The story may or may not be true, but illustrates an always true phenomenon which everyone encounters the moment they start to learn a new language: the grammar of our own language is invisible to us, except when some teacher drearily and pointlessly insists on showing us, although those of other languages are powerfully and bafflingly obvious the moment we encounter them.
It's not just linguistic grammars, of course. Grammar is the set of rules and principles by which a language is organised, but all manner of things in our cultural life have similar sets of rules and principles. So we have moral grammars, and grammars we use to decide how to choose and wear our clothes. We have grammars of belief and action and relationship - sets of rules which tell us what is right and wrong and beautiful and vulgar and acceptable and really that should be taken away and changed as soon as possible. And as with linguistic grammars, these multifarious grammars we all adhere to are completely invisible to us, but, obvious to us IN other people. They are also obvious TO other people in us. We all develop what we imagine to be a neutral zone, that is, the place in which we ourselves live, and from which we observe the world. We imagine this place to be "factual"or "logical" or "real" or "common sense". The rules that define that zone are almost always completely invisible to us, so that the cultural and environmental biases of others are obvious to us but my language has no grammar.
It is this phenomenon which allows the privileged to really, truly, deeply believe that they have no privilege, and that because they can't see the oppression all around them it must not exist. It is this phenomenon which allows people to read into the New Testament their own culturally defined predispositions, and form a faith in their own image. It is this phenomenon which enables YHWH to be cast as a vengeful tyrant, or a man, or the earth goddess, or my best friend. It is this phenomenon which separates me from my true self and from the truth of the universe. It is this phenomenon which enables us to look at our easy bourgeois privilege, or our Rust Belt American capitalism, or our Marxism and in every case name it "Christianity".
We ferociously defend the rightness and neutrality of our own world view because to do otherwise would cause us to question all we know and all we are. The first step in defence is to deny the existence of our grammars and the easiest way of denying our own grammars is to draw attention to those of others. And direct our fury at being questioned towards the deficiencies of those other grammars. Hence suicide bombers and trucks on footpaths. Hence border walls and drone strikes and travel bans.
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Well, to paraphrase Tonto, what do you mean 'we', white man? :) There are actually quite a few commentators (but not enough in my view) who understand the Christian and classical Greek sources of western culture, they make this explicit and they are not ashamed of it, even as they see this culture dying - as it is, as the Christian faith is marginalised and disappears from the West. The voices of anti-Christian, post-modern secularism, shaped by cultural Marxism, have been very strident for a generation and this thinking has percolated into the popular level. In short, the modern left has abandoned classical Marxist economics (because it knows it doesn't work) but they have continued the Marxist project at the social and cultural level, discovering ever more 'victims of hegemony' and seeking to expand the reach of the state over people's lives, replacing the traditional associations of life. (I'm not making a judgment here whether that is right or wrong, only making an empirical observation about: national budgets; the number of laws modern society generates; and the scope of these laws.)
"And direct our fury at being questioned towards the deficiencies of those other grammars. Hence suicide bombers and trucks on footpaths. Hence border walls and drone strikes and travel bans."
Come on, Kelvin, that's a cheap shot. I cannot for the life of me see what is the moral equivalence of building a fence around your property (my property has a fence, does yours?) or the US Supreme Court agreeing that the United States Government may sovereignly decide who enters the United States with the actions of Islamist fanatics murdering people in Nice, Berlin or London. And if you were a Christian in Mosul, you might think a drone strike on the Islamic State jihadis who had raped and murdered your family was not a bad idea. More discernment, please, and less shock journalism.
Brian you seem to have missed my point by a country mile and used my post as the pretext for a fairly charged diatribe against the Christian left, ending with an accusation of shock journalism. I know it has become customary to substitute accusations of fake news for real engagement, but I expected better of you than that.
To co.pare the building of a border wall - Berlin, Palestine, Mecico- with the erection of a garden fence is preposterous. In the case of Trumps wall which you ( but not me) referenced, a complex set of social problems has been simplified and blamed on one easily identifiable group of people. A solution aimed at those people is proposed- it cannot possibly work for even it's stated purpose let alone the social problems it is intended to solve. So many tens of billions of dollars are wasted, social political and ethnic tensions are exacerbated and international relationships strained. The thinking - of demonizing the other - and enacting idiotic solutions against the other is precisely that of the idiots who drove a truck on the footpath.
And drone strikes? We don't have much accurate information for Syria except that the right was decrying them when Obama did them but praising them now that Trump is doing them. In Pakistan the figures are more accessible. About 700 civilian deaths for 14 Jihadi leaders killed. As a military exercise the value is questionable. By any other standard, it's terrorism nothing more nothing less.
“ …… so that the cultural and environmental biases of others are obvious to us but my language has no grammar.”
Our individual world views that have been shaped by our cultural contexts are certainly a pervasive force in the world. But it is not these views per se that lead to the mayhem that has existed from time immemorial, rather it is a belligerent refusal to allow the demands of “A Deeper Magic From Before The Dawn Of Time “ to lay claim upon us.
You further state:
…….. “ sets of rules which tell us what is right and wrong and beautiful and vulgar and acceptable and really that should be taken away and changed as soon as possible. ……. “
Good luck with that. This statement goes to the heart of the matter. It is precisely the worlds collective inability to discharge the claims upon us of sets of rules which tell us what is right and wrong etc which have bought us to yet another century that will be remembered in a similar way to the preceding ones as a vale of tears.
What I have called the “Deeper Magic” [ Which I am sure most readers here will know is a chapter heading from C S Lewis’s book ‘The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe” ] is in fact ‘The Tao’ which is dealt with at length in Lewis’s book ‘The Abolition of Man’.
He says that there is a set of objective values that have been shared, with minor differences, by every culture, which he refers to as, "...the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew...". Lewis calls this the Tao (from the Taoist word for the ultimate "way" or "path" of reality and human conduct). Without the Tao, no value judgments can be made at all, and modern attempts to do away with some parts of traditional morality for some "rational" reason always proceed by arbitrarily selecting one part of the Tao and using it as grounds to debunk the others.
“The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or …ideologies… all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses.” CS Lewis - The Abolition of Man.
Some when they raise their flag see a duck, some see a rabbit, some see both a duck and a rabbit in the paradoxical image - Personally all know instinctively how they should act and there aren't really any excuses not to.
"He says that there is a set of objective values that have been shared, with minor differences, by every culture,". I think opinion is divided on whether or not this is actually true, and even if it is, it does raise the question of the origin of this phenomenon. Is it the detected incidence of some great moral truth, woven into the fabric of the universe? Or is it evidence of some interpretive structure that all people have in common? That is, if at some level we are all wired up in a similar fashion, the Tao would derive not from it's objective existence, but from us. It would be yet one more example of an invisible grammar, albeit one shared by the whole species.
A key passage in the Gospels is, for me, the dialogue between Pilate and Jesus. Jesus claims to be here as a witness to the truth - in Lewis' terms, to the Tao. Pilate asks the ultimate cynic's question: What is Truth? (implying that there is none, that Jesus is witness to something tentative and relative). But the truth is standing before him: not some set of principles or theories, but a living man. The truth, in other words, belongs to some other category, one in which Pilate would never think to seek it.
There is one more issue with the concept of the Tao. What is it? And everyone agreeing that there is a universal morality, will immediately identify it with their own culturally derived morality, and use the concept of the Tao to give their own morality a divine, and therefore unassailable authority. This is just the issue with religious bigotry of every kind. People read into the words of the Bible their own invisible grammar and "I don't like gays" becomes "God doesn't like gays."
For what it's worth, the only way I can even begin to approach the Truth is to acknowledge that my apprehension of everything is culturally, biologically, genetically, personally conditioned; that even were I ever to glimpse the divine mystery the way I would see it and the way I would explain it to myself would be filtered through my biology, my personal history, my culture, my language, my fears and hopes. And knowing that to sit as silently as I can for as long as I can.
“The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.”
In that sense, The Tao is a collection of spiritual laws that can be empirically tested in the same manner as scientific laws. Applying the spiritual law incorrectly will have consequences in the same manner as applying the laws of physics incorrectly by jumping out of an aeroplane without a parachute.
"It is modern man, scientific and materialist man, who seeks to break the cake of old morality to fit his new ambitions rather than to make his ambitions fit within the larger scheme of natural law that unites so much of the Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Confucionist, Roman, Greek and pagan traditions. Despite our political divisions, the true divide in the contemporary world might be between those who seek to live their lives within the Tao and those who seek to blot any such concept out of the hearts of men and thereby liberate us to be anything any current generation of individuals choose."
The path of the Tao is one not of bludgeoning others from the outside with petty rules and regulations but rather by reforming ourselves from within; developing oneself by adhering to time honoured spiritual principles. Meditation and contemplative prayer help with this development within the context of community. The Tao is a guide for those who pursue this path of compassion, wisdom and peace.
The question here for me is; how do you define objective existence? and how can anything be proved to have an objective existence? I am reminded of a film I saw recently ‘The Man Who Knew Infinity’. In the film the Indian math genius Ramanujan arrives at pure math equations without any proofs. It is the job of his supervisor and sponsor “GH” Hardy to insist he provide proofs for the equations. Ramanujan’s equations simply ‘come to him‘ from his subconscious mind. None of this is new of course. Many ideas arise fully formed in dreams and during full consciousness. The fact that this happens though raises questions. One of the big debates in mathematics is: “Are the equations of pure and applied mathematics simply constructs of the human mind or are they “objective realities” waiting to be discovered? The opinion about this is divided. But the question mirrors the argument regarding the human construct / objective reality debate regarding the Tao. My point here would be that despite its first cause origins applied mathematics helps put Mars rovers on a distance planet and the Tao is a useful spiritual tool with a wide universal and unifying agreement as to its truth.
It seems that the only strategy available to us to go beyond language and intellectual, philosophical debate regarding the ‘objective reality of God’ or the ‘ inherent non existence of things’ is by the route of Contemplative Prayer and Meditation. It is interesting that those who are experienced in these practises all regard the principles and values of the Tao as being sign posts along the way e.g. the Dali Lama encapsulates the Tao by stating: “My religion is loving kindness” and if you read any of his books you will find he makes reference to guiding principles that are the context of meditative practise in particular and the wider spiritual path in general. These principles very much echo the Tao.
The other really interesting comment you make is this: “...... Jesus claims to be here as a witness to the truth - in Lewis' terms, to the Tao. Pilate asks the ultimate cynic's question: What is Truth? (implying that there is none, that Jesus is witness to something tentative and relative). But the truth is standing before him: not some set of principles or theories, but a living man. The truth, in other words, belongs to some other category, one in which Pilate would never think to seek it.”
Perhaps both Jesus and Pilate are correct. The fully human Jesus exemplifies a life of loving kindness that has its source in a divinity accessible to us all, guided by the Tao (which simply defines the ground / parameters in which love will have its being) which Pilate mistakenly assumes is something tentative and relative.
I take a step back and say that the Tao is maybe like a rainbow. Rainbows don't exist, yet everyone who stands with their backs to the sun on one of those days when the sun is shining and it is raining will see one. In fact they will see the "same" one, in the same place, at the same time. Yet, in every case, what they are seeing is an illusion caused by the shape of the receptor cells in their retina. If our eyes had been accidentally ordered other than they are we would not see them at all, or would seee something else. So the existence of a universal grammar of morality may prove nothing more than a commonality in the equipment of our perception.
But I KNOW that what I have just said is not true. I know that in the beginning was the Word. I know this subjectively not objectively - but of course the entire universe is known to me subjectively not objectively. I know that in the depths of myself is what Elkhart calls the ground, which cannot be observed because it is what is observing, and if I try to "see" it, or even to think about it, I am immediately caught in a ridiculous game of chase my tail. And this ground is eternal. It IS in the way that God IS. As Father Thomas Keating says, "God and our true self are not separate. Though we are not God, God and our true self are the same thing."
I have been thinking a lot and fiddling around with a few little experiments lately concerning consciousness. And in particular, the consciousness we have when asleep. By which I mean, not dreaming consciousness but the very real one which is in the dark deep spaces between dreams. Which is, I think, the closest we might apprehend to the consciousness which persists after death. Which fronts me with the question, what is "pure" consciousness? Of course bigger and sharper minds than mine have tried to define consciousness, with pretty much no success, and most agreee that consciousness isn't a thing per se but is rather a process, and demands some object: it must always be consciousness OF something, so how can it exist if there is nothing to be conscious of? That is, consciousness apart from matter has a very odd "existence" which is hardly existence at all as we understand the term. Our deep self needs to be embodied in some way and that embodiment will define how consciousness \ being is perceived. Which is a long and probably bamboozling way of saying... Yes. Pilate and Jesus were both right.