Two Short Books to Understand the Chaos
Many of us may shake our heads at tragic trends we see in culture. From looking for “your own truth,” to supporting the sexual exploitation of children through child drag shows, there’s very little taking place on the public stage that would not outrage your parents or grandparents. But behavior stems from ideas. When we trace how cultural thinking has developed, we can see not only what is wrong, but also how we got here.
I have two book recommendations for you today that are vital aids in understanding the chaos that is modern life.
The first book I suggest is The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis. It’s likely that you’ve already read this tiny book, but I still think it’s worth another read. I just finished it for the third time and I get something new out of it whenever I return.
In the first chapter, Lewis looks at what was happening to the study of language in the 1940s when he was writing. A new English textbook for highschool students had been released and he was sent a copy for review.
Lewis hated it.
But instead of shaming the book and the authors, he masked their identities. The book is simply “The Green Book,” and the authors have been renamed Gaius and Titius. The section below explains one of the main issues Lewis had with their work:
In their second chapter Gaius and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it ‘sublime’ and the other ‘pretty’; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgment and rejected the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius comment as follows: “When the man said ‘This is sublime,’ he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall…Actually…he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really ‘I have feelings associated in my mind with the word ‘Sublime’ or shortly, ‘I have sublime feelings.’’ Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: ‘This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.’
The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but let’s focus on two main points.
Lewis believed that some things were “Good” and some things were “Bad” in and of themselves (replace that with beautiful/ugly, right/wrong, etc).
Lewis argues that humans can use language to, at some level, accurately describe reality outside of themselves.
Here’s one example to try to bring this into focus. Love. What is love? What is loving? How does one love their neighbor and who gets to define that love and what it should look like?
For Lewis (and, we’ll see shortly, those who believe the Bible) “love” cannot be defined as if it were an empty box that you can fill with all the actions that bring you most joy. We all know that it’s not actually loving a drug addict to enable them to procure more drugs. I don’t love someone by helping them destroy themselves,even if it would make them happy–even if they hate me and I cause them pain through my refusal to aid them. So what is love then?
God is love.
That sounds really trite, but it’s groundbreaking when you consider the ramifications. God is not just portraying love. He’s not simply exemplifying love (although He is doing that as well). He IS love. That means that whatever I want to declare as loving must comport with His nature and with who He’s described himself to be. This means love has rules, it has guardrails, and it has content. What is loving for me must, in fact, be loving for you, because God is love and doesn’t change. I can say with confidence that it’s not loving to expose my child to certain ideas or images that do not accurately describe the reality that God has created.
‘Love is love’ is self-referential nonsense. God is love.
The second book brings you up to the modern craziness. Two years ago Carl Trueman released his magisterial tome, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. It’s not often that a 400+ page book centered largely on French philosophy can get over 1,500 reviews and sit at 5 stars. Earlier this year, Trueman released Strange New World which is directed to a popular audience at a streamlined 187 pages with no footnotes and very few blockquotes of dead philosophers. He takes all the important conclusions found in his larger work and boils it down to just what you need to know.
Here’s a section from the forward written by Ryan Anderson:
At the risk of oversimplifying what Trueman accomplishes, I would summarize the broad arc of his work as an account of how the person became a self, the self became sexualized, and the sex became politicized. Of course, the person of the Psalms, of St. Paul’s epistles, and of St. Augustine’s Confessions was also a “self” in the sense of having an interior life. But the inward turn of the biblical tradition was at the service of the outward turn toward God. The “self” that Western civilization cultivated, up until just a few hundred years ago, was what Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel described as an “encumbered” self, in contrast to modernity’s “unencumbered” self. The person was a creature of God, who sought to conform himself to the truth, to objective moral standards, in pursuit of eternal life. Modern man, however, seeks to be “truth to himself.” Rather than conform thoughts, feelings, and actions to objective reality, man’s inner life itself becomes the source of truth. The modern self finds himself in the midst of what Robert Bellah has described as a culture of “expressive individualism” —where each of us seeks to give expression to our individual inner lives rather than seeing ourselves as embedded in communities and bound by natural and supernatural laws. Authenticity to inner feelings, rather than adherence to transcendent truths, becomes the norm.
The first book describes a world where your language cannot describe the world around you, but only reflects your feelings back onto the world. The latter book describes a world where your meaning and value are expressed when you try to make reality and nature bend to the will of your inner life. In both cases, you are cut off from external reality–the same reality that the Bible says “declares the glory of God” (Ps 19.1).
We live in angry times when most discussions have more heat than light, and rarely do you find people on opposing sides really understanding each other. These two books will help you understand a few of the ways our culture has embraced chaos. When you next find yourself having that uncomfortable conversation, it will give you more empathy for the person you are talking to when you realize that they believe their worth and value as a person is riding on how you respond to them. They are wrong, of course. They are made in the image of God and have value regardless. But knowing these sorts of things will help you really communicate and share what’s most important.
It’s the loving thing to do.
