Making your own country seem as strange as a foreign land

Some thoughts on education, and reflections on some reflections on the Laws of Manu.

I was poking again through David Cayley’s biography of Ivan Illich. Cayley mentions that Illich threw himself into the study of history to gain distance from “contemporary certainties”, the sort of stuff we assume is true often without even realizing it. He taught students about 12th century Europe, which he particularly loved, with the hope of “making the present seem as strange as the past” to them. I quite like that phrase… if you were coming up with the mission statement for a new school, you could do worse than to say that one of your goals is to teach students so as to make the present seem as strange as the past to them.

And of course to accomplish that requires a serious attention to, and serious respect for, the past. In education today we sometimes see the temptation to teach students about the past, sure, but to spend a lot of time poking fun at it as we do so. Of course that just solidifies the idea that we are the normal people, and the past was broken and backwards. No, they were men and women like us, some of them profoundly intelligent and thoughtful and wise, wrestling with human life just as we do, and (even aside from technological aspects) they would find many of our unquestioned “certainties” bizarre and alarming.

It reminds one of some of C.S. Lewis’ comments about the value of reading old books.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook —even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. … To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

We could also make a geographic parallel here - why bother studying the thinking of foreign lands? Well, because for the same reason, we want to make your present country seem as strange as a foreign land. By showing you how another place thinks, we want to reveal to you how your own country thinks, which things you cannot normally see as the fish is unaware of the water it is in. And indeed, although Illich never did this, he had the idea of writing a history of Western ideas in an Oriental language. (You also see in that his belief that a people’s language is closely connected to how they think… works in translation are never really the same work.)

An Austrian Pine I came across recently on the campus of Michigan State University, speaking of making your own country as strange as a foreign land.

Reflections on some reflections on the Laws of Manu

These thoughts were in part provoked because I’ve also been listening through a Wondrium lecture series called Sacred Texts of the World. The lecturer is Grant Hardy of the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and I don’t know anything else about him. As you’ll be able to tell here, he does speak as if he is addressing a secular audience, for whatever that is worth. But I was impressed by his courage challenging our Western certainties, you might say, during his lecture on the Laws of Manu.

As Hardy says in his lecture, the Laws of Manu (circa AD 200) is an important collection of texts in Hinduism that is largely responsible for how India is socially structured even today. It describes the creation of world, including the creation of the four major castes, or varnas (priests and teachers, warriors and rulers, farmers and merchants, laborers and servants, roughly speaking). It contains details on the ideal life stages for men in the upper three castes (student → householder → forest dweller → wandering ascetic). It has further details on life in the various stages (for householders, it has instructions on marriage, hospitality, sacrifices to ancestors, proper hygiene, food, clothing, etc.) and for the various varnas (e.g. for the ruler caste, rules for kingship, administration, war, contracts, legal witnesses, divorce, inheritance, etc.). And toward the end it has a chapter on karma which explains why people are reborn into different castes (remember reincarnation is central to Hindu belief as well).

But, Hardy says, why should we care? This all looks very strange and perhaps rather irrational to American eyes. A caste system, reincarnation, karma, all very weird. Why should people living in a post-modern world care about a pre-modern text like the Laws of Manu? (And yes, Christians should have no difficulty in answering that question, which tells you that he mainly sees himself as addressing a secular audience!) But even for his wider audience, he says it’s valuable because it gives us a chance to reexamine some of our own cultural assumptions.

And then let me give you four examples he provides that I think we can all appreciate.

Equality

In America, we love the idea that all men are created equal. When teaching at a public college, I liked using this example with students because, yes, the idea is very popular with them… but if you think every belief you hold should be derivable from science (also something people want to believe today), go ahead and prove to me from the data that all men are created equal. In fact, although you may not want to go this far yourself, Hardy claims that “a moment’s worth of reflection reveals [this claim] to be a convenient fiction.” Some people are smarter, or better looking, or were born into more prosperous families. And Hinduism’s law of karma actually accepts these differences as obvious, and provides an explanation for them that satisfies our need for justice. (E.g. yes, you’ve been born into a harsh situation in this life, but that’s because you behaved badly in the last one, so there is a justice to it.) And after all, he says, doesn’t it perhaps make sense to have different expectations for those of varying abilities? Maybe it doesn’t make sense to treat everyone exactly the same.

Ah, but now we’re Americans again - having been made to see, perhaps, the oddity of our claim, what do we do now? Indeed, the desire for equality (and hence our refusal to accept inequality) is a HUGE driving force in American culture today, maybe the biggest driving force of all on a national level. Well, we have more options as Christians. Can Christians affirm “all men are created equal”? I think most of us would say yes, perhaps even emphatically YES, and when we say that we have in mind something like an “everyone is made in the image of God” moral equality. But the danger here becomes… OK, that is what you are thinking, but what is your secular neighbor thinking? And so indeed, some Christians today are opposed to this language because when the world hears “equality”, it hears, it desires to hear, equality-in-every-way, which then must become a belief in a sort of progressive blank-slatism. Everyone is born with the same chance to become an Einstein or a Michael Jordan. Everything a man can do a woman can do too, and vice versa. And if somehow this isn’t true, then the universe is not acting properly, and so it is the duty of the state to provide whatever support is needed to make it true. THAT, they imagine, is truly living up to the principles in the Declaration, that’s the equality we believe in.

Anyway, I appreciated using the Laws of Manu to point out… human equality is not an obvious thing, looking about you. In fact we look quite unequal. If we believe in it, and especially if you, secular man, believe in it, why do you do so? What does it mean?

Social Class

OK, the rest of these will now be shorter. We in the West recoil at the idea of determining social class by caste, Hardy says. That seems rather arbitrary and unfair to just be stuck at whatever level you are born into. But we instead tend to determine social class by wealth. Is that actually better? In India you can be a high-caste priest even if you are poor. We like to think that in the US you can be born poor and still achieve that American Dream, and yes that does happen to some people. But the advantages bestowed by wealth, upbringing, and social connections are quite significant in the US, even if some people can escape those limitations.

Social Stability

I enjoyed these comments in particular. It’s noteworthy that for most of its history, he said, India’s social stability came from the kind of guidance articulated in texts like the Laws of Manu, rather than strict law codes. People had a defined place in society and acted accordingly, and yes social pressures helped to “keep them in their lane”… but not, so much, actual legal requirements. And it resulted in strong, cohesive, local communities, he actually says “of the sort beloved by conservative thinkers”. We in the US tend to instead depend upon laws, contracts, and a rather intrusive government to keep things running smoothly. Is that really better than a system that relies on religious guidance and social pressure?

The sacred and the profane

And finally, he says, did we lose something when we jettisoned concepts of sacred and profane? Are there any people, places, activities that we might regard as particularly holy? Should there be events or buildings that are off limits to outsiders? Some people find an almost religious awe in contemplating the cosmos scientifically. Is that reasonable? Is it enough? And if it’s a valuable sentiment, how would we pass it on to the next generation?

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