Canon Fodder

One day, several years ago, I found myself looking out my living room window at an oak tree about 40 yards away. As I sipped from my cup of coffee, I stared at this tree and asked myself, why do I expect the tree to remain where it is from one second to the next? Why don’t I expect it to uproot itself and walk around, to blink in and out of existence, or to disappear altogether as I look on? I was delighted to have an answer very quickly pop into my head: my expectations for this tree come from my experience. I have seen many trees in my life, large and small and of various types, and none of them have ever behaved in such ways.

From the moment we take our first breath and throughout childhood our experiences shape our view of the world. We learn what to expect in the present and future by drawing on our experiences in the past. We learn that hot things burn and sharp things cut. We learn that electricity zaps, especially if you stick a fork in the wall outlet. (Some of us had to experience this more than once to learn the lesson.) When we find ourselves in a novel situation that our own experience does not prepare us for we turn to the experience of others to guide us. Our first days in school are very stressful, but with instruction from parents and teachers and by watching other children we learn what is expected, appropriate, and useful. We carry our view of the world and the knowledge and skills that we have acquired through experience into adulthood, where these of course continue to develop.

The transition from childhood to adulthood is one that brings increasing levels of freedom, and with it increasingly numerous and ever-more-weighty choices. Meanwhile, our lives are continually being crammed with more-and-more things, so that we feel like we have less-and-less time. On top of this – in my experience (though I’m only 28) and as I’ve heard from others – at various times which punctuate adulthood we become more reflective and begin to ask some of the deeper questions about our lives. I know that this is all true for me. This is where I find myself.

So I started asking, what’s the point of all that I think, say, do… am? What is it all for? What matters? The answer, not unlike the answer I received when staring at the tree several years ago, came rather quickly. For something to matter it has to affect something else, kind of like how the larger an object is the stronger its gravitational effect on other objects will be. The more of an effect that one thing has on another the more that thing matters. And just as we can calculate gravitational forces in physics, we can calculate the effect of a possible action using our past experience – the same experience that we have relied on since our early childhood. I have to confess that when I applied this canon to my life I was surprised at what I found.

Some things in my life matter a great deal. Relationships with family and friends are incredibly important. Being productive at work and creating a warm, safe, enjoyable home matters. Helping a stranger, listening to someone who needs to vent, and doing my small part to care for our environment all matter. Education matters. Remembering birthdays matters. Making micro-loans through Kiva, adopting a family for Christmas, building houses with Habitat for Humanity, helping caregivers to those with dementia, building birdfeeders to give to some elderly people… all of these matter. Things that are beneficial to humanity matter: love, justice and numerous virtues matter. All of these things that matter are worth devoting time and energy to.

But my life was filled with a lot of things that didn’t matter too. It was filled with a constant striving to maintain the faith that I thought was my reason for doing all of those good things mentioned above, but which turned out to be superfluous because I found them important and meaningful even without it. It was filled with hours and hours and hours spent pouring over books on theology and religion, which rarely made me a better person but often simply rearranged my opinions about esoteric trivia. It was filled with the struggle to see our church “arrive” – to figure out the magic formula that was going to fix everything and make us feel good about ourselves. Of course, experience has taught me there is no magic formula and there is no arrival. Often, it’s the “big ideas” which distract us from the smaller things that really do matter. We could feel better about ourselves and be at peace if we just dropped the extraneous things that we fret over and did more of the things that we believe matter.

Asking these tough questions about my life and reflecting on my experience has helped me to see that all we can do is discover what things really matter to us and work toward those ends. We should weigh and measure any potential action with the instrument of past experience to anticipate what actual outcome these may have on us and on others. Those that are found wanting should be set aside so that we can focus on the things that matter to us. This is what I would call my pragmatic and empirical stance. There are certainly additional dimensions to my empiricism: an important one of which is its wonderful ability to help someone as critical and skeptical as myself to decide what is true. I think I’ll save that discussion for another day.

As I was reading Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers last night I found a series of interesting passages, particularly so to me because they seemed somehow analogous to my experience of late. You see, as I have shared with my friends the changes in thinking that I have recently undergone – particularly my growing empiricism and skepticism – I have been accused on at least two occasions of becoming thoroughly “modern.” I’ve said many times that it is a mistake to equate “modern” with “bad” (or “postmodern” with “good”), but that said I’m still not exactly flattered to be connected to “modern” empiricism and skepticism – not to mention the agendas that these often serve. I find these to be full of hubris and often so foolish as to be utterly contemptable. This is in contrast to my “soft” empiricism and skepticism, which I hope is much more humble and wise, but the distinction has been lost on some friends lately.

Apparently when I say that I have become more “empirical” people think that I am becoming a logical positivist. Now let’s turn to Wittgenstein’s Poker:

To the world of philosophy, one powerful appeal of the Vienna Circle stemmed from their simple, basic tenet that there were only two types of valid statements. There were those that were true or false by virtue of the meaning of their own terms: statements such as “All bachelors are unmarried men,” equations such as “2+2=4,” and logical inferences such as “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal.” And there were those that were empirical and open to verification: “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius,” “The world is flat” (which, being open to verification, is meaningful even if false).

All other statements were, to the Circle, literally meaningless. Thus, since it was impossible to verify whether God existed, religious pronouncements were sent smartly to the intellectual rubbish bin – where metaphysics, too, consequently belonged. In with the “garbage” went pronouncements about aesthetics, ethics, and the meaning of life. (pp. 155-156)

The theory that meaningful statements have either to be analytic (where truth or falsity can be assessed by examining the meaning of the words or symbols employed – “all triangles have three sides”) or open to observation became known as “logical positivism,” and many logical positivists took the Tractatus as the Bible. (p. 158)

The Tractatus mentioned here is of course Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (which I confess I once perused while in Borders and would have purchased had I not found it completely impenetrable). This famous Circle of logical positivists was absolutley enthralled with Wittgenstein:

But it was for Wittgenstein that the movement reserved its greatest reverence. In February 1933 A. J. Ayer wrote to his friend Isaiah Berlin with his impression of the group: “Wittgenstein is a deity to them all.” Russell, according to Ayer, was seen as merely a “forerunner of the Christ [Wittgenstein].” (p. 152)

They obviously felt he was on their side. At a shallow level it must have sounded as if they were allies in the same fight. But they were wrong.

The total accuracy of the Vienna Circle’s interpretation of the Tractatus is another matter. Wittgenstein had parceled up propositions into those which can be said and those about which we must remain silent. Scientific propositions fell into the former category, ethical propositions into the latter. But what many in the Circle misunderstood was that Wittgenstein did not believe that the unsayable should be condemned as nonsense. On the contrary, the things we could not talk about were those that really mattered. Wittgenstein had spelt out the point of the Tractatus in a letter to a prominent avant-garde editor: “The book’s point is an ethical one… My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.” (pp. 158-159)

I think it will be necessary and good for me to explore in a later post the differences between the empiricism that I have embraced and other forms of it, as in logical positivism. For now, I just thought I’d share this interesting information about the Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein as a word of caution about judging things by their appearances and as an exhortation to dig deeper. Sometimes the similarities between things are only superficial.

So I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my own mortality. These thoughts were spurred by some recent health issues I’ve been having lately and all the testing my doctor has done as a result. For the record, as of the moment I’m okay and Lord willing, I expect to live for a long time yet. Still, it’s been interesting to experience just a little bit of what a truly “sick” person goes through in terms of doctor visits, procedures, etc.

Part of what has been so interesting for me is my history of responding to the sick people in my life- particularly as this pertains to my parents. My dad’s first wife died, as I understand it, from a long and arduous battle with polycystic kidneys (which my half-brother now suffers from and requires dialysis three times a week as a result of). By way of contrast, my own mother was also often sick, but much of what eventually killed her was the result of her bad choices (she was obese and a lifetime smoker, among other things). Moreover, from my perspective as a child obviously, at the time, those “bad choices” my mother kept making came at great cost to my father. My mother didn’t “feel” liking holding down a steady job, but did “feel” like spending us into bankruptcy. She didn’t “feel” like cooking or cleaning much; so my Dad had to do most of it on top of working long hours starting early in the morning each day at a physically challenging job (and doing so with a very bad hip that had to be replaced- twice). Consequently, while I may abstain from engaging in any kind of calculus regarding the “worthy poor” (see a great MPR article about this topic here), it’s extremely hard not to make judgments about the “worthy sick.” All of that, then, is simply to say that it probably wasn’t a bad thing for me to walk a mile in the shoes of a (potentially) sick person for the last little while.

Anyway, all of this thinking about sickness and mortality brought to mind this exchange from When Harry Met Sally, one of my all-time favorite movies:

Harry: When I buy a new book, I always read the last page first. That way, in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side.
Sally: That doesn’t mean you’re deep or anything. I mean, yes, basically I’m a happy person…
Harry: So am I.
Sally: …and I don’t see that there’s anything wrong with that.
Harry: Of course not. You’re too busy being happy. Do you ever think about death?
Sally: Yes.
Harry: Sure you do. A fleeting thought that drifts in and out of the transom of your mind. I spend hours, I spend days…
Sally: – and you think this makes you a better person?
Harry: Look, when the s—t comes down, I’m gonna be prepared and you’re not, that’s all I’m saying.
Sally: And in the meantime, you’re gonna ruin your whole life waiting for it.

Ironically enough I think this exchange between Harry and Sally closely mirrors the respective outlooks of my wife and I, which is pretty interesting in its own right. In any case, I’m not sure how well being ready for the s—t to come down has worked out for me; I guess you’d have to ask my wife..

…says the proverbial horse we keep beating. I actually meant to post about something else, but when I put fingers to keys, this is what came out. So be it.

So this is what my life as a purported “Christ-follower” these days looks like:

• I almost never pray, except before meals or in treacherous driving conditions.

• I almost never read the Bible, except to look up something to make a point.

• I cuss (also usually to make a point, and I’ll leave you then to make any comparisons between cussing and the Bible).

• I watch “R”- rated movies, listen to a wide range of “secular” music, and am otherwise somewhat thoroughly versed in popular culture.

• I don’t dance, but only because I can’t.

• I don’t drink beer, but only because I think it tastes gross; so I consequently do imbibe a dizzying array of “girlie drinks.”

• I don’t smoke, but again only because I think it’s gross. The same goes for tobacco in any of its other forms.

• I’m engaged in our political system- I vote “early and often,” but do so as a de facto Democrat. If given the chance, I will gladly vote for a woman or an African-American, just because I can, almost regardless of their policy stances, if only to flip the electoral “bird” at a couple centuries worth (in the U.S.) of sexist, racist politics. Having said that, I have to admit the adulterous Republican (or at least the one we all know about) intrigues me, and there’s probably a direct correlation between the degree to which this is the case and the degree to which “fundagelicans” (I just coined that- quick, somebody get me a patent. By the way, that’s the now commonly used “fundagelical”- a conflation of “Fundamentalist” and “Evangelical”- further conflated with “Republican”) are so afraid of him that they’d rather have a Mormon on the ticket (if they can’t sustain Huckabee’s recent surge, and no, Mike, at least according to this account, Mormons don’t believe that Jesus and Satan are brothers, but I digress).

• I’m part of a local congregation, but it doesn’t have any kind of formal membership, doesn’t own a building, doesn’t focus on doing a lot of programs, and doesn’t assuage my middle-class White guilt or assist me in maintaining the comfort of my middle-class White lifestyle.

According to the version of Christianity that I grew up with, all of the above would add up to me in no way being able to claim that I was in any sense a “Christian,” especially since I also don’t “speak in tongues” or otherwise manifest in any way the “life of the spirit” within. However, to my detriment I do live in a de facto suburb, shop at big box retailers, participate in free corporate advertising by wearing labeled clothes, and otherwise do my part to perpetuate all the evils of unmitigated corporate consumer capitalism, and that all by itself probably comes close to making up for all of the above in the eyes of the would be judges from my youth.

Even so, I wonder- what does this make me, and what does it mean that I still hold on to the label “Christian” inasmuch as I still find it useful even though it hardly signifies what it used to? Jared and I have been blogging a lot about identity lately (at least in a roundabout way). In your case, Jared, you’ve said that you want to live a life that is somehow about love and justice, and (as I understand you; correct me if I’m wrong) the Christian story used to serve as the basis for that life, but now no longer seems adequate, able, or maybe just necessary for it. So we’ve both seen the term “Christian” be stripped of its meaning for us, and we’re both responding to the resultant disillusionment.

Jared, you’ve talked about the freedom you’ve felt in discovering that “Christians don’t have a corner on love and justice,” and it reminds me of the manner in which I exulted so many years ago upon discovering that “God isn’t a white, anglo-saxon protestant who lives in the suburbs, shops at the mall, and votes republican.” I agree that Christians don’t have a corner on love and justice, but I think this is worth exploring a bit more. It wasn’t all that long ago that I went through quite a bit of tumult upon coming to a similar discovery. (Is it okay to bring up Buechner now? Look, I’ve gone through a nine-part list and almost three paragraphs so far without mentioning him; so it’s not like he’s my only muse or something). You’ve heard me offer this quote before; so forgive me for recycling it. I do so only because, of course, I think it’s relevant. Buechner writes:

Some think of a Christian as one who necessarily believes certain things. That Jesus was the son of God, say. Or that Mary was a virgin. Or that the Pope is infallible. Or that all other religions are all wrong. Some think of a Christian as one who goes to church. Getting baptized. Giving up liquor or tabacco. Reading the Bible. Doing a good deed a day. Some think of a Christian as a nice guy. Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me’ (John 14:6). He didn’t say any particular ethnic, doctrine, or religion was the way, the truth and the life. He said that He was. He didn’t say that it was by believing or doing anything in particular that you could ‘come to the father’. He said that it was only by him -by living, participating in, being caught up by the way of life that He embodied, that was his way… a Christian is one who is on the way, though not necessarily very far along it, and who has at least some dim and half-baked idea of whom to thank. A Christian isn’t necessarily any nicer than anybody else. Just better informed.

Along with other parts, it’s the “better informed” piece that I keep coming back to. To say that “Christians don’t have a lock on love and justice” isn’t necessarily to say that God isn’t the source of both. From my perspective, it only acknowledges the reality that if God created the world, and if God is love, then there is, in fact, something innate that would have us leaning in the direction of love and justice whether we are aware of and acknowledge the source of that love or not. As I said in one of my comments to your previous post, Jared, I think the idea that “God causes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on both the just and the unjust” also applies to the love we were all made for and the yearning we all have for justice, however marred- in varying degrees- both may be in all of us as a result of our brokenness.

I like that Buechner seems to say above that what matters is being caught up in “the way” of Jesus. That, I think, has much to do with living the kind of life that he did- a life of sacrificial love. I think there’s more to it, of course. I “know” (that is, I intuit) that somehow Jesus is the crux of it all, but I’m in no position to judge how that gets played out for anybody else but me, and by experience I know that I judge the same for myself poorly at best. I take some comfort from seeing how Jesus dealt with those around him. To one he says “Go and sell your possessions.” To another, “Don’t go- let the dead bury their own dead, but come and follow me.” To another it was simply, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Perhaps this is why we are to work out our own salvation with such “fear and trembling.”

I don’t know, and maybe that’s the best I can say about any of this. Perhaps I should have just boldly posted those three words and left us all to sort it out. Like I said before, though, I think that a life committed to love and justice, which I would say is a life lived along “the way” of Jesus, is a life well-lived indeed. I’m glad to join you in that journey, Jared. If you do it for its own sake (or for your own sake, or for the sake of the “least of these”) and I do it for the sake of Christ, I don’t know how very far apart that really puts us after all, and it may be that we both meet Jesus along the way, and realize it only in the breaking of bread after he’s gone.

I haven’t been myself lately. I haven’t been reading or writing as much as I usually do, and instead I’ve been playing more computer games and enjoying many more adult beverages. As is to be expected, I think that my friends have noticed the change more than I – I’ve gotten used to hearing Robert and Tony ask, “So how are you doing?” It would be a silly question to ask a person who’s wrestling with inner demons, since they are probably the least likely to really know how they are doing, if it weren’t for the fact that it shows such love.

It has taken me a while to figure out what’s going on, but I think I have a handle on it now. I’ve been going through what I like to call postmodern despair: the overwhelming feeling of sadness, confusion, and hopelessness that occurs when you realize that all of your existing “grand stories” have cracked, and that your efforts to shore them up are futile, and that no others would fare any better as replacements. It is not a good feeling. The good news is that I’ve begun coming out of it and am feeling better, even though I acknowledge that I’m not totally out of the woods yet. So, I think it will be therapeutic for me (and hopefully interesting to you) to write about this in some depth.

One of my favorite philosophers is Jean-François Lyotard, and the only thing more amazing than his Introduction to The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge is the fact that no two people understand it alike. In it, Lyotard situates the contemporary search for truth and justice, in the forms of science and the social bond, within the context of a crisis of narratives. Basically, he says that we used to have a bunch of narratives, such as “the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth”, which legitimated the search for truth and justice and provided the criteria for judging them. These narratives have now cracked – we just don’t believe them anymore and we are skeptical that any other story is ever going to succeed where they failed. We no longer know why we should care about truth and justice or how to achieve them.

This is exactly how I’ve been feeling of late. All the stories that I tell myself to legitimate the life that I live and that supply criteria for making decisions have cracked. I’m skeptical of them and all other stories; I’m skeptical through-and-through. Worse than this, I despair because these stories were foundational to my identity. Who am I? What gives my life meaning? What do you do when your identity is bound up in a label like ‘Christian’ and then you begin to discover that that label doesn’t always stick so well?

Let’s go back to Lyotard for a moment before I answer that question. Paradoxically, the skepticism he described was, for him, both the cause of scientific progress and its result. Cutting science free from its service to a singular narrative ended up being a boon; we no longer have a singular answer to the questions of “Why do we do science?” and “How do we evaluate truth?”, but science continues and even flourishes. Lyotard finally poses “the question”: “is a legitimation of the social bond, a just society, feasible in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific activity? What would such a paradox be?” In other words, might the narrative crisis be good for justice too – and if so, how?

And this is where things start looking up (after purgation comes illumination). Maybe an analogous paradox exists for faith as well. If faith has a point it’s because it has an object: something it’s driving at. Whether you call that love, relationships, justice, hope, or good works, perhaps not having a singular answer to questions about why we believe or what we believe could be a boon for faith’s object. Maybe we love better when we don’t know why we’re loving. Maybe we are more just when we don’t have absolute rules of justice. If the longing for truth and justice has been placed in the human heart, perhaps we endanger the purity of these passions when we attempt to legitimate them through narrative.

After analyzing his Introduction to The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (and we could analyze the whole thing, but I find that he summarizes the whole work quite nicely up front) I’m starting to believe that Lyotard does not get enough credit as a realist (in the common use of the term). He didn’t let the narrative crisis that he saw overwhelm or scare him. Since he thought that scientific progress was obvious in spite of the crisis he was content to simply label this a paradox and explore its implications. Now I’m finding that I share this realism… and this is breaking my gloom.

…plus, there isn’t a true “local” context for me to act in.

So Jared and I had a chance to talk recently about some “big ideas” like the unintended consequences of technology:
…as well as the global economy and environmentalism (just to name a few), and the relationships among them. The picture above is striking, isn’t it? It’s of a landfill full of obsolete cell phones. With the rate at which technology progresses and the penchant we “first world” folks have for keeping up with the latest technology as much as our disposable incomes permit us, it is likely that such technology mass graves will only proliferate. I don’t know about you, but when God said to “subdue” and “fill” the earth, I’m not sure this is what he meant. To make this personal, I’ve had a cell phone since 2000 (I waited out Y2K :). I said “a” cell phone, but in the past seven years I’ve actually had approximately six cell phones (almost one a year), and I’m sure I haven’t kept pace with the ever-evolving available features and phones that I might have availed myself of. So, to ask that ever-present question from my seminary days- where is God in all this? Does God care that I’ve owned six phones and five of them most likely sit in a landfill somewhere? Should I care?

As you might guess, I think the answer to both questions is “yes!” Purportedly being an intense and complicated guy, however, I can’t just leave it at that. Let’s take a few steps back and again consider the “big picture” here. Without bothering to look up the statistics for cell phone use among the “first world,” anecdotally I am sure that the rates are high and ever growing. Consequently, as I said above, there will be more and more landfills around the world full of old phones, not to mention computers, TV’s, toasters, and the like. This matters to me because it impacts the earth in a negative way, and I directly contribute to the problem. Of course, this is only the “tip of the iceberg” as I’ve said nothing about carbon footprints, energy use and waste creation, etc. If I believe that God cares about all this and I should too, how then am I to live? Unfortunately, this is where I so often get stuck. Of course, I could renounce technology and become a Luddite, but for many reasons I am unwilling to do this. I could live without a cell phone, for example, and I suppose even without a “personal” computer, but my job requires me to use both and supplies me with them. I could do without a car, but then again that job is more than 30 miles away from home. Moreover, Jared and I live more than 30 miles apart too, making our friendship highly technology-dependent. We must drive quite a distance to ever see each other, and when we aren’t face-to-face, we communicate via phones and computers, etc.

All of that is simply to show that “first world” life is set up on a systemic level to require our use of technology, and obviously without that technology such lives as we now enjoy would be impossible. To put it personally again, without technology Jared and I would likely not be friends, I would not be employed where I am, and much, much worse- my former micro-preemie son, Samuel, would not be alive. Inexorably, then, we are led deeper down this path of technology-dependence, and to resist it is well-nigh impossible, or so it seems. I have been remiss thus far not to mention the connection between all of this and individualism, for it is the rampant individualism in modern Western culture that drives much of our technological innovation, I would contend, and it is the fruits of that innovation that makes our isolated lives possible.

One way to begin to thinking about an “answer” to some of this, then, is to consider community. In other words, I don’t know if I could live “off the grid,” but at least by sharing my resources and expenses with others in a shared residence my impact on the world can be lessened, to say nothing of the theological, social, and other effects of community-living. Living “in community” is an important step in the right direction for me. It is, at least, something tangible that I can actually do (if only I once again had like-minded folks to partner with me and my family in such a shared living arrangement). Still, the “big picture” questions persist for me, and as Jared and I recently discussed, I think some of this is simply a “problem” of scale. In the global environment that technology makes possible for us, we are aware of so much that we otherwise wouldn’t be. We “Americans” know about the atrocities in Darfur, for example, or all of the issues that are so worrisome about Africa. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is all well and good; I’d rather know than not, but there is a time when it would have been near impossible for us to know- and what information we did learn about the rest of the world would likely have been limited and outdated by the time that we became aware of it. We live in an information-satured society, then, and this is what I often feel debilitated by. There is really only so much that I can know, let alone do. Moreover, it’s hard enough for me to love and serve those in front of me. What then can I do for those halfway around the globe whom I’ve never met, yet who are directly impacted by my lifestyle?

So context matters, and so does scale- but how to respond to all this is something I mightily struggle to even conceptualize, which is to say nothing for “figuring it all out.” Got any ideas?

The following is a comment that I posted to Sam Frost’s Musings, a blog hosted at Planet Preterist. If you want the references to Wittgenstein and the Tower of Babel story to make sense you may have to read Sam’s original post (linked to above), but otherwise this comment should make sense – which is not to say that you will agree, only that it should not be unintelligible. :-)

If you ask me, Wittgenstein would think that many of us are fools for continuing to argue about ‘truth’ without examining closely what we mean by it. It seems to me that what is meant by ‘truth’ has changed over time, and this has contributed much to the confusion. Of course, I am inclined to blame modernism/modernity for much of this shift of meaning.

I think that ‘truth’ often used to mean (before Descartes and company) something along the lines of “that which can be relied upon.” It would have had both personal (people recognized their own involvement) and communal dimensions (communities would frequently adjudicate truth). Truth appeals would often be made by those without power to counter the self-justifying stories of those with power, and who abused it. Truth was often concerned with love and justice.

In the modern period a much more philosophical meaning of ‘truth’ took over: the correspondence between depersonalized representations and directly accessible ‘reality.’ In reality (pun intended), the representations could never be completely depersonalized and the ‘reality’ was not directly accessible. Much of the responsibility for the adjudication of truth shifted from the community to the individual. Additionally, rather than appeals to truth being made defensively against those who would oppressively use their power, truth became the label which was slapped onto every ideology and used to justify injustice. Modernity weaponized truth. (Due to the belief in universal reason, that all reasonable people should be able to reach the same conclusion when faced with the same evidence, the person who disagreed with your ‘truth’ was implicitly unreasonable – an injustice in its own right.)

What is a post-modern to do? (S)he is just as concerned for love and justice as the pre-modern who used to appeal to truth in order to counter injustice, but (s)he often no longer feels (s)he can appeal to truth anymore since ‘truth’ is the banner under which such atrocities have been and are being committed. (Actually, it’s often ‘Truth’ instead of ‘truth.’) For many, the only recourse is to deny truth in some fashion. If the children are just going to hit each other with their toys, then an appropriate response is to take the toys away. Of course, the post-modern is not denying the pre-modern version of truth, but rather the modern version of it. Unfortunately, this distinction is not always made. We often argue (on both sides of the issue) as if ‘truth’ has always meant the same thing to everybody, which is why I think Wittgenstein would be laughing at all of us.

I have no problem with saying that Jesus is the truth, or that the Bible is true. However, I don’t mean that in the Cartesian way that many Christians do. Truth and objectivity are not identical, and neither are knowledge and certainty. I know many things, and I put much of that knowledge to successful use every day, as do we all. This knowledge varies in degrees of objectivity, but none of it is completely objective – I am personally involved in all of it. Additionally, since all language is symbolic all reading is interpretive in nature. A hard-and-fast distinction between reading and interpretation cannot be sustained. As such, when I read the Bible I am interpreting it: the same goes for you and everyone else. This doesn’t mean that any single interpretation is as good as another as you’ve suggested. This would only be true from modernity’s perspective of extreme individualism – since if two individuals each think his or her interpretation is better and all that matters is the individual’s judgment they have reached an impasse. The post-modern is not so individualistic and therefore is happy to let a larger community judge between them (although I admit this can get sticky at times, but it must have been the same in the pre-modern world).

An aside: As to your Tower of Babel analogy, I think the analogy may fit in ways that you do not expect and will not like. If you recall, in the story the diversity of languages was the consequence of the attempt to build the tower. Similarly, one could argue that modernity’s attempt to unite around ‘Reason’ and build a singular ‘System’ in order to secure ‘Progress’ and through it the salvation of the world has directly caused the diversity, and yes even confusion, that we have today. We are reaping today what was sown many years ago.

Ben Myers has posted an excellent quote of Slavoj Žižek. I haven’t yet read any of Žižek’s work, but the more snippets I come across the more I want to!

“[W]ho, in fact, are fundamentalists? To put it simply, a fundamentalist does not believe in something, but rather knows it directly. In other words, both liberal-sceptical cynicism and fundamentalism share a basic underlying feature: the loss of the ability to believe in the proper sense of the term. For both of them, religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge: fundamentalists accept these statements as such, while sceptics mock them. What is unthinkable for both is the ‘absurd’ act of a decision which installs every authentic belief, a decision that cannot be grounded in the chain of ‘reason’, in positive knowledge.” —Slavoj Žižek, The Universal Exception, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (2nd ed.; London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 308-309.

Jamie Smith is getting at a similar idea, though in different terms, in his book Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism. It is the modern program that equates knowledge with certainty and truth with objectivity. He calls this the Cartesian linkage (or something like that), and it is broken in the shift to postmodernism, which is not to say that postmodernism is fideism, but that it is willing to let faith be faith. Liberal-sceptical cynicism is not postmodern, it is hypermodern.