I remember when I was small and just beginning to receive my education via Kindergarten and Vacation Bible School that many topics and concepts were presented to me in such a way as to put the focus on how I was supposed to perceive them rather than to encourage me to investigate and explore their possibilities.
Later, attending elementary school and going to church followed much of the same fool's road and that trend carried right through into high school. I must say, it had the opposite effect from that intended on this pupil. Most of the instructors were like art experts leading a group of tourists through an exhibition for the purpose of interpreting for them that which they were viewing and thus saving them the trouble of having the responsibility of an opinion.
I found that most folks were happiest with this state of affairs and experienced real discomfort when however rarely, they might be called on to decipher things for themselves. In this typical 'educational' scenario, the person who can memorize and parrot back the buzzword-laden interpretation du jour of a blank canvas is hailed as an intellectual, while the person who points out the obvious will be denounced as a hillbilly.
From what I could discern by the time I got my two front teeth, there are two kinds of people the world over. Those that want to know things and are willing to use the intellect given them by their maker and those that choose to have others tell them what everything means. In part this phenomena is due to an awe of academia which is inculcated into the youngster. The valuable lesson of The Wizard of Oz seems to me to have been lost on most of my generation who were fortunate to have seen the movie.
The foregoing is in no way meant to imply that we do not need teachers and true experts to help us along our way to understanding things. Indeed we do. But what do we need them for precisely? I would venture to say that the most precious thing that they could give us is accurate, documented information or to put it another way, clean data. I would like to define my use of the word expert to mean someone who has exhaustively investigated a particular subject and thus has a greater share of data specific to that topic than the average person out of a random sampling.
If the expert has done their work properly, the student may check all their sources and verify all their data. The boon to the student comes from having all the diverse sources collated into an index that makes for easier examination as simply regards to the time involved in this process. Just as there is an obligation upon the expert to conduct proper research, there is an equal obligation on the student to utilize their own intellect in assessing the data placed before them.
If a teacher presented a bowl of different kinds of bird eggs to five different students for them to examine, they should all come away with individual understandings of these items if left to their own devices and not subjected to any input from the teacher. Having said this, they would all undoubtedly have many similar things to say about the nature of those objects. This hints at the beauty that resides at the core of truth. It is verifiable at any time by anyone, thus we need not fear that each individual seeker of knowledge may incorporate those building blocks into a unique structure of individual thought.
Working backwards, we might take the five unique reports of the students in the example above and sift them down to that which is common to all. Using our results as a base-line we would then be able to conduct our own further inquiries into the study and have saved precious time in the bargain. This phenomenon brings me to the topic of well-written books by reputable authors. They are powerful resources and can save us much lamp oil and shoe leather. They can never replace thinking however and a reputable author in my opinion, would not want a non-thinker to tout their work.
Two topics of the many that have fascinated me from my earliest times were those of history and religion. Alas, it is these two precisely that remain the most nebulous and this is due in part to the fact that the majority of those who write on those subjects have academic, political or business agendas, an axe to grind and have been bullied or bribed to present their material in such a way as to lead a reader to a given conclusion. Techniques to accomplish this are psychological sciences in themselves and were perfected long before technology greatly leveraged their effects.
If a person was given a bowl of different kinds of bird eggs by a chicken farmer to examine and she instructed them beforehand as to what they were to conclude, that person's perception would be already biased. The different results obtained if the same process was initiated by an environmentalist bent on saving hummingbirds or an African Bushman with an ostrich egg canteen around his neck could easily prove this.
Thus, a child who gathers a bowl of different kinds of bird eggs and studies them alone may come away with as much useful hard data as any of the aforementioned groups and also be free of their biases. The child by necessity of being human will have his own bias. It cannot be otherwise but it will not be imposed by a stranger. If you presented a hummingbird eggshell and an ostrich eggshell to our Bushman for the making of a new canteen, which do you think he would choose?
So let us imagine, if you will, that books well-written are like unto bowls of eggs. We should be able to glean from them much basic data that is appealing to common sense and obvious to any observer that glances inside the covers. I would not hesitate to recommend to you three books by one author that deal with the two topics of history and religion.
The author is Douglas Reed and the books are Insanity Fair, From Smoke To Smother and The Controversy of Zion. The first was written in 1938, the second in 1948 and the third was begun in 1949 and finished in 1956, although the manuscript never came to light until twenty-two years later. Book one deals with the lead up to the First World War and book two deals with the aftermath and the build up to the Second World War. From Smoke To Smother also serves as a testament to the accuracy of Mr. Reed's predictions as outlined in Insanity Fair. Similar in effect to a self-induced report card. The third book is an exhaustive and meticulous study on vast and volatile subject of the genesis of Judaism and Zionism, their impact on Christianity and their role in world history.
Mr. Reed was an Englishman who described himself as "relatively unschooled." He began work at age thirteen as an office boy and followed that with being a bank clerk at the age of nineteen at which time he enlisted to fight in World War One. In 1921 at the age of twenty-six he began working for the London Times as a telephonist and clerk. Not until the age of thirty did he become a journalist in the capacity of sub-editor. Three years after that he became the assistant Times correspondent in Berlin and finally was the Chief Central European Correspondent in Vienna of the august newspaper.
He reported from that vantage during the years between the two great wars. Many of the biggest players of that era whom we know only from newsreel clips, photos, microfiche and textbooks, Mr. Reed knew personally by dint of having interviewed them in person or having sat down to coffee with them at cafés in Vienna, Berlin, Prague, London, Moscow and Budapest. The list includes villains such as Hitler, the nobility, heads of state and the diplomat corps of many countries. To supplement and fortify his first hand perspective, Douglas also spoke to janitors, maids, farmers, soldiers and commoners across Europe and their presence in his written observations of the power brokers of the day serve to ground the entire body of his writings in a reality that at once is translatable to any reader attempting to make sense of their own times or of his.
His training as a journalist, his experience as a soldier, his lack of a school tie and his own standard of excellence in his work all add up to one of the best bowls of eggs I have ever been handed to examine on the topics of history and religion. From this bowl of eggs I will make my own omelette and I invite you to do the same.
I have long felt that religion and history are joined at the hip and that this condition explains why they appear to limp like Quasimodo through man’s written record if we study one without taking into account the other. The period of the last two thousand years in particular appears to defy all logic when viewed from the singular perspective of the historical narrative that we have inherited in our own time.
In concert with this we are confounded by the phenomenon as per religious history that an anthropological trend toward the concept of a single universal deity albeit dressed in differing robes, should be suddenly confronted by the concept of a singular god acting on behalf of one exclusive group of humans both to their benefit and to their detriment. Mr. Reed seems to have pondered this conundrum as I certainly have.
In the course his news career, which predated the first transatlantic phone call, Douglas began to notice that many of his dispatches to his employer were either lost, altered or suppressed. This led to him breaking his association with the Times in 1943. It is important to note that he walked away and was not dismissed. Soon afterwards he was to enjoy world fame for his four books, Insanity Fair, Disgrace Abounding, Lest We Regret, and Somewhere South Of Suez.
The recorded figures for the sale of those books is nothing short of impressive and I imagine that at one time Mr. Reed was a so-called household name in the literate world. After 1951 his book Far and Wide was published. It was a journey across America through the eyes of an ex-pat Englishman with much Continental experience and independent study under his belt. I am a born American and I learned much from it. Being a North American, I had very different views on the monarchy of Britain than Mr. Reed but I also learned to cut them a modicum of slack as well. Just a wee, mind you.
What followed next for Mr. Reed was a complete shutting of the doors. His books were banished from bookstalls, publishers refused to even speak to him and the wonderful books he'd already published began to be withdrawn from library shelves and literally disappear. If you had read his books without knowing about that censorship, I wager that you would certainly wonder why it was imposed. Did this treatment finish the man? No.
It was in 1951 that he began writing The Controversy of Zion. He was adding the Epilogue just before I was born. The book is over five hundred pages and thoroughly documented, sourced and indexed with the highest level of professionalism. It was clearly his magnum opus. He knew that it would never be published in what remained of his lifetime and thus it sat in a zippered file on top of his wardrobe in Durban, South Africa for over two decades.
The bulk of the factual information that I have learned about the story of my Cherokee ancestors was from material gathered by a relatively unschooled Irish-American, James Mooney who was as scrupulous as he was meticulous. Similarly, after reading a score of books about the story of the gypsies, I found that the most plausible and resonant attempt to trace that story was in the work of a French-Canadian author who's research and findings were endorsed wholeheartedly by non other than the leader of the Romany Kris.
Thus, I feel certain that Jewish people could learn much from the work of this "relatively unschooled" English newspaperman who utilized his highly honed skills of gathering facts, presenting them in a concise verifiable format and applied them to the daunting task of telling that epic unfinished story. Gentiles could avoid much disinformation by beginning their study of Judaica here. At all points of the compass, Reed allowed and expected his readers to draw their own conclusions and he precisely articulated and indicated those which were his own, driven by a spirit that simply wished to see the lives of all mankind improved in a world repeatedly gang raped by war. When he opines, the reader is responsibly and soberly made well aware.
Also, the book contains the best description of the notorious Texan Colonel House that I have ever encountered to date. While not fully plumbing the depths of that shadow man's personal motivations or his gossamer connections to incredible power; Mr. Reed was easily savant enough to clearly see through Mr. House's methods. He presents them to you in a way that any child could easily grasp. As a Texan myself, it has always intrigued me just how many Texans there are in history's woodpile. We may never know the true number. (smile)
I can confidently tell you that the first two books I mentioned at the top of this essay will give any reader a better sense of the modern history of the Western world when added to whatever texts they have read pondered and retained, particularly those texts that were provided by their formal education. The Controversy of Zion, however, will take the reader many layers deeper. Deeper than most folks in his day and in ours would be comfortable or even willing to venture. I will quote here from Edmund Burke, a quote which is included in the Reed manuscript before me, “An event has occurred, upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to be silent.”
fin