Faith & Truthiness

Everyone shall be remembered, but everyone became great in proportion to his expectancy. One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became the greatest of all.  --Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.--George Orwell

The American Dialect Society recently announced "truthiness" to be their choice as 2005 Word of the Year with this citation:

In its 16th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted truthiness as the word of the year. Recently popularized on The Colbert Report, a satirical mock news show on the Comedy Central television channel, truthiness refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, "I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart." Other meanings of the word date as far back as 1824.'

Stephen Colbert had this to say about it in an interview he gave about the word to The Onion:

"It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the President because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?...

"Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.' It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality."

For a thorough discussion of the word and its significance I refer you to the Wikipedia article where I found some of these quotes.  The same article also refers to Kierkegaard, who

asserted that religious experience could only be understood subjectively, rather than objectively, so that the nonreligious could never understand the truth of religion. Some religions explicitly teach that faith can never come through rational understanding, but only by gaining a feeling that something is true. A religious impression accepted as truth by a believer might therefore be perceived as truthiness by an outside observer." 

This cuts to the heart of the problem that I was addressing in my posts here, here and here about Subjectivity and the Self.  If religious truth is ultimately something that can only be subjectively known, and I believe with Kierkegaard that it's true to say so, then how can you possibly know for sure that you're not deluded?  How is it possible to distinguish "true" religious knowledge from the kind of delusional religion that is typified in cults.  Whose to say that David Koresh and the Heaven's Gate suicides who thought the Comet Hale-Bopp had come to take them to a higher level of existence were not right.  Maybe they knew something that the rest of us didn't.  They certainly thought so.

But good Christians say to themselves, "Well those people were crazy, and we're not.  We're normal."  Well is religious faith about being normal as it might be defined in conventional terms?  Is it simply about doing what one is told it means to be a "good person"?   Was Jesus normal in that way?  Was the Patriarch Abraham,  the founder of the the faith traditions that run through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, normal?  He heard voices, and on one occasion the voices told him to kill his only son, Isaac.    Today Abraham would be judged certifiably insane. And yet we people of the book honor him as Father Abraham, the one who in risking everything made everything possible. 

I bring Abraham in because it was for Kierkegaard the archetypal example of what he called the "teleological suspension of the ethical."  In K's thinking about spiritual development there were three stages, or perhaps more accurately, three states of mind or soul: the 'aesthetic' in which one is driven primarily by self-absorption, the 'ethical' in which one discovers oneself capable of transcending one's self interest for the good of another; and the 'religious', in which one can find oneself in a crisis of conscience that may require him to break the moral law.  A dramatic example of this was portrayed in the "Lost" episode entitled "The 23rd Psalm," in which Eko kills an old man to prevent his brother from having to do so.  Eko breaks the moral law in an act of love in order to spare his brother from having to kill or be killed.  And he pays the price and reaps the reward. 

The faculty by which we make judgments to suspend the ethical is conscience.  The conscience is, in my imagination of it, located in the soul's solar center, otherwise known as the heart.  But it's like any other human faculty: it only works well if it is exercised properly.  Conscience can be called upon to justify the worst crimes, and anyone who commits a crime for reasons of conscience must be prepared to proven wrong.  None of us is immune from delusion.  None of us can be sure with complete certainty of our motivations.  Nevertheless there are occasions when we must act, and we must do so fully prepared to accept the consequences if we are wrong.   

I have argued before that torture is something that should be condemned as morally repugnant without qualification and should be illegal in all instances.  But I could imagine a situation in which I would be called upon to suspend the moral law and torture if my conscience dictated that I could prevent a greater evil.  But I would have then to submit myself to arrest and trial. Nothing should be done to mitigate the morally reprehensible thing I chose to do.  There is no recourse to a "truthiness" defense. It's horror should never be diminished. Any person forced to make a decision like that should be pitied, not praised.  And any person who commits such an act should be tried and only then after a thorough investigation, pardoned if the act was judged to be a necessary evil.  And condemned if the act should be shown to be unnecessary. 

An act of conscience is always a profound risk.  It is an Abrahamic act.  We take the risk in the hope we are right, but never with complete certainty of it.  And we must be open to the possibility that we are wrong, and we must accept the consequences if we are.  It's the failure to accept the consequences that distinguishes an act done out of truthiness from and act done in faith.

That's what makes the "knowing" that is involved in an act of conscience far superior to an act of knowing in the scientific objective sense. Scientific knowing is about certainty.  Faith knowing is about risk. Faith is an act of moral-courage knowing/not knowing. It is always a leap in the dark hoping that you will land safely but not being certain that you will.  And if you were right, your act of faith will bear fruit.  If not?  Well the best that can be said is that you took the risk and now you must bear responsibility and the consequences for it.  It is precisely this failure to accept responsibility for the consequences of his decisions that makes Bush someone committed to his own self-reinforcing truthiness and therefore someone devoid of moral seriousness. 

And so the difference between "truthiness" and faith is that the first is motivated by a need to reinforce one's complacency and need to block out what one does not care to think about, the second by a challenge to transcend or to risk to go beyond what makes sense or what is often conventionally acceptable.  It is never an act of arrogance, but an act, if genuine, undertaken with the deepest humility about the certainty of the outcome and a willingness to accept the consequences if proven wrong.

To know that others have leaped and landed safely is useful, but it is no real comfort because that was then and this is now.  Just as we must all die our own death, we must leap our own leap. And not just once because of life of faith is  life of leaps into the darkness with a trust that echoes Job: "Even though he slay me, yet will I trust him."

Update: For an interesting overview of the weirder apocalyptic dimension of the the truthy religious right and new age left, read Maureen Farrell's piece here.   Plenty of interestingly disturbing links.  One of the primary characteristics that distinguish the spiritually mature from immature is their good judgment and discernment.  It doesn't require a high degree of maturity to discern that all this pre-millennial expectation is childish, anxiety-driven fantasy.  And what is most dangerous about it is the way it gives those who buy into it an excuse to abdicate responsibility for the earth.

For the record, the word "eschatological" in the subtitle of my blog has no connection with the kind of crazy millenarianism out and about today.  I use the word because central to the purpose of this blog is the idea that we have to understand history teleologically, which is to say that it has a goal, an endpoint, as an acorn has an endpoint in a fully mature oaktree.  Or to put it in Teilhardian terms, history is the human evolutionary drama that occurs in several acts or cultural ages between Alpha and Omega. If we don't believe that there is something growing, how can we do our part to nourish its growth?

We are not at the end of the world, but we are  at the end of a cultural age, the Modern Age, and we're not yet into whatever is next.  And for many the being neither here nor there feels like the end of the world.  The end is not imminent; it is as far in the future as the beginning is in the past; but that does not mean that it makes no difference to understand the meaning and purpose of what we do now in the light of that which radiates toward us from after the future.

Comments

[amba]

You're aware that Colbert is religious? Catholic, I think!

[Jack Whelan]

Yes. I read the transcript of his interview with Terry Gross in which he discusses his Catholicism awhile back. He's an interesting guy for being acutely aware of all the absurdities that are associated with Catholicism and religious belief in general, and nevertheless believing. He knows what deserves to be mocked and what deserves reverence, and that it's possible to both mock and revere.