An insightful comment on economics applying to all disciplines from Paul Collier, Oxford prof and author of The Bottom Billion:
Part of the reason single-factor theories about development failure are so common is that modern academics tend to specialize: they are trained to produce intense but narrow beams of light.
I love Stanley Fish for his willingness and ability to see the bankruptcy of his employers. He regularly stands on the foundation which supports him and whacks at it with his prodigious intellectual sledgehammer. I admit I haven’t read enough to see if he ever tries finding another rock to build on, but I suspect he doesn’t and that’s his point.
His latest New York Times blog post is a must-read. It takes up presuppositionalist themes again by reviewing Steven Smith’s The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, a work wielding the same hammer Fish does. Secular reasons, Smith argues, are actually religious ones smuggled in. There is no safe secular arena where neutral arguments reign.
It is not, Smith tells us, that secular reason can’t do the job (of identifying ultimate meanings and values) we need religion to do; it’s worse; secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job—of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects—without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain.
And this from Smith’s book:
The secular vocabulary within which public discourse is constrained today is insufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments. We manage to debate normative matters anyway—but only by smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible, and hence that cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to.
And yet it seems most Christians don’t understand this. They have agreed with the intellectually bankrupt bullies that religious evidence has been ruled inadmissible. So Christians go on TV and talk about the horizontal, sociological effects of homosexuality or teen pregnancy. They never mention the vertical. Granted, in the world God made, horizontal effects are part of God’s general revelation. But no one can repent of their sins and trust creation. Christians are the only people who have a good answer for why the negative sociological effects of sin are in fact negative. We’ve got answers for Fish’s powerful questions!
It always amazes me to read the comments from readers after Fish’s essays. The very first comment:
As an atheist, I read this whole piece waiting for the part where Mr. Fish would explain how, without invoking a secular/religious distinction, a society can prevent the majority religion from imposing its creed on everyone else. However metaphysically unfulfilling it may be, “smuggling” sounds a lot better than “theocracy.”
The only appropriate response to that comment is sorrow. “I will not be ruled by God!”, she is saying. “I’d rather be ruled by a puppet with my own hand inside.”
The next commenter appeals back to his presuppositions: evolutionary naturalism explains all.
The next commenter simply asserts that “there is no ‘metaphysics’ only physics.” Only observable facts are true.
When the truth, or even a portion of it, comes into the house to burn it up, people run and get their valuables.
It is helpful, even essential, to keep the storyline of Scripture in mind at all times as you read the Bible. If the Bible is about what God is doing to glorify Himself by redeeming His fallen creation, then you’d expect Scripture to point out over and over how God glorifies Himself by saving people from the power of sin. It should be no surprise that God’s standards are higher than we can possibly meet, because Scripture is not the story of man working harder and harder to achieve equality with God. Impossible standards like “Love your enemies” or even “Love your neighbor as yourself” are just reminders of how far we’ve fallen and how much divine power it’s going to take to buy us completely back from slavery to sin.
Back in 2005, I wrote the following for the monthly newsletter I’m charged with producing:
Touchstone recently dedicated its cover story to the disintegration of male friendships in American society. In the article, perceptive cultural observer Anthony Esolen noted that the unceasing thrust for the normalization of homosexuality in America has pushed boys into heterosexual promiscuity (lest they be accused of homosexuality) and out of healthy male friendships. Men, too, simply could never express—and rarely have reason to anymore—what David did regarding his friend Jonathan: "Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." Even in the 19th century, Esolen shows, thoroughly heterosexual men knit their souls together. Today that sentence is difficult to write. "What do the paraders achieve, with their public promotion of homosexuality?" asks Esolen. "They come out of the closet, and hustle a lot of good and natural feelings back in." (Touchstone, 9/05)
I just re-read that essay, available here, and I must say that my rather pedestrian summary does no justice to the beauty of Esolen’s style and the power of his argument.
I’m thankful I grew up in a culture which still let me have close male friends, and I’m trying to hang on to that culture and maintain it for my now-gestational son.
Incidentally, Esolen also has some thoughtful objections to the idea often touted on this blog that usage determines meaning—at least the idea, not touted on this blog, that this statement is sufficient to describe the world as it is. Vern Poythress, in a book I’ve been reading on language, has made a similar point: usage may determine meaning, but God is still ultimate. He’s the one who guarantees that words have meaning and that we can understand one another at all. That’s a point from special revelation, and it’s one parallel to the Bible’s assertion of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. Esolen, as a Catholic might be expected to do, makes his point from general revelation: the world is set up in such a way that some syntaxes and some syllables won’t work, and some meanings will never exist in language because they don’t exist in real life. That’s another pointer to God’s ultimacy, because He’s the one Who made the world as it is.
I encourage you to read the whole thing.
