Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados TODAY Inc.
by Adrian Sobers
And he said, “Go and say to this people: ‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.’”
– (Isaiah 6:9, NRSV)
“Human beings may still like to think they believe in good and bad, but these concepts are unhitched from any transcendent framework and merely reflect personal, emotional, and psychological preferences.” – Carl Trueman
CNN posted a photo of Usain Bolt on Twitter: “Jamaican track and field great Usain Bolt announced the birth of his twin sons in an Instagram post on Father’s Day this Sunday.” One comment provided a textbook case of two of our cultural pathologies, namely, anarchic moral relativism and ethical emotivism: “Usain has no right to proclaim that the twins are “sons”. It’s really disgusting to see CNN endorsing this act of predetermining gender and reinforcing stereotypes.”
Even if this were fake it is an accurate representation of the direction we are headed. Translation: the beloved sprint superstar needs to stay in his lane by not “assuming” the gender of his twin. Asinine fatuity of the highest order.
But, as tempting as it is to be distracted by the rhetorical, we would be better served by focusing on understanding the theoretical foundation of the ideas that have all but normalized this (and other trends) along with their accompanying metaphysical assumptions.
In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman details how even institutions are at the mercy of emotivism and the therapeutic self. (The examples of this in higher education are especially embarrassing.)
“For such selves in such a world,” writes Trueman, “institutions such as schools and churches are places where one goes to perform, not to be formed—or, perhaps better, where one goes to be formed by performing.”
A prerequisite to responding to the times is understanding them (1 Chronicles 12:32). And in this regard the onus is still on us. That being the case, we do well to study Mr. Trueman’s offering if, and only if, we want to understand: the shift away from empirical biological facts to inner feelings; why culture assumes that human nature is not something given but something we do or determine; and why society associates sexual freedom with political freedom.
Better yet, why statements like “two consenting adults” or “what people do in private is nobody’s business” completely miss the point.
As Trueman points out, “Sex is no longer a private activity because sexuality is a constitutive element of public, social identity. Patterns of private sexual behaviour are not simply private; they are public and political because they constitute a significant part of how our culture thinks of identity.”
Therefore, to object to homosexual practice in contemporary cancel culture is not to object to an act but an identity. And this is the unpardonable sin of the underlying theoretical framework that influences our culture; one that exalts, not God, but the self as sovereign. Furthermore, since there are no objective/external standards, the language of morality/identity devolves to personal preference and feelings.
Within this framework, the moral outrage we hear about sins ending in – phobia cannot be taken seriously and amount to little more than virtue signaling.
Our social justice warrior friends might mean well but if they remain wedded to the culture’s default setting of morality as personal preference they render their causes null and void since anything can be dismissed with the usual sophomoric sayings: “But, but, who are you to judge” or “True for you but not true for me.”
For Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet is “a person of singular revolutionary political importance” because poets transform people, and by extension the world, through their work. Artists do not simply entertain, reflect, and describe the world, they also inform and, for better or worse, transform it.
As Herbert Gershman (Surrealist Revolution) puts it, “An active engagement leading toward a radical transformation of society and its individual parts must be the goal of all who worked in ink, paint, or clay.” To which we can add, those who manufacture poems on microphones.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, a timely reminder that poets (and pop icons) are our unacknowledged legislators. A lyric from Nas, no doubt intended as a metaphor, literally describes contemporary culture: “You a slave to page in my rhyme book.” This is especially telling in a culture that grounds ethics in feelings and personal preference.
As Trueman writes, “[…] when the sacred order collapses, morality is simply a matter of taste, not truth. And in a world in which the idea of universal human nature has been abandoned or attenuated to the point of being meaningless, it also means that those who shape popular taste become those who exert the most moral power and set society’s moral standards.”
That would be our songbirds, not our scholars. Our poets, not our priests, pastors or principals. The average tween who listens to Ariana Grande may have never heard of Friedrich Nietzsche, but her lyrics communicate his ideas in a way a postgraduate seminar can only dream of.
Therefore, to focus on the rhetorical at the expense of the theoretical is literally asking to be “tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming” (Ephesians 4:14).
The theoretical might seem like unnecessary, torturous work compared to the rhetorical. But as C. S. Lewis said of the Christian faith, “When it tells you to feed the hungry it does not give you lessons in cookery. When it tells you to read the Scriptures it does not give you lessons in Hebrew and Greek, or even in English grammar.
It was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences.” Therefore, if we want to understand why contemporary culture thinks the way it does
(How Barbados get so?), it is to Trueman we must go.
Adrian Sobers is a prolific letter writer and commentator on social issues. This column was offered as a Letter to the Editor.
