Time For Truth

As opposed to modernism and postmodernism, he promotes the 'faith community/tradition view of truth,' represented by both Judaism and Christianity. This way of thinking captures the best of both modernism (strong respect for Truth) and postmodernism (recognition of human tendency to error/bias), while avoiding their pitfalls (making reason autonomous and denying Truth, respectively). Interestingly, he suggests that postmodernism is actually the mirror image of modernism and was born of its deficiencies (15). Unfortunately, 'ever since the Enlightenment, many Jewish and Christian believers have been cut off from the greatness of their own heritages - Jews by the ironclad equation that 'secularity equals security' and Christians by the conviction (or suspicion) that faith and reason are marching in opposite directions' (16).

He likens the American transition from modernism to postmodernism to South Africa's from colonialism to postcolonialism and Russia's from communism to postcommunism (all 3 representative also of other nations), rejecting the idea that postmodernism is merely a fringe intellectual movement in the ivory tower.

'The discipline of living in truth is urgent today because modern life reduces community and accountability to its thinnest, thereby tempting us to live in a shadow world of anonymity and nonresponsibility where all cats are gray. In such a world, becoming people of truth is the deepest secret of integrity and the highest form of taking responsibility for ourselves and our own lives' (18). Ideas have consequences. Living in truth allows truth vs. lies, intimacy vs. alienation in relationships, harmony vs. conflict in neighborhoods, efficiency vs. incompetence in business, reliability vs. fraud in science and journalism, trust vs. suspicion in leadership, freedom vs. tyranny in government, even life vs. death (18). The choices (and consequences) are ours as individuals, nations and civilizations. 'The lies of Western society - particularly as they are compounded by the 'culture cartel' of postmodern academia, advertising, entertainment, and youth culture - are more seductive and enduring than those of communist society' (19). Our challenge is to seek, speak and live the truth. Like Solzhenitzen, we must resolve: 'Let the lie come into the world, even dominate the world, but not through me' (19).

Chapter 1 (Back to the Moral Stone Age on the crisis of ethics) opens with a professor's chilling report that, increasingly, modern students are no longer outraged by Shirley Jackson's story 'The Lottery,' in which citizens draw lots to determine who must be sacrificed (stoned to death) in an annual ritual. In the interest of 'tolerance,' the students refused to 'judge' another society's ritual. Although courses in 'Ethics' are experiencing revived interest, this interest is largely fasionable and transient, more focused on not being caught than on doing right, more social than personal, often espousing a shallow view of human nature and a superficial view of evil. In Karl Menninger's 1973 book Whatever Became of Sin?, he observed the slippage from the founder's notion of evil as 'being 'sin,' defined theologically, to being 'crime' defined legally, to being 'sickness' defined only in psychological categories' (28).

Guinness identifies the 1880s writings of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche as 'the most powerful philosophical source of the crisis of truth' (29). He taught that our response to any claims to truth or virtue should be irony, suspicion and an agenda of unmasking, debunking and dismantling those claims (32). Many in the Guinness' own discipline (the sociology of knowledge) follow Nietzsche in proclaiming all human knowledge as relative, socially constructed and nothing more. In contrast to the traditional conception that 'ideas have consequences' (i.e. they shape culture), the postmodernists claim the reverse; that culture shapes ideas (therefore ideas have little significance beyond their time and place of origin). The author approvingly cites Peter L. Berger as an exception, quoting his play on Ludwig Feuerbach's (a key debunking philosopher) name as the 'fiery brook' through which all knowledge claims today must pass.

Chapter 2 (We're All Spinmeisters Now on the crisis of character) opens with a review of the I, Rigoberta Menchu controversy, in which the 1983 book by that title purporting to describe Guatemalan right-wing terror was later proven to be largely false and propagandistic. The book won its Mayan author the 1992 Nobel peace prize. The story is only one of many that illustrate the dangerously weak standing of truth in the West.

Samuel Clemens, an early practitioner of creative reinvention (as Mark Twain in his case), quiped 'The secret of success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made' (41). Since he didn't believe in God (or Truth), he felt free to fill his work with comic, casual and cynical attitudes toward both. Apparently insecure in his own identity, 'his lifetime achievement was to turn the awkward and uncertain boy-man, Sam Clemens, into the assured, brilliant, witty public man of letters, Mark Twain' (43). The cost, however, was his constant awareness of the gap between his identity and his image and therefore his lack of personal integrity.

These two concepts (ideology as an intellectual weapon to advance social interests, and creative production of a personality to advance an agenda) are related, are as old as the Fall, and were attacked by Jesus as hypocrisy (he added the 'moral deception' twist to the normal Greek meaning of theatrical 'acting'). Although Machiavelli later reversed this disapproval, it has only been in the last 150 years that the West has followed him and diminished the idea of 'character.' Interestingly, Guinness attributes much of this change to 'social factors' such as increasing mobility, shifts from country to city, from the primacy of words to images, from static, face-to-face relationships to mobile, fleeting, superficial contacts, from internal to external, from 'strong character' to 'striking personality' and 'successful image' (44). In a related vein, Richard Dawkins (and others) assert that 'deceit is fundamental to animal communication.' As opposed to the traditional understanding of character as the true inner form that makes a thing what it is (as distinct from 'such outer concepts as personality, image, reputation and celebrity'), the modern idea is that we are 'all spin, all the way down' (from Jedidiah Purdy's For Common Things), that these outer concepts are all there is to us. This new sense of the empty or decentered self is chosen, not given or cultivated; shifting, not stable; aligned with Eastern views rather than solid Western views of Imago Dei. 'Character may be its own reward, but personality is what wins friends, gets jobs, attracts lovers, catches the camera's eye, and lands the prize of public office' (47). Ethics and character are related: if God is dead (as many believe), not only are all things permitted (bye-bye ethics), but any self is possible, and the question of which one is 'true' becomes meaningless (bye-bye character) (cites Peter Berger for this observation). For some, this is liberating, but for others it creates anxiety.

Chapter 3 (The West Versus Itself on postmodernism's influence on America at both global and national levels) opens with a reminder of the struggle between paganism and Christianity in Western civilization. Near the beautiful city of Uppsala, Sweden is Gamla (old) Uppsala, where lie remains of settlements going back to at least 5000 B.C. Three huge grassy mounds mark the boat-graves of Viking kings from ca. A.D. 500, dedicated to Odin, Thor and Frey (their gods of war, thunder and fertility, respectively). These pagan tombs are relics from 'a terrifying bygone era' characterized by 'violent manliness' (49). Just to one side of these mounds lie two potent symbols; the last pagan temple and the first Christian church in this region. Christianity came late to this area and for a century (ca. 1100) the two rival faiths were locked in spiritual conflict.

Although believers may see the rise of Christianity as inevitable, paganism is making a strong comeback in many parts of the modern world. 'In A.D. 1900, the Christian faith, which was Asian and not European in origin, had ... become infuential in only one continent and wherever that continent held sway - Europe. Then suddenly, a century later [it] had become the world's 'first universal religion' and was present and growing on all five continents. Yet from one century to the next, it had lost dominance and much of its influence in Europe' (50). The sobering implication is that God blesses areas receptive to Him and abandons others (including the West?) to sin, darkness and decline. The author's reading of Samuel Huntington's 1993 essay (and later book) The Clash of Civilizations furthered his fear that the reign of Christianity in the West is by no means assured (his book pits the West, with its Judeo-Christian roots, against Buddhist/Confusian Asia and the Islamic Middle East). However, James Kurth of Swarthmore College makes the case that its not so much 'the West vs. the rest' as 'the West vs. itself.' Kurth observes that 'the West is unique in having an intellectual elite and cultural vanguard that are simultaneously secularist, tone deaf toward the faiths of most ordinary citizens, and - at their most radical - openly dismissive of the roots of the civilization itself' (51).

Interestingly, the author divides the history of the West into three phases: Christendom, ended by the 18th century Enlightenment ('since then, the intellectual class has never in large numbers returned to faith'); European civilization, the secularized successor which saw Europe's rise to world prominence, ending with Europe's exhaustion and disillusionment at the end of WWI; American leadership of the West, which has lasted from 1918 to the present and has managed to overcome (or at least check) the tension between Christendom and the Enlightenment, religion and republicanism, tradition and modernism that 'had so often convulsed Europe' (55).

In discussing attacks on Western scientific medicine (even in the face of stunning accomplishments like immunization and antibiotics) by 'alternative' treatments, Guinness admits that it does show many of the weaknesses of modernism; being 'professionalized, commercialized, secularized, technicized, depersonalized,' etc. Two examples include Ayurvedic medicine (championed by Deepak Chopra) and Therapeutic Touch; both trace back through Eastern philosophy to Hinduism. In this case, as in others, the postmodern spirit serves as the trojan horse to 'soften the rational criteria of investigation' (don't ask why it works) and 'harden political considerations' (scientific medicine is a 'mechanistic, male-domination of female-oriented nursing').

Guinness characterizes Bill Clinton as the first postmodern president in history. During his administration, 'America learned to live with the lie' (59). He covers the 7 habits of highly effective postmodern lying: Pride of Mind, Partitioning (giving up integrity), People-pleasing, Posturing, Prevarication, Power-plays and Personalizing. Referring to the fact that his brazen behavior (in the midst of accusations of womanizing, lying under oath, sexual harassment, thuggery and rape) hadn't even made the top 50 stories of the century, he joked 'Number 53? I mean, what does a guy have to do to make the top 50 around here?' In 'moving on' and 'making light of it,' he was 'relying on two of America's stock substitutes for repentance and moral resolution' (65). Charles Murray has called Clinton's impeachment acquittal 'our Dreyfus case,' revealing 'rottenness in American institutions just as the false conviction of Alfred Dreyfus had exposed the rottenness in France in 1893' (65). The author fears that, instead of 'His Truth is Marching On,' as the song says, it is being 'vaporized by critical theories, twisted by ideologies, hollowed out and replaced by psychological categories, obscured by clouds of euphemism and jargon, outpaced by rumor and hype, softened by mawkish sentiment parading as emotion' (66).

Chapter 4 (Differences Make a Difference on 2 arguments for the importance of Truth) opens with the sad story of Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish (but atheist) scientist and writer who, after surviving Auschwitz, eventually despaired and took his own life (ignoring his own repeated advice and following many others who had done so). The sad irony is that he had rejected a key part of his own heritage; a long line of Jewish prophets who had spoken God's Truth to man and given cause for hope. He labored under the convictions that 'if there is an Auschwitz, there can be no God,' 'no one will want to believe us, because our disaster is the disaster of the entire civilized world' and 'life is fundamentally deaf to our aspirations.' He believed that the establishment of truth and justice was up to him and all of us (i.e. not to discover objective truth, but to create it ourselves, to will it into force), but that this task was actually analagous to the curse of Sisyphus (from the classical legend), who had to continuously push the rock uphill, only to have it roll back down again every time.

In contrast to Levi is Solzhenitzen, who rested his verbal opposition to the fact of Soviet evil on a simple and profound trust in The Truth. Although frightened, he simply believed that eventually the truth will prevail. As this contrast between Levi and Solzhenitzen shows, a person's view of truth is far from merely theoretical or academic, it makes an enormous practical difference.

Guinness wants to appeal to two groups; those who hold the Judeo-Christian concept of objective truth but have grown 'careless or hesitant' in defending it, and those who do not hold that view but care deeply about the well-being of society. For the former group, there are two arguments for them to use against the postmodernists, the lesser and the greater. The lesser argument is that, without a belief in truth, we have no response to the charge that we believe not because of good reasons, but only because we are afraid not to believe. This charge (one of the deepest and most damaging in the last 200 years) was raised in modern times by French existentialists and echoed by Marxist and Freudian attacks on religion (a much older version is Lucretius' statement that 'fear made the gods'). Of course, it is true that many believers believe for the wrong reasons; because it works (pragmatism), because it feels true (subjectivism), because its true for them (relativism), etc. This can result from either bad teaching or an escapist motive (from the supposed ravages of reason). The result is 'a sickly faith deprived of the rude vigor of truth' (78).

'The greater argument for the importance of a high view of truth is that for both Jews and Christians, truth matters infinitely and ultimately because it is a question of the trustworthiness of God himself' (80). This is in contrast to Western secularists for whom the final reality is the material world (in which deception is fundamental) and to Eastern believers (Hindu/Buddhist) for whom the final reality is the undifferentiated impersonal (beyond all our illusions of 'truth'). Therefore 'truth is not finally a matter of philosophy, but of theology' (81).

On to those who don't believe in objective truth but care deeply for society. There are two powerful arguments for the importance of truth; one negative and one positive. The negative one is that without truth, we are all vulnerable to manipulation. 'What happens when we succeed in cutting away truth-claims to expose the web of power games only to find we have less power than the players we face' (82) (i.e. might makes right, victory goes to the strong and ruthless, the weak go to the wall). Herbert Spencer took this 'freedom' to create your own 'truth' in an individualistic direction, Marx in a collectivist direction and Dawkins ('selfish gene') in a broad evolutionary direction. The second and positive argument is that, without truth, there can be no genuine freedom and fulfillment in life. The great Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin used to talk of two freedoms: freedom from and freedom for. Young people are famous for asserting freedom from (parents, teachers, supervision) but many don't see (some never do) the more significant freedom for aspect. The author argues that 'modern America has all the appearance of a nation-sized demonstration of the adolescent error writ large' (85). Commenting on this American tendency, D. H. Lawrence wrote 'Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief, ... not when they are escaping to some wild west ... the most unfree souls go west and shout of freedom ... the shout is a rattling of chains ... liberty in America has meant so far breaking away from all dominion ... true liberty will only begin when Americans discover the deepest whole self of man' (86). 'Those who set out to do what they like usually end up not liking what they've done.' 'The true, the good and the free must be lined up together' (87). We are made by God to seek truth, beauty, justice (all made by and personified by God).

Chapter 5 (Turning the Tables on 2 strategies for responding to postmodernists) opens with a retelling of a story from G. K. Chesterton's Manalive. The pessimistic, skeptical and cynical Dr. Emerson Eames argues, essentially, that death is better than life in this depraved world. When his earnest student, Innocent Smith, pulls out a pistol and offers to oblige the professor of his wish, the good Dr. changes his tune considerably, reminding himself and his student that gratitude for existence is the proper attutude toward life, despite all the problems. One of Chesterton's themes was that non-Christian ways of thought are either constricting or contradictory. The marks of the first are 'logical completeness and spiritual contraction,' and for the second are 'comprehensiveness but inconsistency.'

In this line, Peter Berger has developed the two best ways to counter radical relativism. The first, negative, method is to 'relativize the relativizers,' or push them toward the negative consequences of their own beliefs. The idea here is that 'some thoughts can be thought but not lived' (97). Related to this is the conservative idea that 'reality (or truth) is what we run into when we are wrong, for when we are right we don't run into it.' 'Reality always has the last word.' The second and positive method is to 'point out the signals of transcendence,' identifying 'the tension between the relativism or skepticism of their philosophy and the 'treasure of their heart'' (101). Berger points to some of these 'signals' in his book A Rumor of Angels (e.g. order, humor, hope on the positive side; evidence of human depravity [and the need for divine intervention] and the 'moral sense' on the negative side).

Chapter 6 (On Record Against Ourselves on 2 tough choices required to live in truth) opens with Dickens' David Copperfield reflecting on the death of his father before his own birth. Others who lost their fathers very early were Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche and Francois Truffaut (hero of the French New Wave in the 50s/60s). Truffaut managed to escape from or cope with the misery of his childhood by the use of imagination and, later, lying. The author notes the difficulty of identifying the line between his 'imagination and his lying ... wounds he received and those he inflicted ... his prodigious talent and his prodigal self-indulgence' (109). His life illustrates that very real problems in our personal lives can make 'living in truth' a 'strenuous and demanding way of life. Both the objectivity of truth and the subjectivity of our response to it form a sharp moral challenge' (109). This is the central challenge to living free; do we conform the truth to our desires (by creating and believing emotionally satisfying theories), or conform our desires to the truth (although it may be painful). The importance of this choice was the topic of Kierkegaard's famous 'Either/Or.'

Although Enlightenment thinkers correctly recognized the objectivity of truth, they erred in presuming that it could be known 'by the unaided intellect without the interference of personal distortions' (110). Many, like Bertrand Russell and A. N. Wilson, have even argued that belief is inimical to the search for truth. In contrast, the biblical view teaches that we are indeed truth-seekers by nature, but also truth-twisters. This implies that our belief-systems will always color our findings (we might also note that the scientific enterprise depends upon unprovable beliefs such as the existence of objective truth and our ability to comprehend it). It is at this point that the Christian takes the side of postmodernism against the modernists in admitting the role of personal bias. The author wants 'the psychology of knowledge' to take its place alongside his own specialty of the sociology of knowledge (neither should address what is true, only why and how we come to think so). A major theme of Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals is that we should beware of their supposedly objective advice (which led to many of the 20th century's tragedies), since they often had very personal agendas.

So much for the Enlightenment myth of dispassionate truth-seekers. The truth is closer to the opposite; the 'cleverer the mind, the slipperier the heart,' or 'the more sophisticated the education, the subtler the rationalization' (112). Aldous Huxley admitted (in Ends and Means) that 'I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; ... assumed that ... and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption' (112). He went on to admit that 'the philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way they find most advantageous to themselves' (113). The author lists other examples as Alfred C. Kinsey, Betty Friedan, Paul de Man and 'an embarrassingly long list of Western thinkers' whose intelligence 'outdistanced their morals' (113). Nietzsche also admitted that 'it is our preference that decides against Christianity, not arguments' (114). The author also notes that 'many postmodern thinkers are refugees from the collapse of Marxism.' It is a classic case of 'bad faith,' or believing because of fear of the alternative. Conforming the truth to our desires is easier in the short term, but harder in the long term. It 'allows us to remain in control but leads us away from reality and therefore requires rationalization. Worse, because it takes us away from what is real and true it inevitably ends in disappointment' (114). The right choice requires that we submit to truth (giving up control), repentence instead of rationalization, facing up to reality, but eventual freedom due to engaging with reality as it really is.

Unbelief is not merely a passive, unfortunate, 'getting it wrong' at a few points. It is, rather, active, willful and rebellious. Its attitude toward truth is, at different points, suppressive, exploitative, subversive, self-deceptive or delusive. In all these cases, there is always a tension, since truth remains unaffected by the attempt to deny it. Philosopher J. Budziszewski has formulated the 'seven degrees of descent' into dishonesty: the sinful lie itself, self-protection, habituation, self-deception, rationalization, technique, upended morality. Truth is challenging because it is often not convenient, user-friendly or pre-packaged for us. Knowing entails doing. We must stake our existence on the truth. It involves 'each of us as we really are when we stand alone before God' (120). In contrast to the Clintonian way of dealing with unpleasantness, compartmentalization (i.e. ignoring or suppressing the truth, a technique he learned from his mother), is the Christian concept of confession, which involves affirming the true and good, admitting that we've fallen short of it and committing not to repeat the error. G. K. Chesterton said 'when a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar' (122). Kierkegaard wrote 'the truth consists not of knowing the truth but in being the truth' (124).

Although truthfulness and confession are good, the author warns against 'complete authenticity' and 'total transparency,' which are therapeutic rather than Christian goals, impossible to attain and dangerous to attempt, the emotional equivalent of communism. The author summarizes the main goals of the book as establishing the gravity of the crisis, lifting the debate out of the modern vs. postmodern rut, and demonstrating the strength of the biblical view of truth. 'God laughs at those who think they have killed off truth, yet reaches out to all who long for its rock-like safety' (123). 'It is impossible to experience love without being truthful and it is impossible to discover truth without loving it' (124). The West is a living embodiment of the biblical promise that 'the truth will set you free,' but the converse is unfortunately also true. Toqueville said 'if a man has no faith he must obey, and if he is free he must believe' (124). Guinness' last two sentences are appropriate: 'The choice is ours. So also will be the consequences' (125).