Aid, divine and human

What it would have been possible to think at an earlier time would have been limited by circumstances. The very notion of the horizon of thought being a function of conditions is a hallmark of our own times. Modernity can be thought of less as a function of the Industrial Revolution and people doing things that brought change than as a change in possibilities brought about by the natural sciences that is still unfolding, e.g., in augmenting such powers as alone we would have without their aid. But what we are concerned with is possibilities for thought.

Religion can surge up from the past as a neglected possibility, one that had been repressed with the brusqueness of disgust at the imposition of the old on the young, and can herself attempt to repress the new, beckoning with her bejeweled gesture that we should forget about that unpedigreed hussy whom she has empowered emissaries to kill behind our backs. But the situation has emerged, and is a facet of history that cannot be erased. What people could have learned to think in earlier times is qualitatively different than how we think now, even if part of what characterized the last century was the attempt to recapture old ways of thinking that had grown attenuated under the battering of the new from all sides. To keep someone’s horizons limited by limiting their exposure to the outside world is to attempt to create by artifice something that is at odds with nature, or the reality of the situation. If the doctrine of historical progress limits the possibility of an understanding of religion and what she has to offer, then walling off a young man from the outside world miseducates him, if we wish him to learn about things in general, and how they are, the intellectual lay of the land. No Jew can comprehend why he should be limited from engaging with the world unless he experiences its evil for himself. Education is a function of encounter with the world, and the world we encounter is qualitatively different for the emergence of scientific ways of knowing. A formal education is a kind of unleashing of kids down a corralled path that broadens out into it, but at some point, the adventurous who carry on going notice that there are many paths feeding out onto the central plain. You can’t go back, but where you have come from is what makes you distinctive and interesting amidst a hodgepodge of people who otherwise are motivated by the same goal of knowledge. It is a certain species of person who calls his own knowledge universal. All are partial, every claim to grasp the whole struck on the bargain of a human sacrifice. We should educate our kids to think in this way if there would be peace. The natural sciences supplement this humanity with aids to natural powers that run amok without it.