Over the weekend, during one of my stops back home, I was poking around the bookshelves upstairs and found our copy of 1984<\/i>. I had read it about ten years ago. It influenced my way of thinking in significant ways back then, and I had been meaning to re-read it for a long time. I took it back to the apartment and cracked it open again, around the middle of the book where Winston is first being tortured by O’Brien in the Ministry of Love. I’m glad I didn’t have any responsibilities ’round then, since I was drawn into the book again for another fifty pages or so… It’s a hard read at times, but it’s good. I think part of the reason it resonates so deeply with me is that it’s not just a commentary on politics or power plays or even institutions, but it deals with human nature, the things we tell ourselves in our attempts to process the reality around us. Specifically, I’ve always been struck with the underlying parallels between the proclamations O’Brien makes about the Party’s reshaping of society through thought control and the mental processes we go through sometimes as adherents to a particular religion or creed, in order to safeguard our faith. The Party wants to create obedient shells of men, ciphers who interpret reality according to the dictates of the Party, men for whom their “faith” (for lack of a better word) in the Party results in an elevation of “its truth” above our their own capacities for reason. The rub comes because according to God’s word, the Bible, we’re called to do that as Christians with respect to God–there’s a verse that reads “Your Word is truth,” among several others that within their respective contexts say that God’s word supercedes our own reasoned interpretations of reality–in other words, it is our ultimate standard of truth, not our senses. I’m left with the question, then, in terms ofexerting control over our thought lives, where is the difference between the society fostered by O’Brien and its aspirations of omnipotence over its subjects, and the faith to which I hold? The answer doesn’t come easily…the search for it occupied the majority of my thoughts during my run last Friday (great time for thinking), and I’ve been mulling over it all weekend.<\/p>\n
In the book, the telling act by which Winston was to show his complete conversion to the arbitrary standards of truth imposed by the Party was a reinterpretation of reality–O’Brien would hold up four fingers, and tell Winston that he was holding up five, and if Winston would undoubtingly corroborate O’Brien’s declaration about that objective reality, his conversion to the manner of thinking imposed by the Party was complete. Fortunately for us as Christians, the Bible doesn’t demand any similar reinterpretations of the reality we encounter with our senses–most of the issues on which it speaks that people have issues with deal with the supernatural and historical, two areas out of the realm of our immediate, empirical experience. In terms of application there are many other ways in which the two systems differ as well, but it’s late and my brain is mercifully shutting down. I haven’t even gotten into motives and ends, either, two areas where the systems are polar opposites–I’ve only touched on the means. <\/p>\n
But as soon as I arrive at these conclusions, the question of the nature of reality and how it’s arrived at comes to me again… I think I need to read up on Descartes.<\/p>\n
I have a small sore throat. They’re usually the precusors to colds. I hope that isn’t the case this time…ugh. Time for blankets and sleep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}