On Conformity (Answer to the 3 AD Hypothetical)
Happy Palm Sunday!
My apologies for being light with my postings of late, but my latest manuscript is due in a fortnight, and I have more than forty pages of works to work. My copyedits for the previous volume are due and overdue, and my available time is under-sufficient.
In the spirit of Holy Week, let me post for this week’s post a brief thought I have been toying of as of late.
I have outraged some of my non-theist friends of late, and while I am sorrowful for this, I am in no way surprised. It is inevitable; unavoidable.
Does that sound like an excuse? This essay means to show that it is not.
We Christians are supposed to be outrageous. If we do not outrage the practical worldly thinkers (who have practical reasons to do and to excuse evil works) and the idealists (who have elaborate abstract reasons to do and to excuse evil works) and the zealots (who do evil works out of wrath and pride, without bothering with excuses) why, then we are not following in the footsteps of Our Master, who outraged the practical and worldly Sadducee, outraged the idealistic and elaborate Pharisee, and outraged the angry Zealot.
Human nature has not changed since the First Century, or since the Fall of Man, and the same thing outrages those who conform to the world now as then: the simple truth, spoken honestly. Conformists are not prone merely to admit that others have different opinions and go their ways: they are shocked or even angered by the existence of a non-conformist, as if they can think of no honest nor honorable reason for departing from the consensus.
Of all groups, the ones most angered by non-conformity are those who are tied together by a shared bond of mutual guilt, particularly if the group has agreed upon a fictional excuse to explain the guilt away. In such a case as this, the presence of a non-conformist, even if he is minding his own business and going his own way at his own pace, is an affront to the conformity, because the presence of anyone not playing along with the fictional make believe acts as an accusation that touches a sore spot on the conscience. You don’t think the fans of Stalin and Castro and Mao, deep down, know the number of murders their heroes have committed? Or deep down that the abortionists likewise know the enormity of their crimes?
Do not be surprised if I call Christians the non-conformists; the post-christians are the conformists, for all their talk of toleration and patriotic dissent. We Catholics have a formal Magisterium which tells us what we are morally obligated to believe and to think on those topics touching the Catholic faith — you remember the Magisterium, they were the bad guys from Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. But on topics where the Magisterium has made no ruling, we Catholics can disagree with each other, and still call ourselves Catholics.
We conform only on topics touching the universal and catholic faith our beliefs to the teachings of Christ and His Apostles and successors: for without this, by definition we would not be Catholic Christians. What falls outside, we can follow our own reasoning, vain imaginings, or even the fickle opinions and fashions of the world.
You conformists who have no Magisterium are not more free in your opinion, but less, because your informal Magisterium called peer pressure and party loyalty and Political Correctness has no such boundaries. Everything from your diet to the type of lightbulbs to all the matters of public question, war and peace, and which words you may say and not say, is under control of your non-Magisterium, and you must obey it to the last decimal, or else earn the scorn of your peers.
* * *
What makes Christians so different? Are we simply madmen?
According to the rational standards of the world, starting from worldly principles, the answer is yes. Worldly men believe in worldly things.
By this, I do not mean worldly men are hedonists and epicures and money-grubbers who kick grandmothers downstairs, watch gladiatorial games or (what is much the same) watch the bloody and sexy hypnotic dream-images of endless hours of television, or that they drink absinthe and suffer ennui, and divorce their long-suffering wives for younger trophy models with balloon-like silicon breasts. To be sure, some worldly men do these things, but I am speaking of men who are “worldly” in the philosophical sense, not in the hedonistic sense. A man can be an ascetic and still be, in the philosophical sense, worldly.
Those of you with a classical education know the process by which the consensus of a people is formed: a philosopher inspires a school of philosophers by his theories, which, unpopular or even reviled at first, he argues with strict rigor, or, for modern philosophers, outrageous passion and insolent contempt for rigor. Artists and intellectuals fall under the spell, adopt his world view, and being to slip overt or covert references to the world view into their works, and they in turn inspire authors, journalists, jurists, academics, and so on. The arguments in favor of the world view are forgotten or never learned by the general public, but the conclusions, the visions, the general world view is remembered. The common man accepts the world view as plain truth, and never hears the reasoning that birthed it.
Those of you with a classical education know that the modern world accepted the vision or world view of Kant, who proposed that the only true knowledge as empirical knowledge, and that noumenal or non-empirical reality was forever and eternally beyond the realm of knowledge. Everything from mathematics to morality to theology was either arbitrary constructions or a priori assumptions or mere opinion. It was not knowledge because it was not certain.
When this powerful yet false notion was passed through the hands of intellectuals to the general public, the strict technical distinction between knowable empirical fact and unknowable noumenal fact became a maxim or a feeling considerably less strict and technical: empirical facts became the only kind of reality there was. Noumenal reality was downgraded from being real-but-unknown to not-real.
If you have a modern education, of course, you have been indoctrinated with this world-view of radical empiricism, and have probably never heard any arguments for it, because it has never been presented to you that any other argument or world view was possible, or that there was any case seriously to be considered. To the moderns, those of us who do not believe in the modern world view are merely barbarians and yokels, or, worse, out of date and unfashionable.
The unassailable ignorance of the modern mind is such that they take their own inability to argue, or even imagine, the other side of the case as a chrism of their superior intelligence and their deeper understanding.
The Christian world-view, or, to use the technical term, the truth, does not dispute that empirical facts are empirical facts any more than it disputes that the outside skin of a red apple is red.
What it disputes is that there is no meat and no core to the apple, and no seeds that bring forth more life: Christianity disputes that the shallow surface appearance is all the reality that there is.
Empiricism is shallowness. That is what it is designed to be.
What every man can see of the surfaces of things with his eye, or feel of the surface with his hand, are things that cannot be doubted if and when other observers, looking also at those same surfaces, confirm it.
The Empiricist can, of course, cut the apple: but then all he has done is made more surfaces and surface features. Those he can, of course, describe the cut open surfaces with the same exactitude and shallowness that characterizes his method, and the limits of his method.
What he can never see, because it cannot be exposed to his gaze by cutting, it the nature of the thing, that that-which-makes-it-what-it-is. He cannot see the purpose of the thing, that-for-the-sake-of-which-it-is. He cannot see the ethical uses and abuses, the legal or political characteristics, the economic value, the geometric ideal, nor anything else that cannot be seen with the eye, directly or through an instrument. The method of empiricism deliberately prevents this.
We Christians, and the classical pre-Christian philosophers who were groping blindly but successfully toward the Christian world view (i.e. the truth), we think there is an essential nature to the apple; that it is, in fact, a thing. We think that there is a creator to the apple; that it does, in fact, come from somewhere for some reason and even for some purpose. There are right uses and wrong uses, and not only do we know some of these things, there are some things we can’t not know even if we want to.
Jamming the apple into the mouth of an innocent baby to kill him without mitigation, justification, or excuse, is, for example, always known always to be wrong: anyone who cannot know this is wrong is insane in the eyes of the law, and unfit to stand trial, but must be confined like a dangerous beast. Likewise feeding an apple to Eve or to Snow White. Everyone knows it is wrong, and knows it is wrong to deny that it is wrong.
What Empiricists never, ever do is ask themselves how they know. They pretend such knowledge is mere opinion or social conditioning, and in this they lie, and they know they do wrong so to say, and you can see the guilt in their evasive hostility that blooms in their words when questioned on the point.
Profound ideas like “nature” and “essence” and “reason” and “purpose” are ideas the modern mind cannot refute because they cannot be comprehended by the axioms of modernity.
My experience has been that the modern minds I debate merely have one of two reactions when confronted by non-empirical ideas that they themselves use even in order to explain or justify their empiricism.
First, they blithely assert that non-empirical ideas, when used by them, are actually empirical. For example, when asked how the properties of a purely ideal triangle can be deduced by a geometer, the modern empiricist, without breaking a smile, soberly asserts that the triangles are made of atoms in the brain of the geometer, and the geometer is sensing those atoms by means of a hitherto undiscovered new sense impression above and beyond the normal five senses, which allows him to sense the brain-atoms of which the ideal triangle is composed. And the properties of the ideal triangle inhere in the atoms.
Or, second, other moderns without so well developed a blindness to paradox, simply pretend that the conclusions of pure reasoning are the results of contingent experiments. When asked to produce the name and initial conditions of the experiment, the modern merely asserts that these things have been known since antiquity, and that they are obvious, and that anyone at any time can confirm for himself various conclusions of mathematics, geometry, moral reasoning, epistemology, ontology, or what have you.
When you point out to empiricists of this second type that an “experiment” by its nature MUST have a contingent outcome, i.e., it is possible to imagine and outcome with different values or different results, such as an apple falling on Newton’s head at less or more than sixteen feet per second squared; whereas conclusions of reason and metaphysics by their nature MUST have a necessary outcome, i.e., it is impossible to imagine, or even talk sense, about something is necessarily not the case, such as unequal vertical angles, dishonesty being honest, or A being non-A — that therefore experiments in physics must assume and cannot confirm nor deny metaphysical axioms, much less mathematical or moral ones — they give you a blank look and change the subject.
The more ambitious ones accuse you, classically educated man, of being an ignoramus.
The modern educated man, having never read Kant, perhaps having never heard of him, cannot even discuss the topic of Kantian metaphysics, nor say why Kant holds all prior metaphysics to be in error: nor can I clearly explain (unless my listener is very patient, and I have abundant free time) why I deem Kant to be in error.
Let me attempt in brief, and without being too technical. Kant’s error is a paradox. If you believe the metaphysical axiom that only Empirical knowledge is true knowledge, then all metaphyiscal axioms, including this one, are not true knowledge. And if it is not true knowledge, you cannot account for believing it.
This paradox can be resolved only two ways: either accept this (and all) metaphysical axioms as blind and arbitrary acts of the will (This is the Nietzsche solution, and that way leads madness); or accept that this (and all) metaphysical axioms are contingent assumptions like the rules of a chess game, merely inventions for the pleasure and convenience of man, but having nothing to do with reality (this is the logical positivist solution, and that way lies another type of madness).
Since a schoolboy can poke holes in the paradoxes and errors that either one of the two paths to madness maintain, I need not do so here. Just take a look at the post-modern and post-rational, post-ethical world around you.
The real solution to the paradox, of course, is to reason that if the axiom leads to an absurd conclusion, instead of assuming the absurdity is the truth, assume the axiom is wrong.
Classical and Christian metaphysics holds that other valid forms of epistemology exist aside from empiricism, and, indeed, one cannot validate empiricism without reference to one of these other forms of knowledge, either rational or revelatory.
Rationalism, in brief, holds that as rational creatures, by definition we must have certain truths built into us, and built into the mechanism of reasoning. We could not reason if reasoning itself were not true. If we lived in a universe where A equaled Non-A, we could not come to the conclusion that this were so, nor to any conclusions. Merely because we are rational, and for no other reason, we know certain truths to be self evident.
Revelation, in brief, holds that the Truth, acting by its own will, may and can and does from time to time reveal something of itself to those creatures with the truth in them.
These epistemologies cannot be explained to anyone who has been chloroformed by the modern indoctrination that passes for the education of the intelligentsia. You cannot find words simple enough or examples clear enough to overcome their ingrained self-satisfaction, to explain these roots of knowledge to them–even such roots of knowledge they themselves employ in their own world views, such as the idea that human life is sacred, or that men have natural rights, or that A is A.
One cannot lead or lure them to examine their own ideas, or question their premises. What a humble philosopher takes as a joyful speculation and an exciting adventure, the proud intellectual takes as an attack on his shaky self esteem. Here I will make no attempt to do it: there are over two thousand years worth of philosophical and theological works sufficient to do that task for me.
In a recent column in this space, I asked my patient atheist and theist readers a hypothetical: if you were teleported through time back into the First Century Palestine, and saw the miracles of Christ, would this be sufficient empirical evidence to convince you to repent, bow the kneel, and become baptized? I promised I would then reveal, in this hypothetical universe, whether there actually was or was not a God, and whether those miracles were indeed signs that he who performed them spoke the truth; but at no point did I say what, if anything, he spoke.
Alert readers will have noticed it was a trick question.
The hypothetical actually took place in the same blasphemous background universe of Michael Moorcock’s stupid hackjob of a book BEHOLD THE MAN. The person pretending to be Christ was another time traveler, like yourself. The various events that looked like miracles were the by-products of advanced technology from other groups of time-travelers from further in the future, either trying to create Christianity, so as to preserve the main timeline, or trying to obliterate Christianity, so as to create Athiestopia.
The recruiter for the assassins of Christ was, of course, merely another time traveler, someone loyal to Atheistotopia.
SCORING!
Those of you who thought the Atheistotopian was Great Lord Lucifer of the Abyss are docked two points for not adhering to the terms of the hypothetical, which was a question about EMPIRICAL evidence and what conclusions can be based on EMPIRICAL evidence. The Atheistotopian recruiter offered not one shred of evidence that he was a supernatural being. He sat and smoked a cigarette and asked you to shoot Christ. The only correct empirical conclusion to be reached from those facts are (1) he is a being who sits. (2) He smokes. (3) He asked you to shoot Christ. Any conclusions beyond that are not empirical conclusions.
Those of you answered that you would repent and be baptized one you saw the Transfiguration, or the Ascension, or the Nativity are docked one point, because the terms of the hypothetical were asking about EMPIRICAL knowledge. To know yourself, that you are a wretched sinner, and that you thirst for the water of life that will wash sin away, is not only not an empirical proposition, it cannot be expressed or described in an empirical way.
It is a type of knowledge that not only cannot be proven to a worldly and empirical man, it cannot even be described to him. No matter what words you use, O faithful Christian, to tell the worldly man this basic truth of reality, he CANNOT hear it. To him, the words will simply mean something else. It does not matter what words you use, or what examples, or what rhetoric.
It is a truth that cannot be spoken to a man with no truth in him, for the same reason that reasons cannot be given to beasts who have no power of reasoning. First the truth must be inside him, in his soul, and then the truth will react or respond to the truth in your words, if you speak truly.
You, O faithful Christian, have no power, no power at all, to plant this truth in the soul of someone who knows it not. No more than Mr. A Square of Flatland can his fellow two-dimensional beings the wonder of a sphere, can you speak to those who are dead about the glories of life. They are dead. It is not their fault they cannot understand you.
Only the Truth itself (or, rather, Himself) can plant this truth. He will do it only when asked by the dead man. Naturally, the dead man cannot be convince beforehand by some empirical evidence to ask: because no empirical evidence whatsoever has any bearing on the question.
Those of you who answered that signs and wonders do not, by themselves, transform the soul, bring the dead to life, open the eyes of the blind, nor turn mourning into joy are not docked any points, because you got the point of the hypothetical.
The Good Book is full to bursting of warning about false prophets and false messiahs, and the false gods who can — as all wellinformed Christians are required to believe — produce signs and wonders of their own. Did not the magicians of Egypt cast down their rods also and turn them into snakes? Did not Christ Himself warn you that Antichrist will perform signs and wonders to deceive the faithful?
Now, if any of my modern readers who are Christians scoff at the idea of Egyptian magicians, or the miracles of the Antichrist, I suggest you go have your credentials renewed. If you do not believe what the Church teaches, you are outside the Church. If you do not believe what Christ said, you are outside Christ.
Those of you who said that only the Holy Ghost can grant that grace which makes a man realize his wretchedness, and move the soul to ask or salvation, you get a point and win the hypothetical.
If my Catholic friends think this answer sounds suspiciously like Calvinism and Lutheranism, think again: those heresies are simplifications of a doctrine taught in our catechism by our Magisterium.
The hypothetical was a trick question: it was asking how much empirical knowledge is needed to reach a non-empirical conclusion.
The answer is: there ain’t no such animal and you can’t get there from here. Not even an infinite amount of horizontal lines will raise you one inch to the vertical.
No matter what you see with your eye through the medium of light, it makes no difference even in the slightest what you apprehend immediately in your soul.
So it does not matter what the Time Travelers show you, and it does not matter whether you conclude as an empirical matter that God really exists.
The Prince of Darkness, Great Lucifer, knows God exists. The Dark Lord knows for sure, with more clarity in his superhuman, angelic mind than you mere mortals can even imagine, he knows that God exists. He is not likely to repent and seek baptism. He may not be capable of it: I leave that question to theologians.
Again, it does not matter what your five sense show you, and it does not matter whether you conclude empirically God really exists. Empirical knowledge does not make you fall in love. It does not make you forswear narcissism or eschew pride, envy, avarice, sloth, wrath, gluttony, lust.
Nothing you see with your eye or hear with the ear or touch with your hand, either directly or through an instrument, can get a dead man to yearn for life. He is dead. He does not have the power in him, even theoretically.
The reason why the AD 3 Hypothetical was a trick question, and was an unfair trick question, is that my atheist and agnostic friends not only could not guess or get the right answer from the information given, they cannot even understand, except, perhaps, by analogy, what the right answer could be.
Knowing about God is not the same as knowing God. Facts are things you know about. People are persons you get to know. Divine persons are persons who take you up into them, and who shine in you and through you like light through a pure crystal. When you drink the blood of Christ and eat the flesh, you do not take Him into you, He takes you into Him, and He says. “Well done, good and faithful servant. I know you now.”
Human knowledge can only comprehend a little ways. We cannot comprehend infinity. Human love can comprehend everything. We can love the God who is infinite love.
That is why Christ asks us first to love. Understanding, what little is given us, that comes later.
I cannot explain it clearer than this, because it cannot be explained clearer than this, any more than you can explain love to a man who has never been in love.
Explanations only explain the surfaces of things. Reality is the core of things. Reality cannot be explained to post-modern post-Kantian post-rational post-ethical neo-barbarians because they have no category in their minds and no words in their vocabularies for the core of things. They only know surfaces, and their unquestioned and unquestionable axiom is that nothing but surfaces exist.
If they could question this unquestionable axiom, they would not be proud modern men. They would be humble philosophers.
We Christians cannot conform to the world any more than the visiting Sphere can conform to the shallow surface world of Mr. A Square of Flatland. Our metaphysics and epistemology can only be explained, if at all, by analogy, or, to use the geometer’s term, by projection. We cannot conform even if we wanted to. Neither can we conform to the secular age because it is a temporary age. We are eternal, and will outlive and outlast it.
We are both too multi-dimensional to fit into the confines of the world, and too eternal to shrink to its span of time.
So the world has to be outraged at us. We claim to be bigger and greater in space and time than spacetime. It is an outrageous claim.
It also happens to be true.
Would you like, my skeptical readers, some empirical proof that reality beyond the bounds of empiricism reaches exists?
Ah, but that is another trick question.
Dear Skeptical Reader, you are invited to win a bonus point if you tell me what the trick involved in the question is. Perhaps, in so doing, you can take a step down the path that leads toward philosophy and beyond.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
