The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.1955, Blaðsíða 18

16
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Spring 1955
received through our heritage is the
characteristically Icelandic respect for
the truth. By this I do not mean
mere honesty, but rather a burning
curiosity to see life as it is, a curiosity
that is not clouded with self-conscious-
ness. To put this in another way—I
believe that one of the precious qual-
ities of the Icelandic people is their
unrelenting desire to know and under-
stand things as they actually are.
Of course, we have no priority on it.
Philosophers have called it the “Search
for Truth”. When we put it that way
it sounds old-fashioned and trite. It
smacks of Don Quixote tilting at wind-
mills. The important thing is that the
world stands in dire need today of this
very quality that I describe as a
characteristically Icelandic respect for
truth.
To describe one of the fields that
needs this respect for truth, let us con-
sider the modern concept of man.
People generally assume that man is
now at the peak of his development.
The standard of living, at least in this
part of the world, is higher than ever
before. Yet in many respects we are
living in the “dark age of the
machine”. Let me illustrate:
Some time ago, the pilot of a com-
mercial airliner prepared to make his
approach to the landing-strip of an
airfield in adverse weather conditions.
It had to be an instrument approach.
Everything went well until he was
just about to put the ship down. Then
suddenly the control tower ordered
him back into the air again. . .his ap-
proach was way off! He circled the
field a few times and tried again . . .
and again lie was way off! He tried the
third time and was prevented. He was
determined the fourth time and came
on in anyway. The result was another
tragic crash in which a number of
people were killed. The point is that
the pilot never tried coming in using
his own instincts and sense pre-
ceptions, even when he knew his
instruments were unreliable. He didn’t
trust himself.
This is the spirit of the age . . . .
we worship the machine! The only
really fallible element in society is
man . . the machine can do no wrong.
Or think of the recent elections in
the U. S. It was a mechanical field-
day. They prepared the great new
computing machines for the event.
These are the machines that can work
in a few moments a complex problem
that would take many men many years
to solve. These machines were to pre-
dict the outcome of the elections. Of
course, they failed. The next morning
the commentators told us how it
was . . . men had fed the wrong
statistics and questions into the mech-
anical brains. Man was wrong again,
man, the weak and fallible! I couldn’t
help smiling when I realized that the
situation was really ironical . . . this
was, after all, a man telling us why the
machine had failed.
Do we really know what man is?
His senses and abilities have been
stretched beyond imagination. His
eyes are sharper and they see farther
than ever before. He has the micro-
scope, the telescope, and now tele-
vision. He hears more than ever . . .
has high fidelity sound-reproducing
systems, radio, and the telephone.
There are innumerable gadgets to
strengthen and extend the power of
bis fingers and hands. His feet are now
the automobile, the bus, the train, the
airoplane . . . and with them he travels
farther, faster than ever.
But still the man is a mystery. His
truth is not known. The billboards
proclaim that he is little more than a