Understanding comes at a price – and people are not often
willing to pay it.
This may not seem very intuitive, since understanding ought
to be as simple as giving a listening ear and applying one’s mind a little bit.
In fact, it’s not – and even those two requirements are often too much to ask.
What’s the high price of understanding? Primarily, it’s the
threat to what one already believes to be true. We don’t like to have our
accepted truths challenged – it’s a very disconcerting feeling, to be honest.
Learning that one thing you believed
was true is in fact not leads you open to wonder if the rest of what you believe isn’t suspect as well.
And guess what, ladies and gentlemen? In all likelihood, a
lot of it is.
That’s just the way of it – truth is knowable, but it’s not as simple or as easy as we like to think.
And all of us know only a small portion of the truth, and we’re often sadly in
the dark as to which portion of our beliefs it corresponds to.
If you want to understand something, you have to consider it
seriously. But what exactly does it mean to consider something seriously? For
me, considering something seriously means learning about it as if it were true, and then giving
long, hard thought to the proposition that it in fact is. You don’t, in the end,
have to accept as truth what you now understand. But you have to have given it
a serious chance, and that means dispelling your disbelief and cynicism for the
duration.
Believe me, if you take this approach two things will start
to happen. First, you will start to see truth everywhere you look, and realize
that nearly everyone’s viewpoint has
at least a hard kernel of truth to it – something that you should take
seriously and incorporate into your own viewpoint. And second, you will start
to question hard-and-fast truths about the world. There will be no more easy
black-and-white pictures anymore; no more convenient straw men to take aim at.
There is a sad tendency, when it comes to truth and belief,
for all of us to do the following two things:
1.
To believe something principally because it’s
convenient, makes our lives easier, or satisfies some other selfish objective
2.
To forget the crucial difference between truth and belief. The former exists independent of whether anyone believes it
or not; while the latter admits, by definition, the existence of some degree of
uncertainty
And that is the price of understanding. It requires giving
up the beliefs we cling to in prideful self-interest, and accepting humbly that
we don’t know for sure, and that there
is the very real possibility that we are in the wrong. Neither of these two is
comfortable, easy, or very much fun. It costs
us to be willing to really understand. It demands the courage to face our fears
of being wrong (with all its often far-reaching implications), and the humility
to sacrifice our convenient, yet prideful and often dearly-held, beliefs.
This is probably why Jesus, the master teacher of truth,
taught using parables. The symbolism allowed those of his listeners who were
ready and willing to pay the price to understand to do so – and to advance in
wisdom and understanding at their own pace, independently of those around them
who were unwilling or unable to do so. That way, Jesus didn’t have to force
understanding on anyone, and each could pay the price – and reap the reward –
at their own choice.
And while it remains true that the decision to pay or not to
pay the cost of understanding is our to make, the words of the master urging us
to choose understanding ring as true – and as hauntingly – today as they did
two thousand years ago. “Any who have ears to hear, let them hear.”
