Lies My Teachers Told Me

The falsification of the past, Orwell’s memory hole, is everywhere in history classes. Palestinian children ae apparently taught that  Palestine was until recently always Muslim. Palestinian Christian children, whose ancestors were there long before Islam, are taught they come from Europe. And Canadian children are taught they burned down the White House. 

But not just in history classes. He who controls the past controls the future. And he who controls the present controls the past… And those in power seem never able to resist the temptation to control. They are in power largely because they crave power.

Philosophy classes neglect everything between the ancient Greeks and the Renaissance, not to mention the world beyond Europe. I had to full in thousand-year gaps on my own.

And I went all the way through grad school assuming that poets always burned out in youth. What actually happens is that poets, as they mature, like most of us of healthy interests, turn from sex and politics to religion. Eliot, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Auden, Donne, Blake … their best work is often suppressed in the modern academy, as if an embarrassment.

Also suppressed is the fact that most prominent scientists over the long run of history were religious. Copernicus who discovered heliocentrism, LeMaitre who discovered the Big Bang, Mendel who discovered genetics, Isaac Newton, Wallace, co-discoverer of evolution … actually pretty much all of them, up to perhaps the middle of the 19th century. The fact that be basic premise of science, that the material world is intelligible and follows laws, is religious, is also suppressed.

In history, the schools slander and misrepresent the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch-burnings, the “Dark” and Middle Ages, the “patriarchy.” They invent out of nothing an age of innocence and sexual equality before the coming of the book. By emphasizing the exceptions, they give the false impression that religion over history has fostered rather than prevented conflict.

In Canadian history, they systematically misrepresent the relations between the “settler” population and the indigenous people as one of conflict. They misrepresent the intent of the early Christian missionaries; and, strikingly, the nature and intent of the residential schools.

The broad general conclusion that can be taken from all these examples is that the powers that be in our system are systematically trying to suppress and discredit Catholicism in particular; Christianity more broadly; and religion in general.

This is what comes from the secularization of the education system. Secularization is not neutral. It is necessarily anti-religious.

The solution is a return to denominational schools and denominational universities, as used to be the standard world-wide. Each may have its biases; but at least, in the wider society, they should cancel each other out.

A Painful Blockage of the Memory Hole?

John Ivison writes in the National Post, “If the elites are wrong about their ‘man-made climate change’ fixation, they’ll pay dearly for it.” He figures that have gone so all-in that their credibility will be shot.

I don’t see why. The mistakes of the elite seem generally to disappear quietly and completely down the memory hole. Why should this time be different?

Remember “peak oil”? Remember how we were going to run out of water? Remember how the world would soon dissolve in war over basic resources? Remember how we were going to run out of food? Remember global cooling? Remember the population bomb?

When you’re my age, you’ll remember when it was imperative to get out and get some sun, then it was imperative to stay out of the sun, now it’s imperative to get out and get some sun. You must not eat eggs. You must eat eggs. Cholesterol is bad. Some cholesterol is good. You need cholesterol. Use artificial sweeteners to get thin. Avoid artificial sweeteners: they make you fat.

What usually happens is just silence regarding the previous, disproven error. Nobody says anything.

What sometimes happens is that it is claimed later to all have been a joke. You mean anyone took me literally? This is especially the case, it seems, with feminist inventions, like the one that “rule of thumb” originally meant the right to beat your wife with a stick. It turns out such things were always meant “ironically.”

If all else fails, or even when it does not, the cutest tactic is to run around to the head of the parade and start to denounce those guys who believe such old nonsense. A good thing you have experts like me to enlighten you that the “general opinion” is wrong! Never noting that it was not the general opinion, but the opinion of the experts in the field. Sometimes including the speaker.

Has anything changed to make it no longer so?

Perhaps it has. At least the elites no longer have a lid on the media. And you can Google up old news stories now.