I have one child who every night, by her very positioning,
exudes a blissful sense of security. When I pop in to turn out her reading
lamp, she is lying on her back, face towards the ceiling, snoring softly, arms
flung wide as if to embrace the night sky above her roof. It strikes me every
night as the most confidently vulnerable position a body could choose in which
to surrender consciousness. And it reminds me every night how few children
sleep with such fearless abandon.
I say this to establish that while my philosophical argument in the face of global tension
may sound callous, I am not. That while you or I might personally lay down our
lives for a stranger’s child, I don’t think America has the moral footing to
make such statements collectively. And that is an important distinction.
It starts with Rene Descartes. In developing a mechanistic
vision of the body, he was unable to account physically for the soul and so
cast personhood as a separate phenomenon: a “ghost in the machine.” Odds are,
whatever else you believe, you assume some kind of mind/body dualism that stems
from this notion and affects how you interpret the world. The philosophical end
of this split is a fact/value dichotomy that dominates modern thinking. Things
we can study empirically go in the lower story of facts, and everything else is
relegated to the upper story of values. This is the basis of the dogma of
relativism.
Yet there is no one on earth who can live as though this is
true. Because it doesn’t reflect reality, it tears asunder the cohesive nature
of our true world and ourselves. We live in tension.
And nowhere does this become more depressingly apparent than
when a nation suddenly rises in moral outrage against atrocities. Because by
what measure can we rationally call anything atrocious?
I don’t know (and I have a MA in the subject) exactly what
the right theoretical role of a hegemon is in morally policing the world, or
how the rights of individuals and the rights of sovereign nations are rightly
weighed in international law. Maybe nobody does.
But I do know that in embracing the cognitive dissonance of a
fractured reality, we have surrendered our standing to make any big moral
statements whatsoever.
The thing is, most moral or even theological frameworks are
attempts to describe the real world. They exist to fit with reality.
Christianity goes so far as to beg for a good fact check. Its explicit basis is
in historical fact and it claims outright that if those historical claims are
not verifiably, objectively true, then its entirety is null and void. While I
don’t know that any other religion is so forthright, most purport to describe
reality.
Yet such is our devotion to empirical knowledge that we forget that
knowledge is not so limited in its sourcing. What we find is that our modern desperation to shut
belief systems into an upper story, divorced from physical reality, cannot be lived
out rationally. Truly, most of the vociferous denouncements of “values”
attempting to weigh in on issues of fact, are aimed at religion. Because there
are broad moral statements being made with impunity in all other realms.
Think of the rhetoric of most politically active groups. When
we state that kill shelters, rape, racism, child abuse, puppy mills, sexism,
and environmental pollution are wrong, we do not mean that we personally
dislike them. We do not mean that it is a value divorced from physical reality.
We mean that these things are universally, unequivocally, wrong for everybody.
If they were values, existing in their own sphere, then the guy with the dog
fighting ring could say, “Oh, this is ok for me. That’s my truth.” And we would
say, “Carry on, brother! Do what seems right to you!” But we don’t. Because
whatever we say, however we cling to Cartesian dualism, we all know deep down
that it doesn’t fit reality.
Our sense of justice may be shaped by current cultural
dynamics, but the fact that it exists implies that it reflects a reality, that
justice and injustice exist outside of the individual mind.
And all of this is to say that our collective cognitive
dissonance is thrown into relief every time something is so egregious that we
all pretend we weren’t just saying “you are your own truth” and instead
together shout, “Stop this evil!”
We are right to try to stop evil. We are wrong to pretend it
is relative. So long as we fight to keep knowledge limited to the realm of empiricism,
we will live with the tension of a life disjointed. But for those for whom
knowledge forms an integrated whole, a Matrix-like beauty, the tension
dissipates. In the face of evil, our hearts still break. We cry with the
afflicted and rage against the oppressors. But amidst the tumult, we sleep the
peaceful sleep of babes.