I was listening to a talk from Andrew Kern yesterday and one thing he said was… when Jesus used a mustard seed as an illustration of the kingdom of God, do you think Jesus just had the idea to make that comparison right then, or did God create the mustard seed in part so it could be that illustration for us? We paved paradise and put up a parking lot, as the song says, and does the devil want us to pave over paradise because paradise points us toward God?
I liked that comment.
Truth needs a community
Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, I am at the annual conference of the Association of Classical Christian Schools in Dallas, Texas. I know some readers know them, so let me give you a photo of some of the fine folks representing our Cedar Classical Academy in attendance!
This post is not a summary of the conference, in part because… oh, there is so much good discussion happening, and these education conferences always remind me that doing education well is difficult. The personality I have and the training I have had as a physicist1 mean that, at least some part of my brain thinks it would be happy if education could just be about making logical arguments. I am good at spotting unstated assumptions and employing rigorous reason and drawing necessary conclusions… and don’t misunderstand me here, those are very important things to be able to do and to teach to students. It just isn’t enough. And in large part our own lives are planned and directed from other impulses.
Why do people believe in Darwinism?
So for this short post I’m just going to grab one little thought from the conference expressed in talks by both Andrew Kern and Douglas Wilson. Andrew Kern’s talk… was really a sermon about beauty, but one question he raised was, why do people believe in Darwinism? Is it because they’ve read all of Darwin’s books and studied the evidence and come out convinced that Darwinism is true? For nearly all of them, no, that is not the explanation. For nearly all of them, he said, they believe in Darwinism because they are going to be mocked if they don’t believe in Darwinism. The community pushed them into that belief, not study and argument.
In part this reminded me of the information problem / time problem I mentioned in the last post. The CDC promotes a study that makes major mistakes in an analysis of risk from COVID, and a mom from Georgia figures it out and tells the world. That’s great, but would you have done that work yourself if she hadn’t, and figured it out for yourself? No. You might have reasons to generally not trust the CDC, but you just don’t have the time to go diving into the details of medical studies. You’re supposed to be able to trust the community, in this particular case led by the CDC, to lead you into truth. You can’t right now, at least you can’t trust the CDC-community, and that’s a problem. One very practical reason truth needs a community is because of the time problem - you just don’t have to time to go study all of these things for yourself.
But Kern’s talk actually began with Psalm 149, “the Lord takes pleasure in his people”. We all need praise to live, he said. Christians sometimes see worldly people trying to satisfy their desires in worldly ways, and we respond by saying “well you just shouldn’t have that desire at all”. Maybe every now and then that is true, but quite often the root desire is fine and was created by God, but the way people are trying to satisfy it is messed up. I’ve mentioned many times here that in COVID-world, and masking, and vaccination, and all that, some people have found meaning for their life. Is it wrong to seek meaning for your life? Absolutely not! But finding meaning in disease-avoidance is the wrong choice.
So God takes pleasure in his people. But human praise matters too. A community will praise its members for seeking after those things the community believes to be good. And, people in a community will seek after those things in order to win that praise. That’s all fine. But a critical, gigantically-important question, then, is who is Lord of the community?
The community steering your thinking
Douglas Wilson made some slightly related comments in the first plenary of the conference. Now, I know Wilson is a polarizing figure, and in fact that was relevant to his comments here. The comment I’m going to grab for this post is, he said, notice that the Left never apologizes for its left flank, whereas the Right is constantly apologizing for its right flank. And realize, he said, that when you are being asked to apologize for something, you are being steered.
It did make me think again that, if the Right makes arguments (and I’m not against arguments), the Left spends more time trying to “program the air we all breathe”, trying to create community conditions such that the way people are thinking and behaving, when they are not thinking about it all that much, is in line with what benefits the Left. There could be some disagreement here, but just as an illustration, the Right might try to make an argument that racism isn’t all that bad in the US today, might throw up some data and statistics for a moment, but if every institution is constantly apologizing for racism (historical or present-day), that creates a sense that it must be a pervasive problem. And that “sense in the air” created by constant repetition is going to affect more people than your argument.
Progressives are intentional about this sort of thing and do it all the time, because they are playing a generational game to win. To continue the apology example, many Christian institutions have historically made the mistake of just looking at the propositional truth value of an apology or other statement, noticing that it is 100% true, let’s say, and concluded “so what’s the problem with our institution formally apologizing for racism for the fourteenth time?” And yeah, in a denominational assembly or whatever, it is hard to argue against affirming a statement that is 100% true, which is one of the reasons this is a brilliant way to attack good people. But even if everything you are saying is literally true, you are being played by people who are running the long game. The devil is very smart, and he has time.
One more final point that is more obvious, but in a later talk, Wilson elaborated on other ways rituals inculcate certain truths without the need for propositional teaching. At a K-12 school he works with, they have trained the children to stand whenever an adult enters the room. Without ever having to actually say, “respect adults”, they are teaching that lesson by the ritual. Or having the boys hold the door for girls again teaches a certain lesson without having to speak it out propositionally. (Or, as I said long ago on these pages, having your students mask every time they enter the school building teaches another lesson without your ever having to say the words.)
Good arguments are valuable, but truth also needs a community.
For the curious, the way we teach physics at the college level, at least to majors, is to make some effort to derive or prove every single claim we make, every equation, every Law. Very much in line with this post, this has the effect of training students that everything that should be believed should first be proven by argument, without ever having to actually tell them that with words.
On the "air we all breathe" point: why is the focus on racism and colonialism and so on? Why not instead demand that the relevant institutions, most obviously those communist parties that remain active, issue multiple formal apologies for communism? Why is Mao still on China's currency, for instance?
Some people share songs they can't get out of their heads, which then gets stuck in whomever is listening to the complaint. I can't get a parallel-sounding argument to the title out of my head, that is, "it takes a village to raise a child." Was that purposeful?
I don't believe the veracity of Hilary's claim, because even though I mostly agree with the facts (eg, I want children at Classic Schools or homeschooled), I don't agree with her unstated implication, which was, God was wrong that parents are enough, kids need bigger government to be raised successfully.
I think the Bible treats the fostering of truth differently than raising a child, so the comparison doesn't work for me, but I wouldn't be surprised if your post had a wider audience, then a progressive might make the comparison.
Anyhow, thank you for sharing another conference report. I enjpy reading what you see and hear at conferences.