Imagine if all the worst predictions of the current splatter of YA dystopian novels came true. Civilization falls. Your post-apocalyptic community correctly understands that the collapse was a natural consequence of our decadence and abandonment of God, and you’re faithful Christians. As faithful Christians, you’re trying to live up to the Dominion Mandate, and so trying to recover the scientific knowledge to do so. On one of your forays into the city, you discover a couple boxes of science textbooks in a closet, clearly left over from some long-gone engineer’s college days, or some such.
Of course you haul them all back to the compound, and start going through them. You discover pervasive references to human evolution, favorable references to abortion, and so on.
So here’s the question: do you chuck the books?
This is exactly the position we find ourselves in now when it comes to various forms of knowledge preserved by traditional societies. Modernity burned through our culture, and for a few generations nobody believed Granny knew anything worth preserving. Most of our folk knowledge has been lost, and what remains is largely preserved by weird little enclaves that are wildly out of step with the rest of the world in various distasteful ways. We can also look to a variety of foreign cultures for support in our reclamation project, but we encounter all manner of pagan balloon juice along the way.
Shall we chuck the books? Or do we do the best we can to filter the genuine knowledge that’s there?
I say we filter. Not all of us are called to it, and in general the impressionable young’uns have better things to do, grounding themselves in the truth. But I’ve been at this work 30 years and more, and there’s a lot to be learned by paying attention to what other people know.
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