One of the many things I love about my Dad is his sense of humor and its amazing social versatility–if you can tell this joke to your straight-laced pastor and get him to laugh out loud, you have a gift. And in the days before caller ID, Dad could make prank calls with the skill of a seasoned radio shock jock. I’ve never been all that impressed by the Jerky Boys because I know Dad can do far better (and without any profanity).
I’m not so proud of it now, but in my younger days I excelled at telling dirty jokes. I like to think that I have matured somewhat (fart jokes notwithstanding) especially since becoming a husband and father, and in retrospect I can see that some off-color jokes ironically have redeeming moral value and can even be worth repeating in polite company. Here is one such example:
A lecherous man finds himself seated next to a married woman on a long flight. He notices the wedding band on her left ring finger but, undeterred, shamelessly propositions her for a hypothetical $10 million dollars. Shocked but curious, she replies “For $10 million …? Sure. Why not?” He follows up with an insultingly low-ball offer of $10. “JUST WHAT KIND OF WOMAN DO YOU THINK I AM!?!” she yells. He responds with the joke’s punchline: “I think we’ve already established that. Now we’re just negotiating the price.”
This joke has value in that it shows how some things are not (or should not be) negotiable because they are sacred. And if you try to abase what is fundamentally sacred, you’ll find that only you become abased, while what is sacred remains so, regardless of how you yourself may see things. In this joke, that sacred object is marriage.
Another sacred object is human life and its inherent value. I find that attempts to diminish the sacredness of human life often take the form of an arbitrary and indefensibly illogical definition of personhood. In the United States of the late 1850s, the legal definition of personhood was defined to exclude persons of African ancestry, for example. This arbitrary definition was used to perpetuate slavery, but the ultimate result was abasement: complete breakdown of the social order culminating in a civil war costing the lives of over 600,000 Americans and the economic devastation of the South.
Today, we find ourselves in a similar situation with respect to the sanctity of human life. Personhood has been arbitrarily, though legally, redefined to exclude persons in-utero (and even freshly ex-utero). Though scientifically and philosophically unsound, this definition is used to justify abortion up to and including the moment of birth, and consequently the United States now has debatably over 60 million fewer citizens than it would have had since 1973, the year SCOTUS handed down the Roe v. Wade decision. There are very real and measurable economic consequences for this loss of respect for human life (to say nothing of the deeper philosophical/spiritual costs), and I think we’re only beginning to see the first and mildest effects.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the would-be iconoclast’s unintentional self-abasement–whether it’s an individual, a philosophy, or a culture at large–and it seems to me that this degradation progresses through three phases: First, there is a loss of the ability to reason; second, there’s a loss of the ability to productively dialogue; and third, there’s a loss of the ability to live peaceably with others (and even with oneself).
Late last year I wrote about how, in my former life as an agnostic, I failed to see the primary philosophical contradiction inherent in postmodern thinking. That failure was enabled and actually reinforced by fellow agnostics and atheists, who unconsciously could not function without the very notion of objective truth they were consciously abnegating. The reference point of absolute truth is an essential condition for purposeful rational thought. I would even go so far as to say that, with respect to moral truth, this reference point is sacred, and its proximity to the Divine is no mere coincidence: When you can’t find your balance on the pitching deck of moral relativism, your argument is not with those who hold to an objective moral framework but rather with the Author of that framework. In denying the objectivity of truth, our culture has consequently lost the ability to reason, and one can see evidence of this everywhere in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago.
The ability to reason being a prerequisite for effective dialogue, it then becomes difficult and even dangerous to talk with someone who has become irrational (or, as German pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dieterich Bonhoeffer more bluntly put it, stupid):
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
–Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
Bonhoeffer aptly describes the transition from the second to third phase of self-abasement: Having lost all humility and the ability to dialogue, the irrational person becomes insulated in a fog of false self-righteousness which, when challenged, gives way to murderous anger. It was the irrational evil and stupidity of fascist Germany that cruelly executed Bonhoeffer at Flossenbürg concentration camp just days before its liberation by the U.S. Army in April of 1945.
Maybe it’s my price to pay for a youth misspent desecrating the fence that separates the sacred from the profane, but having lived long enough to learn why that fence is necessary, I now feel some responsibility to mend the parts of the fence that I once damaged and to keep a watchful eye on the cultural horizon. That sense of responsibility grows in urgency as, unfortunately, Western Civilization seems to edge from the second to the third phase of degradation. Writers and commentators with intellectual clarity and moral insight that I respect are increasingly indicating that we’re already in a cold (i.e., relatively non-violent) civil war and focusing on how to prevent that cold civil war from turning into a hot (i.e., violent) civil war–because no matter how confident some people may be about surviving that prospect, it’s generally considered to be the worst-case scenario.
Frankly, I struggle to be so optimistic as to think we can reverse course, but there are those who believe that by “creating dialogue,” or even just maintaining a strained conversation, we can avoid the worst. And that reminds me of another joke about a lady who walks into a psychiatrist’s office with a duck on a leash: “What seems to be the problem?” asks the shrink. “Oh, it’s my husband,” says the woman. “He thinks he’s a duck.” That joke ends with a punchline, but I feel like we’re now living in some awkward post-punchline silence, when the psychiatrist’s mind tries to keep from slipping into despair. What’s the point of having a conversation with a lunatic? For the psychiatrist, the aim is to restore sanity, not to abdicate one’s own mental health and help a lunatic feel better about his condition. It would serve neither person for the psychiatrist to lie and agree that a duck is a man (or that a man is a woman, or that a baby is simply a blob of cells with no unalienable right to life, or that you can force people to violate their conscience and never have the same, or worse, done to you).
In matters of sacredness, the credos of postmodernism/multiculturalism and the Hegelian dialectic are worse than pointless when the aim of communication should be to influence, to persuade, to warn, to acknowledge the immutable truth of what is inviolable before imminent catastrophe transpires. I can’t help but think of some video filmed in Phuket on 26 December, 2004: Vacationers wanting to put out to sea were annoyed to find all the boats strangely beached, despite still being out in the bay. Not thinking of why the water level might possibly recede so quickly and dramatically, some of these people ventured far out into the wet sand, musing over rocks and sea shells. The camera then raised to the horizon and glimpsed the tsunami’s crest approaching at 500 miles per hour. A few locals could be seen sprinting toward the hills and then the camera captured the first casualties, many of them frozen in confused terror as they were inundated by the merciless wave. Were those who saw the tsunami from safely atop their hotel balconies debating about what it was? No, they were screaming for others to run for their lives.
As Ravi Zacharias once put it, “… even in India, we look both ways before crossing the street–it is either the bus or me, not both of us.” It is either us or the bus, truth or a tsunami of moral obtuseness, our deference to the sacred or our ruination. So when you see danger looming, do you stare breathlessly or sound the alarm? If you yell at children running toward a busy street, are you trying to dialogue with them? If you honk at a car entering a freeway exit ramp, are you trying to win an argument? What satisfaction could there possibly be in saying “I told you so” to someone who fell through the ice and drowned?
Another of the many things I love about my Dad is that he always told me the truth when it mattered, even when (especially when) I didn’t care to hear it. He wasn’t trying to win an argument or “engage in dialogue.” He told me the truth, knowing that I would reject his advice and argue with him and even insult him, because he loved me. A friend of mine always tells his daughter, “When you deny the truth, there’s nothing left but lies,” and his words seem more meaningful when I imagine them spoken in his Russian accent. He grew up in the USSR, where truth was deemed incompatible with the state’s ambitions, where telling the truth would get you beaten up, thrown in jail, or killed. Many people suffered all three of those consequences yet were followed by more people still willing to tell the truth.
When I rebranded this blog two years ago on Father’s Day, I wrote about this kind of love, “… the real, gritty thing: sacrificial, unpleasant and often chaotic, inconvenient and usually mistaken for something else.” I still think that’s a better-than-average description of real love, but I would make one addition/edit: Like truth, real love is going to offend lots of people; in fact, love and truth are inseparable. I’m bracing myself for that like I prepare for my two-year-old daughter’s reaction when I lovingly tell her that a growing body requires more sustenance than can be provided by a diet of dried strawberry chips. Or when in casual dinnertime conversation I point out that, with things like this happening, we do not have happy days ahead as a civilization (sorry if that doesn’t nicely square with your vacation plans or your remodeling project). This is difficult because I don’t like conflict or confrontation, but I’m finding there are some things I just can’t shut up about. And I can’t say it any better than this:
“We are in a war of ideas in which we must defend the idea of the human soul and the moral world in which it has its being and its rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We need to map this defense with logic, with science, with patience, with humor, and with courage. We need to do it, yes, even if they ban us from Twitter and Facebook. We need to do it even when they riot on campus at our speeches. We need to do it even if our professor marks us down and our boss sends us to HR and our sponsor drops our show. And God prevent it should ever come to this, but if at last the truth itself is outlawed, then outlaws we must become …. I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but we have to at least embrace the principle that telling the truth about the human condition is worth great sacrifice so we’ll be ready to face the lesser sacrifices that even here, even now, the truth sometimes demands. We have to be ready to make those sacrifices for truth because the wages of lies are corruption, slavery, and death. This country has been so free, so safe, so powerful, so long that it’s easy to forget how quickly freedom can be lost in the fog of bad ideas. Wandering in that fog, the world goes mad. And in a world gone mad, we cannot be silent.”
–Andrew Klavan, Address at Hillsdale College, April 2019