Text or community: how the pursuit of truth has changed

Since human beings entered the stage of this world we have come to the truth through community, that is, human interaction. Before the advent of writing about 4000 years ago, truth was never acquired or sought in text.* It was learned person to person. Not only words, but all the non-words were transmitted: feelings, energy, gestures, among other intangibles.

From this beginning of "history" until the last century, truth was still sought and found in community. A few extraordinary and literate individuals might seek through through text, but you can imagine how unusual this was in a world where books cost thousands of dollars, needed to be hand-copied, and were not translated, except in rare cases. These facts of life circumscribed your search to a few volumes of text. If you lived in a Muslim area, you'd never read about Buddhism. You would have heard about the other monotheistic faiths, but not in a positive light, and thus you really wouldn't give them the time of day. In other words, the search for truth was a narrow affair. Moreover, the search for truth was still within a community. Knowledge was gained from others rather than texts.

Fast forward to today. Today truth is not sought in community; it's sought in isolation. We have access to an impossibly conflicting number of worldviews. We no longer need somebody, a relationship or community, to tell us about them. We can learn more about a religion sitting in our rooms with an internet connection than the adherents of that religion would learn in a lifetime prior to the last century.

History and objective-thought are the harbingers of truth. Truth is contained in historical volumes, written by experts. Or, it's contained in sociological or anthropological analyses, also written by experts, all of who assume the western materialistic model of reality. Our search is circumscribed but we don't realize it. We've taken off the glasses of our pre-modern ancestors and donned the glasses of science and relativism.

We don't realize the earth-shattering implications of what's happened. We search for the truth our whole lives and never find it. Is it because we searching in the wrong way? Is truth found in texts, biased yet purporting to be objective? Or is truth found in a living community? To give an example, is the truth of a religion found by reading its sacred texts and reading its history, or is it found in the community, in the day to day practice and life of those members?



*Even though writing began roughly about this time, 99.9999% of people were totally illiterate.