Not prescriptive but HEURISTIC – or, “understanding the Preface with the aid of my iPhone”

When this book club read Christian Science in Germany earlier this year, I was impressed that those new German students of Christian Science, with little or no knowledge of English, read and studied Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (by Mary Baker Eddy) with the aid of a dictionary.  I’ve found that this practice really lifts one’s reading into new spheres of understanding. 

So, with our current book Spiritual Healing in a Scientific Age by Robert Peel in hand, I finally stopped my reading (I’m up to Chapter Four) and returned to the Preface with my dictionary.com “app” and Google search on my iPhone at the ready, to revisit some of the obviously carefully chosen words Peel employs, and which I had not really grasped – either this time, or in previous readings.  What a good idea this was!  (Note that your correspondent had had the inclination to go back several times before and ignored the intuition.  An aside: at dinner last night a beautiful glass went crashing to the floor and my table neighbour remarked confidentially “I saw the glass there” – it was one he had used – “and I thought, I should remove it from the edge of the table, but never got around to it.”  Ah, if only we were more immediately responsive to such intuitions!

Let’s then take a look at pages viii and ix where Peel outlines his purpose and aim for giving the world this book:

“...the book aims at something far larger than sectarian apologetics.  Its purpose is not prescriptive but heuristic.”

 

Uh?  What is he talking about?

According to the freedictionary.com, sectarian means: of, relating to, or characteristic of a sect. Apologetics is the branch of theology concerned with the defence or proof of Christianity. Peel has not set out to defend Christian Science.

 

Prescriptive means to give direction, to impose rules of correct usage, to enforce a rule or method.

Peel has not set out to tell others “how to” do or think about something.

 

Heuristic is a marvellous word, a word I’ve never actually digested before.  What does it mean?  Dictionary.com says: encouraging a person to learn, discover, understand; Merriam-Webster has: involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experiment...

The Greek means “find” or “discover”.

 

It seems, then, that Peel has set out to help the reader to discover what spiritual healing in Christian Science is all about.  To do this, he employs his remarkable scholarship and also liberal quotations from other authors. Furthermore, he wants the reader to know how Christian Science healing looks “from the inside”, and so offers us a huge volume of affidavits and letters of testimony from individuals in the second part of the book (starting at Chapter 5).

 

Now Mr Peel tackles an interesting phenomenon: how society has tended to view Christian Science.  He uses terms such as “tended to tolerate”, and “not to be taken seriously”.  And then he employs another term that I thought I vaguely understood until I looked it up: “technocratic society”.  I’ll quote the entire paragraph from page ix:

 

“During the past century society has tended to tolerate Christian Science as it learned earlier to tolerate Quaker pacifism.  Each is seen as a kind of spiritual luxury for a few odd souls – permissible and perhaps even inspiring as a very minor element in the great cultural mix, but not to be taken seriously as a challenge to the dominant structures of thought in today’s technocratic society.”

 

A little research yielded the following about Technocracy:

1.       A theory and movement, prominent about 1932, advocating control of industrial resources, reform of financial institutions, and reorganization of the social system, based on the findings of technologists and engineers; a system of government in which this theory is applied (Dictionary.com)

 

2.      The government or control of society or industry by an elite of technical experts (google.com)

3.      Society which is neither a democracy nor a bureaucracy because the real power has shifted from the elected representatives and bureaucrats to technocrats (engineers, managers, scientists).  The term was coined by the US engineer William Henry Smyth (1855 – 1940) in 1919 and popularized by James Burham (1905 – 87) in his 1941 book “Managerial Revolution”. (BusinessDictionary.com)

 

The question which may present itself to the reader at this juncture is “to whom are we yielding power”?

 

Note:  The reader can be assured that your writer does not rely only on her iPhone, but is very often found opening up much loved texts of the paper kind in researching topics of interest! J