"A Tale, Told By An Idiot"

No.100: March 25, 2022

Dear Friends,

One hundred weekly newsletters seems like a milestone. I guess it’s another month until the actual aggregate two-year anniversary (104 issues) of The Square Inch, but why not start celebrating now, at the advent of the triple digits?

Thank you for being along for the ride. I began this newsletter two years ago largely for a personal reason. I have struggled mightily with a kind of writer’s block for the past five years or so, a mental numbness when confronted with a blank document on my computer. I started The Square Inch so that I would be forced, week after week, to write something. Whether it was good or bad, polished or not, did not matter in my calculations. Promising readers a letter and being forced to make good on it was the plan, and it has been, from my perspective, a success. Thank you so much for subscribing, reading, and sharing.

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Today I want to write about the state of our public discourse.

There has long been brewing a societal dissatisfaction with secular public discourse. A decade ago one of my favorite books was published: Steven D. Smith’s The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse. It is a fairly high-brow (Harvard University Press!) academic analysis of our public debates, involving the basic ground rules for disagreement, compromise, and resolution in our diverse, pluralistic society. Out of the Enlightenment emerged a modern world full of rules and conventions for how public discourse should operate (i.e., how to disagree without killing each other), and here at the disenchanted “end” (?) those rules and conventions have satisfied very few people.

And it isn’t hard to see why. The Enlightenment project has been a failure in its most basic promise. That promise, historically developing out of the aftermath of horrific religious wars in the 16th and 17th centuries, is that if we all set aside all our deepest-held religious convictions or—some might say—idiosyncratic leftover “Dark Age” superstitions, and instead agree to resolve all public questions with recourse to universally agreed upon norms of Reason, then society would operate on a solid, shared, observable, and provable foundation that would inaugurate a harmonious utopian world. The End of War and the “Brotherhood of Man,” and all that obvious rubbish.

The nagging little problem, as Smith pointedly observes and illustrates, is that nobody sets aside their deepest-held religious convictions. They instead “smuggle” them into secular discourse by dressing them up in “secular” terms according to the “secular” rules. It is a kind of play-acting. This might work and has, more or less, in a society with a broadly shared religious orientation. But without that consensus? Take a look around.

So, highly contestable claims are made in the name of “Reason” that actually have little or nothing to do with the exercise of reason. The appeal to reason is only to hide the deep ulterior motives (Exhibit A: note any contemporary proclamation of what Science™ says. Scratch Science™ and it starts to smell like politics). And so discourse becomes an exercise of power—who are the gatekeepers of the public square? Who makes the rules? Who defines the language? Who gets to claim that their convictions are rational while opposing views are irrational? Just look at the current culture war over who gets to define the term “woman.” “Secular” discourse is looking pretty impotent (ahem) at resolving that question. Apparently, not even something so objective and, frankly, obvious as basic biology can settle the question.

Because everybody is forced to couch what they really believe in the language of abstraction—supposedly neutral, objective principles—nobody is really satisfied. A Christian might want to argue by opening up the Bible to the first page to read, “male and female he created them,” but that is out of bounds in secular discourse. It’s against the rules. None of that Bible mumbo-jumbo! One must instead pack that conviction into luggage stamped “Neutral and Objective” and then smuggle it into the conversation by talking about, well, biology and chromosomes. There’s nothing wrong with talking about biology and chromosomes, and it certainly isn’t materially divergent from what you can read on the first page of the Bible. But it doesn’t give voice to nor satisfy the desire to share one’s deepest-held convictions. It is an artificial constraint. Smith calls this the “secular cage.” We yearn for intellectual and moral freedom beyond the boundaries of secular abstraction. When does one get to pull off the dress-up clothes and say, “Okay, this is what I really believe!”? On the Enlightenment’s terms, the answer is never. Because that, so the story goes, would lead to bloodshed and war and misery and—oh, never mind. The Enlightenment certainly never came close to eradicating any of that.

Moreover, an opponent will simply listen to all your talk about biology and chromosomes and say, “You’re just smuggling in the ancient bigoted views of Genesis chapter one.” Which is true (except the “bigoted” part). But, of course, the opponent will also not likewise acknowledge that they, too, are smuggling in their deepest-held convictions—say, a commitment to absolute personal autonomy, the contingency or malleability of nature, and so forth.

Few people are happy with the secular cage, this artificial constraint placed upon our thoughts and speech; the only ones happy with it are those who have successfully manipulated the system so that their deeply held convictions are taken as self-evidently true and rational. Just look at the way major media organizations present their worldview to their audiences. Only crazy or wicked people say that Lia Thomas or Rachel Levine aren’t women! Be that as it may, even with those outliers, we can at least say that the secular cage hasn’t solved what it set out to solve. There’s no End of War and Brotherhood of Man emerging anywhere any time soon.

The postmoderns—vengeful little Enlightenment step-children seeking to slay their own intellectual parents—recognized that discourse is always motivated discourse. They rightly understood (but hardly invented the notion) that everybody approaches questions from a given standpoint—that is, they have deeply held convictions about Life, the Universe, and Everything. They saw through the shallowness of all the talk about objectivity and neutrality. For them, there is no “objective” or “neutral” or “God’s-eye view” from which one may intellectually reason. There are no “self evident truths,” with apologies to the Declaration of Independence. All discourse, on this view, is therefore about power. There’s nothing “objective” about it. Discourse is just two motivated agents trying to manipulate and dominate each other into seeing the world their way.

There are many things wrong with postmodernism, but it does have the advantage of perceiving an important truth ignored or downplayed by its Enlightenment heritage. We are all “situated.” We all have environments, upbringings, cultures, institutions, community norms, intuitions, and so forth that shape our interpretations of the world around us. We are all engaged in motivated reasoning, and that motivation comes from all kinds of places that are not, strictly speaking, “neutral” or “objective.” None of us has the “God’s-eye” perspective. Fair enough. But nevertheless the most basic problem is that postmoderns assume that not even God has a God’s-eye perspective. That is, the universe is subjectivism and motivated reasoning and power-plays and manipulation all the way down. The acid of postmodern skepticism disintegrates the very concept and hope of Truth.

But this is a basic theological/metaphysical mistake: what is true for creatures need not be true of the Creator. Just because I can only see partially, or “through a glass dimly” (as Paul puts it in 1 Cor. 13:12) does not mean that God only sees partially or dimly. The Bible places quite a strong emphasis on the difference between God and human beings in this regard. And there is no reason whatsoever to assume that such a Creator as proclaimed in Genesis 1 could not communicate knowledge of himself and the world to creatures made in his image in a real and adequate way, especially if he designed it that way. And this is exactly what the Bible claims. Our finitude and inability to have a God’s-eye view is not at all incompatible with God sharing his view with us as he sees fit. That’s what special revelation is. Our “situatedness” is not in conflict with Truth. Accessible Truth. Disclosed Truth. “I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” The Word (divine communication) who was in the beginning with God, and was God, “became flesh” and dwelt among us. “No one has ever seen God. But the Only Begotten God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18). The Eternal Son became situated in space and time, and yet had no difficulty revealing himself in “grace and truth.”

Now, why do I go through this heady theology and philosophy lesson? Because from my perspective (!) our public discourse has almost entirely succumbed to the most radical kind of deconstructionist postmodernism—instantiated most notoriously these days as, but certainly not limited to, “critical [race/feminist/queer/fill-in-the-blank] theory.” There’s certainly an important truth in the idea that everybody is engaged in subjective, motivated reasoning. But if that is all that there is all the way down, if there is no Truth (with a capital “T”) to which we might approach and conform, nothing outside ourselves to which we must submit (not even biology, much less the Bible!), if we cannot be reformed and corrected by even reality’s “school of hard knocks,” then we really are screaming into the void. Shakespeare’s Macbeth describes our situation perfectly:

It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

If that isn’t a perfect description of our “discourse,” I don’t know what is. Sorry for quoting a dead white male, but if that bothers you then you’re the person I’m talking to.

I’m going on too long, but let me just suggest that our choice is not between Enlightenment secular discourse, with all its disingenuous-yet-robust smuggling trade, or radical postmodernism that untethers us from even the possibility of Truth. Why don’t we instead try open and public discourse, but leave out the intellectual black market? Lay all our cards on the table, express what we really believe about the world? Propose it, articulate it, defend it. I’ll start with Genesis 1, if need be. We can have a robust and diverse and serious intellectual conversation in pursuit of truth without the artificial constraints of so-called “secularism.” Those constraints have utterly failed in their intended purpose. Let’s not dump either the idea of rational public discourse or the idea of Truth.

Let’s dump the charade, instead.

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I say all this because I have a newly obtained Twitter account. There was no subterfuge involved. I went to Twitter and clicked the “Sign Up” button, told them my real name and my phone number, and they let me open a new account. As far as I’m concerned, that means I’m in good conscience not violating my Twitter ban.

I only use it to follow people. I don’t have any followers, and don’t bother looking for me because I don’t actually Tweet anything. I’m just eavesdropping on the end of civilization—er, I mean our “public discourse.”

Here’s something you might want to try: get off of Twitter for about five months, and then get back on. It is utterly surreal. The exact same people are arguing about the exact same things, five months later. It’s like they are robots. I got back on Twitter wondering if I missed anything. It only took about ten minutes to figure out that I hadn’t missed a thing.

Yes, Twitter is a great way for me to become aware of good articles and essays published here and there, but apart from that purpose, it is boring me to death. Because almost the entirety of the discourse (and this is not just secular discourse, but also rampant in Christian circles) is C.S. Lewis’s “Bulverism.” Bulverism is his cleverly made-up term that means if you can simply explain why somebody believes a thing, you have therefore discredited that belief itself. No need for argument! Bulverism is the sum and substance of nearly all public discourse today, and it is a particularly potent weapon in the hands of the critical theorist. Its premise is always, “You only say that because….” If I can point out all the factors that contribute to you holding a particular viewpoint—your upbringing, your community, your church, your denomination, your education, your class, your sex, your skin color, your ethnicity—that is, if I can only just describe your “situatedness” then I have thereby exposed your ulterior motives and can then dismiss your every argument as a cynical power play made in the interest of protecting some private interest. It is 100-Proof Guilt By Association. “You only say that because… you are a white heterosexual cisgendered male.” And a thousand other variations on the theme.

And it gets worse. When one objects to such stereotyping and ridiculous generalizations and the obvious unwillingness to engage in actual arguments about substantive matters, the Bulverist will say, “Why are you getting so upset? You must feel threatened!” (And these are always people accusing others of being narcissists.) I have seen this a million times on Twitter and other platforms for public discourse. For a recent example, if you’re not persuaded by Kristin Kobes Du Mez in her wildly popular and Bulveristic book, Jesus & John Wayne (which seeks to explain—you guessed it—why white evangelicals think and vote the way they do; spoiler: they are racists and patriarchal misogynists protecting their private turf) the response is ready-made: “You must feel threatened!” You only say that because you must be a racist bigot and patriarchal misogynist.

That’s just one example out of dozens I could pick. And none of it—none of it—amounts to an actual legitimate, real live argument. It is the world of Macbeth: a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

We definitely need to ditch the secular cage. I’ve been banging against that cage for well-nigh twenty-five years. But we’re also in danger of ditching reason, evidence, and argument along with it. If the alternative is nothing but these shallow, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, juvenile sandbox jeers, I really am eavesdropping on the end of civilization.