CSA wrote:
Gordon B. Hinkley wrote a book called Standing for Something, and taking a stand for or against things can be a good thing, especially when it requires commitment and sacrifice. Being able to put aside your own prejudice and your understanding of things may be required when passing judgment on if someone did wrong. Certainly in our western civilization the moral rights and wrongs are established based upon common human understanding and belief. The natural man is an enemy to God, not only in his desires, but in his understanding of what God may demand. How may someone withhold unrighteous judgment of Jospeh Smith? By deciding and understanding that God's ways are not always the ways of man.
"Standing for something" should include careful reading and honest understanding of the works of others and not the disingenuous use of them for padded quotations from "famous authors."
When I first heard of this book, I took a look at it on Amazon.com using the "look inside" feature. The first few pages struck me as bland pablum about "values" and "standards" devoid of any real philosophical insight and weight. I might not have looked further had I not glanced at the Index and found a listing for "Strachey, Lytton."
What on earth could Hinckley be quoting from Strachey?
And why on earth would Hinckley be quoting Strachey at all?
After all, Lytton Strachey was a notorious homosexual, a notoriously bitchy Bloomsbury homosexual, whose works were filled with mockery of the status quo. In fact,
Standing for Something is exactly the kind of empty, moralizing text that Strachey most despised. He would have had a field day with it.
Strachey's most well-known work is
Eminent Victorians, a biographical look at four icons of the Victorian era. However, Strachey was not writing appreciative history. His goal was to shatter the pretensions of Victorian morality, to puncture the pompous way "great men" of the past are presented as role models for the present.
Imagine my surprise when I found Hinckley quoting from one of the most controversial chapters of Strachey's book: his treatment of Florence Nightingale. In Strachey's portrait "the angel with the lamp" comes off as a manipulative, neurotic, control-freak. (Strachey also hints that her defects hindered the creation of what later become the Red Cross).
In
Standing for Something, several quotations from
Eminent Victorians are used to bolster Hinckley's praise of Nightingale's selflessness, charity, devotion, etc. However, these quotations are taken wildly out of context as they come from Strachey's description of the conventional view of Nightingale, a view he then proceeds to demolish.
It's a rather delicious irony that Hinckley, or more likely, whoever ghosted
Standing for Something, has borrowed from a work which is pretty much its direct antithesis. But stranger still, is that someone would turn to Strachey's work, a book known for unconventional, ironic and negative views, to cull admiring quotes in the first place. Since the work is mistitled in the citation (it's referred to as "The Life of Florence Nightingale"), I wonder if whoever wrote
Standing for Something has even read, let alone understood, the source material at all.
Given this, I can't take the book seriously as a good lesson in understanding, judgment or reading comprehension. All things necessary, I would think, to a consideration of the relation of god to man.
From the Ernest L. Wilkinson Diaries: "ELW dreams he's spattered w/ grease. Hundreds steal his greasy pants."