Anti-Intellectualism and the Rejection of Modernism: Wrapped in the Flag and Carrying a Cross—Evangelicalism and Fascism Part 2

Sinclair Lewis probably never said "When Fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." But he should have because he would have been right.

For Part 1 in this series Tradition and the Mythic Past CLICK HERE.

I want to begin by backing up a little. The project for this series is to examine the intersections between white American Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism and U.S. fascism as a politics. But this is really two projects because it involves both demonstrating that U.S. fascism is a going concern in the present day—a claim which is not at all universally accepted—and also that it is shaped by and intersects with white American Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism (wAE/F). Because I take Trump himself to be a fascist—by which I mean that "fascism" describes his politics more accurately than any other term of which I am aware—I further take wAE/F support of Trump to indicate if not active support of fascism then a tolerance for and/or willing blindness towards U.S. fascism. I want to make it clear though that I do understand that the validity of the the latter argument (that support for Trump = support for fascism) depends on the validity of the former (that Trump is a fascist) and I will be making both of those arguments in parallel over the course of this series as I work to identify the presence of Eco's 14 features of ur-fascism and Stanley's 10 pillars of fascism in both Trumpism and wAE/F. Fascist politics does not necessarily lead to an explicitly fascist state but it is dangerous nonetheless. Thus the fact that the U.S. is not (yet at any rate) a fascist nation does not at all imply that the president is not a fascist.

I think that I demonstrated effectively in the last post that both wAE/F and U.S. fascism share a common national myth, or at least that there is a national myth which is accepted and promulgated by a segment of wAE/F which is perfectly conducive to the purposes of U.S. fascism. I hope to demonstrate in this post that there are significant voices and themes within wAE/F which share the anti-intellectualism and rejection of modernism around which U.S. fascism is able to coagulate. Once more, this is not to say that all white American Evangelicals (or even Fundamentalists) are fascists or crypto-fascists—just because the soil in a garden is conditioned in a way that is especially nutritious for one type of plant does not mean that it cannot or does not host other plants more or less effectively. I do think that wAE/F is especially hospitable soil for U.S. Fascism and there have been U.S. fascists among the ranks of white American Evangelicals and Fundamentalists but wAE/F plays host to other politics as well.

I am basing much of my work in this series off of  Umberto Eco's 14 features of Ur-Fascism from his essay Ur-Fascism together with Jason Stanley's 10 pillars of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them while much (but not all) of my analysis of white American Evangelicalism comes from Frances Fitzgerald's The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America together with my own experience as someone who experienced Christian homeschooling in my elementary and middle school years, matriculated at a conservative Bible College, and who identified as an Evangelical for at least the first 30 years of my life.

Anti-Intellectualism and the Rejection of Modernism

While I intend to treat these two facets of fascism together I should begin by emphasizing that their relationship is more one of resonance than identity. One can be anti-intellectual without rejecting modernism per se and one can reject modernism (even in the very specific mode in which Eco is speaking) without being an anti-intellectual.

Anti-Intellectualism

Fascism is not alone in anti-intellectualism, it shares that quality with significant leftist forms of totalitarianism as well. The rejection of modernism is, perhaps, peculiar to fascism as a totalitarian politics since most (all?) leftist politics tend to locate their origins in the Enlightenment. Now both of these elements are evident in Trump and in white American Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism but they tend to manifest in ways that are more or less obvious depending on the context. That Trump and the modern Trumpist(1) movement are anti-intellectual is, on a surface level, fairly obvious in the stock in opposition to "educated elites", attacks on tenure for university professors, regular mockery of intellectuals and academics as functionally useless, and Trump's well known aversion to reading books. But Trumpist anti-intellectualism takes a deeper, and probably more sinister, form as well. Trump and trumpists make a point of casting suspicion on college in general and especially on non-technical college education (mostly sciences and the liberal arts). The tactic involves assertions that universities are functionally little more than indoctrination centers for "liberal" politics and is usually embedded in bad-faith arguments about free speech on college campuses(2).
conservative complaints against public intellectuals, the valorization of white blue collar culture framed

What really strikes me about that second form of anti-intellectualism is the degree to which it parallels a pernicious attitude among wAE/F. For a variety of historical and cultural reasons  fundamentalists and evangelicals often frame "secular" universities as centers of indoctrination to the point that a heavy focus of the youth ministries I was involved with as a teenager was "preparing our faith to withstand college". One friend of mine who attended Summit Ministries (currently advertising itself with testimonials from James Dobson, Josh McDowell, and Eric Metaxas as preparing post-high school students to "strengthen their faith, prepare for cultural engagement, and earn money for college") recounted "an amazing lecture" in which the central figure (a young woman) went to college without "world view preparation" and became successively, a communist, an atheist, a feminist, and a lesbian. Fitzgerald frames the Evangelical and Fundamentalist attitude towards higher education well describing her experience at Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church:

For Thomas Road people, education—in the broad sense of the word—was not a moral or intellectual quest that involved struggle or uncertainty. It was simply the process of learning the right answers. The idea that individuals should collect evidence and decide for themselves was out of the question. Once Falwell told his congregation that to read anything but the Bible and certain prescribed works of interpretations was at best a waste of time. He said that he himself read all the national magazines just to keep up with what others were saying, but that there was no reason for them to do so. (Most of his church members seemed to follow this advice faithfully; their weakness, if they had one, lay in the realm of television watching.) He and his fellow pastors attacked the public schools for teaching "immorality" and "secular humanism." But what bothered pious members of his congregation was not just that the public schools taught wrong answers; it was that they did not protect children from information that might call their beliefs into question. When I asked Jackie Gould whether she would consider sending her children to something other than a Bible college, she said, "No, because our eternal destiny is all-important, so you can't take a chance. Colleges so often throw kids into confusion." The progress of education, then, was to progress in one direction to the exclusion of all others.

Notice that technical college and degrees are, in this analysis "safe" in that they exist to teach skills and provide pre-established answers whereas liberal arts and theoretical sciences, which teach students to think critically and engage with a large variety of ideas are viewed as "corrupting" and "dangerous". At the most basic level, the anti-intellectualism of U.S. fascism and of white American Evangelicalism and (especially) Fundamentalism values training rather than education. And this is important because fascism is not, strictly speaking, opposed to all schools or all teaching; fascism is opposed to teaching and schools which deviate from the party line, which teach students to question

authority, teach histories which challenge their nationalist mythologies, develop empathy in students and teach them to broaden their horizons and assumptions about the nature of the world and their (collective and individual) place in it. Fascism requires technical expertise since technology is fundamentally one method whereby humans gain power over one another and our environment but is threatened by critical thinking, and this accords very nicely with the Evangelical/Fundamentalist desire to see people trained towards a specific predetermined set of conclusions and skills without "endangering their faith" through exposure to challenging facts, ideas, cultures, and beliefs.

Before going on I want to say that this is one area in which white American evangelicals, particularly more recently, take some pride in distinguishing themselves from fundamentalists. When I was studying at Columbia International University (CIU), an evangelical Bible college(3), I was told that the key difference between "us" and fundamentalists was that we evangelicals were not afraid of the academy or the intellectual life. While I have since come to believe that there is no hard distinction to be made between white American evangelicals and fundamentalists but that they exist along a spectrum, the distinction made sense to me at the time. The other major Bible college in my state was Bob Jones University, a school so fundamentalist that it did not allow interracial dating until 2000 when it dropped that policy in an effort to shield George W. Bush from national criticism, and which was regularly cited as a foil for CIU in our efforts to prove that we were not fundamentalists. I will have more to say about the "evangelical vs. fundamentalist" distinction in future posts, but here I think it worth saying that in my experience white American evangelicals differ academically from fundamentalists primarily in their levels of confidence. Whereas fundamentalists tend to think that their children will be corrupted by a modern liberal education, white American evangelicals are more prone to believe that, with sufficient training, their children will prevail because they are already correct about all matters of faith. Put another way, the fundamentalist approach to education and the truth is more fideist while the white American evangelicals take a more apologetic approach. Neither, however are fully open to the full and free exchange of ideas or to following a line of questioning wherever it might lead. That is to say that their fidelity is to a pre-defined truth rather than to truth-whatever-it-may-be.

Rejection of Modernism

The rejection of modernism is somewhat more complicated, both as Umberto Eco means it, and as it applies to the Evangelical world. In discussing the rejection of modernism, Eco acknowledges that fascists embrace technology—remember that they champion technique rather than understanding—it is rather the larger philosophy of the Enlightenment (particularly the political and social philosophies which emerged from the enlightenment) that they reject. His exploration of the theme in Ur-Fascism is worth quoting in full:

Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

The desire to parse the Enlightenment in order to critique or affirm it in parts is not, I think, peculiar to fascism though its concomitant rejection of Enlightenment liberal thought is clearly an important element in fascist thinking. Certainly post-modernism, of which many leftists and anti-fascists today are often fans, is more define-able as a critique and rejection of modernism than in any other way. It is the politics of the enlightenment that liberals tend to celebrate and which fascists reject.

Cornelius Van Til

At this juncture it could be tempting to imagine that wAE/F folk must embrace the liberal and antifascist, rather than the fascist critique of modernism. Given the wAE/F boosterism of the United States, and the U.S. history of championing liberal democracy(4) it would make sense that wAE/F people would largely support the liberal politics of the Enlightenment—and in some cases that is exactly how it plays out. However, as I described in my last post in this series, wAE/F (particularly in the more Fundamentalist leaning portions of the wAE/F spectrum) includes an element of historical revisionism which involves defining "America" not as the first liberal democracy birthed of the Enlightenment (the standard "secular" story of the country's identity) but as a fundamentally Christian (and white) nation. Further, as Fitzgerald makes clear, this anti-liberal democratic outlook is only one element of a far larger tendency on the part of wAE/F which does include a significantly larger portion of the Evangelical side of the wAE/F spectrum.

The apologetics of Gresham Machen and most Princeton scholars, based on Common Sense Realism, sought to prove the truth of Christianity through factual evidence. Van Til, by contrast, held that facts did not speak for themselves but were meaningful only within some presupposed framework of interpretation. The truth, he held, lay only in God's framework as revealed in the Bible. Natural law, or autonomous human reason, reflected only man's fallen state, and the attempt by nonbelievers to create their own coherent interpretation of reality was doomed to failure. (His interpretation of the Bible was nonetheless based on Common Sense Realism.) Rushdoony took this notion farther, arguing that there could be no common ground between believers and nonbelievers. Then, while Van Til avoided the social and political consequences of presuppositionalism, Rushdoony did not. In the 1960s he became an early advocate of home schooling, arguing that education was not theologically neutral, and the state had no business imposing its own truth and its own religion on the American populace. (p.339)

Rushdoony and the christ-fascist re-imagining of the American myth are thus situated as an offshoot of a larger branch (mostly Calvinist—now celebrated largely by the PCA, reformed Southern Baptists and especially the Gospel Coalition crowd) of an Evangelicalism which rejects Enlightenment epistemology—the study of knowing and truth. It is important to recognize that this rejection of Enlightenment epistemology is, in its incarnation in individual thought leaders among these groups, almost always concomitant with a rejection of post-modernism as well. This is, at first blush, ironic since both Van Til and the post-modernists agree both in the rejection of Enlightenment epistemology. What makes sense of this is the fact that Van Til influenced presuppositionalists reject modernist epistemology by a method which is just as much (or more) subject to the post-modern critique as the system they both reject; presuppositionalism amounts to a sort of fideism which responds to modern and post-modern observations, critique, and questions by the simple expedient of refusing to recognize their legitimacy. The presuppositionalist claims to win all arguments by refusing to "see" anything which would undermine their central tenets with the result that they will only really entertain discourse with people who agree with their narrowly defined vision of reality. Again the training vs. education distinction comes into play since any apriori restriction of the realm in which truth is deemed "discoverable" must ultimately be reduced to training by restricting the questions and critiques which can be acknowledges or explored.

Conclusion to Part 2

So do white American Evangelicals/Fundamentalists engage in anti-intellectualism and the rejection of modernism in the same way that fascists do? Clearly there are some differences, the popularity of the new atheism and sort of banal nihilism (as distinct from philosophically informed nihilism) among America's online alt-right communities makes that abundantly clear. However there is much that both groups share in their habits of mind—rejection of both modern and post-modern epistemologies, a preference for technique over theory and question, distrust of liberal education to name a few—which precondition wAE/F individuals and communities to be particularly receptive to fascist propaganda and politics under the right conditions (such as the emergence of a shared and powerful enemy or a sense of threatened identity). There are also, certain stop-gap, beliefs of many wAE/F groups which need to be overcome before they (or the individuals of which they are constituted) can be subborned by US fascism. The Bible cannot be easily interpreted to allow for ethno-nationalism and, at the very least, presuppositionalim does include sufficient intellectual resources to argue against such a politics. So, I am not saying that white American Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism is tantamount to fascist thinking. What I am saying is that there are major (and increasingly dominant) strains within white American Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism which encourage habits of mind able to serve as a hospitable environment to US fascism.

As a coda to this post I want to emphasize that these problems in white American Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism are (so far as I can tell) particular to those specific strains of Christianity and are not shared by the many Christian traditions which are distinct from that particular stream. Within the US Roman Catholicism, for instance, has a profound intellectual tradition which could hardly be farther from the presuppositionalism of Van Til (for those who are interested in peculiarly Roman Catholic vulnerabilities to Fascism I would recommend this piece over at Mudblood Catholic); the so called "progressive and ex-evangelical" movement which has emerged in the US  over the last decade or so, is largely defined by its embrace of doubt—see particularly Pete Enns' bibliography—, of openness to questions and exploration—one defining feature of the late Rachel Held Evans' work—,and sometimes of an almost naif acceptance of modernist empiricism and the authority of the sciences—check out "Science" Mike McHargue. That is not to say that either tradition is perfect by any means, only that they are different and that in those differences they posses greater protections against US fascism in this instance.

Footnotes

(1) I want to begin using Trumpist and Trumpism to distinguish the president and those whose political affiliation seems to be driven by allegiance to his leadership, personality, and political "style" from Republicans or political conservatives whose relationship to Trump may take a number of different forms.

(2) For a good run down on the ways in which trumpists and the alt-right utilize bad faith arguments about free speech generally, check out this video essay.

(3) I am, in retrospect, well aware of how ironic it was that I learned this at a Bible college.
(4) I am not claiming the US has always been a particularly good or effective champion of liberal democracy, only that "championing liberal democracy" on a global scale has been the primary stated raison d'être for US interventionism since WWI. "Being a champion of democracy" is, in the US mind, roughly equivalent to "being a good patriot".

Why I am not a Postmodernist (I Think)

Photo credit: Evan Dennis at Unsplash

More and more people seem to be under the impression that I am a postmodernist* or, at least, that I take a postmodern approach to understanding reality. Further, the expectation of my postmodernism comes from very different ideological positions. I have had theological and political conservatives worry that I have "bought into postmodernism" and I have proudly self-identified postmodern friends who are convinced that my analysis of social, theological, and political subjects is postmodern. Usually these are friends who are well informed and have an informed understanding of what postmodernism entails (and for the record, here is a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on Postmodernism). And yet I do not think that I am a postmodernist and have resisted that label for as long as people have wanted to apply it to me.

Before I go any farther please allow me the grace of a big caveat: I am not writing under the impression that I have anything particularly original to say on this subject; the post is meant to be read as a reflection and not as a wild new attempt at either debunking or validating postmodernism. I am not really even trying to persuade anyone with this piece, nor am I ready to assert that I have understood the central terms with total accuracy; I am merely hoping to explain why I understand myself not to be a postmodernist. If you are convinced that my reasoning is based on a flawed understanding of postmodernism then that is definitely a conversation I would love to have with you in comments.

I think that the reason I am often confused for a postmodernist is that I essentially accept the postmodern critique of modernism. Because of this, insofar as postmodernism consists in nothing more than a critique of modernism, I could be categorized as a postmodernist (he typed anticipating some early reactions to this post). The problem with that line of reasoning will, I hope, become clear in what follows.

The analysis of the relationship between modernism, premodernism, and postmodernism which I find most persuasive is one which focuses on the relative importance of epistemology (the study of knowing, what it means to know, and how/whether knowing takes place). Throughout the history of Western philosophy* epistemology has always been relevant to the greater philosophical project**. It comes up a lot. However I would describe the shift from premodern to modern philosophy in terms of a paradigm shift in which (thanks to Bacon, Descartes, and a few medieval philosophers) the epistemological question "how can we know anything?" became the primary question of philosophy. By "primary" I mean that "how can we know anything?" became a question which "had" to be answered before any further philosophy could really be done. It became the first question, and because of the way the shift occurred, it had to be addressed in a certain way.

Descartes

Before that shift (and the reasons for it are fascinating enough to merit multiple books) thinkers certainly asked questions about epistemology—they still wanted to know how we know things—but epistemology wasn't necessarily the starting point. Some began with ethics (the study of morality), some began with ontology (the study of being and existence) and some began with theology (the study of the Divine). You could really sort of start where you wanted to and work your way into other parts of the the philosophical project from there.

I pin the actual shift to modernism on Renee Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. In Meditations Descartes manages to single out the most rigorous definition of "known truth" which humanity has managed to produce so far as I am aware: indubitability or un-doubt-able-ness. Descartes refuses to claim that he knows a thing as true unless he is unable to doubt it. His method is to pare away all of the truth-claims he has provisionally held as true up to that point until he finds some core indubitable truth, and then he rebuilds his entire understanding of reality (including the legitimacy of reason and of observation) on that truth. He is essentially trying to take the scientific method and apply it to the whole project of human knowing. It is an elegant and initially persuasive approach to the philosophical project. After all, how can we make any claims about anything until we first determine that knowing is even possible, what it means to know, and what criteria can be justifiably used to test a claim?

The postmodern project has done a remarkably effective job of critiquing the modernist approach. The postmodernists have taken on modernism and demonstrated that indubitability is an impossible bar, and that treating empirical data and Aristotelian derived logic as the lone methods for determining truth value necessarily leads to contradiction and to oppression. Essentially the postmodernists have shown that Decartes' methods for determining truth are at best seriously lacking and at worst entirely ineffective. I very much agree with and will cheerfully cite the postmodern critique of modernism and I suspect that that is why people tend to think that I am postmodernist myself.

See, the thing is, there is more to having a philosophical position that concurring in a critique of a particular school of thought. I also have critiques of postmodernism, at least as it is frequently understood and manifested. First, I fault postmodernism for not going far enough—postmodernism critiques the modernist belief that the scientific method (empirical observation + Aristotelian derived logic) is sufficient for understanding reality but tends to tacitly accept the fundamental modernist premise that epistemology is the first question. Second, I am not a reductionist—I do not believe that the full meaning of a given thing is finally reducible to its constituent components (physical or otherwise). Finally I am not a postmodernist because, when it comes to postmodernism, I don't really think that there is any there there—I take postmodernism to be a critique of modernism and not a distinct school of thought in and of itself.

On reflection, I think my first reason for not identifying as a postmodernist is contained within the next two. If you were to imagine the human philosophical project as a number of people exploring the world seeking to find Truth, then I would locate Descartes as a specific fork in the road of western philosophy. Most western thinkers took the modernism fork and, after overcoming some obstacles and wandering down a variety of side trails and dead ends, our society has found itself in the cul-de-sac at the end of Modernism. Postmodernism is little more than an exploration of the cul-de-sac itself and a rigorous, thorough determination that "this road doesn't go anywhere else". While many modernists insist on denying the post modern critique and want to pretend that the road goes on in some direction, some modern and postmodern thinkers have, instead, declared themselves to be perfectly alright with that conclusion. They seem to want to be saying that the entire project of philosophy has hit a final dead end and that we need to just sit here in the cul-de-sac, insisting both that truth can only consist in indubitable knowledge derived from observation + logic and simultaneously insisting that it is finally impossible to derive indubitable knowledge (and therefore truth) from that source. They tell us that we were correct to take the modernist fork and that as a result of our exploration we may now safely conclude that there is nowhere to go and no Truth to find.

And I don't accept that. I am grateful to the postmodernists for showing us the failings of modernism and I very much appreciate the gains in human knowledge and (frankly) power which modernism's particular approach to exploring the physical world has allowed—it is, after all, modernism which led us to the great technological breakthroughs of the last four hundred years. But I think the conclusion we need to draw from postmodernism's discovery that modernism is a dead-end, is that we ought to go back and explore other paths. My own philosophical approach is to back track to late premodernism and take the other side of the fork. I do not mean by this that I want to forget all that we learned exploring modernism; there is a very real sense in which it is impossible to "go backward" and even if it were possible, it would certainly not be advisable. I want to move froward from the point of departure with the full history and benefits of modernism traced on my philosophical map. Truth still beckons, the project of philosophy remains and the road goes ever on.

What that more radical break with modernism means to me is, primarily, a decentralization of epistemology. I am not at all convinced that we are obliged to start with epistemology and I am fairly convinced that starting from epistemology leads only to a dead end. It is entirely possible to start by asking what things are and what things mean, before we worry overmuch about whether knowing the thing is possible. So far I have been calling my approach neo-premodernism to distinguish it from premodernism (which operates without recognizing the developments of modernism and post modernism). But I really hate the term so I am open to suggestions. How would you describe my approach to Philosophy?

In case anyone in interested in what this looks like in practice, I would say that THIS post on the myth of America and THIS one on art are still broadly representative of my thinking.

Footnotes

*I am mostly focused on Western philosophy throughout this piece since I believe that both modernism and postmodernism are essentially phenomena of Western philosophy.
** I am inclined to define the philosophical project as an attempt to wonder about reality.

What Happened to My Deconstruction?

In my last post I started with the observation that, while much of my personal "faith journey" maps well onto a common faith deconstruction narrative, I haven't actually experienced a deconstruction—at least not it the way that experience is usually discussed. I offered (got sidetracked by) a short analysis of the difference between a modernist and a premodern approach to understanding reality and indicated that my tendency towards premodernism might account for my lack of a typical deconstruction experience.

In this post I want to pick up that thread and give a few more reflections on how my tendency towards a premodern understanding of reality let to my having a different experience with regard to deconstruction. The really short version is that I never had a deconstruction because I am always deconstructing and always reconstructing. But explaining what I mean by that might take a few more paragraphs.

I have mentioned that I was raised in a fairly typically conservative US Evangelical household. My parents helped to found a non-denominational Protestant church, I spent time both being home-schooled (using a really conservative curriculum) and at a private Christian school. But there is one, really important way in which my experience growing up was non-typical for conservative US Evangelicalism of the late 20th century and it has everything to do with my parents.

My parents are politically heterogeneous as people. Where my Dad has a generally conservative approach to life; my Mom is has a pretty liberal* approach. Further, I would say that both of them are bad fits for those terms. My Dad's conservatism is nuanced by deep wells of reflection and a phenomenal appreciation for the stories of other people. Where the typically conservative response to unfamiliar stories is one of fear, anger, or rejection, Dad has always responded to new stories and data with interest, excitement and attempts to generate new models and theories about the world. In a parallel way, my Mom's liberalism is nuanced by razor sharp critical thinking and a strong empathy for those who found beauty and security in tradition and the past. At least—and this is what determined my experience—that is how I thought about them growing up. I should note that while these general tendencies did map onto their respective politics and theology to a significant degree I am speaking more here of their approaches to life in general than to any particular policies or beliefs they espoused.

I don't think, though, that simple constitutional heterogeneity accounts for everything that I ascribe to the way I was raised. My parents didn't only have different approaches to life, politics, and theology, they were cheerfully open about them. My home was one where finding the right answers was important but so was thinking about the question. Until I was in Bible College, I assumed that every church going family spent time after church discussing the sermon—disagreeing with some parts and agreeing with others. I always knew that my parents had different politics; and while I was somewhat more inclined towards my Dad's, I understood that these things were debatable and that there was value in having the debate.

On top of this, I grew up as a third-culture kid. My family moved to Turkey when I was seven and I stayed there through the end of high school. Due to the many cultural differences between Turkey and

Turkey photo by Samuel Giacomelli at Unsplash

the US, and thanks to my parents' and Grandmother's deep enjoyment of cultural diversity and exploration, I ended up with a pretty well developed understanding of the fact that the world is a complicated place, that lots of people have strengths and some weaknesses in the way they do things and the way they go about understanding the reality of their world, and that it is unlikely that anybody has things "just right". The conservative part of my makeup had (and still has) me convinced that it is almost always worth supporting the model of truth I found most compelling at a given point, while the liberal part of my makeup (one which was the weakest in me while I was in high school) reminded me that that I still had plenty to explore and learn.

The net effect of all of this was that when I went off to Bible college seeking to find all of the final answers to all of my questions, I went with a really robust understanding of what that would entail and a still (somewhat) flexible understanding of what reality might turn out to consist in. That said, I went to Bible college with the full expectation that I would find proofs and demonstrations which would allow me to concretize a final model of the world. I genuinely believed that the answers (and logically unassailable proofs of those answers) to all my questions were going to be found during my time in undergrad. And it seems likely to me that, were I going to have a deconstruction experience, mine would have started there. What I realized slowly over four years as an undergraduate was that, we still don't have final answers to "life the universe and everything"—we are still building our models of reality even while we are living in the world.

There were other factors too. I have been a fan of fantasy, fairy tales, and mythology since I have been reading and, in many ways, those genre are themselves an immersion into a pre-modern approach to the world. I also discovered philosophy during my last year of high school and focused heavily on that subject in college as a part of my attempt to finally "get the True answers". Most vitally I had a series of experiences which began to center my experience of Christianity more on a relationship with the person of Jesus and less on the lists of things people believe about Jesus. (I have written about that aspect of my thinking HERE)

None of that is to say that I "abandoned my faith" or even made a particularly significant change in the tenets of my belief structures while I was in college—I didn't. What I do think happened though is a sort of final shift in my overall approach to understanding reality. The experience of finding more questions than answers in college shifted me, or maybe just finally determined my psychological development, away from a modernist approach to a pre-modern approach to understanding reality. On a strictly historical level, it was over the ten or so years most directly after Bible college that my theological shift from functionally conservative white Evangelical to functionally progressive Christianity took place. But I am pretty convinced that it was the experiences which I have outlined hear which allowed that theological transition to happen in the way that it did—that is to say, that prevented me from experiencing a deconstruction in the way that it seems to typically occur.

By the time I really began taking out and examining or questioning those tenets of my faith and of reality itself, my understanding of reality had shifted from the strong-yet-brittle modernist "wall" to the more complex, less easily defined, and less thoroughly interdependent pre-modern symphony or dance. If a piece (a tenet) was discarded (as my original beliefs in gender complimentarity, LGBTQ+ exclusion, young earth creationism, Biblical literalism and others were) the total edifice did not shatter. It was affected, certainly. Each piece I removed had played a role in constructing the whole, each piece resonated with many other pieces. The whole, therefore went through a process of "re-tuning and re-orientation" each time something was removed. The ideas, beliefs, facts, convictions, and tenets I replaced them then necessitate further re-tuning—both of the idea itself, and of the edifice as a whole. But far from experiencing this as a crisis, I find great fun and even joy in it. When I discover that I now think a new thing to be true, I am thereby promised the opportunity to work through the rest of my beliefs, ideas, opinions, etc... and to find out how they are influenced by this new idea, and how they influence it in turn. Sometimes I will try ideas out, just to see what impact they will have on the edifice and what impact it will have on them.

I wish that I could end this with a recommendation for how one could choose to experience deconstruction in a modernist or premodern way—I suspect that mine has been slower than the modern one but that it has also been far gentler—but I don't have any certain prescription for how that might be accomplished. Modernist Christianity has gone to great lengths to wall out the whole philosophical tradition (postmodernism) which was built as a critique of modernism and as a result, most Evangelicals will probably experience a softening towards postmodern critiques of modernism as a de facto deconstruction in any case. There may be a back-door if an Evangelical were to start reading as much as they can of the Christian mystics, of the Inklings (try Lewis' essays, Tolkiens Silmarilion and On Fairy Stories, Barfield's Poetic Diction, Sayers' Mind of the Maker, Willaim's The Descent of the Dove) Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, and MacDonalds At the Back of the North Wind and other premodern thinkers with an open mind and without merely trying to mine them form apologetics or for aids in evangelism, but I am not entirely sure whether that will work. The simultaneous strength and brittleness of Modernism require both great power and great gentleness to undo it without shattering it. I suspect that in most cases the shattering may well be inevitable. And maybe that is another reason that community is needed. We need to be there to help pick up one another's pieces—maybe even to keep a few safe for a time while our friends are rebuilding their world. If it is a good piece they will find a place for it in due time.

Footnotes:

*I use the terms liberal and conservative throughout this piece in a horrendously oversimplified way but I haven't worked out a way to get around that in a blog post. Maybe someday I can write a book and luxuriate in the nuance and complexity that medium affords. In the meantime, by liberal here I am using the loose political definition of "an outlook which tends to welcome change and improvement" whereas conservative "indicates an appreciation for tradition and stability with an attendant skepticism towards change".

Deconstructing as a Legacy of Modernism

As a heads up this is a particularly in-the-weeds post about my relationship with exEvangelicalism and some of the minutia of Christian theology in the United States.

Stories of deconstruction are a pretty solid way to get a blog post to go viral on the Christian internet these days. The haters (mostly conservative white Evangelicals) get to hate and break down your story into a million little warnings about the danger of doubt, Progressive Christians cheer you on and leap to your defense (sometimes after a little checking to make sure that you aren't harboring any problematically oppressive views which you haven't quite managed to deconstruct away just yet) and and since nothing drives site hits so much as controversy, your blog stats spike nicely. If you are really lucky you might even get invited to do a podcast with one of the more influential progressive Christian conversation leaders. 

All of that probably sounds cynical so let me follow with this: aside from the vitriol which tends to work its way into these things, I think this is a really good thing and a natural outgrowth of the desperate need so many Christian and Christian-adjacent people in the US have to know that they are not alone, aren't insane, and aren't going to hell because of their doubts, thoughts, and concerns. I do not think it would be accurate to classify white Evangelicalism as a cult, but I do think that it has in common with cults, the need for those who are trying to leave it to find a way to deprogram ourselves from ideas and thinking patterns which are so ingrained that they still shape our lives and reactions even though we no longer accept them on a cognitive level. "My Deconstruction" stories can be really helpful towards that end—which is probably also why Conservative Evangelical leaders make such a point of attacking them and the people who pen them. 

All of that said, I don't have a deconstruction story. Or at least, if I do, I certainly didn't experience my own story in a way that felt particularly like deconstruction to me. It mostly felt like growth. And yet, I get asked about my deconstruction and the people whose theology and life/faith experiences I identify most closely with are people who speak fairly regularly about their deconstructions. I was raised in solidly conservative white US Evangelicalism. There were a few quirks (and, as I will point out later, they were pretty important) but on the whole I can tell an honest and accurate version of my childhood which fits the deconstruction narrative really well.

I have attended Evangelical churches my entire life*. I was home schooled in elementary, at least in part to protect me from the "New Age agenda" (look it up); I attended a Christian private school; my parents were part of a church start-up/planting team; I attended a conservative southern Bible College, I have—on more than one occasion—thrown away collections of "secular" media; I debated classmates and teachers as a staunch young-earth creationist; there is a picture of my still floating around the internet wearing a "straight pride" t-shirt while attending a Christian music festival (LGBTQ+ friends, I am so sorry for that); the list could go on and on. Now I could probably be accurately described as a Progressive Christian (I am a Charismatic Anabaptist and my politics are unorthodox but that term probably fits better than any other) so how did I transition from the one to the other without a deconstruction?

I think the answer lies in the way I understand the project of understanding reality—I have tended towards a more pre-modern than enlightenment modernist approach to understanding the world. I could be very wrong here and I would love to get feedback from people who have gone through a deconstruction (and maybe their own reconstruction process?) to let me know whether I have understood y'all's experience accurately, but my impression is that—for a lot of folks—deconstruction is a bit like messing with a house of cards. Over time, they start to worry more and more that some aspect or tenet of their faith may not be all that accurate. This leads to a period (short or long) wherein they are internally wrestling with whether or not it is "safe" to examine that bit of their faith structure. The worry frequently seems to be based on a conviction that all the parts of their faith need all the other parts of their faith. This often seems to be related to their understanding of the Bible and its relationship to the truth value of much or all of their understanding of reality as a whole. White US Evangelicalism deeply inculcates its adherents with the conviction that the Bible accurately describes reality. If a proposition contradicts "the Bible" then it is necessarily wrong and the job of good intellectual Christians becomes finding a way to demonstrate that wrongness. Of course there are many, many problems with this approach to understanding realty (the Bible is a text which needs to be interpreted, there is no structure for determining an "absolute" interpretation of the Bible, the Bible doesn't actually speak about every aspect of reality etc...) but that hasn't deterred its near-total integration into the very meaning of Evangelical. 

Back to the house of cards. 

Eventually, the person in question will either repress their concerns, avoid a deconstruction, and go back to being a good (if somewhat defensive) Evangelical or they will bite the bullet and take a good hard look at the tenet which was giving them all the trouble. In my experience—and this is part of what makes being in a supportive relationship with doubting Evangelicals so tense—they almost always find that they can't really support a continued adherence to the tenet they are examining. Whether it is young earth creationism, LGBTQ+ exclusion, gender complimentarity, a particular reading of the "texts of terror", the historicity of the exodus, the authorship of Isaiah, or something else entirely, a doubt which had to be so painfully resisted almost always turns out to be a pretty legitimate doubt. This then seems to usually presage entry into "full deconstruction". It doesn't always, some folks (and I suspect that this has a lot to do with the specifics of the denomination and the tenet in question) manage to maintain themselves as slightly unorthodox Evangelicals but it seems that often the removal of the this tenet starts a cascade of other tenets the total removal and examination of which amounts to what Progressive Christians seem to be talking about when they talk about their deconstruction: a semi-systematic examination of much of their worldview with a subsequent rejection of many aspects of it. 

Or, at least, that is how it is often described. In fact (and I want to say that I think that this is inevitable given basic human psychology) it often seems to mean the systematic examination of a number of tenets of Evangelical faith followed by a reidentification on the part of the deconstructor as an ex-evangelical (or possibly as an agnostic or atheist) once a critical mass of tenets is reached. For some folks I know that critical mass has been a single tenet (young earth creationism), for others it took more that ten to reach the critical mass. However it goes though, the effect is that the person who is "going through the deconstruction" eventually rejects much of the structure and content of their previous faith. Depending on what is left afterwards (and this varies significantly but that is probably a subject for another post) the person may or may not follow this by a period of reconstruction in which they carefully build a new structure incorporating what survived the deconstruction. 

As best as I have been able to observe, all of that describes a fairly "typical" deconstruction process**. The thing is, it doesn't really describe the process by which I moved from there to here and after years of wondering about it, I finally have a theory. I think it has a lot to do with how we think about reality. I will take it as a matter of agreement that humans like certainty. We like to know and be confident about how things are. I am sure that psychologists have a lot of explanations for why—I am partial to the view that feeling certain about how things are gives us a sense of control and security—but at the end of the day it seems clear that we do. We also tend to cluster in ideologically homogeneous communities. As a result I suspect (and my conversations with many of my friends who go through deconstruction have borne this out) that we tend to build ideological structures which are both extremely strong, and extremely brittle. They are strong insofar as they are really resistant to change once they "set" and they are brittle insofar as the removal of any one part of them tends to represent a threat to the entire structure. 

That approach, the strength and the brittleness are, I think, representative of the great strength and

brittleness of western enlightenment modernism as a whole. Before the enlightenment, Western society tended to understand reality in terms of a great, intricate, complex, yet fluid structure (imagine a chandelier or a symphony). Premodern society tended to understand reality in terms of stories, music, and logic. When some new proposition was presented to a pre-modern thinker and accepted as true, the thinker would then cheerfully insert that proposition into the edifice which was their model of reality and then get to work tweaking assumptions, re-telling stories, and re-tuning harmonies, until the whole thing came back into some sort of resonance. When presented with evidence or argument that a previously accepted proposition was actually false, that proposition would be removed and the removal would necessitate years of discussion, argumentation, and re-interpretation in order to be re-tuned back to a resonant state. 

In contrast to that, the enlightenment model worked far more carefully to examine each proposition for it's truth value before incorporating it into the model as seamlessly as possible (imagine building a stone wall). The goal for any proposition was indubitability, (un-doubt-able-ness) arguably the highest bar for confidence we, as a species, have managed to devise. In fact, indubitability turns out to be an impossible bar—though many Enlightenment thinkers managed to stay in denial about that for several hundred year—but it has remained as the sort of "gold standard" or aspiration for people who build their understanding of reality under the influence of enlightenment modernism. For Evangelical Christians, the Bible worked dangerously well as a source of indubitable "knowledge". The only catch was that the Bible is not indubitable in and of itself—billions of people manage to doubt it every day—so it can only serve as an indubitable truth-source by an act of trust or a white-knuckled act of the will. As children who were raised in churches, we trusted the adults who just told us that the "Bible is true" and, for a time, that enabled us to treat it as a source of indubitablity. But as we grew we eventually faced the challenge of working out for ourselves just what it was that made the Bible indubitable. In my experience the answer comes down, not to an explanation but to the command to "not doubt". We are told that doubting the Bible is a sin and we might (or might not) be pointed towards some thinker or other who has scraped together an apologetic defense of the doctrine of inspiration (which can temporarily alleviate the tension but doesn't actually solve the problem in the long run). This amounts to the "white-knuckled act of the will" approach which cannot last. 

HERE is Part 2 of this piece in which I speculate more about why I didn't experience a more typical deconstruction.

Footnotes:

*With the exception that I am currently attending (and a member of) a wonderful open and affirming Mennonite church.

**I want to clarify that nearly every person I know who has been through this process would not want to use the term "typical" to describe their experience. It is a journey which requires significant personal and intellectual courage and I have great respect for those friends of mine who have been able to manage it regardless of where they "ended up". 

Resources;

When it comes to facing the importance of doubt I would recommend. Pete Enns' The Sin of Certainty and The Bible Tells Me So as well as Greg Boyd's Benefit of the Doubt.

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.

Why We Need Artists or: Why Modernists are Letting their Guard Down

Eve L. Ewing has written an Op-Ed over at the New York Times reflecting on the penchant of authoritarian regimes for censoring and controlling the arts. While I think the article wrings its hands a little too much over the Trump administration's move to cut the National Endowment for the Arts (there is a significant difference between cutting government funding and outright censorship and control) the piece is well worth reading for its straightforward and elegant apologetic for the arts in a democratic society. She argues that artists, and particularly avant-garde artists, play a crucial role in critiquing the norms and institutions of a given society. Given the value authoritarian regimes place on defending established norms and institutions, it is unsurprising that authoritarians generally react against our more prophetic artists.

The piece has me thinking about the overall role that artists play in human society. Well beyond offering important critiques of existing power structures and institutions, I want to suggest that artists are able to communicate a consciousness of the world which is not fundamentally reducible to propositional language. My favorite example of this is the story that, when asked to explain the meaning of The Wasteland, T.S. Elliot replied by reciting the poem itself—art can be discussed and explored, maybe even understood, but it cannot be fundamentally deconstructed. Along these lines, I have become more and more convinced of late that we have both direct and modeled experiences of reality—let's call the modeled experiences physical and the direct experiences metaphysical as they do not require a sensory model. I suspect that we experience the world more fully than our five senses can adequately process or than our mental models can represent. And art, of nearly any type, communicates on both the physical and metaphysical level. Either that, or by being an unfamiliar representation of the familiar, art confronts us with the artificiality of our own model of reality, thereby shocking us into some sort of greater contact with reality as such. 

Or I could be entirely wrong about that. 

Either way, the fact remains that art is able to make an impression on us which prose and reason find far more difficult. The philosopher Peter Kreeft compares art, poetry, humor, and music to the burglar who sneaks past our critical thinking to take up unexamined (or at least, far less-examined) habitation in our minds. From the perspective of most philosophers. mentors, parents, and teachers this makes art exceptionally dangerous and exceptionally powerful. Art bypasses all of the carefully trained resistances we have against bad thinking and fallacious logic. And, of course, so it is. We cannot combat the negative influence of bad or evil art by critical thinking; it is, to quote Dr. Kreeft again, dark magic. And the only solution to dark magic is good magic—good art (total side note but is it any surprise that Evangelicals who, with a few notable exceptions have proved unable to produce much beyond the most anemic art, feel that they are losing a great culture war?). This has resulted in a considerable amount of hand-wringing on the part of those who hope to keep bad beliefs out of the heads of good people. And for good reason.

But I think there is a serious mistake we frequently commit when we start to worry about the powerful impact of art on our own minds; and I think that it is a modernist mistake. We tend to believe that truth comes from logic or reason and that any other communication represents, at best, a short-cut or an attempt to make the experience more palatable. Put another way, we believe that reason=truth and art=emotions.This is, as I have said, a mistake—for a number of reasons. First, it is a mistake because it fails to recognize that there is truth which cannot be reduced to rational propositions (if there weren't then the cosmos would be fundamentally reduce-able to a perfect mathematical model and I don't accept that it is), it amounts to a claim that our constructed models of reality can be tested for "truth" but gives up on the possibility of a more basic, more absolute Truth against which those models might be judged. Second, it is a mistake because it overvalues our capacity to recognize bad reasoning. If the recent elections and the ensuing brouhaha over legitimate and illegitimate news sources, or the crisis of internet polarization and sloppy reasoning have taught us anything, it is that the Dunning-Kruger effect and confirmation bias are far more powerful that any 18th century rationalist or empiricist would ever want to accept; a guard who can fulfill her duties is a great thing, but putting our trust in a guard whom we know to be only semi-competent at best is simple foolishness. And the fact of the matter is that with all of our careful reasoning and critical thinking, the rational guards on our minds are semi-competent at best. Wisdom demands that we recognize our own rational limitations and work within them rather than pretending that our critical faculties are able to perfectly sort good reasoning from bad.

And yet we can't and won't simply throw in the towel and accept an existence wherein we stop evaluating all experience for Truth. 

This, too, is a book of Truth

I want to suggest that we are left with only one option. We need to allow it all. We need the artists, the poets, the painters, the singers, and the story tellers with all their silver lies and golden Truths. And we need the Mathematicians and the physicists with their known unknowns and their limited models of reality. The quest for Truth cannot be avoided—to avoid it is to surrender—and the fight for Truth cannot be restricted to a single arena—that would be to invite summary defeat from another arena. Our approach must be mixed, it must be complex, and it must be alive. We need to ask about the aesthetics of our proofs and much as we ask about the logic of our dance. We are whole persons living in a real world. No partial measures will do.

The Justice of Horton

Do you think that there is a way that things are supposed to be?  I don't mean a belief in the "best of all possible worlds" that Voltaire liked to make fun of, I mean a sort of basic sense that some things are just right and that sometimes a situation is just wrong?

This is an elephant on a tree

One of my favorite children's books is Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss (one of my favorite children's authors). In Horton our hero, Horton the Elephant, agrees to "egg sit" for a lazy bird (Mayzie) who promptly takes off and vacations on the beach for several months leaving Horton on her nest. We see him suffer through increasingly unpleasant trials beginning with bad weather and going on to abandonment by his friends, abduction (along with the egg, nest, and tree) by hunters and finally abject humiliation. Throughout it all Horton says to himself "I meant what I said and I said what I meant; an elephant's faithful one hundred percent" and sticks to his commitment. Then, (spoiler alert) at the climax, Mayzie stumbles upon him and the egg hatches. Seeing that it is hatching, Mayzie tries to re-claim her egg but when it breaks open, out flies... you guessed it... an elephant-bird! And Horton get to go home with a child while Mayzie pouts in a corner and everyone exclaims that "It should be, it should be, it SHOULD be like that!" - A sentiment with which I heartily concur. It should be like that.

Hard work should be rewarded, bad people should get their comeuppance, children should outlive their parents, the good should thrive. And all of that and so much more; all of the should be like is what I mean by the word "justice".

I think that the idea of justice has been misunderstood for a while now, especially in American culture. It is not so much that we have gotten it completely wrong as that we have narrowed it too much. Most people I talk to want to use "justice" as a synonym for "fairness" or, if they see a distinction, they will treat justice as a more powerful or deeper version of fairness. Thus someone might say "It wasn't only fair, it was just". But while fairness is often a part of justice, it is by no means the whole of it. To be fair is merely to treat everyone equally, to be just is to treat each person and every thing the way that person or thing should be treated. And that treatment will only be fair (though technically "fair" has experienced its own unfortunate devolution over the last several hundred years) if it treats them all equally.

Totally didn't see this coming

Here is where the practical problem comes into play: it is only possible to be just if you have some idea of how thing ought to be. To be just is to say "this should be like that" and to then go about trying to make it so. Neither a determinist (who thinks that all things already are as they have to be), a modernist/non-supernaturalist (who has no grounds for claiming that there is any such thing as should be only what, in fact, is) nor a post-modernist (who doesn't think anyone has a right to talk about what should be for anyone else and besides how sure are they that there really is a this or a that  anyway) can be just.

Now please don't misunderstand me, I am not saying that those folks can't be virtuous, kind, fair or egalitarian. They are often all of those things. In fact, they are often very just - I would point especially to the social gospel of the liberal Christian, modernist movement of the last century and the "social justice" movement so popular among contemporary post-moderns as wonderful and encouraging examples of people loving justice. What I am saying is that those worldviews give them no grounds for believing in or even really understanding justice. To the extent that they have it, they have it by tradition, by uncritical conscience or by divine Grace.
  But it takes a pre-modern (eastern or western) to get justice.

Socrates

A little history: the basic concept of justice in the west seems to have originated with Socrates. Plato's most famous book The Republic is entirely concerned with the question "what is justice" (the Greek word was dikaiosune). After quickly demolishing arguments that justice is "the will of the strong over the weak" (a view that stayed pretty well dead until Nietzsche came along) and the slightly stronger claim that it is "doing right by friends and harm to enemies", Socrates spends most of the book defending the idea that to be just is to act and become in accordance with the way things are, or put another way, to love the good and conform to it. (He then has a lot of ideas about how that can be accomplished and a really unfortunate extended-analogy about the soul and the city-state which has given rise to some misconceptions about his political views; but I won't get into all that right now). But from then, right up until the enlightenment, the idea that justice was conforming to the way things should be was the dominant understanding of the west.

Over in the east, Lao Tzu seems to have independently come up with the same basic idea. He was able to speak much more simply about "life in conformity with the Tao". Confucius then watered it down a bit by trying to get really practical by providing elaborate descriptions of what different 'tao-conforming' lives would look like. In both cases, eastern and western pre-modernism seems to have independently agreed that justice requires first an understanding of how things should be and then an attempt to conform oneself to that understanding.

Lao Tzu

Finally, in the contemporary world, justice is most clearly talked about by natural law and virtue ethicist (who are mostly going back to the pre-modern thinkers). Most notable would be CS Lewis who showed, rather convincingly, in The Abolition of Man that belief in the natural law, the Tao, is necessary for humanity to remain human. The love of that Tao and the attempt to conform to it is justice.

But why is justice so important? Well, a sense of justice implies a vision of how things should be, and without that, I can't help but think that there will be a great deal of drifting about without any real direction. Quite practically, it is justice that tells me that I cannot do just anything to accomplish a good goal, for a world in which one problem is fixed and I have been corrupted by a terrible act (even in the service of a good goal) is not the way things should be. It is justice that tells me things can be better and it is justice that urges me to make them better. It is by justice that I recognize injustice. Justice is the eye of the conscience; what I do blindly by conscience is illuminated by justice.

Justice is  Badass