The True Story

One of the other very striking things that Dr Ramachandra said on Thursday night, was that we should make use of our university years to establish firm, intellectual foundations for our faith. He noted that we ourselves might be the biggest stumbling block to thoughtful inquirers about the faith, with our superficial theology and our shallow understanding. I found this quite sobering.

Looking back, I see how the Lord has led me on this wonderful journey. I started out standing at the crossroads of faith and philosophy. I had always considered myself a Christian, but in my three years at Oxford I was steeped in secular philosophy, which left me rather confused for the first two years. In my third year I started, for the very first time in my life really, to fully grasp the truth of the gospel, emotionally and intellectually. I left Oxford convinced about Jesus, and convinced about the inadequacy of secular philosophy to bring about real, positive change, but I was not quite sure about what Jesus had to say to secular philosophy. In my six months or so in New York, God has been giving me some great answers.

I’m finding that my semesters have come to have certain themes to them. Last semester my philosophy classes covered the nature of justice, as well as secular liberalism and identity. This tied in very well with the Vision Campaign sermons at church which touched upon the nature of competing truth claims and the transformative power of the gospel. (See Liberalism, the Gospel and the Truth: Part One, Part Two). This semester, I’ve been taking courses in human rights, globalization, civil liberties and terrorism, and another course in modern philosophy. The focus is now more on the “practical” side of justice with a more global perspective. The Veritas Forum came along at just the right time – the speakers who came were all actively on the front lines of human rights and global justice, and it was fascinating to hear what they had to share. This semester, my human rights course in particular, has provided me with much food for thought.

We recently read one of Richard Rorty’s lectures, Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality (On Human Rights: Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993). Rorty is a prominent atheist and a self-described “neo-pragmatist”. His philosophy is anti-metaphysical: he believes that the traditional philosophical pursuit of ultimate, objective, foundational knowledge (especially regarding the existence of God), is misguided and ineffective. In this article, he argues for a pragmatic approach in establishing the basis of a human rights culture.

He cites a report about the atrocities in Bosnia, commenting that Serbian murderers and rapists not think of themselves as violating human rights, for they are not doing these things to fellow human beings, but Muslims. They are not being inhuman, but rather are discriminating between the true humans and the pseudo-humans. As Clifford Geertz puts it, “Men’s most importunate claims to humanity are cast in the accents of group pride.” By default, we tend to think of our humanity is a tribalistic and ethnocentric way – we think in terms of “them” and “us”.

He notes that outside the circle of post-Enlightenment European culture, most people are simply unable to understand why membership in a biological species automatically qualifies a person of another culture, one of the “others”, as a member of our moral community. On Thursday, Dr Ramachandra also similarly argued that the moral equality and dignity of all is not a concept that is innate to most cultures at all. India and China had extremely hierarchical, class-based societies, and most cultures are inherently tribalistic. Any culture that respects universal human rights, regardless of ethnic boundaries, have all, historically, been influenced by Judeo-Christian thought. The philosophy of the Enlightenment is deeply steeped in Judeo-Christian tradition. For example, Kant’s account of the respect due to rational agents tells us that you should extend the respect you feel for people like yourself to all “featherless bipeds”. Rorty goes on to say “This is an excellent suggestion, a good formula for secularizing the Christian doctrine of the brotherhood of man.” (See The Veritas Forum at Columbia – A slight diversion: Secular Humanism as a Christian Heresy).

He points out that “most people – especially people relatively untouched by the European Enlightenment – simply do not think of themselves as, first and foremost, a human being. Instead, they think of themselves as a certain good sort of human being – a sort defined by explicit opposition to a particularly bad sort.” Ironically, this is also true of the very Western intellectuals who have been touched by the European Enlightenment. Rorty says “I quite agree that [our Western human rights culture] is morally superior…” and “We Eurocentric intellectuals like to suggest that we, the paradigm humans, have overcome this primitive parochialism by using that paradigmatic human faculty, reason.”

But Rorty has a problem with the appeal to reason to justify human rights. Kant, following Plato, emphasised rationality as essential to being human. Plato believed that the best way to deal with immoral people was to demonstrate to them that they had an interest of which they were unaware, an interest in being rational, in acquiring self-knowledge. Plato saddled us with a distinction between the true and false self. That distinction was, by the time of Kant, transmuted into a distinction between categorical, rigid, moral obligation and flexible, empirically determinable self-interest. Kant claims that sentimentality has nothing to do with morality, that there is something distinctively and transculturally human called “the sense of moral obligation” which has nothing to do with love, friendship, trust or social solidarity.

Rorty thinks that appealing to common rationality as the basis for respecting human rights does not work. It does not do much good to get tribalistic, ethnocentric people to read Kant, and agree that one should not treat rational agents simply as means. For everything turns on who counts as a fellow human being, as a rational agent in the only relevant sense – the sense in which rational agency is synonymous with membership in our moral community. For most white people, until very recently, most Black people did not so count. For the Nazis, Jews did not so count. For the Serbs, Muslims did not so count. He says, “Even if we do think that all human beings are rational, we tend to equate “human beings” with “member of our tribe”, we have always thought of human beings in terms of paradigm members of the species. We have contrasted us, the real humans, with rudimentary, or perverted, or deformed examples of humanity.”

Rorty’s solution is to give up rationality for sentimentality. He follows Hume in believing that “corrected sympathy, not law-discerning reason, is the fundamental moral capacity.” He cites contemporary philosopher Annette Baier, who would like us to get rid of both the Platonic idea that we have a true self, and the Kantian idea that it is rational to be moral. Instead, she advocates a Humean “progress of sentiments”, which consists in an increasing ability to see the similarities between ourselves and people very unlike us as outweighing the differences. Rorty calls this “sentimental education” and he describes it as manipulating the sentiments of future generations by telling them long, sad, sentimental stories which typically begin “Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers,” or “Because she might become your daughter-in-law,” or “Because her mother would grieve for her.” It is novelists and stories that best capture our imagination and engage us morally, and Rorty believes that this is the best catalyst for change.

Reading this article it occurred to me, that the only way in which a story could both capture our sentiments and grip our reason, and really change our lives, is if it were about us, all of us, (and not just some distant, almost hypothetical "other"), and if it were true.

I think that Rorty’s dichotomy between sentimentality and rationality is a false one. It was the great C. S. Lewis who understood so very clearly that we have both the heart that yearns for God and the mind that seeks to know him. Lewis himself grew up loving the Greek and Norse mythology of old, but it was only after his conversion that he started to see in them glimpses of eternal truth.

Colin Duriez writes that it was J. R. R. Tolkien who helped him to see this, during a long night's talk in September of 1931. Tolkien argued that the Gospels have a satisfying imaginative as well as intellectual appeal, demanding a response from the whole person. He accused Lewis of an imaginative failure in not accepting their reality. What Tolkien did was help Lewis see how the two sides, reason and imagination, could be integrated. During the two men's night conversation on the Addison Walk in the grounds of Magdalen College, Tolkien showed Lewis how the two sides could be reconciled in the Gospel narratives. The Gospels had all the qualities of great human storytelling. But they portrayed a true event—God the storyteller entered his own story, in the flesh, and brought a joyous conclusion from a tragic situation. Suddenly Lewis could see that the nourishment he had always received from great myths and fantasy stories was a taste of that greatest, truest story—of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

Lewis himself later argued in "Myth Became Fact," that “[t]he heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. … God is more than god, not less: Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about "parallels" and "pagan Christs": they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome.”

I was reminded of my favourite Tocqueville quote where he says, in a draft for the 1840 Preface to Democracy in America, 'Not a man in the world has ever found... the central point at which all the rays of general truth (which come together only in God) or even all the rays of particular truth meet. Men grasp fragments of truth, but never truth itself.'


Plato was right. We do have a true self.

(Charles Williams, Lewis' fellow Inkling, wrote about how the lover's romantic vision of the beloved was not confused, but illuminated. The lover sees through the beloved's flaws to the image of God. It is this truest and deepest self of the person - the person as created and potentially redeemed by God - that Williams called that person's "eternal identity.")

Kant was right. It is rational to be moral.

Hume was also right. Sentimentality matters to morality.

But they have only grasped fragments of the truth, which seem to contradict each other.


Tocqueville was right.

It is only in God, where all the rays of general and particular truth meet.


Postscript: Amazing. Just got back from church. Tonight, there was this guy who shared his experience of doing mission work, helping street boys, in Mexico City. He started out talking about how he came to faith. He was raised in a nice, secular family. He loved history and science and he only read nonfiction, because he thought that fiction was just a bunch of made-up stories with no real point to them. This is what he thought about religion for the longest time. But when he found himself confronted with the truth of Jesus Christ, he came to see that this was not just another story. It was, as C. S. Lewis said, a myth that was true. And that just totally changed his life.