Do We Need to Pretend it's a Game?

I have been reading and enjoying Dan Heck's According to Folly (here is my review) a Socratic exploration of contemporary American approaches to Christianity, recently (really enjoying it and I plan to review it as soon as I am done). In the book, the narrator witnesses a series of conversations between a Socratic interlocutor (the titular "fool") and three different "types" of contemporary Western folk. In the book, the Socratic fool identifies the different conversations he has with each of the types as a "game". Now I realize that this isn't original to Heck, but running into it the context of our current culture and the national moment has me reflecting on our methods of discourse in a particular way.

A few months back I put together a list of ten guidelines for arguing about theology on the internet. One of those guidelines has been haunting me so let me quote it at length here:

Remember that humans are complex

Everything I have been talking about has assumed the culture of debate and philosophy which was built by and for educated white men (and also some Greeks and North African men, and a lot of scholars who predate the whole concept of whiteness but whose work formed the foundation on which the men who came to think of themselves as white ultimately built their own power structures - some women also contributed but fewer than we should wish thanks to millennia of patriarchy). As such, while I (a white man) do think that theses guidelines really will be helpful in having productive and healthy arguments about theology, I would be utterly remiss if I neglected to recognize that the list is built on a presumption of the luxury of "doing" theology in relative security. Yes, white men have been martyred for their theology but the vast majority of western white, male theologians have been able to operate from a place of relative security. I don't think that I have heard this explained more powerfully than by Broderick Greer 

I descend from enslaved people. From lynched people. From racialized people. From people who took the Jesus their white enslavers introduced them to - a white Jesus happy to watch them suffer in order to maintain the proper social and economic order - and understood him not as enslaver, but as emancipator. I descend from people who created liturgical music not in grand cathedrals or impressive basilicas but on labor camps from Texas to Virginia. 

Folk who cried out, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen // Nobody knows but Jesus” and “Tell old Pharaoh // Let my people go”. Folk who sang, “ And before I’d be a slave // I’ll be buried in my grave”. Folk who did not dream of a pie-in-the-sky-when-they-die, who awaited a heavenly home free from the troubles of this life. No. They expected their God to act decisively, in history, to free them from the ravages of white domestic terror. 

These were people for whom theology was more than an intellectual exercise. They did not have the comfort of ivory towers or lengthy sabbaticals. They just had each other: families and communities forged during the evil institution of African enslavement. And that’s what “powerless” people have to do: theology on the go, without books, seminary, theology on the streets, in the face of people wearing white sheets. Theology after we’ve been kicked to the corner for a perfectly holy and wholesome sexual orientation and gender expression, from the text of our very lives.Excerpt from Theology as Survival 

It would be (and far too often is) catastrophic to mistake a person who is doing theology as survival—for their basic dignity, for their inclusion in sacred communities, for their ability to exercise the gifts and calling God has given them—for a person who is doing theology for simple (yet still valuable) edification. To demand that someone doing theology of survival operate in the mode of someone doing theology "from the ivory tower"—or keyboard, would be like asking someone on fire to not to speak too loudly; "too loudly" has a very different definition when you are on fire than it does when you are arguing around the kitchen table in the bloom of health.
It is, therefore, critical to remember (if you are a straight, white, male) that when you have a theological argument, you have the privilege of having it in a space designed to your optimal specifications. It is like the old joke:
Q: "Who would win in a fight, Kevin from Home Alone or Superman?"
A: "How much time does Kevin have to prepare?"When you are engaging on terrain that was built on the assumption that your culture, educational history, and gender are the definition of "normal" you should not expect people whose experience has been a different terrain with it's own "rules" and expectations to engage in the way you are accustomed to.

What I find myself wondering today is all to do with the power, risk, and essential value of discourse. I am a massive fan of Socratic dialectic as a way of discovering truth. The greatest educational experience of my life was my time at St. John's College where the teach the great books program and classes take place as discussions of texts around a table. The so called "great conversation" my abiding passion. In short, I am deeply committed to the proposition that rich, meaningful, robust, rigorous, and honest conversation is at the heart of human progress and understanding.

But here is the thing: In order to work, Socratic dialectic requires the conceit that all participants may engage freely without fear of existential threat or coercion. This is, technically, not a logical requirement but I am convinced that it is an almost entirely unyielding psychological requirement. I am not trying to say that the conceit is inaccessible to any particular class of persons, I am trying to point out instead that the conceit is a) often false, and b) easier for some people in some situations than for other people in other situations. When a straight Christian debates the meaning of the Bible on LGBTQ+ issues with a queer Christian, the consequences of the debate are significantly and unavoidably different for the two of them; this needs to be recognized by anyone who values dialectic as a tool for discovering the truth—it shapes the meaning, import, and weight of the arguments advanced by the two interlocutors.

It might be tempting to conclude from this that the less interested party, the party to who the conceit comes more easily, is more trustworthy in a spectators analysis of a given conversation. It might be tempting  but it would also be wrong. The more interested party is often more invested in the outcome of the conversation precisely because she is better, and more holistically acquainted with the total truth of the matter. Yes, she does have a clear psychological investment in the outcome (provided she is arguing for the conclusion which would benefit her) but that does not preclude the possibility of her being correct. It was C.S. Lewis who identified the Bulverism, a combination of the ad hominem and genetic fallacies, demonstrating that a person's interest in the outcome of an argument does not ipso facto invalidate that argument.

The idea (itself a conceit) that disinterest strengthens the validity of an argument is quintessentially modernist in that it emerges from the attempt to reduce all knowledge to scientific and mathematical rubrics of knowing. While it would be a mere re appropriation of the bulverism to suggest that the conceit of disinterest as strength in an argument is wrong only because it serves the interests of those whose power is already well established (relatively wealthy cis, straight, white men) and that it was first forwarded by that same class of people; the genesis of the idea is certainly relevant to the discussion. So, again, I am not claiming that the conceit of disinterest as strength in an argument is wrong merely because it was developed and preserved by those people best situated to benefit from it. I am arguing instead that this may explain some of the idea's longevity—it is useful to those with power and that is generally a solid predictor of a things longevity in society. I think the idea is wrong because it fails to allow for the fact that knowledge can be acquired in ways that are not "scientific" and because it fails to allow for the simple fact that those most impacted by a proposition are often ipso facto those who are best acquainted with the strengths, weaknesses, and consequences of the idea.

That dude who thinks he can mansplain feminism because "he doesn't need it"

It was, again, Lewis in his essay Meditation in a Toolshed who clarified the difference between looking at something (that is to privilege what can be described in a disinterested manner) , and looking along it (that is to know a thing from the "inside").

When you have got into the habit of making this distinction you will find examples of it all day long. The mathematician sits thinking, and to him it seems that he is contemplating timeless and spaceless truths about quantity. But the cerebral physiologist, if he could look inside the mathematician's head, would find nothing timeless and spaceless there—only tiny movements in the grey matter. ... The girl cries over her broken doll and feels that she has lost a real friend; the psychologist says that her nascent maternal instinct has been temporarily lavished on a bit of shaped and coloured wax.

As soon as you have grasped this simple distinction. it raises a question. You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. which is the "true" or "valid" experience? Which tells you most about the thing? And you can hardly ask that question without noticing that for the last fifty years or so everyone has been taking the answer for granted. It has been assumed without discussion that if you want the true account of religion you must go, not to religious people but to anthropologists; that if you what the true account of sexual love you must go, not to lovers, but to psychologists; that if you want to understand some "ideology" (such as medieval chivalry or the nineteenth-century idea of a "gentleman"), you must listen not to those who lived inside it, but to sociologists.

The people who look at things have had it all their own way; the people who look along things have simply been brow-beaten. It has even come to be taken for granted that the external account of a thing somehow refutes or "debunks" the account given from inside. 

I want to retain Socratic dialogue, healthy argumentation, and rigorous debate. But I think we need to learn to do it in a more fully formed way. We need to understand that the arguments of those who do theology, philosophy, politics, or ethics "for survival" may well be doing a better, or at least a differently informed and equally valid job of it than those engage in a more superficially disinterested way. Certainly we need to begin calling out the false claims of those who flippantly boast that they are "just interested in the truth" and "don't have a horse in this race". I still believe that the game is a useful—even a vital—one, but its rules are far more complex than we often want to admit.