“I say, no one receives the same education [as anyone else]. Everyone, if I may put it this way, has for his preceptors the form of government under which he lives, his friends, his mistresses, the men by whom he is surrounded, his reading, and, finally, chance, that is to say, an infinite number of events whose causes and connections our ignorance does not permit us to perceive.”

I was recently asked by my undergraduate college to fill out a survey. The first question gave me pause. It was something along the lines of was I satisfied with the education that I had received. I wasn't thinking about education according to the broad outlines that Helvétius proposed. Perhaps I should have...

New Life Church is the church that Ted Haggard founded and led for twenty years. A quote from their new interim pastor caught my attention: “We feel a lot worse today than we did a week ago. But we were a whole lot worse off a week ago.” Many in that church might question whether they are better off now that their pastor has been fired due to drug problems and likely sexual infidelity. They certainly do not feel like they are in a better situation, but perception and truth are not the same thing.

This summer I read an Agatha Christie book titled Absent in the Spring. It is a single-character psychological thriller. A middle-aged woman is stranded in a deserted train station for a week in the Middle East. She has nothing to do except reflect on her life. These thoughts eventually lead to the climatic moment when she realizes that she is a horrible person making the lives of those close to her miserable. It was only this isolation that could force her to honestly evaluate her life and see truth rather than the reality she had constructed. Christie is careful to point out that it was the busyness (or rather the busybodyness) that protected her from the truth about herself. And, of course, once she re-enters her busy life, she excuses away her self-realization for the comfortable yet false world that she had created.

It seems to me that the modern world with its fast pace and endless entertainment does not encourage the quiet reflection necessary for separating perception and truth. In a Brave New World-sort of way we are kept amused and busy. We can think that we are happy and productive without having to struggle through any self-criticism. But this happiness is a perception that is fed by the images of the “good life” as portrayed by the mass media. What if we would rather have the perception of happiness and fulfillment regardless of the truth?