Quote of the Day: Education and Mystics

His education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman,” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.

This is from the Novel That Hideous Strength which I am inching my way through. A longer quotation talks about one of C.S. Lewis's favorite themes of people pretending to hate what they actually like.

They walked about that village for two hours and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy. They saw the recalcitrant and backward labourer and heard his views on the weather. They met the wastefully supported pauper in the person of an old man shuffling across the courtyard of the almshouses to fill a kettle, and the elderly rentier (to make matters worse, she had a fat old dog with her) in earnest conversation with the postman. It made Mark feel as he were on a holiday, for it was only on holidays that he had ever wandered about an English village. For that reason he felt pleasure in it. It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward labourer was rather more interesting than Cosser’s and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear. ... All this did not in the least influence his sociological convictions. Even if he had been free from Belbury and wholly unambitious, it could not have done so, for his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman,” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.

I can't say that the dry dialogue of the book appeals to me. The character seem mostly rather wooden but some of the descriptions are great.

I'll let the commentators add any example they want of statistics or education overwhelming the plain experience of reality. We aren't wanting for choice.

I suppose my choice would be the libertarian/globalist idea of humans as being interchangeable widgets. The idea that Taiwanese Chinese are the same as Somalis who are the same as Italian immigrants is laughable on it's face but the idea is overwhelming. But to the Bryan Caplan types it's all a problem of labor and nothing more.