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Every era has common assumptions we all take for granted, beliefs so commonly accepted that we don't even think of them as 'beliefs,' and to pick them out of our heads and examine them is as impossible as deciphering the individual molecules of the air we breathe.
An excellent illustration of the sort of thing I mean can be found any time you read older books. Take Charlotte Mason as an example. She was an educator in the Victorian era, popular today with certain bookish, liberal arts inclined homeschoolers like myself. She wrote six lovely volumes ( the sixth is my personal favourite) about her philosophy of education. In order to explain what she believes about education and where she differs from other theories she often goes into great detail, first explaining what those other ideas are, and then, very gently, where she disagrees with them.
When reading Mason it’s easy to see similarities between her approach and some other contemporary-to-her (or older) philosophy of education. Miss Mason was a well-read woman, and there are few writings on education available in her day which she did not read. CM and Montessori had some ideas and practices in common, just as Miss Mason did with Froebel, Pestalozzi, Plato, and even Rousseau, who preceded her by many decades, but was still very popular when she wrote. She sort of cherry picked, or gleaned, for good ideas everywhere.
So one reason for some similarities is because Miss Mason deliberately borrowed the ideas she thought best from each educator and fit them into her own philosophy. But there’s another reason. She and Montessori were contemporaries, so they also shared certain underlying assumptions in common with their time. As C. S. Lewis put it (in an article worth reading in its entirety for its own sake):
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions.
It is a very humbling thought, is it not, that a hundred years from now, people will look back up on us and what we wrote and thought and see more agreement between, say, an easy believism evangelicial, an atheist, and a full five point Calvinist, or a staunch pro-life advocate and equally staunch pro-abortion proponent. Possibly a hundred years from now people will look back on some current topic of great debate and won't even be able to tell what we thought we were arguing about.
From time to time I find myself pondering what our own particular ‘great mass of common assumptions’ might be. And how would we know ? Because the thing about common assumptions is that they are assumed, taken for granted, believed as thoughtlessly as we take in the air we breathe.
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