“It’s On the Role of Government”

Rachel Held Evans has posted her “Ask a Christian Progressive” post, which features Progressive Tim King, of Sojourners.  I especially appreciated Tim’s response to the question “What myth about progressives would you like to debunk?”  He says:

“It’s on the role of government. Now, I believe that government can and should play a positive, active and limited role in society. But, sometimes I get the impression that others think I’m so in love with government that I spend my free time standing around in long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles or figuring out ways to pay more taxes.

“For example, I think it is absolutely essential that the government play an active role in making sure our food is safe. But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t also problems with the regulatory system. Here’s a story about a local farm that was hosting a ‘farm to fork’ dinner when a state health inspector came by and shut the whole thing down for a series of ridiculous reasons.

“As someone who has grown up on a farm, situations like that really frustrate me. Why are they picking on the little guy? Especially when environmentally detrimental practices of large agri-business aren’t reigned in.

“Our current regulatory system is weighted to benefit big businesses that have the resources and the staff to figure it all out and it leaves a lot of small businesses with unnecessary extra costs.”

I agree with Tim.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to me that Republicans do enough to roll back that sort of regulation, as much as they like to blab on about how regulations kill jobs.  When it comes to deregulating big banks that cause financial crises, sure, they’re willing to do that (as when they joined Bill Clinton and many Democrats in tearing down Glass-Steagall).  But, even when the Republicans are in power, I still hear stories about regulations stifling and hindering innovation among the middle class.  Do the Republicans do anything about that?

Skepticism

G. Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy: The Schools of the Imperial Age, trans. John R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990) 111.

Reale discusses Aenesidemus, whom he dates to the first century B.C.E. Aenesidemus was a significant figure in the rebirth of Pyrrhonism, which is a form of skepticism. Thus, Aenesidemus appears in Reale’s section on Neo-Skepticism.

Here is a quote:

…in the same individual not only are the structures of the senses different but so are the dispositions, conditions, states of mind different and changeable, all of which consequently condition the representations. It all verifies the conclusion that our representations differ according to whether we are happy or ill, young or old, in our right mind or out of it, happy or unhappy and thus as a consequence, for this reason as well, we must suspend judgment.

How well can human beings understand and conceptualize the outside world? We look at this world from our own perspectives, and our conclusions about what we see can be different. Some people notice one detail, while others observe another. And then there is the question about whether people are interpreting the detail that they see in a correct manner.

Memory can also be flawed. I once saw an episode of Frasier in which Frasier and Niles remembered an event quite differently. The event was this: Niles said that he was content as he put his arm around Daphne, and Martin said he was too as he put his arm around Ronnie (Martin’s girlfriend, aka Nina on Just Shoot Me). And, in Nile’s recollection, he and Martin made those remarks in a normal voice. But Frasier remembered them saying it in a snide manner, as if they were bragging about their own success in love as compared to Frasier’s failure. Frasier heard “Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah” in his recollection. There’s one event, but two different recollections.

It often baffles me how I can mis-remember things that I see and hear. When I watch something on TV, I remember what I see in a specific way: this person said this in this manner as he was standing here, looking like this. Then, I watch the same scene months or years later, and what I see is not what I remember. You’d expect the pictures in my head to be accurate, but that’s not always the case!

In my understanding, post-modernism says that we can’t objectively know the outside world, since we look at it through our own culture, biases, etc. I do not consider myself to be a hard post-modernist, for I agree with something that Jon Levenson said when I was at Harvard: Sure, there is subjectivity, but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing but subjectivity. We can know some things with a degree of accuracy, even if our knowledge is not perfect.

At the same time, there is a lot of subjectivity! Academia, for example, has a great deal of group think. One reason that people like the New Perspective on Paul and Judaism (i.e., the view that Judaism was not legalistic) is that they want to avoid Christian supersessionism, which led to the Holocaust. But the scholars before them had the opposite kind of group think: they were influenced by the New Testament to view Judaism as legalistic, a religion that promoted a works-based salvation, in contrast to Paul’s emphasis on God’s love and grace. One idea is the fad now, whereas another idea was the fad not that long ago.

I’ve heard scholars of Judaism claim that you can’t use the Mishnah to understand the first century Pharisees, since the Mishnah is a later document. In a class I once took, a student tried to understand the Gospel story of the disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath in light of the Mishnah’s rule prohibiting harvesting on that day, and the professor criticized him for that. “The Mishnah was later than the New Testament.” But I’ve often seen scholars use later sources to understand earlier ones. Both are from the ancient world, so, with the Mishnah and the New Testament, why can’t a person use one source (the Mishnah) to understand another source that was written only slightly earlier (the New Testament)? The answer: academia has its fads that we’re supposed to honor (for whatever reason)! We’re told that scholarship is all about finding an objective truth, but academia is conditioned by its own culture, perspectives, group think, etc.

But that’s just my view, based on my own experiences. Others may argue that reality is more complex than that!

Is Stephen aka Q a Postmodernist? Am I?

After a long hiatus, Stephen aka Q has returned to posting on his biblioblog, Emerging from Babel. Unbeknownst to me, he’s been active on another of his sites, [A]mazed and [Be]mused, which gets a lot of responses.

Stephen wrote a post entitled Whose Christianity?, in which he says that he is now a postmodernist Christian. He has arrived at these convictions because of divisions among Christians over crucial issues, such as torture, annihilationism, and pacificism. As many of you may know, Stephen has been active in these debates on the blogosphere.

My impression of what’s going on is this: Old Stephen believed that God is obviously against torture and war. The things that told him God’s will (e.g., Scripture) indicated this, and so that’s what he accepted as true, in typical modernist Christian fashion. More than that, he hoped that the Christian church would take a united stand on these issues, acting as a conscience to society. But he has encountered well-intentioned, reasonable Christians (such as John Hobbins of Ancient Hebrew Poetry) who see a different message when they read the Bible, one that views torture and war as necessary in certain cases.

And so Stephen now seems to be more skeptical about our ability to arrive at an objective definition of Christianity. He states, “A postmodernist will not be shocked to learn that ‘Christianity’ is an empty basket that people fill with their own prior convictions. Those all-important prior convictions are local and contingent — not to say self-serving.” What he means is that there are all sorts of Christianities, some that promote liberation, and some that promote the status quo. And, since Jesus is not here to tell us which one is right, we’re basically here, interpreting Scripture according to our own subjective preferences.

But I wonder if Stephen is totally a postmodernist. Even now, he seems to believe that torture and war are wrong. He says, “I would prefer near-unanimity among Christians: against torture; against the doctrine of hell as a place of eternal torment; against abortion; in support of pacifism; in support of a substantial redistribution of wealth[.]” So he believes in the existence of right and wrong, right? Don’t postmodernists believe that right and wrong are relative, meaning that there are no absolutes?

Of course, I’m just speaking from my own understanding of postmodernism. I don’t know for sure if they’re complete relativists, who deny the existence of objective truth. That’s how they’ve been presented to me in Christian books. Even a Harvard scholar such as Jon Levenson has framed postmodernism in such a way before arguing against it. I have read postmodernists in the past, but I don’t understand what the heck they’re saying. (Clarity is not one of their strong points, though Stephen writes clearly.)

If postmodernists deny that we can accurately describe reality, then what’s that do to their truth claim that we can’t accurately describe reality? I mean, postmodernists themselves make truth claims, right? I can argue this and pat myself on the back, but, seriously, postmodernists are intelligent, educated people. They have to be, to use the big words that they use! Surely they have some way to respond to this!

I once heard a professor discuss a book that features a debate between Richard Rorty and Umberto Eco. My impression from my professor’s discussion was that Rorty was the postmodernist, whereas Eco was more of a modernist. Eco said (and I paraphrase), “Of course there’s objective truth! Drop a ball! What goes up, must come down.” My professor said that Rorty didn’t have much of a problem with that, and that he was also open to the existence of better and worse interpretations. But Rorty thought that, in many cases, reality is ambiguous and open to multiple outlooks.

I’ve not read the book, but that’s somewhat where I am. I think there are things that are obviously true and false, but much is open to interpretation. You can place all sorts of spins on history. I’ve done that myself in debating numerous people. Not everything is subjective, but there’s a lot of subjectivity out there.

I think that all sorts of beliefs have a reason for their existence. I read Christian debates on Calvinism, preterism, hell, and a host of other issues, and I see “My view is right, and your view is wrong, so you’re stupid.” I don’t think so. Calvinists can find scriptures that coincide with their view on salvation (predestination), and Arminians can cite verses that support free will. The fact that people disagree shows that the truth is vague. The Bible is open to all sorts of interpretations.

But I’m not ready to say that the Bible can’t serve as a conscience. There are still many things that Christians agree on. On the basis of the Bible, we believe in honesty and love for neighbor. We can evaluate (say) the Iraq War according to certain standards: Is it rooted in justice and concern for humanity, or in greed? If the former is true, then it is good. If the latter is the case, then it is bad.

I realize things are not that simple, but I’m just saying that we don’t totally lack a moral compass as we evaluate issues.