The Caves of Our Fathers

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     In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” the human condition is described as analogous to a people chained in a cave with only a fire behind them. Their knowledge of the world is restricted to their perceptions through watching shadows of things moving before the fire, shadows cast by firelight against the wall of the cave. They fail to understand that there is any reality beyond the shadows they see. Content and disinterested, having no curiosity about the world beyond, they accept what they have spent their lives experiencing and reject anyone who contradicts this reality.

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     We all know this experience because we have on occasion lived there. Sometimes it’s just denial (I refuse to believe this!). It’s easy to convince ourselves that we are right and the world is wrong. Writing in the 1920s, historian James H. Robinson wrote, most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing what we already do. So the feeling’s not new.

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     But often it’s just complacency. We want to live in the cave we were raised in because it’s more comfortable there and we feel protected. Only, there comes a time when it is not, and we do not, and we stumble about in our mental landscape for places to hide. There are none. In the face of long-harbored beliefs, a “truth” that contradicts them pulls us cruelly into an unfamiliar world, and we resent this intrusion!

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     But, how do we detect “truth” in these torturous times? There have always been half-truths and un-truths, but we now have “alternative truths”! As a fiction writer I live in a delicious mix of fantasy and reality—but I always know the distinction between the literary and the living, or believe that I do. In medieval times, reality was porous, allowing fact and fiction to mingle. It was an enrichment back then; it is menacing today.

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     So it’s probably good if you double-check most sources and be skeptical of all. Trust but verify, as Reagan told us.

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     And stay out of the cave.

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Ron Wetherington