A Better Conversation
Some friends and I are going to have a conversation about the second part of Rod Dreher’s most recent book Live Not by Lies this afternoon. We have made two videos already, and we are thinking that this will be our final one unless we really get talkative.
The kind of conversation that we are trying to model in these videos is the type of conversation that we learned to have as doctorate students in humanities at Faulkner University. These conversations center on the interpretive question. An interpretive question seeks to understand what an author meant in a given passage. Answering them relies on drawing support from the text itself. This is not about “my truth.” Of course, we do talk about our own perspectives on what Dreher wrote, but when we interpret the text, the meaning of his text is always assumed to be what he meant it to be, referring back to the text for support, not how we believe it could and should be.
This is a difficult exercise for many in the postmodern era. This expands far beyond higher education, but discussions about individual truth have dominated our cultural philosophical conversations. There are probably a few reasons for this. The first reason is that nobody likes to be wrong. Therefore, if truth is entirely self-defined, I am always aligned perfectly with truth because I am the one who set the rules. We don’t like the shackles of objective truth, so if we reduce truth to an individual construct rather than a fact about the external world, we can rid ourselves of that pesky occasional wrongness.
Another reason why it easy to reduce all truth to “my truth” is because it is ambiguous and can shape shift whenever needed. One set of rules can apply to me today, but if those rules are no longer convenient for me or my narrative tomorrow, I can discard them at will. Perhaps this sounds cynical, but if we reject objective truth, then we have a great deal of flexibility. Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro has become famous for saying, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” If facts are not objective though, they are 100% feelings. It does not matter if I am actually a 75-year-old man. If “my truth” is that I am a seven-year-old giraffe, there is no way that you can dispute that without appealing to some degree of objective truth.
You can see how, with either one of these justifications, conversations devolve into meaninglessness. If we cannot even agree that the text we are considering has an objective meaning that Dreher tried to communicate on the page in the best way he knew how, there is nothing for us to talk about. It is possible that we do not always accurately represent Dreher’s position; our understanding of his work may not always align with what he intended the reader to absorb, but our goal is to first of all extract this objective meaning from the work in question. Once we figure that out, our conversation is able to continue.
After we have ascertained what the author intended to communicate, we are in a position to consider whether or not his claims are valid. To take a sample quotation from Dreher’s book, he writes, “The fact that relative to Soviet Bloc conditions, life in the West remains so free and so prosperous is what blinds Americans to the mounting threat to our liberty.” If we have accurately understood the point that he is trying to communicate from this passage, we are able to consider whether or not that claim is accurate. Some questions flow out of this quote. Is he right that our life in the West is free and prosperous compared to conditions in the former Soviet Union? Is our liberty actually in danger?
These types of questions are important to consider on the second level. We began with the interpretive question to actually try to uncover what Dreher meant. Only after we have done that first level activity are we able to advance to this second level of evaluating the merits of what the author has written.
You can watch our videos and see if we have achieved this objective. I think that we have done a reasonably good job through the first two, and I anticipate that the third video will exhibit a similar type of conversation. We try to stick to the same process. Look at the text, ask a question, have a conversation to understand what the author is trying to communicate, and finally begin discussing whether or not the author’s position is valid.
In order to have this kind of conversation, we are swimming against the philosophical stream in many ways, but I hope that you can see the fruit that can grow from a simple philosophical commitment to the existence of objective truth. Conversations couched in subjectivity get nowhere; they are all feelings and no facts because facts cannot exist by definition. If facts cannot exist, then any “truth” that is discovered is kind of like an object in zero gravity, floating around, unable to progress. To the contrary, when we ask interpretive questions and assume that it is possible for the author to communicate and for us to understand that communication, it seems simple, but it creates the possibility for a higher level of conversation.
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