“How did we get here?” It’s a question I’ve been asking myself an awful lot lately. I’m guessing you may have uttered it yourself a time or two. If you weren’t acquainted with this grief-filled question before 2020, you may well be now.

To sum up, so far 2020 has given Americans:

• An impeachment trial for President Trump which never had any chance of yielding a conviction.
• A global pandemic which has caused death and division in seemingly every way possible (though I don’t rule out it may yet find some new ways to kill and divide people before it’s done).
• Continued racial strife as the death of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor (and a long list of others) boiled into protests in hundreds of cities across the country.
• A presidential campaign that yielded two old white men vying for the highest office in the land, neither of whom have a particularly good history of party loyalty, even while their partisan supporters tout their party bona fides.
• Severe economic crisis following the pandemic which has led to millions being furloughed, fired, or separated from their jobs.

And that’s before we get to Tiger King, Kobe Bryant’s death, unrest, revolution, and difficulty in several other countries, continued refugee crises around the world, and on the list goes. The world is having a season. And it’s not a particularly happy one.

One of the standard parts of all of the unhappiness in our world right now is the increasingly divided and partisan way so many things are handled. Smarter people than me have written about our increased division and polarization, but it will suffice to say here that if there is a way to find for people to make something about proving they were right all along and that anyone who disagrees with them is purely evil, there’s a better chance than ever before that there will be people in our society pushing that narrative.

As it turns out, there really is a simple explanation for “how we got here.” This cultural thunderdome was created by the abolition of a few key pillars of the society that was constructed through centuries of American history. As those pillars have fallen, one after another, we have lost the ability to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong, ultimately leading to the current situation where outrage is currency and screaming the loudest means a temporary platform and influence, at least until someone screams louder or you get cancelled for an old tweet.

“Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool…”

Isaiah 1:18, English Standard Version

The first pillar to fall was the hardest to topple: the idea that there is knowable, publicly available, objective truth to which all arguments should appeal. Most discourse throughout history is based on the principle that the people you are conversing with have access to the same information and facts that you do, and, all other things being equal, the real debates were about proper interpretation of the agreed upon facts, not about what constituted a fact. Logic and reason depend on publicly available truth which corresponds to reality. Proper authorities were identified by training and experience and so were experts on the matters of fact in given situations. Those wishing to engage in a conversation would apprise themselves of the facts, settle on an interpretation, and then enter the conversation. Experts were given pride of place in discussion because of their knowledge and experience, though the insightful and bright found ways to move conversation in new directions, especially as new data came to light. All of this data, when considered together, would give a composite sense of the reality, and then all truth claims had to correspond to this crowd-sourced view of reality. Changes culturally were based on the discovery and admission of new facts to the discourse.

The attack on truth came from a variety of fronts. A host of -isms were thrown at the truth: relativism, pluralism, postmodernism, and they ultimately eroded confidence in “the truth” so that it became a matter first of personal exploration, then of private conviction, then finally of an exercise of political or economic power. Perhaps the most telling example of this was from the American philosophy professor Richard Rorty, who famously quipped that truth was, “what my colleagues will let me get away with.” No matter how you want to parse up this reality, however, the idea that there were many “truths” out there which we could experience was the outcome. Distinguishing between competing claims became unpopular, and especially as the three -isms above I have noted took hold, telling someone that they were incorrect, or wrong, was quickly labeled as “being judgmental.” Somewhat ironically, the original claims from those like Rorty who were pushing for the fall of the correspondence theory of truth were based on the assumption that power made truth, and so the only way to free it would be to democratize it. Instead, the toppling of subsequent pillars only concentrated power in the hands of the same powerful people, though without the pesky experts, only for a different reason–the powerful are ever resistant to giving up power.

The felling of the pillar of objective, publicly available truth did not stop the reality of competing claims to truth. But with no agreed upon standard to adjudge between competing claims, those making arguments needed a new way to distinguish the validity of claims. Without truth to appeal to as a first principle, all that is left is to look at the results of competing ideologies. This leads to the falling of the second pillar, wisdom, especially as it relates to relying on feelings over facts. Wisdom takes the application of known, agreed upon facts and applies them so as to save people from avoidable errors. If there’s no longer a way to know before you do something if it is wrong, the only way left to know is to look at what happens after you do it. This means that the first metric in the new cultural order is to evaluate if anyone is immediately hurt by someone living “their truth.” If the answer is “no,” then the behavior or the view which commends the behavior is deemed acceptable. The word ‘intolerance’ was applied to anyone who suggested that just because something did not immediately harm someone did not mean it may not ultimately cause long-term harm somewhere, or that the law of unintended consequences may apply. A fancier way to talk about this is to say that we abandoned cultural wisdom in favor of raw consequentialism: anything flies as long as the ends (I benefit and no one got hurt) justify the means (my actions and the beliefs or principles which support them).

The result of this first movement to “Does it hurt you? Then keep out of it!” was that the community elements around individual behavior were severed. Individuals were free to do whatever they wished, provided that no one was immediately hurt. These first two movements therefore obliterated the ability of any sort of cultural check on behavior. This second move was particularly damaging because it reframed the question of something being right or ethical almost totally by whether or not it harmed someone else in a noticeable and immediate way. No attention was paid to the lessons of history around some of these behaviors previously, either because history had fallen out of favor (perhaps a victim of C.S. Lewis’s “chronological snobbery”) or because these historical narratives were questioned because of who they nominally “harmed” after they had taken root–“the historians are all biased against us, and these tellings of history hurt people!” (I will save for another day my takes on revisionist history, but it will suffice to say that when a long-held narrative is inconvenient, nothing is simpler, once you have dispensed with the troublesome commitment to facts, to retell the history in a way that supports your ideology.)

There was also another result to this second pillar’s fall. Not only did actions (and the truth claims which underpin them) become subject to a post ipso facto test of who was hurt by them, but the reverse belief–that truth could only be identified by whether someone was immediately hurt by it–also took root. This second result may have more direct application to our current situation than any other. The assumption that the “real” truth wouldn’t ever cause anyone any hurt or discomfort made human feelings the ultimate arbiter of the truth or falsity of a claim or a reasonable justification in the new order of any activity. This was very quickly dressed in the language of “human rights” so that “the pursuit of happiness” has very nearly become in our times “the right to feel good.” This right is now tacitly seen by many people as absolute, either in the form of physical pleasure, or in some other emotional or psychological state, from the protective impulse of cultural conservatives for “their way of life,” to the ever-expanding permissiveness of cultural progressives. Other examples abound.

The inevitable result of this was the annihilation of perseverance and fortitude in the face of adversity and injustice in favor of a newer ploy: the assertion of victimization as a means for claiming power in an argument. This represents the falling of a third pillar. Once the harness of truth as the ultimate judge of claims was cut, and human feelings were enshrined as the true measures of behavior, while simultaneously denying any sort of community ethic, the only remaining way to assert rightness and wrongness in an argument was to demonstrate that you are speaking from a place of deep personal aggrievement. In a truthless realm where feelings rule and pain is reviled, those in pain make the rules. While nominally suggesting that this was about raising up historically disadvantaged populations, the reality of this adoption of victimization culture is that it caused those in power to search for pathways to accumulate power through absorbing the experiences and values of those who had been actually victimized historically.

The key to understanding this is not to ignore or minimize the struggle of those historically disenfranchised, but rather to see where power collected when the victimization culture took hold. The power did not finally coalesce around those with the best claims to being on the receiving end of historical and real prejudice, but rather with those who claimed to represent them. Conveniently, on both the left and the right, those groups are the two main political parties, who immediately drafted those closest to their nominal values to their cause with promises of power and righting the injustices so that the culture wars continued in earnest, though in the realm of feelings rather than in the realm of intellectual arguments. Both parties and their purchased media outlets have, for the most part, stopped making reasoned arguments based on intellectual principles.

A final collapse in the area of discourse and media is the icing on our disastrous cultural cake. There was no chance that discourse would survive the falling of these three pillars: the disavowal of objective truth, the installation of feeling over reason as the final cultural judge of claims, and the weaponization of victimization as a means to both claim and exert cultural power. However, without the explosion of media and social media and communication technology, the disastrous effects of this collapse might have been dampened. Instead, the public square has devolved into a truthless, valueless, emotive colosseum, where survival is achieved by either hiding in obscurity, or aggressively marshaling power to silence dissent to buttress your power. Said differently: either you can keep to yourself, you can be the biggest victim, or you can be the biggest bully. Anything else is untenable.

That leads us to the present.

This cultural moment is one of enormous fear and bald power grabs by ideological thugs, politically, culturally, economically, and nearly any other way you can think of. The traditionally powerful institutions: family, community, religious faith, and the academy, have all been co-opted by the political parties, which have replaced elements of all four. The redrawing of the cultural order to weaponize political ideologies has led some to withdraw and others to make their deals with their preferred devils. Politics has never been a pure endeavor in American life. But it was also downstream from more stable elements, historically. When these institutions were robust and powerful, there was no need to trust in a political party for your protection. Furthermore, when these institutions were ascendant (though not without difficulties themselves, obviously), there were clear restraints which protected against the worst outcomes. The political systems were imperfect, but as long as the principles were debated and politicians were able to deal and show something for their skill in compromise to the communities they represented, they were allowed to keep their jobs as a necessary evil. As it is, the politicians have no such harnesses.

Instead, the political parties, as the sole remaining cultural institution which has survived the cultural tumult of the past thirty or more years, have become the last bastion of hope for many. As fear has taken hold, the entrenchment in the ruins of our culture has only deepened. Both parties have committed themselves to a brand of statism which promises freedom of an agreeable kind in exchange for cultural power. Afraid of losing power and becoming victim to all the other victims, people continue to hold their nose and vote for candidates who increasingly hold the role of “strongman” rather than “lawman.” But this is all we can expect when we have obliterated any way to ground law and justice beyond our own feelings and demanded that our desires be inseparable from or symmetrical with “our truths.”

Is there any hope for this tide to turn? In short, yes. I would not have written this if I did not have hope for a way back to something which can help us find a firm place to stand and try to fix what we have broken. As a Christian, I believe the most direct route is through faith in Jesus Christ followed up immediately by living out that faith as the Bible lays out. But there are other projects we can embark on together, even if we do not agree about the particulars of my faith.

My current plan is to address the things we can do in some depth soon, but in short, I believe that there are a few key steps to reclaiming solid ground in America to address our many issues, all of which address these fallen pillars in a targeted and systemic way. First and foremost, however, we must realize that something has gone awry. Given the events of this year, most of us would be hard pressed to deny that reality. What we do about it will make the difference for generations to come.

“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”

Thomas Paine, in “The Crisis.”