Corrective reading

Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

C.S. Lewis

The above words by C.S. Lewis seem wise in a politically correct age where large segments of the populace believe that only one point of view, no matter how often this point of view may change, should be voiced, heard or tolerated. Yet Lewis was speaking not about culture or politics but rather about literature.

His view was that ideas expressed in books from the past can act as a corrective to ideas expressed in books today, just as those ideas found in today's literature can be a corrective to those expressed by writers of the past. He considered those open only to ideas from one's own time to have a kind of blindness. "None of us can fully escape this blindness," he wrote, "but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books."

He went further. "Where they (modern books) are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only reading old books."

There is "no magic about the past," he writes, but then there is no magic about the present either. There is no magic, only wisdom, and wisdom comes from considering other points of view from other times — and, he might have added, from others who think differently in our own time.

Somewhat facetiously, Lewis goes on to say that "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." Science fiction writers do attempt to invent a future corrective in their stories, as Lewis himself did in his own science fiction. Yet science fiction is just guesswork. We have no way of really knowing what ideas will be prevalent a century from now. What we can guess with accuracy, however, is that thinkers in 2120 will think many ideas current in 2020 as foolish as people today consider the ideas of 1920.