A Map of the Maze

Today was an odd reading day, with multiple trips from St. Vivian’s to Eastman and back. I translated a few vv from Revelation 14, and some of Aeneid 6, but didn’t get to any Homer or Isaiah. I finished GKC’s Lunacy and Letters, which was brilliant, and am torn between my suspicion that everything interesting in Udolpho has already passed and my conviction to finish the book no matter what.

Here is GKC on bigots: Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition. It has nothing whatever to do with belief in the proposition itself. A man may be sure enough of something to be burned for it or to make war on the world, and yet be no inch nearer to being a bigot. He is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true. Persecution may be immoral, but it is not necessarily irrational; the persecutor may comprehend with his intellect the errors that he drives forth with his spear. It is not bigoted (for instance) to treat the Koran as supernatural. But it is bigoted to treat the Koran as natural; as obvious to anybody and common to everybody. It is not bigoted for a Christian to regard a Chinamen as heathens. It is rather when he insists on regarding them has Christians that his bigotry begins. One of the most fashionable forms of bigotry exhibits itself in the discovery of the fantastic and trivial explanations of things that need no explanation. We are in this cloudland of prejudice (for example) when we say that a man becomes an atheist because he wants to go on the spree; or that a man becomes a Roman Catholic because the priests have trapped him; or that a man becomes a Socialist because he envies the rich. For all these random and remote explanations show that we have never seen, like a clear diagram, the real explanation: that Atheism, Catholicism, and Socialism are all quite plausible philosophies. A man does not need to be driven or trapped or bribed into them; because a man can be converted to them. True liberality, in short, consists of being able to imagine the enemy. The free man is not he who thinks all opinions equally true or false; that is not freedom, but feeble-mindedness. The free man is he who sees the errors as a clearly as he sees the truth. The more solidly convinced a man really is, the less he will use phrases like “No enlightened person can really hold----“; or “I cannot understand how Mr. Jones can possibly maintain----“, followed by some very old, mild, and defensible opinion. A progressive person may hold anything he likes. I do understand quite well how Mr. Jones maintains those maniacal opinions which he does maintain. If a man sincerely believes that he has a map of the maze, it must show the wrong paths as much as the right. He should be able to imagine the whole plan of an error: the complete logic of a fallacy. He must be able to think it if he does not believe it.