A Record of Prodigious Failure

It is a record of prodigious failure:

(1) the promise to close Gitmo in the first year -- failed

(2) the 800 billion dollar stimulus package intended to fund shovel-ready jobs and to fix both unemployment and a staggering economy -- failed

(3) the promise to provide the most transparent administration in history -- failed

(4) the promise to push the reset button regarding our relationship with Russia -- failed

(5) the promise to set US-Islamic relations on a better footing than under Bush -- failed

(6) the promise to restore American prestige in the world to new heights -- failed

(7) the promise to reduce the income gap between rich and poor in America -- failed

(8) the promise to use the Arab Spring to promote better regimes and relations in the Arab middle east – failed

(9) the promise to be the post-partisan and post-racial president who healed America and closed its divisions – failed

(10) the promise to reduce the deficit and the national debt -- failed

(11) the promise not to raise taxes on the poor and the middle class -- failed

(12) the promise to pass a budget, any budget, any year -- failed

(13) the promise not to let Detroit go bankrupt -- failed

(14) the promise to put all pending legislation on line for at least five days prior to voting so that the American people can read it and debate it -- failed.

No doubt you recall your own set of Obama’s failed promises.  There are so many, it’s hard for one person to remember even the most important ones, let alone remember them all.

Where Have all the Epics Gone, Long Time Passing?

       I often ask my students why the 20th century, and now the 21^st, produced no great epic poems.  I have yet to receive an answer, any answer.  After 30 years of such questioning, I suspect I never will.

       So here, in pedagogical desperation, I do what I seldom do:  I give them the answer they never gave me.  It is not my own; it comes from Russell Kirk, as does so much that explains what’s wrong with the world.

       Great literature, Kirk insists in his “English Letters in an Age of Boredom,” habitually hovers around four enduring themes:  religion, heroism, love, and human variety.

       But, he says, (1) a society, like ours, which has lost its religious convictions and its piety, denies itself the first theme.  (2) A society that denigrates true greatness denies itself the second.  Think about them what you wish, girl-smitten vampires are not heroes.  (3) A society that takes love for nothing more than carnal gratification denies itself the third.  (4) A society that conceives of humans as little more than accidental, soulless, interchangeable, cogs in a mechanistic nexus denies itself the fourth.  “The springs of the imagination thus are dried up,” Kirk pronounces truly, tragically, and finally.  In that springless desert, not even satire can flourish or long exist, for with the loss of the great themes and imagination comes the loss even of mockery.

       There, in one paragraph, is why great literature died in our hands.  We stopped believing the right things.  We stopped asking the right questions.  In our hands, the perennial issues and the perennial questions to which they gave rise all died.  We have the opposite of a Midas touch.  What we handle turns not to gold, or even to garbage, but to ghosts.

       You can expect nothing else from the culture of death.

       No cure for it can be found, save the Word of Life, which we meticulously have banned from the public square, the academy, the laboratory, and the arena.

       Wyndham Lewis, it turns out, despite his pessimism and complaints, was too optimistic.  He thought human reason might save us.  He never asked what, or Who, might save reason.

       Lewis forgot that while we human creatures are capable of reason, because of our selfish desires and unruly appetites, we are rarely ever reasonable.  Thinking is hard work; thinking rationally harder still.  We are not at all well suited, by birth or by habit, either to hard work or to thinking, much less to both.

       Kirk could have gone on, could have continued his litany of epic killers.  Had he done so, he might have included impatience, the sort bred from years spent planted squarely before a television set, years during which we acquired the habits and rhythms of sitcoms and soap operas – thereby inexorably acquiring a taste only for problems that can be raised and solved in 30 minutes minus commercials, problems like a torn prom dress or backing your dad’s car into a tree.  For us, if it can’t be handled in 22 minutes, it’s too long and too difficult.  Reduced to those shrunken dimensions, Milton’s epic panoply (or Dante’s) becomes a mere screenplay, a script, replete with artificial laugh lines, clichés, and crudities, wherein inane anatomical utterances replace eloquence and wherein scatological shock replaces beauty, truth, and goodness, things far more difficult to conceive, write, produce, and to communicate than garish, slapstick stunts and juvenile vulgarity.  For shrunken sensibilities like ours, the word “epic” means two hours of TV watching for three nights in row.  On any or all of those three nights, thinking is optional, hardly required.

       That shrunken sensibility stands behind what I hear too often from my students.  For example, while discussing Beowulf in an English literature survey course, and the fact that while sometimes you slay the monster, in the end the monster slays you, I asked Jen, a most delightful sorority girl, what monsters she faced.  She said:  “Every day, when I get up, I don’t know what clothes to wear.”

       Somewhere in the 20^th century, the scope of battle shrunk; the monsters withered; and so, apparently, did we.

Froude's Conservatism

“It was not for me to solve the problems which surrounded religion and morality.  Like my own existence, they had their roots in mystery.  I had been born into the Church of England, and the Church of England was an institution of the realm.  It had grown into its peculiar form as the law and the constitution had grown, under historical conditions and influences.  It did not pretend to perfection.  Like the law, it had its local peculiarities.  But the interpretation which it offered of the mysteries of the universe, if perhaps mistaken in some points, was the growth of generations, the product of the thoughts of men as good and wise as had ever lived.  It was immeasurably more likely to be true than the speculations of a single individual, while, as a guide of life, it would be time to ask for fuller light when one had lived up, as one never could, to the rule it offered . . . The [Roman Catholic] Church must have strangely neglected her educational duties if she has allowed a generation to grow up in England, Scotland, Germany who had broken away from her in indignation.  The snakes which had stung her had been bred in her own bosom and nourished on her own breast.”

W. H. Dunn, James Anthony Froude, (Oxford:  at the Clarendon Press, 1961) pp. 169, 170

Two Roads Diverged in a Mental Wood, and That Has Made All The Difference

            The fundamental difference between the Christian worldview and all secular worldviews is reducible to this:  God is there and He is not silent.  Because He exists, and because He has spoken meaningfully and understandably to the mind and senses He both designed and then validated by his revelation to them, we now have a well-grounded system in which facts and knowledge are metaphysically warranted, and in which learning can begin.  We can arrive not only at utilitarian technique and personal or cultural preferences, but at the knowledge and wisdom that relates all things to their rightful and transcendent point of reference.  By knowing which direction is north, you know all other directions.

            In this case, north is personal, indeed Tri-Personal, and not the ultimately impersonal, uncaring, and doomed universe of mindless matter to which students taught in a secularist context must adjust.  The difference between these two worldviews could hardly be greater.  One world is the cosmic home made for us by our gracious and self-revealing Father, a world in which history has meaning, purpose, and direction, a world in which Providence oversees all, and leads the universe and its inhabitants to their proper destiny.  The other is a hostile world unaware of, and therefore indifferent to, both its and our very existence -- an existence forfeit to ultimate destruction, a destruction to which nihilism is the only realistic and appropriate response.  One worldview teaches students that they are everlasting souls of inestimable worth; the other that they are soulless lumps of momentarily animate matter, part and parcel of a dying and meaningless world, and that whatever they might do or think, they are destined to share its inevitable doom.  Those are the options.  If the Christian worldview is true, then secular learning is not education but an exercise in nihilistic disorientation.  If, as Christians say, Christ is the Lord of all things, then nothing is properly secular.  Anything pursued in a secular fashion is, therefore, at least partly, if not wholly, mispursued.  Whether we speak of the academy, the marketplace, the public square, the laboratory, or the arena, all human endeavors, to be rightly understood and rightly pursued, must be related back to Him, back the God who, in Christ, walked our roads, breathed our air, and spoke our language, the God in whose light we now see all things.  If the Christian worldview is true, then secular education is a terrible disservice to those in whom we inculcate its impotent methods of intellection and assessment, methods that, from the beginning, banish the Transcendent as either unimportant or unnecessary.  Conversely, if Christ is not the rightful Lord of literally all things, then Christian education is a deep and wide delusion on the grandest scale because, if matter is all there is, then matter is all that matters.  In the canyon between these two possibilities, neutrality is not possible, despite modernist and postmodernist pretenses to the contrary.  One simply cannot escape the fundamental importance of the question Christ asked his disciples:  “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8: 29).  The secularist worldview answers, in effect, “Not much,” or “No one worth considering.”  To the Protestant, the answer is “You are the One by Whom, and for Whom all things were made.  You are the glue that holds the universe together” (Col. 1: 16, 17).  Upon their differing answers to that question hinges everything.

Compared to the Protestant view of reality, the secularist vision begins from a very different point, and it yields massively different conclusions.  That assertion, of course, is not new with me.  In the words of renowned atheist Bertrand Russell:

“That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noon-day brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.  Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built . . . Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow doom falls pitiless and dark.  Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little days . . . proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate for a moment his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.”[1]

            Russell is right:  The secularist worldview is the death not only of optimism, but also of any final distinction between good and evil.  To such a world as they presuppose, only despair can be an appropriate response.  Only death awaits us, the cosmic rendering of what Milton called “ever-during dark” (Paradise Lost 3: 45).  We will, according to Russell, finally be trampled under the heel of the same mindless power from which the world itself arose.  You end where you began.

Whether their secularist teachers intend it or not, the more astute students deduce from all this that life is a cosmic joke without a punch line and that they are part and parcel of a universe on its way to ruin.   They recognize the profound difference between living and learning under the love of a God who would, and did, die for us, on the one hand, and full-orbed, cosmic nihilism, on the other.  They discover that the differences between the Protestant and secularist worldviews are neither incidental nor neutral; they are antithetical.  They notice that ideas have consequences.  They learn that they must adjust to ultimate reality because ultimate reality will not adjust to them.  They learn that Allan Bloom was right about their thoughtless teachers:  Those teachers are the silly purveyors of what he identified as nihilism with a happy ending.  They paint the world with the blackest set of presuppositions and consequences, yet they think that a smiley face sticker on a spelling test can still be appropriate.  By contrast, the Protestant worldview yields an educational philosophy based upon the revelation of God in which – and only in which, things as diverse as humanity and chemistry find their proper place, neither too high nor too low.

            By emphasizing the profound differences between these worldviews, I am not ignoring or belittling what theologians call “common grace,” the enabling grace given to all God’s creatures, the grace by which we all benefit in countless ways, and which links us together in various levels of blessedness.  While real and available to all, common grace neither overlooks nor plays down the ultimate differences between competing worldviews.  Rather, common grace helps us to understand that things that are similar in some ways are not, therefore, ultimately alike.  Simply because the Christian and non-Christian worldviews intersect at various points, or simply because they seem similar in some ways, does not mean that that which divides them is insignificant.  The doctrine of common grace says that similarities between the Christian worldview and others are real but not fundamental.  We must remember that those superficial likenesses appear before the backdrop of the ultimate differences delineated above.  Those who either do not understand or do not believe in common grace are likely to elevate superficial likenesses to ultimate likenesses, with the result that absolute differences are shrunken, even willfully dismissed.

In light of those inescapable ultimate differences, things like the content of the periodic table or the notion that four plus four equals eight, do not have, and cannot have, the same significance for secular thought as for Christian thought, even though their use might be roughly parallel.  Just as epistemological warrant arises only from the God who makes known and who transcendently validates the use of our mind and senses, so also does authentic understanding (or wisdom), which comes from knowing the source, the purpose, the nature, and the end of all things.  That higher, more synthetic, knowledge is not the same as merely efficient manipulation toward a desired end, or as mastery of technique.  Because thinking persons seek to understand the real nature of all things and the relationship that ought to exist between those things, they cannot divorce the reality of, say, atomic weight from the source and proper use of atoms and from our knowledge of it.  The fact that mathematical functions are available to all does not mean that the significance and uses to which those functions are properly put are also equally available, regardless of the context in which we wish to use them or from which they derive.  

You must make a choice:

Either justice and grace are at the root of the world, or else indifference on the grandest possible scale.  We are faced with two very different worldviews as the basis for education and, inescapably, we offer them to our students.  One worldview has the best of all possible outcomes, the other the worst.  An omnipotent and omniscient God is the only sufficient basis for optimism, even in the worst of times; but mindless, indifferent matter at the core of all reality is the death of optimism even in the best of times.  If part of education is to help students know their world and learn how to adjust their responses to it accordingly, then ultimate despair is the only reasonable response to the secular worldview taught in public schools, where the Gospel of John is banished but Heather Has Two Mommies is lauded.  To think things in line with the secularist worldview and yet to inculcate the baseless optimism so characteristic of contemporary education is simply to make Pollyanna the patron saint of secular indoctrination and to sacrifice the minds of our children on her altar, the Moloch of postmodern learning.  Secular educators must either adjust their teaching to their worldview, or else get a different worldview.  Failure to do so is a crime of the intellect and an injury to the next generation.

The road forks; you must go right or left.

---

[1]Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1925), pp 47-48, 56-57

Getting Knowledge, or The Difference Between Certainty and Certitude.

         I must do now what scholars rarely do, but should do:  I must define my terms.  That way, even if you disagree with what I think, at least you'll know what I mean.

         "Knowledge" is justified belief.  That is, knowledge is consent to a true idea because the reasons for it are sound.  Consent to things true for the wrong reasons, or for no reasons whatever, is not knowledge but luck -- dumb luck.

         "Truth" is the agreement of our ideas with reality.  If our ideas comport with how things really are, they are true.  If they do not, they are false.

         "Objective" is when the object under review controls your thoughts about it. "Subjective" is when the subject doing the investigation controls his or her own thoughts about the object.  "Objective" receives from the object; "subjective" imposes upon the object.

         "Certitude" is how sure we feel about a thing.

         "Certainty" is how sure a thing is in itself, regardless of how we feel about it. 

         Regarding the last two notions, I need to say more.

         Having great amounts of certitude does not make a thing certain.  Having no certitude about a thing does not make it uncertain.  We often mistakenly think so because we confuse these two concepts, which I'd like to keep separate.  Because we conflate or confuse these concepts, we sometimes do things that increase our certitude about an idea and think that by doing so we have increased its certainty when we have not.  Certitude is something about us; certainty is something about it.  That's another way of saying that it's possible to feel quite sure about things that are utterly false and unsure about things that are objectively true.  Think here about all the centuries we thought the earth was both flat and the center of the universe.  To our detriment, we sometimes confuse and conflate things that are different, things like certitude and certainty.  Our task, in part, is to keep separate things separate.  Certainty and certitude are two such things.

         I think that when many persons complain about uncertainty they actually are complaining about imperfect certitude.  Therefore, when they set about trying to fix what troubles them, they do things that make them feel more certitude, but that don't really strengthen certainty.  Some appeals to authority and to infallibility strike me as just such aids-to-certitude masquerading as aids-to-certainty.  Those appeals are futile simply because we human beings cannot produce certainty.  Producing certainty is a Divine, not a human, prerogative.  Only God can make things certain, and He does so by establishing those things Himself.  What God has established is certain -- whether we know those things or not, whether we agree with those things or not, and whether we have certitude about them or not.

         Because I am a Christian and move in predominantly Christian circles, when I explain here the difference between certitude and certainty, and the way some folks strengthen the former while thinking they are strengthening the latter, two groups come to mind:  Protestants who misapply the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, and Catholics who misapply the doctrine of infallibility.  I am not here arguing against either doctrine.  I am remarking about their misuse and about the motivations that seem sometimes to lurk behind that misuse as its operative and generative principle.  (To be fair, I lay exactly the same charge, and perhaps more, against most of the scientists with whom I have ever spoken.  Indeed, I know of no group of scholars more inclined to conflate certainty and certitude than modern scientists.)

        To move one step forward:  The only good reason for believing a thing is because it's true; the only good reason for rejecting something is because it's false.  That much is simple, but not easy.  It's sometimes hard to tell which one is which, and that can be enormously unsettling.  It undermines our certitude, which makes us deeply uncomfortable.  Because we humans have a strong distaste for ambiguity, especially on the issues that are most important to us, we don't want to stay in that uncomfortable and unsettling position.  To escape it, we sometimes produce specious reasons for believing things, reasons that comfort us, but that aren't sound reasons for belief, and that don't establish certainty. 

         Short of Heaven, full certitude is probably beyond us, even if we pay close attention to Scripture, to tradition, and to the Church.  But I, for one, will not complain to God about that.  If that is the world He left us, it is enough.

         Knowing is required of us by God Himself.  We are commanded by Christ to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength (Matt. 22: 37).  When Jesus said that, He was quoting an Old Testament passage (Deut. 6: 5) -- a passage to which He added a word -- and the word He added was "mind."  Minds are for knowing, and knowing is more than repeating what we've been told or taught.  As a matter of Christian stewardship, we are to make the best use we can of our minds.  By means of them we are to know -- each of us.  Our task is to know things as they really are, and not how we'd like them to be, because how we'd like them to be does not make them more certain but simply gives us a heart-warming sense of certitude.  As regards you and me, this shortcoming is not the shortcoming primarily of others.  We need to see it as our own and to guard against it diligently.   You will know yourself in greatest danger of opting for certitude (how you feel) rather than for certainty (how God has actually worked) in those moments when your system is under attack.

         To quote Tennyson:

"Our little systems have their day;

They have their day and cease to be:

They are but broken lights of thee,

And thou, O Lord, art more than they." 

   

Freedom, Government, and Your Soul

Some years ago, in an Introduction to Political Thought course I was teaching, while we were discussing the American Constitution, I asked my 29 students if they would rather be free or safe.  All but one chose safety.  Monica, the lone dissenter, a girl who wore black to class every day, chose freedom.

When I asked her why, she said, “Unless you are free, you can never be safe.”

She was exactly right, of course.  Hers was an insight lost on too many contemporary Americans, who would much rather be safe than free.  For safety and security, they would willingly surrender to the nanny state all or part of nearly every freedom they have.  The nanny state is quite willing to provide for them in every way, from health care, to education, to housing, to retirement, to food subsidies -- as if government could live your life for you, and fulfill all your moral and personal responsibilities in your stead.  All government requires in return is that you sacrifice your independence and your inalienable responsibilities, which are the obverse of your inalienable rights.  (The inalienable rights that cannot be taken away imply responsibilities that cannot be forfeited or assigned.  Just as the rights are irrevocably yours; so are the obligations they entail.  If you want to keep them, rights and freedoms are challenges you must live up to.)  Government asks only that you become a permanent ward of the state, and vote in accordance with your dependency.  Too many modern Americans do not know what George MacDonald knew:  Security is a mortal’s greatest enemy.

You can never be what you were meant to be if you cede your responsibilities over to the state -- or to anything else.  To do so is to rob yourself of the chance to be yourself, to be the man or woman God intends.  He intends you to be conformed to the character of his Son, Whom no one ever accused of selling His soul to Caesar for a meal or a handful of coins, as if government were His God, bureaucrats were His bishops, and federally produced case manuals were His Bible.  Those things are not the means to freedom.  Truth is (John 8: 32).  And if you want to make free persons, you must bring them to the Truth (John 14: 6), not bind them to the state.  When governments operate as they ought, they are the protectors of freedom.  When they operate as now they often do, they are among its greatest enemies, and therefore also the enemies of sanctification and your soul.

Remember this:  Government money always comes at a price.  That price is your freedom and, therefore, your self-determination and spirituality.  If you expect to derive your security and your provisions from government and not from God or his people, then your very soul is stymied.  It was made for God, and for God only.  It cannot thrive or grow by feeding at the government trough.  Lift your eyes Higher, and your soul will follow.


P.S.  A few weeks later, after making her comment about human freedom and security, black-wearing Monica came to class dressed all white.
"Monica," I said, "you're wearing white!"
"Yeah, she replied, "I'm depressed."