Suppose a man just wanted to talk. Suppose he wanted to explore the world in conversation with others and get into the deep things of life—the wisdom of the ages.
But suppose he lived in a culture where, for whatever reason, almost nobody else had such a desire. And suppose that of those who did have that desire, very few were any good at it. Suppose they were clumsy with their reasoning and hamfisted in their attempts to explain the fine details of whatever they mean. Suppose they had limited and dull vocabularies, and little experience at having deep rapport and trust with other people. And suppose they were already oversensitive from sour conflicts with others in the past.
This is what time it is in our culture. And even if someone wants a rich fellowship of minds, he likely cannot have it quickly. And he’ll have broken lots of relationships along the way to discovering what is good reasoning and what is not and who is willing to engage in it. He can have it, all right, but rare is the good fortune to find it quickly.
In fact, the reason that most can’t find this quickly is that they themselves have lots of learning to do when it comes to the clarity of thought and of expressing the finer distinctions between things. If he’s like most, he’ll have a big task ahead in simply learning to acknowledge all the assumptions he’s making about what he believes, and then there’s the long business of beginning to test those assumptions!
But this is what wise people do—and what they have always done. It is a way of life, and he who is still a novice at it should know that in just a couple of years, he can be much better at it, indeed! And many years hence, he will still be discovering errors in his thinking, for that is how prone we are to error. Yet he and his friends will know then how to handle it deftly, whereas now, they may not.
