Menu
header photo

Project Vision 21

Transforming lives, renewing minds, cocreating the future

Blog Search

Blog Archive

Comments

There are currently no blog comments.

Three big lies I learned during a visit to Harvard

Last week I had the opportunity of visiting Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I learned many valuable lessons during that visit, but the most important lesson was the history of the statue of John Harvard.

In Harvard Yard, the oldest part of Harvard University campus, there is a bronze statue. In its base, it says: John Harvard, Founder, 1638.

It is interesting to note that John Harvard was not the founder of the university that today bears his name. He was its first benefactor, giving 400 books and 779 pounds to the then-called New College. In addition, the university was founded by the General Court of the Massachusetts Colony in 1636. And the statue, unveiled in 1884, does not represent Harvard since there are no known portraits of Harvard.

(It seems the sculptor, Daniel Chester French, used one of his students as a model or perhaps one of the university’s presidents.)

For that reason, the sculpture is known as “the statue of the three lies,” because the image presented of the statue is nothing like the real Harvard, the reason to remember Harvard is misstated, and the date is incorrect.

For me, it is interesting to note that those same “three big lies” (a “modified” or “improved” image, a wrong list of achievements, and a fuzzy chronology) are still present, and very much so, in our time and in our society. In fact, they are part of our everyday life.

I don’t think French (the sculptor) ever wanted to deceive anybody in presenting a statue of a healthy and strong man, the opposite of what Harvard really was. Harvard was sick most of his life and he died of tuberculosis at 31, in 1638.

I do believe, however, that in our times “image” has become so important that it is even more important than the real person. For that reason, many people spend more time taking care of their image than taking care of themselves and their inner beings.

“Image” is the only aspect we know of other people, and we seldom see the real person behind the image. As it also happens with the moon, we only see a “shinning face” of a person, but we will seldom see the “dark side” of that person.

Why is that? Because, according to a 1938 lecture by German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the whole world has become an image, a mere picture, due to the dominion of techno-science and the oblivion of being (existential meaning of life.)

That’s why there are two other lies: the lie of pretending to be somebody and something we are not, and the lie of “modifying” our own history, changing it according to our needs (similar to what George Orwell describes in 1984.)

To build our lives on the quicksand of a “flexible” past and a present of continuous self-delusion can only lead to a meaningless future where our best hope will be to be remembered for something we didn’t do and for what we were not.

 

Go Back