#BTColumn – The onus is on us (Part 1)

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by Adrian Sobers

“Yet you have made them [human beings] a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour.” – (Psalm 8:5, NRSV) “Glory to man in the highest! For Man is the master of things.” – (Algernon Swinburne, Hymn of Man)

Whether interacting with scholars or the streets, Jesus grounded their misunderstanding(s) not in Scripture, but on their misunderstanding of, and/or failure to, accept them. He placed the onus on us: “have you never read in the Scriptures …” (Matthew 21:42); “have you not read what was said to you by God” (Matthew 22:31). And the words that still applies to both scholars and the streets: “you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29).

Matthew Barzun alludes to a similar Dominical lesson in his wonderful little book The Power of Giving Away Power. He references the autobiography of Dee Hock, the man behind Visa, who made the point that while it is tempting to point our fingers in frustration at institutions like governments and corporations, the onus is on us: “In truth, there are no problems ‘out there.’ […] The problem is ‘in here’ in the consciousness of you and me.”

Mr. Hock is right (and not far from Matthew 15:19 and Proverbs 4:23). That being the case, we had better examine what informs/influences said consciousness/heart.

Or, as Carl Trueman (The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self) puts it, “why a certain notion of the self has come to dominate the culture of the West.” On this point, O. Carter Snead (What It Means To Be Human) persuasively argues that the dominant image of the human being today is “expressive individualism”.

For now we can ignore the fact that this image is incomplete, incoherent, and in desperate need of an anthropological correction. Under expressive individualism, the self is sovereign: “persons are conceived merely as atomised individual wills whose highest flourishing consists in interrogating the interior depths of the self in order to express and freely follow the original truths discovered therein toward one’s self-invented destiny.”

But we cannot ignore Trueman when he says the answer will not be found by “simply repeating the phrase “expressive individualism” but by looking at the historical development of the relationship between society at large and individual identity.”

For Trueman, the ideas that inform/influence our conscious(ness) have “deep historical roots and a coherent genealogy that helps explain why society thinks and behaves the way it does.”

Barzun repeats the point made by Stephen Covey (The 8th Habit): “interdependence is a higher value than inde pendence.” This is true but completely at odds with expressive individualism.

As O. Carter Snead puts it, “the anthropology of expressive individualism elevates the principles of autonomy and self-determination above other competing values in the hierarchy of ethical goods, such as beneficence, justice, dignity, and equality.”

Trueman cites Philip Rieff (Deathworks), who reminds us that, “No culture has ever preserved itself where it is not a registration of the sacred order.” We are in the throes of said culture.

A culture where catastrophe and confusion abound (and will continue to do so), because there is no external justification (and more importantly, grounding) for objective moral codes. Even the world’s poets, who happen to double as our unacknowledged legislators, know this to be true.

A textbook case comes via two lines from the interlude of Kendrick Lamar’s Cut You Off: “See it’s known today that the human race is nothing / No morals, no standards.” Zero lies detected. Contrary to the Climate Cult, anthropogenic climate change is not our biggest existential threat.

(More on that later.) Our biggest existential threat is a trend that started in Eden and continues to this day: our devolving moral climate. (A trend that accelerates the cozier a country gets to communism.)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained why Soviet communism happened in his 1983 Templeton Prize address: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” This doubles as the reason for many of the pathologies in contemporary culture.

This is, to be clear, no lament for the “good ole’ days”. As Trueman says, “lamentation offers little and delivers less.” It is, however, a call to recognise that when we forget God, we also forget ourselves.

Adrian Sobers is a prolific letter writer and commentator on social issues. This column was offered as a Letter to the Editor.