This is a paper written for my Sociology 101 class after reading Francis Bacon’s essay The Four Idols. Bacon was a philosopher from the 16th century who became frustrated with the science of his day: namely how deduction was no longer contributing to anything new or interesting. My paper is a summary and conclusion concerning the idols which he proposed are blinding us from seeing the truth.

 The Four Idols

An idol is that which inhibits the ability to see clearly. Our idols distort our vision so that we cannot see clearly into and from the world. In his essay, The Four Idols, Francis Bacon says that idols “have most effect in disturbing the clearness of understanding”. At the end of the essay, Bacon likens the cleansing of oneself of idols for the purpose of seeing the things of the earth to the innocence of a child by which men may see the kingdom of heaven.

Idols of the Tribe

Bacon says that, “The idols of the tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things.” To rid ourselves of the idols of the tribe we must realize the errancy of our sense perceptions of the world. The senses of the mind are “according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe.” When our own sense experience shapes our understanding, we are prone to worship the idol of the tribe. A personal example of the idol of the tribe is my love of lemon. According to my senses, lemon makes everything better – lemon pepper, lemon juice, lemon slices, it is always an improvement on flavor. This tendency of mine to add lemon to any substance is noted by my family, and they get wary whenever I approach pots of food or gallons of tea with good intentions.

 Idols of the Cave

In the absence of the idols of the cave, “understanding may be rendered at once penetrating and comprehensive.” Yet the tendency is for a man to become obsessed with a few laws or properties of the universe and elevate those to the highest degree. Bacon criticizes the school of Leucippus and Democritus as being too busy with particles to give due diligence to the structure. Still he accuses other schools of being “so lost in admiration of the structure that they do not penetrate to the simplicity of nature.” The hope is that instead of eradicating those things and areas which we are biased towards, we can study them in turns – this way our understanding will be more complete. In my own experience, I have noticed that when handed a guitar I almost always tend towards the key of E. I find that the notes and chords there make the most sense to me. They sound the best. They are the best.

Idols of the Marketplace

Bacon terms the idols of the marketplace as “the most troublesome of all: idols which have crept into the understanding through the alliances of words and names.” We must realize that our language is not completely accurate in its attempts to explain. Bacon divides the idols of the marketplace into two kinds, the first being “names of things that do not exist.” There are things which remain unnamed for lack of observation or are ill-defined and based upon faulty theories and suppositions. The second kind is that which “springs out of a faulty and unskillful abstraction.” Bacon gives the example of the word “humid” which, depending on the circumstances and the speaker, could mean any number of different things. Different senses of the word infer different meanings – thus an idol which obstructs understanding. An example which I’ve noticed in my circles is the way we refer to the agendas of politicians. It isn’t uncommon to hear a candidate touted as good on education and healthcare. And it always leaves me wondering what it means to be good on something. It could mean the politician used to be a teacher and now wants better salaries for teachers, achieved by raising the budget for schools. Or maybe it means he or she recognizes wasteful spending within the system and wants to tighten the budget.

Idols of the Theatre

The idols of the theatre obscure our understanding by way of conventions. These have to do with the society we’re born into, the beliefs we’re brought up in, and the ideologies we buy into. The idols of the theatre beset us when we no longer bother to question or investigate established lines of logic. In the absence of the idols of the theatre, perhaps every generation would put on trial the accepted theories, beliefs, and customs that rule the day. Bacon says of these idols, “[They] are not innate, nor do they steal into the understanding secretly, but are plainly impressed and received int the mind from the play-books of philosophical systems and the perverted rules of demonstration.” We witness the idols of the theatre in the education of children. Whether a child grows up believing in the theory of evolution or the account written in Genesis will depend on the beliefs held by those who raise him.

Conclusion

One way to think of bias is that which we naturally tend towards. Our biases are often fundamental players in our erection of idols; yet they don’t have to be – the two things, bias and idol, are not twins. There is no question as to whether our idols cloud our vision and pervade our judgement. But the problem of idols is not our certain demise. Perhaps the cure to the problem of idols lies with the community. We need each other; to review our papers, critique our experiments, challenge our belief systems, run against our political candidates, to praise us for our faithfulness, and call us on our treachery. Almost nothing profitable is done in a vacuum. Often our biases stem from our love. And our love, of fields of study, of laws of nature, of worlds within the kingdom of men, is what enables us to be productive to society. But when bias turns to idol, we are no longer fit to look into any kingdom, that of heaven or of earth.

Written in blue ink: 9/3/18

Revised: 9/23/18

I’ve had the tale of Revelations, and Johnny Cash’s song, in my mind lately. Cash says it like this:

Whoever is unjust – let him be unjust still,

Whoever is righteous – let him be righteous still,

Whoever is filthy – let him be filthy still,

Listen to the words long written down,

When the Man comes around,

I hear sometimes about the absurdity of believing there’s a God. And some say that maybe there’s God and maybe there isn’t – but better to live like there is. And I hear people making a god of the scientific method and well-reviewed theories and tenured ideas. And tonight I reckoned that I’d like to be a writer for the Post one day, but I don’t feel like I have much to write. But I reckon I’ll go on writing anyway. And I have a lot of questions about Christianity and the things I’ve always held as true. But, regardless, I think I’ll just go on believing, having faith. They’re always changing minds about what the world needs: sometimes it needs Christians, sometimes we’re the idiots. So I reckon we ought to just go on believing whatever the case may be.

There’s a line from the Greeks that goes,

“I would rather labor on earth in service to another,

to a man who is landless, with little to live on,

than be king over all the dead.”

And I think Homer’s right. Perhaps it’s better to be a savage praying to a beetle and hoping for a miracle than a nihilist. Paul said that if we’re wrong about Christ rising from the dead, then we’re of all men most miserable. And I’ve never been able to come to grips with that. Isn’t it better to have hoped than to have believed in nothing, bowed down to chaos, and inaugurated the underworld?

Anyway, I think I’ll go on writing, though I’ve not much to say. And go on believing, even if I sometimes doubt. And I’ll go on hoping – what are we without hope? The one truly without hope, the nihilist who embraces despair, lives only in the darkness of the hallway, only in the dampness of the cave. He doesn’t know what it feels like to see a corner up ahead and wonder what’s around it, or why he’s walking towards a warm, bright pinhole of light. And I think I’ll go on loving, even though my love goes wrong. For after all of all have rotted away, been exposed, and cut down, love will remain. I suppose the only thing then will be to find out who it was that allowed us the pleasure, built the hallway, and poked the hole.

And I hear them – making love to the void,

But I suppose I’ll go on,

For the kings of the dead will be made low,

When the Man comes around,

I’ve been reading Huck Finn for English 202, and it’s a wonderful story, at least until Tom Sawyer gets involved. He’s aggravating and really drug the thing on longer than necessary. But since I’ve been reading a story through Huck’s voice and thought processes, I notice that I seem to think to myself sometimes with words he would use. It was the same way after watching a lot of Better Call Saul, I found I thought in the voice and likeness of ole Jimmy. Perhaps a dangerous activity. Twain anyway is sheerly a genius. He makes conversations like:

“I sha’n’t ever forget you, and I’ll think of you a many and a many a time, and I’ll pray for you too!” – and she was gone.

Pray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she’d take a job that was more nearer her size. But I bet she done it, just the same – she was just that kind. She had the grit to pray for Judas if she took the notion – there warn’t no backdown to her I judge. You may say what you want to, but in my opinion she has more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in my opinion she was just full of sand. It sounds like flattery, but it ain’t no flattery. And when it comes to beauty – and goodness too – she lays over them all.

Anyway, the best scene in the whole book comes a little while later when Huck decides to do the “honorable thing” and write a letter back home to turn in his friend Jim, a runaway slave. He tries to pray away his guilt for harboring a slave.

Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself, by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, “There was Sunday school, you could a gone to it; and if you’d a done it they’d a learnt you that people that acts as I’d been acting about the nigger goes to everlasting fire.”

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray; and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of boy I was, and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come . . . It was because I was playing double. . . . I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie – and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie – I found that out.

So Huck writes the letter, and then his conscious is light as a feather. But then he gets to thinking about how Jim hasn’t ever done him any wrong, and how happy he’s always been for Huck’s help and company. So that it goes:

I happened to look around, and see that paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, a sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “Alright then, I’ll go to hell” – and tore it up.

Socrates thought that justice was really worth something if the just man developed a reputation for injustice – and kept on being just. When he did right, was viewed as wicked, and did right anyway. But I reckon even Socrates didn’t think to make a man consider himself unjust and still choose the right thing out of the justice in him. He’d of needed Huckleberry Finn for that.

This is an essay I wrote in Ms. Blank’s English 102 last semester on a book assigned to the class: The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Handmaid’s Tale: A Dysfunctional Dystopia (3/29/18)

Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale with considerably limiting self-imposed constraints in place. In the book’s introduction, she says she feared that the story would have a “lack of plausibility”, so she purposed not to “put any events into the book that had not already happened […] nor any technology already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities” (Atwood XIV). Because of the restrictions Margaret Atwood imposed on herself, such as only implicating language, events, and technology which were already familiar, The Handmaid’s Tale proves an unimaginative dystopia with a warning dissident to the author’s intent.

In the introduction of the book, Atwood explicitly cites the intended purpose of her story. She says, “The book is not anti-religion. It is against the use of religion as a front for tyranny; which is a different thing altogether” (Atwood XVIII). It is apparent that she is not attempting to predict the direction of the United States but to warn against its becoming totalitarian upon the back of religion. The context of Atwood’s tale is widespread disaster, and her warning concerns what Americans will lean on to move forward in the aftermath.

In an article written as a critique of The Handmaid’s Tale, Mary McCarthy expounds on why the limitations Atwood imposed on herself hinder the literary power of Gilead. She writes that, “[…] the most conspicuous lack, in comparison with the classics of the fearsome-future genre, is the inability to imagine a language to match the changed face of common life.” In most prominent dystopian stories, there are characters and language as fantastic and imaginative as their society is bleak and twisted. In The Hunger Games, Susanne Collins writes resilient characters to stand up under the wicked oppressors using language suited to a futuristic tragedy. Far from rendering it implausible, this approach strengthens the story.

Louis Lowry uses a premise similar to that of Atwood in her Newberry Medal winning dystopian novel The Giver. Lowry however is not afraid to write her dystopia imaginatively. It is a setting far less familiar than Atwood’s, yet it is certainly plausible and much more compelling. In the dystopian society of The Giver, the tyrants have gone so far as to eliminate the changing of the seasons, to render the world colorless, and to form a society which holds no memory of the days before them. The Giver invites readers to use their imaginations and welcomes them into a dynamic world where a story is happening. This opposed to the storyline of The Handmaid’s Tale which is told in a rather cryptic fashion. Atwood has determined that her story be the remnants of a bygone society stumbled upon by historians of the future. According to Atwood, the whole text is a transcription of tape recordings done in secret (Atwood 301). She also makes use of a disillusioned narrator who is trying to hold onto her sanity. Atwood makes these literary choices in the name of plausibility. What she ends up with is a story which is neither inviting nor compelling, one that sends a warning other than she intended.

In a letter to James Warren in 1779, Samuel Adams wrote, “While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader […] If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved” (Adams). Margaret Atwood wrote the story of Gilead with the intent to warn against the use of religion as a front for tyranny. The real warning reflected through the pages is one contrary to that intent. The effective admonition is not that American government could be overthrown by tyrants fronting an excuse for Christianity. And a poor excuse at that, for any claim to Christianity which makes captives, oppresses the lowly, or shrouds in darkness is entirely other than its true purpose. The scathing warning of The Handmaid’s Tale is one of a loss of virtue, the same virtue hoped of this nation’s citizens by Samuel Adams.

The story of Gilead would have been more poignant had it been told by a better suited narrator, one with the presence of mind to speak to the things Atwood intended the reader to pick up on. Offred does have at least a nominal understanding of Christianity, yet only makes passing remarks as to its being used as a political weapon. Her voice though the story is one of a kitten lulled into the hands of strangers: she laments for a while, and then relinquishes all hope. Towards the end of her narration, Offred’s death of spirit becomes painfully clear. After being caught for her secret meetings with Nick, she says, “I feel serene, at peace, pervaded with indifference. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I repeat this to myself [sic] but it conveys nothing. You might as well say, Don’t let there be air; or, Don’t be” (Atwood 291) And then, sitting alone in her room contemplating suicide, she says, “That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered” (Atwood 292). This language of an unwillingness to even acknowledge hope or a cause greater than herself is evidence of The Handmaid’s Tale’s truer warning: this local lulling to sleep and not the awakening of a foreign monster is “fatal to a free society” (McCarthy).

Atwood intended her novel to warn against tyrants using false religion. But because of a dystopia lacking imaginative quality and an unfortunate choice of narrator, the warning of The Handmaid’s Tale is one about civic virtue. The rise of the district of Gilead warns that the enemy should come when a nation is asleep, lacking good conscious and spirit. The horror is that they are caught without a single Joan of Arc, Spartacus, Churchill, or Benjamin Franklin in their company and are made willing slaves to a barbaric ideology.

All told, if you’re looking for dystopian fiction, just read The Giver or Lord of the Flies or something. In my opinion, this is a ‘classic’ best left on the shelf.