Two Worlds: Can A Balance Be Struck As One Becomes "Educated"?

Tara Westover has courage. Of that, there can be no doubt.

Westover, the author of Educated, on New York Times best-seller list for more than a year now, had the guts (or the temerity, depending upon who inside her family one might ask) to put into print her life-changing transit from fundamentalist-survivalist in the back hills of Idaho to a far more secular, Cambridge-based scholar. This was not a leap, either of faith or despite faith. It was a gut-wrenching, daring, genuinely dangerous excursion into literally the rest of the world, with starts and stops and endless questioning about substance and process. You know how it ends by reading the back flap, because it catches up with her where she presently is. What you don't know is how the steps were made, how faith is redirected, and how, when family and faith are so intertwined, leaving someone's vise-like grip on one sometimes must mean the leaving of another, not unlike getting a divorce, with all its regrets and weight of confrontation while stepping into another endless unknown, yet knowing it must be done, and reversal would be far worse.

It was done while knowing next to nothing about it, about what learning truly is and how one adapts to the educational system at its highest level with almost nothing of the preparation that the rest of the college-educated world has had to develop and (at times) to endure through grade school and high school. But the center of the transition and the awakening was learning--learning about the world far more than whatever is contained in the Bible; about unleashing the path of wonder that, once opened, can never be closed; about, as the Clarence Darrow-like figure in the play and film Inherit the Wind said in open court, "The Bible is a book. It's a good book. But it's not the only book."

She didn't absorb herself in Danielle Steel novels, either; at least she didn't say so. She took on John Stuart Mill and Hume and Rousseau and Madison and Hamilton. She combined ideas so lofty that her coaching professor was simply stunned. She stretched herself at Brigham Young (once she caught on to what her exasperated friend told her, read the textbook: note that someone had to actually tell her that), at Cambridge, and at Harvard; not a bad educational legacy, that.

All this while trying to deal with a paternalistic obsessive father who repeatedly cared only for the spiritual needs of his children as far as he wished to extend the caring--which is to say, as far as it helped him meet his own needs, always falling under his control. All other modes of learning were dangerous and risked eternal damnation. Though he kept a framed copy of the Constitution, he spent years preparing the family for the day when, like Ruby Ridge (not lost on any of this family), the government would come for them as it did for the tempest-tossed Spencers, who ran afoul of the FBI in a horrible moment of survivalism vs. submission to government.

Most of us were welcomed to try college, at least, as my parents suggested that I and my brothers do (and we all have at least bachelor's degrees). They sent us off with the understanding that many of their generation had: that ours should be better than theirs (and it was educationally; what has happened as a result of it is quite open to interpretation, since the next one has new challenges we've left it with). Tara's father and mother cut off the children who dared to extend themselves intellectually, who challenged a lifestyle they found stifling and increasingly stranger the more they stepped away from it.

Tara saw it before she went through it. She knew she wouldn't make her family happy. But she kept going because she could feel herself becoming someone new, and she liked that new person. In doing so, she had to question the basis of her own faith, since her family and her church were the only places she sustained it. Public school was forbidden. Only poisoned ideas could be learned there.

It was through the arts that the world became, gradually, a new. fascinating and inviting place. One creative endeavor that demonstrated a latent talent led to another. The parents tried to absorb the good it did Tara, as long as she remained home and helped the family. They saw it as an addition; she saw it as a trap, pressing down on her much like a cult, irrationality bouncing off her growing armor of intellectual development and expansion of ideas.

It all begs the question: How should religion fit into our lives? Should it be the dominant gateway to all thinking and interpretation of the world in which we live? Or should it be put into perspective, with beliefs considered against the backdrop of history and common sense? Is a literal interpretation of the Bible--as if there really is any such thing; usually, it's expanded cherry-picking--a bulwark with which to hold off evil, or a guideline returning us to simple truths in case we're littered with confusion? Is it a matter of being able to count on the Bible or other basic religious text, or a matter of demanding it at every turn?

All this against the backdrop of the secular state as well; the idea that laws devised by people of varying religious backgrounds, including those who are not religious at all, govern us and not what a religious text says, making morality relative and not absolute. Religion has been utilized to claim and achieve freedom as much as it has to squash it. We need to remember that as we re-enter the very intense issue of whether a woman has the right to control her body, and where that right ends.

Tara Westover gives speeches, too. I'd like to hear her someday. I'd like to know where she now is on her journey--either farther away from religion than before, or having incorporated it into her evolving and brilliant intellectual growth. She felt forced to run from her family literally to another continent to be everything she could be, but nothing close to what she has become--an emerging scholar of political philosophy--could have taken place had she remained in her father's scrapyard. Has she achieved a balance between these deeply contrasting worlds, in her mind if not in fact? Or can that no longer take place, since her family has eliminated her presence for all practical purposes?

No one's journey is the same. All we can do is play with the cards with which we've been dealt, pick from the deck, and improve our hands with each turn.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark