Mark Twain said, “Faith if believing in what you know ain’t so.” Today, this is so true it’s funny.

I thorughly enjoy “documentaries,” but I get an extra kick out of them that is denied to modern young people. Documentaries discuss the lastest information about history, about DNA analysis and the finding of fossils and carbon dating.

There are lot of different people watching these documentaries. What young people do not know is that there are a lot of us older people watching them. Most of us were raised in a world of certainties which every documentary makes look sillier and sillier. Let’s start with one example.

In our day it was absolutely proven that man was vilent whereas chimapnzees and apes were peaceful. We now have documentaries showing how chaimpanzees hunt down monkeys and tear them apart for meat. To a young person this is routine. To us this is a violation of our whole mentality.

It is quite impossible to explain this today, but in our time it was taken for granted that only men fought over territory. The beasts of the field ignored territory. In nature, there were no borders. Marxism and Christianity explained to us that borders were something the fallen nature of man or capitalism engendered in us. That sounds a nit nuts today. We now that ALL social animals are territorial.

But there is a lot more to this than a simple factual correction. All of our philosophies were based on the innocence of animals and aborinigal peoples. In nature there were no borders and no social distinctions.

Once again, these ideas were more than just factual conclusions. They were the basis of our entire philosophies of life. Asbolutely no one, from Ayn Rand to Karl Marx to evagelicals, made any room for the idea that man was not a uniquely fallen being. Only humans had social disctinctions. Only humans had borders.

One thing we all agreed on was that humaity was unique in patrolling borders or maintaining diffferences based on class.

I cannot take you back and rub your nose in it, and that is a shame. If a young person today could really see what all of our present orthodoxies are based on, he would laugh himself silly.

We BELIEVED that crap!

In the 1980s one required statement was that “Men and women are the same.” Outside of genitalia the only difference between men and woemn was the way they were raised. Everybody had to BELIEVE that.

Now let us go back to the documentaries. What young people and older folk with corrected memories donot realize is that every single documentary contains material that is alien to my generation. At the end of many documentaries on PBS or BBC is a discussion which explains why the foregoing was not REALLY a contradiction ofhte line we were raised with.

One example. One thing that was absolutely agreed on in my day was that American Indians never practiced cannibalism. Spaniards had reported cannibalism among Mexican and Central American Indians. The official line was that the Spaniards were just trying to excuse their conquest of Native American Civilizations by claiming this.

Recently I saw a documentary which reported some analyses of the feces of fifteenth century southwestern American Indians which demonstrated that they were eating people. Tha took about fifteen minutes. The restofhte show was devoted to the following point:

1) This cannibalism was imposed on wotuhwester Indians by the stronger civilizations invading from Mexico. Those were the civilizations that we had been taught had never practiced it:

2) The next fifteen minutes explained that the word “cannibalism” was introduced into Europe by a Spandiard who said it was common and overstated it. He just wanted to justify the Spanish Conquest;

3) The next half hour was devoted to saying that Euroipe practiced cannibaism because people ate parts of the human body as medieine against illness. I have studied medical history on and off for fifty years, and I never heard of such a thing.

Today, it is taken for granted that all social animals are territorial and that all social animals have a rigid heirarchy.

So what?

Like chimpanzees, Native Americans needed some meat in their diets. Like chimapanzees, Native Americans had a shortage of meat animals until the horse was brought from Europe so they could hunt buffalo and the like. So the chimapnzees tear monkeys apart and NA’s tore other humans apart.

Young people today cannot even UNDERSTAND the last forty-five minutes of that documentary. Why did a discussion of southwestern Indians require a forty-five minute talk about the sins of Europeans?

Young people will never ask. And older people will never explain.