For the past half-decade, I have been undergoing a detoxification of embedded secularism discovered throughout so much of my thought. There are 2 highlight that come immediately to mind:
I’ve been escaping the impact of age-ism. Scholars talk about this as chronological horizon; philosophers might call it the zeitgeist. There are certain assumptions that guide all thought across the globe to one degree or another (excluding, of course, peoples who are not plugged into the global interconnectedness, like primitives tribes, and so forth). To the extent we can escape and overcome the barriers imposed by the assumptions of our age (age-ism), we get some great benefits that, frankly, make life more fun.
- Humility: coming to an understanding that our thoughts are limited by our age has made me profoundly clear on my weakness.
- Being free to disagree with current thought-trends, no matter how seemingly immovable, is astronomically freeing. Doing a bit of homework, we would find that the scientific consensus in the 80s and early 90s was that the universe was eternal; now the consensus is that the universe had a beginning (big bang). A Nobel Price winning physicist now argues that this universe is one in a series of expanding and collapsing universes–his view has not displaced the big bang, but it shows that would-be immovable scientific facts change in a relatively short amount of time.
- The mental prison most people live in without noticing seems so obvious now. The quest of freeing people’s minds is also a quest for what we should free them unto. Certainly in the West, an assumption that guides so many is that they should be free, free to do as they please. This has led to a hasty erosion of morality since “doing as you please” demands us to answer what it is we should be pleased to do. The thought-trend prominent in the 20th and early 21st century in the West that “I am free to do what I want and everyone else should not prohibit it” is a fragmented notion, and it should be clear why the West is destabilizing at a quickened rate. The associated idea that “I am okay, you’re okay, just let me live my life, it is a private matter,” is painfully myopic: it implies that someone’s desires are virtuous or “right” simply because this person has the desire. Desire unmoored from morality leads to any number of rampant evils. To my postmodern friends, let me affirm your sneaking suspicious that I am conjuring the specter of truth and asking “whose morality.” You are precisely right, I am advocating for logocentrism.
I have also learned the fact that the spiritual battle between good and evil is prominently a battle of epistemic exposure. If we think about the Adam and Eve narrative in Genesis 1 – 3, we find that the events of humankind’s ill-fate happened because humanity changed its epistemic limitation in the wrong way. Adam and Eve were limited to the good, but then they knew both “good and evil.” The serpent undid the trust humans had in God; the manner of how one comes about the knowledge of evil and how that knowledge is understood morally is largely at the crux of humanity’s ill-fate. It is therefore critical that we note that the ability to frame knowledge, color its moral quality, and set its limitations is a god-power. In this season of humanity’s destiny, big tech companies and social media’s capacity–both with very few guide-rails–to govern how knowledge/information is framed, delivered, and understood puts humanity into god-tier power, a return to the Tower of Babel as it were. Most humans are unimpressive; in terms of morality, most humans are even more unimpressive. Bureaucracy is evidence of human failure: in its purest and best form, it is the endless rules humanity has to make to prevent human immorality, all the while installing a systemic web of control far more evil than the evils that supposedly justify bureaucracy. Lastly, bureaucracy is wasteful in so many ways.
Dr. Scalise