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John Kerry, Allan Bloom, and the problem of true and false openness
In a meditation on William Buckley’s 1971 West Point speech about John Kerry’s anti-American testimony to Congress earlier that year, Paul Cella wonders, are there certain topics, such as whether our nation is morally worthy of existing, that ought not to be opened to discussion, since such questions, once opened, cannot subsequently be closed? Allan Bloom raised a somewhat similar question about the perils of openness in the famous introductory chapter of The Closing of the American Mind . True openness, said Bloom, is an openness toward the truth that lies above our own particularity, above our own culture, and thus shows our culture in its true light. But there is another kind of openness, an openness that is closed both to our culture and to the higher truth that provides the standards by which that culture (or any culture) can be judged, and instead opens itself toward other cultures, without any standard of truth to judge them. Such non-judgmental openness toward other cultures means the extinction of our culture.
Comments
Perhaps it would be helpful if the idea of objective truth were understood better by the public. So maybe it is worth this effort. Captivating is the idea that truth is a matter of consensus. In America, there is a consensus that first degree murder is one of the most awful actions in the world. The awfulness is an objective truth to most of us. Our consensus leads all the way down in importance to the act of breaking in line, which can, for reasons hidden, make one think awful truths about what to do TO the joker. Maybe objective truth has no meaning. “Objective truth” appears to be a comprehensible English phrase, but maybe it is just gibberish like “34 Sawanee 25” (except that a Florida State quarterback might understand the phrase). It seems to me “objective” is a useful adjective appropriate to the result of scientific experimentation. Truth, alone, seems available only to those that believe in God or at least want to believe in God. Truth is what God reveals. I am not sure what to say to those that observe an appeal to truth is often a reason to commit atrocities on others. The Islamic Jihadists certainly believe it is true that they will go to heaven if they murder people. All I can say is Christian truth is the truth. To Mr. Murgos, this is the way I would put it. Society has two axes: truth and concrete particularity. Truth is transcendent and universal. But a particular society is formed by its particular relationship to, and its particular embodiment of, the truth. Truth cannot be lived apart from human beings living it. On the highest level, Jesus embodies and makes fully visible the invisible Father. On an ordinary human level, a society embodies, or fails to embody, the truth. A society can have a relatively evil consensus, or it can have a relatively good consensus. A society that has a firm consensus on the absolute wrongness of first-degree murder is, insofar as that issue is concerned, a society living in truth. A society that loses that consensus on the wrongness of murder is not living in truth. There is no “solution” to this problem of truth versus social consensus, because men are free. Isn’t that what the Bible is about? From beginning to end, the Bible is about men either coming closer to God, or falling away from God. There is one book of the Bible in particular, Judges, in which this alternating rise and fall of man is the main theme. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on February 6, 2004 10:10 PM |