Screwtape's Modernity and the Failure of Objective Belief

At the beginning of C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, the demon Screwtape castigates his nephew Wormwood for trying to get his patient to read texts that argue against the existence of God.

That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. but what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily 'true' or 'false,' but as 'academic' or 'practical,' 'outworn' or 'contemporary,' 'conventional' or 'ruthless.'

...

By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. (Letter I)

From this perspective, modernity created a major shift in how people think. Beforehand, it was assumed that there was an objective truth in which if something is true and we find ourselves living lives that are not keeping with that truth, we must accept that we are living the Wrong way and must change ourselves so that we live according to the Truth. We moderns, though, have been trained to accept things as true from a certain point of view. Something can be true for some people and in some places and not in others. 

The practical implication of this for anyone in Christian or any other kind of outreach is that you can have the best arguments in the world and it still will not help until you have forced the person to acknowledge that there really are objective truths that we must accept in ways that affect how we live. It is not even that people will disagree with you. Instead, as subjectivists, people will say that your beliefs are very nice for you and they are glad you find them meaningful but they are going to go live their lives as they wish to find their own meaning. 

This is what lies behind Lewis' famous Trilemma. His point was not that Jesus was God, which Lewis certainly believed, but that you cannot think of him simply as a great moral teacher like Socrates to be admired but not necessarily listened to on any particular issue. Either Jesus was someone much greater or much less than Socrates. If he is worth paying attention to at all, he must become the basis for your life.   

Think of the theory that smoking causes lung cancer.  It makes no sense to talk about the elegance or the noble sentiments of the theory. Either the theory is true in which case I had better quit smoking at the risk of my health or it is a wicked conspiracy to destroy innocent tobacco companies. In the same sense, we might say that either a certain nice Jewish preacher arose from the dead in first-century CE Judea and therefore, I need to radically change my life for the sake of my immortal soul or Christianity is one of the greatest and most diabolical frauds in all of human history. Modern secularism has gained its dominant position not because it was able to convince people that Christianity was the latter but because it was able to convince people that the question of Christian truth did not really matter, robbing Christianity of its ability to have a meaningful say in how even nominal Christians lived their lives.  

The advantage of this interpretation of modern secularism is that it calls attention to the fact that what has happened has not been the masses of people reading science books and becoming convinced atheists. The Enlightenment caused very few people, outside of intellectual circles, to reject Christianity and that nineteenth-century Europe was actually a more religious place than medieval Europe. Atheism, outside of academic circles, remains rare even as religious observance continues to plummet. Most people remain vaguely spiritual even as they eschew the notion of belonging to a formal religion that can demand specific behaviors. 

My problem with Lewis' theory of secularism is that I am skeptical about the claim that pre-modernity was some kind of rationalist golden age in which it was possible to convince people to change their lives through argument because they believed that certain things were True. It was ancient and not modern rhetoric that invented the concept of pathos, that people should emotionally connect to your argument, and made it critical for ending speeches. The purpose of engaging people's pathos is precisely because, apparently even in the ancient world, you could have a logically unassailable argument and people would still say that this is all very nice but has nothing to do with them and go on their way. 

The preaching orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans came into existence in the early thirteenth-century precisely because even in medieval Christendom there were plenty of Christians who needed to be "converted" to Christianity. While the Dominicans were formed to argue with actual heretics like the Albigensian Cathars, the Franciscans, when they were not seeking martyrdom in the Islamic world, must have been trying to reach nominal Christians content to live their lives untainted by Christian practice. Clearly, the need to bridge the divide between theoretical belief and actual practice is not a recent problem.      

Furthermore, I fail to see certainty in belief as necessary for changing one's life or even for giving it up. Socrates, certainly not a modern, was a martyr to philosophy as a way of life. He did not die because he was absolutely convinced of any particular doctrine as to the nature of the soul or of justice. On the contrary, Socrates was a man of doubts, whose claim to knowledge was that he knew that he knew nothing. There is a critical tension at the heart of Socrates in that he was the ultimate non-dogmatist and yet he died for philosophy. The mystery at the heart of the Platonic dialogues is what is this philosophy that Socrates died for. Philosophy is this process of asking questions and to love the question more than any answer you might find. This can become a way of life to the extent that to be forced to live any other way would be death. 

This balance between taking ideas seriously and claiming absolute objective knowledge applies to followers of monotheistic religions as well. An inescapable part of monotheism is that God is distinct from the world which makes him fundamentally unknowable. Yet we are commanded to know this God. If you are a Jew or a Muslim, you try to know God by studying his Law and following his commandments. If you are a Christian, you try to know God through the person of Jesus. 

All three of these religions developed rationalist and mystical traditions in dialogue and confrontation with each other. Both religious rationalism and mysticism are premised on God's unknowability. Even as mysticism holds out the hope of achieving unity with God, its starting point is that the gap is unbridgeable. True unity with God requires God to cross the divide in ways that are impossible, at least from a human perspective. One thinks of Christian writers like the author of Cloud of Unknowing, Nicholas of Cusa, and St. John of the Cross. All of these were thinkers whose starting part for their theology was that God is someone fundamentally outside human understanding. As with Socrates' knowledge of his own ignorance, one comes to know God and develop a relationship with him, paradoxically, only by recognizing that one does not know him.     

The fact that God is outside our understanding means that any attempt to talk about God is going to be imprecise. This means that any statement we make about God at best is going only to be true from a certain point of view. Certain ways of talking about God and relating to him are going to be appropriate for certain people and not for others. Even a seemingly innocuous statement like God commands is riddled with theological pitfalls.

Modernity did not create Averoeism with its doctrine that there can be multiple religious truths, one for the masses and another for philosophers. Similarly, it was Boccaccio from the Renaissance who gave us the legend of the three rings. The message being that Jews, Christians, and Muslims should concern themselves less with which religion is ultimately True and more with building the best version of their religion they can. The idea being to let divine providence reveal itself in its own time.   

Long before the advent of modernity, if people were going to be religious there was always going to be something more at work than simply believing with absolute certainty that their religion was True and could be translated into clear do or don't actions. Living your life, religiously or otherwise, means having faith. At a certain point, you need to act in a way that implies certain knowledge even though that certainty does not exist.             

An Introduction and a Word of Explanation: A Response to Some Comments (Part II)

Part I

The place, I suspect, were I part ways with most of those writing comments is that I am a committed theist, even if it is a very abstract deity, and desire to come to terms with Him. I do not claim to be able to prove that this deity exists in any ultimate sense. I accept his existence as a more reasonable alternative to not having such a being. (I am willing to elaborate on this in future posts, but I expect that many of my readers will just have to agree to disagree with me on this one.)

When talking about secularism it is important to distinguish between several different issues. There are many things that may be labeled as secular that I support. For example, I support the secularization of the political sphere. I have no interest to go back to kings presiding over Church councils to decide religious dogma. This view of the political as something divorced from religion owes itself to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as much as it does to John Locke and John Stuart Mill. I also have no interest in trying to force my own morality on other people. I am a Libertarian and I take an even more extreme stance on this issue than most liberals. I go so far as to support the legalization of prostitution and of all drugs, including hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine. I believe that a person should have the right to control one’s body so not only do I believe in legalized abortion but I also believe that people should be able to sell their kidneys and other bodily organs on the open market. I am even willing to go along with gay marriage. (I also believe that private businesses should have the right to practice discrimination but we can save that for later.) I am perfectly willing to live my own simple puritanical life in a fully hedonistic world. This would again be an example of the Augustinian side to me. I expect the world to be sinful and corrupt so I am going to live my life and not worry too much about everyone else.

This political secularism is very different from social secularism and secular moral values. While there are many social and ethical issues that we agree on and can work together like fighting poverty and racism. That being said, there are ethical differences between me and much of the secular world. For me, sexuality is an ethical issue. Sex, in of itself, is ethically problematic since it involves physically taking someone and using their body as a means to your own pleasure. (I hope to further delve into this issue in later posts) I would no more do anything to enable and encourage unmarried teenagers to have sex than I would to help them in acts of racism and intolerance that cause no physical harm to others.

There is a type of secularism that I find attractive and is where I would go if I ever decided to abandon Judaism, theistic ethical humanism. To believe in God as the creator of the laws of nature and the giver of moral law and to attempt to relate to him particularly through living an ethical life that advances the human race. This may be a more accurate description of my theology than Orthodox Judaism. (Why I remain an Orthodox Jew and do not take this option is an issue for a different post.) This brand of secularism would maintain the same moral standards as any formal religion and would still value ritual, whilst doing away with the dogma of religion; it would be a religion of reason.

Be that as it may, I choose to operate within the context of Orthodox Judaism and to relate to my theoretical deity through the prism of Orthodox Judaism. More than the Bible, this means the rabbinic tradition. As with most traditions, this is not a coherent whole but a stream with many different branches. I try to make the decisions as to what I accept not out a sense of what is most convenient for me but with an eye to defending what I see as the best of the tradition. A big part of this is that I submit myself to religious authorities and recognize that the buck stops with them. They may get it right they may get it wrong, but someone has to make a decision.

As long as I remain within Orthodox Judaism I am going to make a serious effort to keep to Jewish practice to the best of my understanding. So for example, even when I am at the HCCO banquet and I see no other Orthodox Jews around, I am not going to sample the salmon or the chocolate chip cookies even though one could make a good case that they are kosher from the perspective of the Bible. For me, kosher is a way that I can relate to God with every bite of food that I eat. I am also a Kantian so I am going to keep those rules of my own making and am not about to cheat on those rules even if it is for a small thing of little consequences. Being consistent and true to one’s own rules is something of supreme value.

Fighting the Whig Narrative in the Classroom: A Modest Proposal

When we last talked about the Whig narrative, I said that attacking the Whig narrative could be useful as a way to fight secularism. I offer, here, a possible way to go about this.

Since the Whig narrative is a historical issue, the first and most obvious place to go after it is within the confines of history and how it is taught to the public, particularly in classrooms. Judging from my experience of talking to non-historians, the fact that historians as a whole have rejected the Whig narrative is not something most people are aware of. On the contrary, they take it as a given that the history that constitutes the Whig narrative is a fact. The blame for this must be placed on the doorstep of grade school history teachers and textbooks, the source of most people’s knowledge of history. When I was in school my teachers taught what essentially amounted to the Whig narrative and I went to religious schools. I remember one teacher in high school, and this was an otherwise excellent history teacher, openly connecting what she was teaching to her being a deist. I take it as an operational assumption that the situation in public schools is if anything worse; particularly considering the demand to teach multiculturalism and tolerance for which the Whig narrative and its whole line of reasoning are quite suitable.

This situation is analogous to that of evolution. Despite the fact that evolution is an accepted fact by the scientific community, including those scientists who are theists, evolution is not accepted by the general public to the same degree. One can still reject evolution in polite company without having one's sanity questioned. This situation was made manifest in the recent courtroom battle over Intelligent Design. The scientific community has made an effort to reach out and make its case to the public. I suggest that historians and those interested in history make a similar effort.

Secularists, joined by many people of faith, rightfully and successfully challenged the teaching of Creationism and Intelligent Design as a means of selling a religious ideology. I suggest that all people of faith follow this example and challenge the direct or indirect use of the Whig narrative in the teaching of history. The Whig narrative amounts to nothing more than the teaching of secular ideology and passing it off as history.

To give an example: when I was in fifth grade my teacher opened up her discussion of the Middle Ages by telling us: during the Middle Ages people decided that the Greeks had discovered everything that there was to know about the world and that no further study was needed; people, during the Middle Ages, were therefore content to simply study the works of the Greeks. At age eleven I was quite well-read in history and knew enough to realize that this teacher was not particularly qualified to teach history. I did not yet know enough, though, to challenge her on this particular issue.

As a parent, you could call such a teacher and, in a polite and friendly manner, ask her to explain how she could say such a thing in light of all the various attempts by the Church to crack down on Greek thought. What about the 1210 ban on various teachings of Aristotle, or Pope Gregory IX’s attempt to curtail the Aristotelian curriculum taught at the University of Paris? How about Bishop Etienne Tempier, who, in 1277, issued a condemnation of 219 Aristotelian theses? (We will deal with this in greater detail later.) You could then offer the teacher a way out by giving her the chance to correct herself in front of her students. Hopefully, you could leave this conversation on friendly terms. The teacher could acknowledge that she is ill-equipped to teach history. You could tell her that you do not hold it against her, considering all the other subjects she has to teach as well, and recommend a decent medievalist for her to read; maybe someone like Norman Cantor, whose work is quite accessible for a lay audience.

If the teacher chooses to be obstinate then the fun begins and we drag this teacher in front of a board and if that fails a courtroom, to have her fired. Contact a professional medieval historian; you should have no trouble finding someone willing and able to explain to a lay audience why this teacher is incompetent to teach history. Gather a large collection of statements by the teacher that are Whig in nature and historically incorrect. Hopefully, you will also manage to catch her pontificating to her students about her secular beliefs, which would allow you to place them side by side with her Whig statements. The most obvious way to do this would be to have your child take good notes and record her classes.

If, and this is quite likely, she was teaching based on a specific curriculum then we go after the curriculum. This is, of course, the real goal of such an exercise. While going after individual teachers may be fun, it is inefficient. The goal must be to change how history is taught right at the source, the curriculum. The Whig narrative can stand only through bureaucratic inertia. The moment the Whig narrative is hauled out to stand on its own merits it falls apart like rotten timber and not even the most ardent secularist can defend it.

Mr. Enlightenment Meet Meom Loez

I was walking around the gallery in downtown Columbus last night when I got handed a pamphlet titled: "What is Secular Humanism?" written by Paul Kurtz. These secular humanists have to be careful; someone might confuse them with the Jesus freaks handing out pamphlets. According to the pamphlet, "secular humanism rejects supernatural accounts of reality; but it seeks to optimize the fullness of human life in a naturalistic universe." (pg. 9) To be a secular humanist you cannot resort to anything beyond material nature in order to explain the nature of reality so anyone who talks about gods or metaphysics should not count as a secular humanist. 

The pamphlet gives a history of secular humanism. Its heritage goes all the way back to Confucian China. From China, we move to the Carvaka materialist movement in ancient India and finally to ancient Greece, which produced such great secular humanists as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The glorious tradition of secular humanism now moves to the Romans who in addition to Lucretius produced the stoic philosophers Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Then came those Dark Ages “during which faith dominated Western culture and humans looked vainly outside of themselves to a deity for salvation.” (pg. 11) Things turned around though once we got into the Renaissance and people started to turn away from the bible. The great scholars of the humanist movement were Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Erasmus. I do not know much about Confucian philosophy, but last I checked it involved metaphysics, various sorts of gods, ancestor worship, and the belief that the emperor was the Son of Heaven. One wonders if Kurtz has ever bothered to actually read Greek philosophy, particularly things like the Platonic dialogue, Timaeus. If Timaeus is secular humanism then so is the book of Genesis. The Epicureans may have been legitimate materialists, but the stoics were not. As for the Renaissance, one of the main things it was a renaissance of was biblical scholarship. How much did Erasmus need to write about the bible in order for him not to count as not being interested in it? Obviously a lot. I wonder do Martin Luther or John Calvin count as being interested in the bible? As for Ficino and Pico della Mirandola being secular humanists, I never knew that spreading Kabbalistic teachings was a hallmark of a secular humanistic mind-frame. 

According to the commentary Meom Loez, Aristotle, right before he died, wrote a letter to Alexander the Great in which he expressed his regret for his “erroneous” teaching and that he wished that he could suppress and destroy his own books. For you see Aristotle recognized that the God of Israel was the true God and Judaism the true religion. We need to make a rule that if you wish to distort the views of past thinkers you should have to at least make up a decent deathbed conversion story. You should not be able to just have them believe the exact opposite of what they actually wrote.