of Forbidden Fruit, the only source of meaningful knowledge that came of making one’s own mistakes in order to become a mature human being.
So, one stormy evening, you all embarked on a night sea journey to discover what those other tribes thought about the questions of life. To your surprise and amazement, you found that all of them were also forbidden to think, although they, too, had authorities with different answers, and believed that all other answers, including your own, were but snares and delusions. But more surprising than anything else was that they all seemed likable, honest, and good human beings.
The longer you pondered these revelations, the more did troubling questions arise. What if you had been born among one of those tribes? Wouldn’t you also have believed in their answers as readily as you now did your own?
And would that mean that what you and they believed was simply a matter of chance, and that “Truth” was only what you were accustomed to believing?
And what if your authorities themselves had been born among one of those tribes? Did everything depend on where you grew up? Were you and your authorities “trapped” into holding the beliefs of the tribe into which you were born?
Were those beliefs objectively true, or did they only seem true? Was one set of beliefs as “true” as another? One set of authorities as “right” as another? Were those authorities merely their tribe’s corporate lawyers, who defended the beliefs of wherever they were born?
Suddenly, you recall an old saying from long, long ago: “He that increases knowledge increases sorrow.” Is this what an education was really about? Figuring things out for yourself, forsaking authorities, and setting sail into regions unknown? Is an education immersing yourself in the myths of your tribe, or forgetting them to go your own way? You find your head spinning. Why did you ever leave home where everything had been so bucolically simple?
*****
Dear Reader, we must now leave Everyman alone with his thoughts, sorry that he ever embarked on this journey that has left him confused, but what if we could go back in time and offer him another outcome?
*****
You find your head spinning. Why did you ever leave home, so bucolically simple, a Garden of Eden, now a Paradise Lost? Pursued by the Furies, you are bereft of all peace. For days you are tortured by only one question: Was it possible that all these tribes could really be wrong, and that your tribe alone possessed the Truth?
This inner turmoil continued for a very long time until, suddenly, it happened — your beliefs and authorities seemed strangely transfigured. You’ve arrived in safe harbor to find inner peace. You and your tribe did have the Truth, while all the others were misguided and wrong.
It was now all so clear! Transfixed with certainty, you shed tears of emotion! Why had you doubted? Belief and surrender were the keys to the Kingdom! Your tribe alone, set apart, pre-ordained, possessing the Truth!
You now understood why thinking for yourself was so perilous, unsettling, confusing, and wrong! It rejects Tradition. It leaves you no certainties. It sets you adrift with no guidance. Contrite beyond words, you vow to become an example to others. You would always follow the Ancient Ways.
Humbled and blessed by this crisis, you now possessed something precious and rare — critical detachment from those other tribes and sages. You see them objectively in a way unknown to their flocks, who mistakenly believed that theirs was the only True Way. You understood why they revered their authorities, who gave them security, direction, meaning, and purpose. You pitied these deluded captives, convinced that they alone were truly free. If only by some miraculous intervention they could see themselves as you saw them, as inmates in chains, they would laugh you to scorn, but this will never happen because . . .
“No! No! No! This just won’t do! It’s all too far-fetched! No one’s this blind! How could anyone who has come full-circle and behold the mote in his brother’s eye, but not the beam in his own? Dismiss all those other authorities, yet remain blind to one’s own?”
And, of course, my Friend, I must agree with you. No one has a problem rejecting other authorities, but when they’re one’s own, ah, now that’s something different! Questioning them would mean the end of one’s world! So, one puts out one’s eyes to avoid what one sees.
Everyman thinks that it’s an either/or situation. Either one’s own sages are right or the others are right; but if those others are wrong, then one’s own has to be right, forgetting, of course, that both might be wrong!
However, that’s just the beginning. The allure of authorities has nothing to do with rational reasons and everything to do with emotional ones — nostalgic ties to one’s past and tradition, the need for belonging and being accepted, and the yearning to become a child once again by surrendering to authorities, whom one simply obeys.
One can simply abandon that most terrible of all human burdens — being responsible for one’s own life and decisions. Reason is powerless with those who refuse to grow up. The only response is to calmly move on.
So, let us resume our tale and, after the passage of years of soul-searching, our hero now views “authorities” in a more nuanced way:
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(1) There were some “authorities” who were unworthy of their calling. In love with power, fame, and preferment, they sold their souls to the highest bidder, who wished them to brainwash the people, to control and exploit them through guilt, fear, and terror in order to subject them to themselves.
(2) Some were charlatans who distilled their toxic brew of bigotry and obscurantism as truth from on high to those susceptible to their specious argument and theatrical manner. They brought great comfort to their audience since their message was always the unverifiable effusions of their own imaginations.
(3) Some were self-appointed prophets with a following, who needed authorities to take control of their lives and assure them that they, indeed, did have a purpose and destiny if only by following their authorities’ wishes. These authorities did much mischief in the world by inflaming their followers to advance their own designs and whom they later discarded as disposable tools after serving their purpose. There is nothing so evil that some will not do if made to feel righteous in the doing of it.
(4) There were other authorities who sincerely believed in their tradition, completely surrendering their hearts to it, which they studied devoutly and bequeathed to the next generation.
(5) Others saw their tradition as narrow and rigid and sought to develop it in the light of new knowledge. Tradition was something alive and grows to reflect what earlier generations could not have foreseen. It was not the growth of tradition, but the growth of those within that tradition by making explicit what implicitly had always been there.
(6) Other authorities thought that tradition should never change since truth never changes. Adapting to the present was the supreme betrayal of tradition, which was always in turbulent times the people’s North Star.
(7) Others saw the tension between (5) and (6) as healthy, since it reflected two valid views, each of which needed the other for wholeness and balance, the essence of a rich, vibrant legacy that must change or die.
(8) Others were appalled by the scandal caused by this tension and feared that the people would lose trust in tradition. Disagreements should be conducted far from the people, lest they be scandalized by dissent, while still others thought that ferment was healthy because it would reflect a more mature view of the people, who should never be treated like children who could be easily led.
(9) Others thought that this tradition had been wrong from the outset — that it should never have been about beliefs, but solely about a well-lived life. Tradition should never be a loyalty oath to a fixed set of doctrines expressed in the original, inflexible language, but a commitment to how a good life is lived.
(10) There were also authorities who never viewed themselves as “authorities’’ in dispensing hard and fast “answers,” or in wanting to be seen that way by the people. Rather, they saw themselves only as “seekers,” who did their best with the light they were given. They would have been amused at being called “authorities,” since they themselves were always in ferment, forever outgrowing their former positions, which to them were but waystations on a continuous journey toward truth.
They knew they were erring, fallible creatures, never wanting themselves to become portals to Truth. They suffered the embarrassment of passing for “authorities” for those in need of a guide, yet felt uneasy about keeping them children.
While they thought that their own views were right because of the evidence, yet at the same time they also knew that they might also be wrong, so were unwilling to impose their views on the people as infallible oracles but only as debatable opinions, since during their lifetime other authorities, no less learned than themselves, had disagreed with them. They felt that the present belongs to the living, who should never be controlled by the dead.
Nor did they see themselves as their tradition’s jailors, but wanted it to be free to grow as something living and breathing. They may even have felt entombed by tradition and sought the aid of other traditions since no one tradition could contain all of truth. “Heresy” to them was but an invitation to wider horizons, since they felt confined within a tradition that thought it could force the universe into a thimble.
Like wandering deer heedlessly traversing national boundaries, they saw no demarcations when searching for truth. They embraced every tradition, thinking that each was only a piece of the puzzle, mosaic, enigma, for Truth could never be caught or contained by the mind. Revering every tradition opened their eyes to hidden treasures that could only enrich their own.
Yet they were also wary about how much insight their age could bear, since the flame-keepers of orthodoxy, of every orthodoxy, were always in search of someone to burn.
So, they offered their views as only modest opinions, which after their death became hardened doctrine that redounded to the glory of the institution they had ambivalently served. Or which they might never have held the views placed on their lips by those bent on exploiting their name in sectarian battles.
*****
Slowly, everything is now transformed as the old paradigm melts away in the heat of a deeply-lived life of the mind. You begin to see all traditions as so many time- and culture-bound “confines, wards, and dungeons” that take over the mind, mental software that programs a tribe or tradition to think and behave in predictable ways.
Since you sensed that there were different kinds of authorities within any one tradition, you also knew that they were all but flesh-and-blood fallible creatures, conditioned by different historical and cultural contexts.
To what extent could you trust them?
Are you naive if you follow the authorities of a tradition, or should you approach them with caution as only fallible human beings whom you should respect as you would any fellow human being, but never revere as embodying the truth
Is tradition a polite term for herd instinct that provides warmth and safety to a docile flock?
Does it offer only fallible opinions that illumine a question from only one point of view?
Or is this the most you could expect of any tradition?
Were those different opinions only reflections of different temperaments, imaginations, creative minds of stunning originality that corresponded to nothing objective outside those minds, pale projections of great beauty into some Eternal Platonic World of Forms, itself but a metaphorical Ideal, but never meant to enslave their adherents?
Which tradition was right, or were they all right as far as each reflected human yearnings?
Was each as true as another if it helped some to grow, widen horizons, and soften the heart?
Did every tradition contain only a sliver of a much larger vision? Should you listen to all of them, or only the one you inherited by chance, or none of them because each might become its own mental prison barring one’s future growth?
Or was there a danger of being too open-minded, or could one ever become open-minded enough?
Did subjective conviction prove one was right, or wrong, or what did it prove?
In following these authorities, should one take into account the times and culture within which each of them lived and how that historical context shaped their thinking?
Should one distinguish the essentials from the accidentals and focus on only what was enduring?
Were traditions only speaking in tongues and symbols rather than literal truths?
If you have the need to be led by others, should you resist that temptation?
Are you allowing them to diminish your autonomy?
Should you beware of any person, group, institution, or tradition that would enslave you?
Authorities you may feel the need to follow need not only be adults or institutions, but also other young people like yourself, or even your friends, should they want you to become someone you’re not?
Immanuel Kant once wrote an essay about becoming one’s own person, “What is Enlightenment?” Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage. Sapere Aude! Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding!
Others say one needs only three authorities — a critical mind, a courageous heart, and the will to press on.
Frank Breslin is a retired high-school teacher in the New Jersey public school system.
