Why relativism is always an invitation to chaos
Over the last 24 hours the predictable cycle emerged around the events of January 6, 2021. The media coverage and immediate scramble for information. The social media fire storm. The blame being pushed everywhere. The arrival to the conversation of the cancellers to remind everyone they would “never forget” those who were wrong the entire time and about who they hate. The minimizers of what happened. The deniers. The conspiracy theorists. The whatabouters. The predictable cowardice and disavowal from the politicians who first encouraged, then enabled the attack.
That these categories exist shouldn’t be a surprise. The communication environment we are in has created this ecology and food chain. The media produces the information buffet, prepared according to the recipes their audiences prefer, and everyone feasts. Then the arguments start, and the jackals and profiteers come out of the woodwork. It’s what our system rewards. But how did we end up with Trump voters storming the Capitol?
The pieces have been moving for a long time. The outrage on Capitol Hill yesterday was not the beginning of something–it was the logical end of something. In short, the events of this season, including the insurrection yesterday, boil down to what happens when a culture denies that bad ideas have consequences. That denial is doubly problematic for Christians.
I saw a meme circulating on social media today which ultimately was the final straw for me to pick up my digital pen today. I dropped it in below. It was shared by folks on various platforms, and from all walks of my life. There didn’t seem to be any particular pattern in the folks who were distributing it either. It’s truly viral.
I can only assume the reason that this is circulating today specifically is because those posting it believe the problem our country has is intolerance for varied opinions. On the broadest level, I suppose, that’s correct: the protesters yesterday certainly believe they weren’t being heard and that their beliefs weren’t being honored. Most protests could broadly be described that way. Americans have protected protest in law precisely because preserving and protecting liberty of thought is, at least nominally, an American value.
But every freedom comes with implicit responsibilities and duties. Liberty of thought as it has always been conceived of in American law and culture has been an invitation to engage with facts and reality. It is the chance to come to your own opinion, yes, but about agreed upon facts. It is not, and has never been, a blanket invitation to every individual to create their own reality. Believing something to be true doesn’t make that thing a reality. There is no way to believe yourself to new facts. The freedom to believe as you like in America is not, and has never been, license to demand your own separate reality to which everyone else, and the physical world itself, must conform.
On the logical side of things, it’s impossible to consistently defend that everyone should be free to believe whatever they want AND that some ideas are wrong or bad. You have to choose one or the other. If you want to choose that everyone is free to believe what they want, you must be prepared to do two important things: be diligent about establishing facts, and you must have a high tolerance for dissent without violence. The first thing is necessary because a robust marketplace of ideas must have common currency if it is going to avoid chaos. The second thing is necessary to make sure there isn’t a monopoly or dictatorship by a single bully/ideology. If you’re going to take option two and label some ideas as bad, you need an agreed upon standard by which you will differentiate what is good and what is bad in addition to the things necessary for option one. It can be broad or narrow, but there must be a standard. You need a way to construct the “bad idea which we all reject” list and the “good ideas we all accept” list.
Failure to accept shared facts and establish parameters for discourse leads to chaos. If every person is entitled to their own reality, it is only a matter of time before differing realities collide. As they do, fears increase and coalitions form. With no rules, things devolve to raw exercises in gaining and exercising power. Hostility is guaranteed.
In practice and for most of American history, there was only rarely disagreement about the need for established facts. But as the years have ticked past, Americans have had more and more trouble discerning facts. It began innocently enough with discussions about whether particular things were true or not. Those discussions led to arguments about the ways someone could identify the truth. Finally, those arguments led to a broad philosophical upheaval in the early to mid 20th century which denied the ability to positively and confidently identify any truth. With that, the dam broke. But the generations of people who grew up and came to adulthood prior to the dam breaking managed to control the institutions long enough to prevent the collapse of our culture. Even though they bandied about the idea that objective truth didn’t exist or wasn’t knowable, they still behaved as though it did exist and they knew what it was. Their children exorcised the ghost of objective truth and embraced relativism, the idea that truth changes given the circumstances and perspectives of the participants in the conversation.
The prevailing ideology of our time is an individualized relativism, where people hold absolutely their own ideology and their ability to construct their own truth and will not tolerate anyone questioning it, while at the same time feeling freedom to attack and label others. This produces absurdity all the time, but most notably in two types of people: those too enlightened to take their own side in an argument, and those so enraptured with their own openmindedness that they cannot see all they talk about is how bad everyone who disagrees with them is. In serious discussions, both of these types have little to contribute.
The idea that everything is relative is just that–an idea. And it’s a bad one. The Western world has been trying to make it work for more than a century, coming up with more and more elaborate ways to defend it, but in the end, it always ends like it did on Capitol Hill yesterday: with a body count. No one knew better than Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and survivor of the Holocaust, that ideas have consequences. Writing after WWII as a survivor of Auschwitz, he addressed the connection between idea and action:
“If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.
Victor E. Frankl, “The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy”
I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”
Frankl connects the ideas of nihilism to the actions which came after. If you believe that everything is ultimately meaningless and life is the product of purely mechanistic scientific principles, there is no reason to value life. Teaching the idea of nihilism instills in those who imbibe it the ethic of nihilism which leads to nihilistic action. It’s a straight line from idea to action measured only in the passage of time. American individualistic relativism is a bad idea that yields bad consequences. The events in our nation’s capital yesterday are only one example.
The reality is that the Donald Trump did not win the 2020 presidential election. He was not even close. It was not one of the five closest elections in US history. There was no enormous conspiracy to steal the election. The reality is that there were more than 50 lawsuits to challenge the fairness and reality of the result, and none of the lawsuits have yet persuaded a court of law that there was sufficient cause to overturn the results in even a single state. The reality is that the GOP prepared to challenge the election before there was a single vote cast, and then undermined the processes to help the election to run more smoothly in several states in this pandemic season we are in, before challenging as unfair the broken processes they fashioned for yielding a result they did not desire. There was an election that produced actual ballots in a variety of safe and protected ways. These ballots had markings on them coding for who the voter wanted to see elected. Those ballots were counted. The results were tabulated. They were certified by local election officials, sometimes after multiple counts, then by state officials, then national officials. Those who felt there were improprieties brought their facts to support the assertion to a court of law, and those courts (many of them filled with conservative judges) ruled that there was insufficient evidence to prove the election results invalid. This is not a matter for varying beliefs. These are facts. They are not facts because I want them to be true or because they serve my ends. They are true because of the objective, knowable, measurable, public nature of them. It’s is not an opinion that Joe Biden won the election–it’s a fact. Every American is entitled to their opinion about whether that is good or bad–and I would bet that nearly everyone has some opinion about that. But the reality itself is not a matter of opinion.
The protest and assault on our Capitol yesterday is ultimately the fruit of American individualistic relativism: the protesters take as fundamental their right to their particular brand of reality, buttressed only by those facts and explanation which affirm their correctness. “If I just speak my truth,” they seem to believe, “then my reality must necessarily follow.” “If I deny facts which are contrary to my conclusion as fake-news or biased nonsense, I can retain my self-righteousness in my cause.” In this, they take their guidance from Trump himself, who for the past several months, and indeed at regular points throughout his presidency and life, seems impervious to objective reality. Trump doesn’t engage facts he doesn’t agree with to prove they’re not true. He simply calls them fake news, implies they are biased against him, and moves on. Trump’s world tolerates no facts which do not conform to his pre-established narratives. In this, I think the claims he is a liar are false–he believes what he is saying. Trump is not a liar. In order to be a liar, he would first have to be able to positively identify reality and then twist it. He simply does not possess that ability.
For Americans to escape from this spiral of insane competing truth claims shot up with the steroids of political power and bolstered by the inflammatory rhetoric of politicians who have learned that they can win elections by making the “other” an existential threat to their base, we need to get back to shared facts. We need to dispense with relativism and admit that it, and many other things our culture is desperate to promote, are bad ideas. We don’t need an enormous base of shared agreement to get started–we just need a few key facts where the vast majority of us can say, “we all agree this is right and that is wrong.” Having a mob invade the US capital should be one of those things we should all be able to point at and say is wrong.
A few additional words for my Christian brothers and sisters. This matter of relativism is especially important for us because we believe in a God who IS the truth. There is no consistent way to represent him as God and yourself as the final arbiter of truth at the same time. Either God IS the truth, or you are the one who decides your truth. There’s no middle ground. If you choose to dip your toes in the water of relativism, don’t be surprised when you encounter unbelievers who dismiss “your truth.” You’ve got nothing to offer them beyond your own judgments–you are asking them to trust you over themselves. If you’re human, that’s not a very compelling argument, no matter how good or right you believe you are.
One other thing here: it is not only our secular culture which has lost its way in this relativistic season. Yesterday’s invaders made it very clear what they thought they were representing–some carrying their faith sentiments on their clothes or on signs. While I can see some justifications for believers to rebel against earthly authorities if they are prepared to receive the consequences for that action, I can see no justification for what happened yesterday, precisely because it is all motivated by falsehoods. Furthermore, that some of the same “Christian” people who decried protests for the majority of this year would suddenly reverse positions and support what happened yesterday (and what has happened since the election) indicates clearly there is no broader principle or ethic at work in their behavior than the bald play for political and cultural power. It’s time to be clear.
That play for cultural power is a lose/lose gambit. If you play for the power to try and enforce faith and win, you increase the animosity and antipathy unbelievers have towards the faith we profess. In other words, you win the power and lose on God’s mission. If you play for the power and lose, you get nothing–not the power, and not the respect of those who do not have the faith. Beyond that, playing for the cultural power assumes a thing which is historically not true–that cultural power increases kingdom outreach. Finally, seeking cultural power as an end proves we trust men and earthly power more than the God of the universe. If we win cultural power to expand our kingdom but prove ourselves faithless to God’s Kingdom and it’s expansion, we lose twice. It’s time to be wise in how we engage.
The amount of paranoia in the Evangelical community about this election and its result betrays our real hope, and the extent to which charlatans, false prophets, hucksters, and grifters have captured our attention as a group reveals how desperate we have become, how unrooted from the Scriptures, and how clueless we are about God’s actual work in this generation. The writing is on the Capitol walls. It’s time to repent.
We don’t repent because we want an audience. We don’t repent because we want to convince unbelievers. We repent because there IS a God, and we have departed from him to our own way. We turn back to him because he is worthy of following more than our own visions of what we might accomplish in His name. We turn back to him because without turning back, there is no hope for us or our lost world, both now and for eternity. Everything we need is in him–not in an election result or retaining cultural power. Our country needs Jesus now, and the way to show him clearly is to follow him without any qualification or presumption about what he is doing in this moment. If he returned tomorrow, our labor for cultural power wouldn’t make us read for that return. It’s time to make ready.