The Rawls Report
Jesus Christ is the Lord... of Secular Reason?
by Alec Rawls
Contributing Editor

The most fundamental choice we all make is whether to think frontwards or backwards. We can either follow reason and evidence wherever they lead, or we can direct our intellectual resources to the task of making the most effective case for what we presume to be right or in our interests. To think frontwards is to trust in truth. To think backwards is to defend presumption against truth. But divorced from truth, one's presumptions about right cannot possibly be right. The only purposes that can actually be served by thinking backwards are demagogic purposes, trying to turn error to expedient advantage. Unfortunately, thanks to the social nature of human reality, this can be a tempting strategy.

Consider the culture of political correctness. The whole nature of this culture is to intentionally misunderstand as racist or sexist or otherwise offensive anything that can possibly be misunderstood in order to make claims of victimization or demands for redress. That is where the ludicrous and hyper-qualified politically correct speech pattern comes from. It evolved as a defense mechanism for avoiding attack within a culture where the goal is not to understand, but to misunderstand. We often treat the effeminate prissiness of politically correct speech as a joke, but in fact it is the symptom of a serious moral sickness.

"Effeminate prissiness? That's a slander on women!" When you or I conjure "feminine," we don't think of "effeminate prissiness." Those who are looking to misunderstand set aside that inconvenient truth in order to find a way to take offense. That is their goal. Our terrorist enemy does the same thing on a far grander scale, constituting something close to a pure manifestation of manipulative unreason. Virtually the entire Arab world is at this point immersed in a gigantic culture of lies, both about Israel and America. Their truth-lovers are heroes, like freshwater lilies somehow managing to grow in the Dead Sea.

You can trust in truth or you can distrust in truth but you can't do both. This mutually exclusive choice eventually determines the future course of one's soul.

Favoring presumption over truth is a foundational element of the Biblical concept of "original sin." Making the best case for what we think is in our interest is an original inclination of our open ended faculties of intelligence. Manipulative unreason is just one more tool that "knowing" human nature will test for advantage. Ultimately it takes learning to realize that only the truth matters, and all the thoughts one derives while divorced from truth will be inherently incorrect.

Although any person is capable of realizing that only the truth matters, it is nonetheless important to spread the message. The only way to assure that large numbers of people are to learn early and well to trust in truth and to spurn manipulative unreason is through the guidance of great teachers and movements dedicated to the cause. The greatest teacher of this cause, spawning the greatest movement, was Jesus.

Asked by Pontius Pilate to account for himself, Jesus answered: "I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice" (John, 18:37). What did Jesus mean by "truth"? He did not elaborate on that abstract question, but we can answer it, because we know what truth is. Truth is two things. It is first of all a method. When you hide from nothing and when all reason and evidence is accounted for, what remains is a kernel of pure wisdom. Which brings us to the second element of truth: that which the method reveals.

If Jesus was the son of God in some way that the rest of us are not, he presumably had grounds to assert more about the content of truth than we mere mortals. The concept of truth, however, is fully available to mortal minds, and we do not even need the example of Jesus to know that we too should be witnesses of truth, instead of selective truth-heeders, picking and choosing what bits of reason and evidence seem to support one's presumptions.

Christian believers can decide for themselves whether these interpretations of original sin and of Jesus as our deliverer from original sin are compelling. What is unavoidable is that the message of Jesus
to trust in truth
is a necessary principle of secular right reason which everyone, Christian, Muslim, atheist, agnostic, Hindu, Jew, Aztec to Zoroastrian, must abide, if they are to be moral.

The world is terribly divided between different religions and between secular and religious society. Uniform trust in truth would provide a common ground for bridging these gaps. As a secular saint, John Stuart Mill put it: if two people's claims about what is right are in conflict, then someone's synthesis must be exceeding his analysis. Abide by the requirements of honest reason, don't assert more than you actually have grounds to, and the meeting of minds becomes possible.

All three of the great western religions
Judaism, Christianity and Islam characterize the embodiment of evil
Satan
as "the deceiver." All forbid the bearing of false witness. Except for the postmodernist left, which denies that there is such a thing as honest reason, all of secular society also proclaims the ideal of honest reason. However, we need to start holding people to it.

A revealing small example of the challenge that backwards thinking presents can be found in the responses I received to my recent opinion column on adoption. The column described the personal and social benefits of delivering a baby to an empty nest. But if delivering a baby to an empty nest is valuable, that puts weight in the scale against having an abortion. To backwards thinkers of a certain persuasion, anything that makes a woman's choice to have an abortion more difficult is an enemy to be resisted. It goes against their presumption that social good lies in making it easier for women to choose abortion, not harder. I received a number of emails that fit this backwards thinking pattern, grasping for ways to dismiss what I wrote as either wrong or offensive. But notice the consequence of this backwards thinking. Because the goal of these interlocutors was to dismiss and take offense, not a single one of them ever figured out what the article actually said. This can be easily determined by examining the substance of the issue.

The actual message of the article is pretty straightforward. With many lovingly prepared empty nests available, any pregnant college girl has an amazing opportunity. She has a chance to buy Microsoft at the IPO. All she has to do is lend her body for nine months, a period during which the baby is not crying, not fussing, not demanding, and that gift of life will then grow every day for the rest of her life. That is HER child, HER happiness to have in the world, in a time when many American women (and as many as half of high achieving women) end up not having children, though most want to.

Any concerned person must insure that the reasons this opportunity is being neglected en masse are not due to misguided social concerns or pressures. The thrust of the article was to describe the opportunity and to debunk misguided social concerns. None of my respondents, if they understood the article, would be against this purpose. They can't possibly actually want women to be oppressed by a misguided social stigma, but because they were thinking backwards, they never even realized that that is what they were defending. They were so successful in convincing themselves that they shouldn't pay attention to what I was actually saying that they were oblivious to what they were attacking.

A lovely such example is Jennifer Yoon's Letter to the Editor in the last issue of the Review. Look what good truth-sense she has. Yet because I gave her some openings to attack, she fell into backwards thinking and ended up grasping at straws to defend the misguided social stigma against filling an empty nest, holding it as a shameful disgrace that my views would even be allowed to see the light of day.

It is not enough to look for what those on the other side get wrong. You also have to look to what they get right. It ought to be obvious that grasping at straws provides no grounds for angrily dismissing proper consideration of a subject. But students today have been trained to think backwards. Even when students have truth-loving instincts, the pervasive culture of politically-correct backwards thinking can direct these instincts to serve anti-truth. One becomes a picker and chooser of truth, which is not fundamentally different from any other variety of manipulative unreason.

To escape from the mind-snatching anti-truth false consciousness, one must love all truth and renounce all manipulative unreason. One must be consecrated to truth, "born again" in the waters of fresh vision, washed clean of all forms of the moral dishonesty to which we are all innately prone. Recall the words of Jesus: "All who are of the truth hear me." Are there truths that you don't hear, because you are too busy thinking backwards, treating as an enemy whatever threatens what you presume to be right?

All of us are called upon to see, hear and speak the truth. For Christians, this is the path to the discovery and dissemination of the light of Jesus. For the non-religious, it means adherence to sense and reason as the primary means of discovering what should be valued how to pursue it. Luckily for humanity, these differing starting points all lead to the same finish line. Regardless of which category one belongs to there should no discord. Rather, both should be working together to win over where possible and defeat where necessary all those who favor manipulative unreason over trust in truth.

Contact Alec Rawls at alec@rawls.org or visit http://www.rawls.org/

Page last modified on Thursday, 02-Mar-2006 00:26:16 MST.