Canon Fodder

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.

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.