Making Our Way
Journeys shape us, change our viewpoints, disturb our assumptions, and enrich our awareness of places both common and exotic. Join Jan, Rob, Dee, and Jim on a weekly journal of where we’ve been, how our perspectives have grown, and what may lay beyond the next bend in the road. Our dogs might join in, too, so grab a cup of coffee for an armchair journey around the world of travel, food, culture, and friends.
Making Our Way
Books, Chapter 3
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We conclude our series on books with a look at some less stellar experiences we've had with reading: The Hollow Earth? The Protocols? Others?
Plus, a preview of our next episode as we begin a conversation on the possible intersection of faith and reason.
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MAKING OUR WAY - A McMahon/Cheyne Podcast
Books, Chapter 3 (Season 1; Episode 8) - 1/3/24
ROB: This is so fundamental to our Republic, to the maintenance and health of our democracy. It's an educated citizenry. I mean, the founders, they said that, you know, we needed an educated citizenry to make wise decisions, decisions based on facts, decisions based on truth, and today, that's so blurred. It's purposely blurred.
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ROB: So it becomes even more so important for us to be able to read, and, as you said, discern, and to check, you know, what we're reading and what we're learning and what we're hearing with what the facts are.
JIM: Welcome back to Making Our Way. We hope you enjoyed last week's audio Christmas card, A Visit from St. Nicholas. Today, we conclude our series on books with Chapter 3 - just how important is an educated citizenry anyway? We'll join that conversation in just a moment.
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JIM: Have you ever read a stinker of a book?
JAN: Oh gosh, yeah.
JIM: I mean, just something when you're finished with it, you're thinking, “I'm not going to get that week back.”
JAN: Yeah.
JIM: Do you want to drop any titles?
JAN: I don't remember them.
JIM: That's good.
JAN: I mean, honestly, what happens is I end up feeling like I should - I end up feeling like I should go take a shower. [laughter] You know, it's one of those like, I should not have wasted my time. But what it does is it pulls you back to good literature. I try to follow those readings with a classic. I have a really good friend, Lillian Harrison, and she had a reading habit at one point. And she would always alternate a classic with something else. And I thought, what a great discipline that was…
ROB: Yeah.
JAN: …because it mixes up your reading. It also helps you make - be a better judge of current literature to make sure that it's valuable.
ROB: I read the Wheel of Time series. I started to. And it was like, it's like 10, 11 books. And I got through 5 or 6 of them. And it just became - it wasn't so much, it was just, you know, there was some interesting stuff in it - it’s fantasy - but he kept introducing new characters. And these are big, thick books. And by the time I got to the sixth one, he's introducing brand new characters, and I can't even remember the ones who were in the first book. So it's like, this is not good…
JAN: Well, and yet…
ROB: …it’s just not well written, for my point of view.
JAN: …and yet you devoured War and Peace, which is not an easy thing with character names.
ROB: No, that's true.
JAN: So, I think it was the writing.
ROB: Well, yeah, there's no doubt it had a lot to do with the writing, but…
JIM: It's a little bit like walking out on a movie. There are movies I'll stay right through because there may be something amazing right at the end…
ROB: Yeah.
JIM: …”this may have a twist in it,” and I'm disappointed. The only movie I've really walked out on was Moulin Rouge, and the reason I did was because our seats - I don't know if you remember them.
ROB: You were too close?
JIM: We were in the front row all the way over to the left, and so I'm looking at it thinking, “My neck is not going to survive this thing.” So, it was dizzying because visually it's quite active. And so we left that. We went into another theater and we were watching the "Tailor from Panama," I think, this Pierce Brosnan thing, and we're watching it - and it has Geoffrey Rush in it, too - as the tailor. And we're in that. And then that movie finishes. The lights come up and a whole bunch of our group was also there. They just couldn't have taken it that close. You just walk out on the thing. The thing about these bad books, it was--I'll set it up this way. Jerry Seinfeld did this line once. He said, you know, this is about the year 2000. He says, back in the mid-80s, there were like 40 comics. Only eight of them were funny. Today we have like 4,000 comics. Only eight of them are funny. [laughter] I forget who I heard say that everyone's got a book in them. For most of them, that's where it should stay. Don't write it down. Don't publish. Just enjoy your own fantasies. That was just to lighten it up. Do any of us remember the first book that we read on our own?
JAN: The Little Engine that Could.
JIM: Really?
JAN: Yeah.
ROB: Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars.
JIM: I've got a copy of that in the top drawer of the dresser right over here.
ROB: Seriously.
JIM: I do. There's a drawer there. This is the dresser that was in Mom's and Dad's bedroom. Then Mom had this furniture. And the furniture is - I think they bought it in 1954 because she'd lined the drawers with newspaper. And I opened those drawers and still, underneath my socks, is a newspaper from 1954, a sheet from the newspaper. And so in the top drawer there, which is her drawer, I've never cleaned it out, and it has the Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars in there. I don't remember my first one, but I do remember - I think it was about third grade - when it suddenly occurred to me, I had been given the tools. I didn't have to read a book in a classroom setting anymore, with everyone reading it together, everyone taking turns, and stuff, that I actually had the tools with a dictionary by my side. I could read anything in the world.
JAN: Oh, it's heaven.
JIM: I mean, it was kind of like getting your driver's license and you could go anywhere. I could go anywhere in these books. And I remember the excitement of that. I remember the classroom I was standing in when that thought occurred to me, that I could read anything, always with a dictionary nearby. But I still need it, you know. And I look up words and I'm thinking, “I don't know how to pronounce that.” Here's another thing. People that mispronounce words learned them from reading them, which is a good thing. So I never worry about people mispronouncing words. People that don't spell words correctly, learned them by listening. Now, these are two great gifts, listening and reading.
JAN: You know, you mention the joy of just reading anything you want on your own. And to me, that's how reading became such a draw. I'm on my own in this little world reading this book. And it wasn't until I worked again at the library at DHQ when I experienced my first book discussion. And I had to lead it and I had never been in one. And actually the suggestion for it came from Paula Bridges. She's the one that said, "We ought to read this book, and we ought to have a conversation about it." Okay, sure, we can do that. Here's what I learned from a book discussion. Everybody gathered together. We had all read the same book. But different people - I mean, this isn't profound. Different people had different experiences with that book. Some liked it, some didn't. Some had focused on different parts of it. And every time we left a discussion, I came away thinking, first of all, I know more about the people in the room because of what they found important or meaningful to them. But secondly, I learned something myself. I looked at that book differently because someone else had read it and had a different experience with it. So I've grown to see great value in people reading a book together and then having a conversation. There are these community reads that occur across the country where a public library can pick a book, and everybody in the community is reading that book at the same time. And it has this undercurrent of building community because everybody's having that same experience. So, I also still enjoy that solo read, but I've grown to value the conversation afterwards.
JIM: I've never had that experience of being a part of a book club like that other than, like, a Sunday school class, and it was the Bible, and people would talk about that, but I've never been in a group like that. It feels like a community that's been around me and I've just missed it.
ROB: I benefited from that when I was volunteering at the library. I was able to participate in several of Jan's book discussions. [to Jan] Thank you.
JIM: When I was in college, all of my jobs were in libraries. I figured out. I had other jobs when I left college, but in college it was always in a library. It was at the Graduate Stacks, University of Illinois. I did a summer job in a law library where people like you, Jan - experts - were grateful for people like me, worker bees, who would do all the shelving because in the law library they had to do a move, and there was a science behind how you expand a collection from a certain shelf acreage into a larger shelf acreage, and how much room you leave for growth, and where you're likely to need space and make it efficient. I remember that one. I also worked at the Champaign Public Library. This is when the card catalog was going on to a computer-based catalog, and our job was to input all of the bibliographical information of a book into the thing. Now the official people, the smart people, had already gone in and made an entry for every one of the volumes, and we had to go in and fill in all the details. I was happy in a 4-hour shift. I always counted myself successful if I had put 200 books in. That is the LCC number, the ISBN number, whether it has illustrations, who the illustrator is, whether it's a translation, who the translator is, all of that information had to go in there. And so, if I could get 200 books in, I had a good night.
When it was a slow night, and perhaps the specialist hadn't provided us with enough material, then we were used to shelf books. There was one night I had a cart of books. I had these two books on this one cart. These two books were on this one cart. One was called The Hollow Earth, and it was an author named Bernard - I think it's a Raymond Bernard. It was a curious book because it explored the theory that the Earth is actually like an eggshell, and inside are super-race of humanoids - giants, and since the nuclear age, when we started detonating nuclear devices, they became very concerned, so they would start to visit us, hence UFOs. We've got the giants visiting us using UFOs, and if you were to go to the north, the Earth would simply curve back on itself. Now you're inside, and you've got an eternal sunshine there, because in the middle of it would be a sun. How the physics work on this and why the sun doesn't just collapse into the Earth, that doesn't matter. This was the book, The Hollow Earth. I thought, "That's absurd." The other book on the cart was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And I thought, "What is this book about?" You know this book.
JAN: Yeah.
JIM: This is part of the Nazi warrant on genocide, and it supposedly shows the elders of Zion and their notes from their meetings and their plans for world domination through commerce and banking and things like that. “And, see, there's the bad guy pointed out.” That's an obvious forgery that comes out of Russia at the early part of the 1900s. But people, even today, take that as an actual treatise that presents people in a way that says we've got to resist them. I have these two books. One of them seemed completely harmless to me, and one of them seemed full of venom and danger. And that's what got me thinking about, "Okay, well, this library holds these two books.” They are presenting the information. What does the reader do with this? What do you do when you come up across this? How are you going to evaluate the information in each of these books?" I've never been to the North Pole. I've met someone who has, but I can't tell you from personal experience one thing or another. So if it's not personal experience, which seems to be the “holy grail of all knowledge in our current national discussions,” it's “personal information is the true information.” In all of that, how am I supposed to know something that is beyond my immediate experience? Did we go to the Moon? Did we do this? Is this really happening this way? We just had a 60th anniversary of Kennedy assassination. Do you want to get into that one and open that one up? How do we know what we know? And that's more than just a question that is floated out there just to destroy things. It's actually a legitimate question. How do we know what we know? How do we know the Earth is not hollow? How do we know the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a forgery?
I don't have a full way of expounding on the whole thing, but we have to have an educational foundation on how we are thinking about things and how we're evaluating literature. We do have our personal preferences like, “I just couldn't do this series,” and someone else could sit - where it's going to listen to Rob and said, "Oh, but I love that series." Someone else would say, “To Kill a Mockingbird” - I can't read that. Someone else would embrace it and just say, "This is life changing." So, the personal preferences go there, but also actual information texts or texts purporting to present information, especially in this Pandora's box called the Internet.
JAN: There are people that don't think you can tell the difference between real, "How do you know?" It is that, "How do you know what you know?” and I don't know if they've never been given the skills for that because it's not - I wouldn't say it's not that hard, especially in this day and age. It is harder now because things are intentionally misleading.
ROB: Yeah.
JAN: But there are - when a library is built and the collection is developed, it's not based on all the books the librarian read. I would have people come into the library and say, "Have you read all these books?" I'm thinking, "I'm not, I’m not that good." No, there are places you can go and know if something is credible or not, and know if it's legitimate or not. This is less important obviously in fiction where that's more about taste, but when you're looking at - I’ve had people present to me health books that are, - oh my gosh - they have a little thread going through them that may be correct, and people take that thread and build on it, but because that one little fact might have been correct, doesn't mean that everything that's built on that is credible. Anyway, it's a skill that can be developed. The best class I took when I went back for my master’s - it was a class that was meant for college freshmen, and, I - it was all about how to evaluate information sources. We were put in situations. We were given stories. We were given articles, and our job was to delve into whether this was actually accurate or if it was not, and it was a wond… - honestly, the best class I took was that class. It made me think differently about what I was looking at and how to determine if it was real.
JIM: That's why I was thinking of a progressive as someone who follows the argument past where they wanted to go - to the next thing. It leads to confirmation bias. I've got a great illustration of confirmation bias. Do you remember Dad and Indiana drivers?
JAN: Oh, yeah.
JIM: Dad was convinced that Indiana drivers were the worst in the Midwest, probably the world, and he had a discussion with Uncle Frank, who lived in Indiana in Muncie. I don't know how that discussion ended, but I think they were still friends. Once you've got the idea that Indiana drivers are the worst, what you're going to see is someone drives poorly if they've got an Indiana plate. See? See? I told you. If someone drives well and they've got an Indiana plate, well, that's just an exception. Anyone else who drives poorly and they have a non-Indiana plate, well, there are other bad drivers, too, but Indiana drivers are bad. It's kind of ridiculous to say Indiana drivers are on the whole bad drivers, because it's obviously Ohio drivers. [laughter]
ROB: That's right. Amen.
JIM: Right?
ROB: Yup.
JIM: I mean, you go out, you watch for it, you'll see it. You know, someone cuts you off. Look at it.
ROB: Yup.
JIM: Probably an Ohio driver.
ROB: Yup. Or he was born in Ohio and grew up in Ohio…
JAN: Buckeyes. Stinkin’ Buckeyes.
ROB: …that’s where he learned to drive.
JIM: So, yeah, confirmation bias, because you're going to accept the information as valid if it confirms what you already believe, and you're going to reject - not even here, perhaps - but filter out any evidence against your beliefs because that makes you move, makes you progress, and you don't want to. You're happy with where you are, and you'll fight back any challenge to your being wrong.
ROB: And this is so fundamental to our republic, to the maintenance and health of our democracy. It's an educated citizenry.
JAN: Yeah.
ROB: I mean, the founders, they said that, you know? We needed an educated citizenry to make wise decisions, decisions based on facts, decisions based on truth, and today, that's so blurred. It's purposely blurred. And so it becomes - even more so - important for us to be able to read and…
JAN: Discern.
ROB: …as you said, discern, and to check, you know, what we're reading and what we're learning and what we're hearing with what the facts are.
JIM: And we can circle it back to Jefferson again. When he founded the University of Virginia, what's the building he put at the center of the campus? Was the library. Yeah. And yes, we can cloud his reputation with a number of facts from his life, and he did not completely fulfill the ideals that he wanted to fulfill. He was incomplete, as were many of the founding fathers on that, but he did know that part. This is where it is, and his 7,000 volumes - was it? - It went to the Library of Congress to do that? You can still go there to this day and look at his collection. That's cool. It's a great room to walk into and say, "This man had this," and then he went about purchasing more. I found out it wasn't actually a gift to the Library of Congress. It was a sale.
JAN: Well, he had financial issues.
JIM: Yeah, that’s right.
ROB: [laughs] He certainly did.
JIM: But at his, um - on his, uh, tombstone there at Monticello, he doesn't mention that he was president of the United States. That didn't make the cut. He was the author of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom.
JAN: I think that's right.
JIM: And he's the founder of the University of Virginia, and he's the author of the Declaration of Independence. Those are the things he had directed to go on his tombstone. I think it's the author of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom.
JAN: The Virginia Statute or Relig… - for Religious Freedom.
JIM: Which then informs the First Amendment, which allows us to have this podcast. It allows people to say things. It allows people to say ridiculous things. And we stand in defense of people who are saying absurd - even vile - things, because it must have taken some effort to come up with what they thought. And if I can't protect THAT church from being pushed away, I have no defense of my church being pushed away. I'm very grateful that we have this secular democracy in which the church is protected from government interference, and the government is protected from church interference, as a matter of principle, because I see that as the best defense of my own religious faith, is that no one gets to come in to do this. And should I find myself - I may enjoy a majority status right now, but should I find myself in a religious minority position, what do I do? Who do I call on to defend me if I have voted against them my whole life, thinking I was going to be fine?
The guy I met who had gone to the North Pole was named Laurie Dexter. Laurie Dexter was an adventurer - still does the things. He does a lot of excursions to South America. He did a ski trip, um, and I think it was with some Canadian skiers, and their goal was to ski from Canada to Russia, going across the geographic North Pole? - I think. The way I knew him is I met him on a plane once. We were going down to Buenos Aires, and so Dee has the aisle seat, I've got the middle seat, and the window seat is Laurie Dexter. I don't know who he is, but he explains - actually, Don Kerr did a lot of research on him to find out that he was this adventurer. He does one talk that includes L’Anse aux Meadows, and the way that the Vikings found their way to Newfoundland. But in talking with him, I also found out that he learned to play euphonium in The Salvation Army. So we talked a little bit, and then he slept. It was an overnight flight out of Miami down to Buenos Aires, and he slept overnight. If anyone's wondering if there's actually a hole at the top of the earth, Laurie Dexter would say, "Nope, I've been there, I looked.”
JIM (voice-over): And with that, we have reached the end of our book discussion, but dealing with the four of us, as we are, books will be lurking beneath the surface of all of our discussions. Next week, we have a special guest with us, an actual, live, young person. A geologist, and she has a few things she'd like to say.
MATTEA: Again, I think just because you're coming from a place of faith, or, you know, religious background, the university is not your enemy. Education is not your enemy. It gives you a lot of critical thinking skills and can open up your world and what you think, but it's not, kind of, trying to convert you into being anti-religion, you know, it's not - the world isn't evil. Sometimes they just want to teach you new things and new ideas, and I think that's very important. I always try to, if I have a very solid belief on something, I like to look at the other side. I like to see what is their side, and a lot of times you're like, "Okay, I can see where they're coming from.” Maybe I'm still not fully agreeing, but I think it is important to be able to understand the other side, and I think university and science in general gives you a lot of skills that helps you with your critical thinking and how to properly research.
JIM: That's next week on Making Our Way. Until then.
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