On Having a Mentor from a Different Century

I believe it's good to have a mentor, and it's all the better if that mentor is from a different culture, even from a different century.

A mentor from a different century: G.K. Chesterton

We all have our blind spots, which, by definition, we are unable to see ourselves. As the proverb goes, birds of a feather flock together; we gravitate towards those with whom we feel comfortable, and often what makes us feel comfortable is what is already familiar. But if we most often associate with those who are already like us, then it is likely that our associates share many of the same blind spots that we do. If that is the case, it appears that we need a mentor who has a different perspective and who, therefore, does not share all of our cultural experiences and values.

I used to think that I could free myself from my American prejudices and blind spots by embracing America's counter-culture, by reading its literature and rocking out to its music and all that. "Turn on, tune in, drop out," as Timothy Leary put it. At some point, I started to get annoyed at what I felt was a tangibly Pharisaic smugness among the counter-culture, and after a while, it started to feel very much like the same "us and them" bullshit that you could get in regular mainstream America. And then I realized that, if I was honest with myself, part of what attracted me to the counter-culture was a feeling that I was more "authentic" or "aware" than the run-of-the-mill shmucks who majored in business or voted Republican or whatever. And if I was really honest with myself, the status symbols were different among the counter-culture, but the pattern of pursuing those status symbols was, on a fundamental level, really the same. Businessmen brag about their stock options, sociologists brag about their publications, hipsters brag about how they knew about some avant-garde band before anyone else did. And if I was really, really honest with myself, I was no more free of the desire for status symbols than anyone else, and neither were most of the people I saw or read or listened to, who were supposedly so "counter-cultural." They were just as thoroughly immersed in American culture as me or anyone else, and they had most of the same blind spots I did.

St. Augustine said that if the entire world is a book, then those who do not travel read only a single page. In addition to traveling through the dimension of space to visit other countries and continents, I believe that one should also travel (virtually) through time as well, visiting great thinkers of different eras. This is probably all the more important as our modern world becomes increasingly interconnected and homogenous. And all it takes to travel back in time is to open up a good book, like Montaigne's Essays or James Bosworth's Life of Samuel Johnson.

If you study even a minimal amount of history, you find a cyclical pattern at work  in terms of what is fashionable and what is not. The same school of thought is held in utter contempt by one age, but it is celebrated few generations later, before falling back into disrepute. For example, although Stoicism had been a major philosophical school in the Ancient World, it had gone completely out of fashion by the time the Roman Empire was Christianized; but during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, Stoicism was back in vogue among the elite. Who knows? Stoicism will probably have its day again.

If this pattern continues to hold, then it is almost certain that some of the sacred cows of todays educated elite will be skewered by the great thinkers and reformers of the future, and that some of the old-fashioned ideals that exist only in history books and museums today will somehow find their way back into the mainstream in future decades. While some social movements and cultural norms are truly evil and abhorrent (e.g., Nazism, apartheid, Jim Crow), there are others that are merely a matter of taste and convention; yet it can be easy to take your own tastes and conventions as moral absolutes, especially when your own prejudices are widely respected in your culture. So how do you avoid being blinded by the prejudices of your own time and place?

This is where having a mentor from a different century is so valuable. For example, I may not agree with everything G. K. Chesterton said -- and some of what he said I may find totally objectionable (e.g., his sentiments about race were typical of his era) -- but there are a great many insights that he offers, and his perspective is broad and enriching in many ways. If I was to read only the thinkers of my own time, I would be unlikely to find anyone offering quite the same perspective today. And if I take a step back from reading Chesterton's Orthodoxy or The Everlasting Man to read, say, The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Naht Hahn, I can find some deep parallels between their approaches when it comes to things like experiencing the wonder of everyday things that we tend to take for granted. Something like a sunrise or a hawk floating through the air or people-watching. Chesterton and Hanh could not be more different, yet in some ways, they seem to be saying much the same thing, although they approach their subject from completely different vantage points.

Anyway, I am going to make more of a point to read some of my old books that I haven't read in a while, and thereby spend some time with some of my old mentors. It really is a blessing to be able to have a mentor from a different century.