CXCIX – What The World Doesn’t Want to Hear

This is the fruit of a conversation with Hambone about a variety of topics. The main thrust of it was along the lines of “what would be the most effective thing the Church could preach”. Hambone phrased it differently but for my purposes that is a useful paraphrase of our conversation.

If your parish is anything like mine, you hear a lot about peace and love. Peace and Love are great, and of course should be preached. A pulpit that didn’t profess peace and love would be a poor one indeed. Of course, that is the problem: Peace and love are perfectly unobjectionable concepts. At some point The World^TM caught on to peace and love and made it it’s own. Catholics may wonder why their brand of peace and love isn’t getting traction. The World^TM started preaching peace and love and the Church started preaching it back, and the world just laughed at us because ours has rules.

The Church can’t compete on peace and love. It’s like negotiating to get your new brand of soda put into a vending machine: sure, it might taste better or be cheaper but you see, they’ve already got soda and it’s selling just fine. In other words, you can’t sell a different kind of the same product and expect people to change behavior: You have to sell them a different product.

So what is that different product? I don’t know, but I can tell you what I think it is.

If there’s one thing that The World^TM likes, it is individualism. This concept has even entered into Catholic circles, and it is dangerously acidic. The Catholic answer to that should be obedience to authority. The yoke is easy and the burden is light! Christ is our King, and we owe him a duty of obedience. In that same vein, we owe a duty of obedience to truth. Christ is our King, and we accept this because it is true.

We can tie it back to peace and love if we wanted: The only way to truly have peace is to accept the laws of our King obediently. There would be no conflict if everyone was perfectly law abiding–obedience is peace. We do this because it is true, and God is the perfection of Truth, God is Truth itself, and we love God, therefore we love Truth.

If we heard from our pulpits that we must accept the yoke, I think it would pop a lot of brains. It is counter-intuitive, certainly counter-cultural. Everyone has already heard peace and love. How many people believe that Obedience and Truth are perfectly unobjectionable? That’s what would make it an effective message.

AMDG

CXC – Assimilation of Truth

Acknowledging that something is true changes our behavior. This statement has two aspects, which I will restate so as to make it plain: The first is the idea of “acknowledging that something is true”, or that Truth needs to be acknowledged at all; The second is the idea of changing our behavior in response to that acknowledgement.

As I seem to enjoy doing, let’s take the second aspect first. Truth changes our behavior. There are some examples that are deceptively simple: If it is raining outside, that truth changes our behavior such that we grab an umbrella on our way out the door. Simple, right? What about other truths? Some involve simply acknowledging what is in front of our faces: There is a car in front of my car so I need to apply the brakes. Others are more abstract: I know how algebra works therefore I can do algebra problems. I think it’s fair to categorize these ideas into “Observation” and “learning”. Let me approach from a different angle: Before other planets were discovered, we lived in a universe that only had Earth. When we discovered Jupiter, our universe grew, and expanded. Jupiter has traits that now we have to acknowledge. We can’t go back to the universe that only had Earth, that is an Observational Truth. If we think Jupiter is not very massive, then when we launch satellites to orbit it we will utilize that understanding, and our calculations will be wrong as a result. When we learn the true mass of Jupiter, we can now make specific calculations to put a satellite into orbit around it. This example is Learning truth. We observed that Jupiter existed, and then we learned attributes about Jupiter. It’s fair to say in each of these cases, each observation and each datapoint we learn changed our universe in the same way as stepping outside and finding it is raining. We make sub-optimal decisions when we do not have the full picture.

The first aspect is that truth requires acknowledgement. The first person to observe Jupiter couldn’t ignore it. There, through his telescope, was the great planet itself! The truth doesn’t have to be acknowledged by everybody–you can believe Jupiter is a hoax and that it’s not actually raining, and go about your day as such. It won’t change that Jupiter is there, and that it is raining, and you will get wet. The pursuit of knowledge is, fundamentally, the pursuit of truth.

This next step might be a bit of a leap: we, all of us, have a duty to acknowledge truth, and a consequence of that is that we have a duty to pursue truth. The duty to acknowledge truth comes first, because we must accept the world as it exists around us (observation), and we must accept the current understanding of attributes about those things we observe (learning). If I get rained on every day, it is because I eschewed my duty to acknowledge truth and that led to me getting sick. I would be negligent if I failed to pursue the root cause of my chronic illness, that it rains frequently in my home and devices exist to keep us mostly dry when it rains.

The font of all truth is God, so the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is fruitless, but the pursuit of knowledge insofar as it is the pursuit of Truth and therefore the pursuit of God, is not fruitless. When we acknowledge that God exists, and that He loves us, then that Truth necessarily expands our universe and must change our behavior.

CLXXIII – Conflicting Authority

I made a claim in a recent article that Authority exists within context. I think this helps to clarify a point I have been unable to move past: When two people disagree about an authority, who is right?

The solution I have come to is that this is the wrong question. To wit: An officer in the Army and an officer in the Navy of approximately equal rank both have authority in their respective contexts. The Army officer cannot go to the Navy and expect the same latitude he receives among his own men, though the Navy personnel can and should afford him the respect that comes with being an officer.

Now let’s imagine it’s a Turkish Naval officer and an American Army officer. Lets suppose as well that they are allied and so cooperating. The Turkish Naval officer would not have authority in the Army for the same reason as the American Naval officer. For all intents and purposes they are the same. Now lets suppose two soldiers meet in the mess hall and get to talking about their experiences. Lets suppose the Turkish sailor remarks to his American army counterpart that the Turkish navy is great and makes the most sense. If he could join any force in the world, he would join the Turkish Navy. The American soldiers pride has been struck, naturally, because he has enjoys his experience in the American Army, he retorts in kind: If he could join any force int he world, he would join the American army because it is the best.

Well there you go. Two people with different ideas of the preferred authority have no way of determining which authority is “best”. The Turkish Naval officer and the American Army officer both have authority that their counterparts subordinates will not acknowledge. So arguments from authority when there are rival authorities are especially weak. In the context of an apologia for the Catholic Church, if I argue that the Church has Authority, to someone who does not recognize the authority of the Catholic Church, then I should not be surprised that the argument goes nowhere.

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What then would be an effective apologia for the Catholic Church qua authority? I approached this before in a roundabout way by discussing what an ideal authoritative structure might look like. But that remains subjective, as different people have different ideals. Essentially that argument can be reduced to “I believe this authority therefore you should also believe this authority.”

When it comes to Faith, we are talking about matters of truth. But arguing that the Church is true, I have argued previously, returns us to a question about the Authority of the Church. There is a triad that is usually shared as “Beauty, Goodness, Truth” as things which point to God. So the apologia for the Church would be somewhat naturalistic, I would say. Goodness can be argued without addressing directly the claim that the Church has authority. What things are good? Does the Church promote those things? Beauty perhaps as well: What is beauty? What things are beautiful? Does the Church promote those things?

Ultimately people will be persuaded by different arguments unique to themselves, but I have been puzzling over how to talk about the authority of the Catholic church for a long time. I believe the answer I have just arrived at is “don’t”.

AMDG

CLXV – Ad Hominem

Beliefs can be evaluated independently of people. If an incontrovertibly evil man says that a piece of good stock advice is to buy low and sell high, that does not make the stock advice incontrovertibly evil. It might induce an element of skepticism, encouraging one to seek out a more authoritative source for stock advice.

Communication relies on the authority of the speaker and the validity of what is spoken. Trust is what you get when a speaker consistently speaks truth. A speaker with a lot of authority has a higher starting point of trust than a speaker without authority, but consistent truth can lead to equally trustworthy communicators.

Evaluating whether or not a statement is true relies on a value judgement of the person receiving the communication. The person’s value judgement begins with the authority of the speaker, and is adjusted by their biases for what they are saying.

For example: A person with high authority (A subject matter expert) says that good stock advice is to buy low sell high. I recognize the authority of the speaker, and have heard this advice elsewhere, so the authority of the speaker is given to this advice.

I, a person with low authority, say that good stock advice is to buy low sell high. A person with whom I don’t get along hears what I have to say. They do not acknowledge my authority, and so the advice is discounted, and they happen to believe the stock market is intrinsically evil, so the advice is discounted further.

This nemesis then goes and hears a person they admire, who they perceive as having high authority, making the claim that a good bit of stock advice is to buy low and sell high. This is a claim they have already discounted extremely. The high authority of the speaker is not enough to offset the bias in this regard, but perhaps in the eyes of the nemesis the stock trading maxim has gone from “A false statement” to “A misguided judgement”.

Evaluating the authority of people is not something that can be generalized, because there as many ways to do it as there are people. We all have a way peculiar to ourselves for determining who we trust and who we do not.

So when someone makes a claim, their own authority doesn’t make it credible, but the validity of the claim itself determines its credibility.

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Persuasion is the talent for making people either accept your authority or accept the validity of your claim. Persuasive writing, for example, asserts some claim and then supports it to show that it is true, presuming that the reader does not know the claim or does not know the evidence. Persuasive writing is usually limited to formal debates or business pitches, because in every day life most people know something about any given topic and usually will have an opinion on it. When two parties know the claim but have different evidence for it, that is argumentation. Both sides have to be looking to trying to establish that their claim is the true one, and simultaneously be willing to admit that, given specific evidence, their claim is not true.

AMDG

LXXXVIII – The Middle Way

John Henry Newman is now, officially, a Saint. I have some reverence in my heart for him, as I am also a converted Anglican. I received a brief introduction to him via a video series a while back, and there is only one thing that I remember from it.

In St. John Henry Newman’s life, he pursued what he called a “Middle Way”. He wanted Anglicanism to be a balance between Roman Catholics and Protestants. He converted when he realized that Truth is binary.

“Is this claim true?” It can only be yes or no. There is no middle way. When it comes to Truth, no compromise can be considered true. The evil one wants us to compromise with him. Meet in the middle.

Truth is uncompromising. There is no middle way.

AMDG