A Moment for Practicality
John FarnumThe most frustrating thing about learning theoretical chemistry has been the failure on many occasions of my teachers to spend ample time teaching how to apply the theories to relevant, real problems. Often, practical application is relegated to a footnote of the lesson or dismissed as “beyond the scope” of the course. Yet, the only way to actually get interesting and meaningful work done is to figure out how to apply a theory to real problems. The same problem exists across nearly every other discipline and applies to philosophical beliefs as well. I can write and rant about what is right and wrong and about what people should do and how they should act, but without actually convincing them that they should believe the same, I will fail to do anything but make noise and cause minor irritation to those within earshot.
I propose that there are two main factors that hinder a person’s effectiveness as an advocate of a particular belief: failure to connect with the audience and inconsistency between beliefs and actions. I will address them in that order. I will also address these problems as they pertain to Christians in particular both because Christians over the past few decades have become an organized political entity and because, as the book “unChristian” shows, Christians have largely failed to communicate to young adults what Christianity is and stands for.
A connection with the audience can fail for any number of reasons, but there are some obvious ones that deserve to be pointed out. If I can not show that I at least partially understand someone’s situation, then they most likely will not give much credit to my words. It is a perfectly reasonable requirement of a speaker. He should have some sort of special knowledge of the problem before he tries to solve it. Yet it is not uncommon to find people giving advice to situations with which they are completely unfamiliar. Christians often have this problem and make pronouncements and judgments of people without understanding them. Even if their pronouncement happens to be correct, their audience will ignore the uninformed opinion.
An implied hierarchy in an argument will also likely alienate the audience and make a hostile listener. This point is tricky because depending upon what position a person is trying to advance an actual hierarchy might be the case. For example, if I am arguing that workers in a nuclear power plant should be required to have a background in the theory of atomic reactors, I am advocating an education-based hierarchy. Whether my audience gets offended or not, there is a hierarchy built into my position. The Christian position is often a special case because if a Christian is arguing for a moral belief, e.g. calling homosexuality or abortion a sin, there can be no hierarchy. Christians often add an implied moral hierarchy to their beliefs which is both offensive to their audience and Biblically incorrect. Their belief might be correct, but when the audience perceives that the Christian has relegated them to the ranks of the “evil” or “corrupt” or “sinners,” they will most often be repelled from the Christian’s position. When Christians make moral arguments, they have to convey the truth that their audience is no more evil and corrupt than they are. Otherwise they hinder their argument with a lie.
Along with a connection to the audience an effective advocate has to show consistency of thought and action. Hypocrisy is a massive drain to credibility, and unChristian reports that it was one of the top characteristics that 16-29-year-olds attribute to Christians. But the Christian example does not need to be taken separately in this case because hypocrisy is corrosive to any argument. The person who argues the case for mixed income housing but then moves to a “safer” neighborhood will get few recruits. Al Gore took a lot of scathing comments when people compared his conservation and environmental positions with the extravagance of his home. Any parent who wants to stop a generational trend, whether it be smoking or dropping out of school or whatever, will most likely fail when he or she has to tell the child to “do what I say, not what I do.” Though people live with inconsistencies peppered throughout their own lives, we have very little respect for the value systems that are preached to us when they are riddled with inconsistencies.
Most examples of hypocrisy involve doing the opposite of the stated belief, but a milder form of hypocrisy, stemming from apathy, also saps the strength of an argument. Often people have no trouble getting passionate about their convictions and beliefs, but they have no actions to prove their convictions. They will not receive open rebuke for their mild hypocrisy, but their words will have no weight. James 2:15-16 says, “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warm and filled,’ without giving them the things they need for the body, what good is that?” Though you have not stolen from the person, they will not believe that your wish for them to be warm and filled is any significant conviction in your life. The scope of a person’s actions should meet the force of that person’s convictions.
And now here I am, trying to convince people to believe what I believe about convincing people of things, and I make no great example of what I have been advocating. But without the practical effects of convincing others of your beliefs, what good will it do to write all these essays? Theory becomes useful when it effects the real world. With all the theory and philosophy of The Only Orthodoxy (which I think is very important), it is also important to think about its practical working out when it comes to brass tacks, where the rubber meets the road, [fill in your practicality cliché here].
November 9th, 2007 at 10:02 am
We try to have two kinds of discussion here–the first is where we try to figure out the truth for ourselves by using each other as sounding boards, and the second is where we try to convince others of a truth we think we’ve got a handle on. John makes excellent points about the latter project. There aren’t clear distinctions between content and presentation, and each affects the other.
November 11th, 2007 at 7:35 am
Well, as a Catholic I find it somewhat humorous to learn that only in “the past few decades” have Christians “become an organized political entity”. Catholic Christians, at any rate, have been an organized political entity in the US for at least 125 years. And I’d also been under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that Protestant Christians have been an organized political entity in the US since the mid-19th century at the least. (Abolition, anyone? How about Prohibition? Or Civil Rights?) But I digress.
Not to show off too much of my EP roots, but I think Toby McKeehan only somewhat exaggerated when he said, “The single greatest cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and then deny him by their lifestyle.” I think the unChristian folks John mentions have a good point there. But, as John also says, religious folk of all stripes certainly have no corner on the hypocrisy market.
It doesn’t help to tell people offended by someone’s hypocrisy that the offender’s behavior has no effect whatsoever on the merits of his position. Logically, of course, the concept that hypocrisy nullifies a person’s argument is a fallacy. The more we study the human mind and human behavior, however, the more the Kantian concept of actions motivated by pure logic or reason seem unrealistic. Humans, even the most logical, base many of their decisions on emotion. The old debate between Kant and Hume — about whether we want what we want because we want it, and only use our reason to justify our appetites and desires after the fact (a la Hume), or whether we can use reason to govern our passions in order to desire things which are more or less correct according to reason’s accordance with an objective normative reality (Kant) — rears its ugly head.
One question we’re trying to answer through this website, it seems to me, is whether Kant was right and we can analyze and discuss issues based on reason and not so much on emotion. If the answer to that question is yes, then we might disagree with someone like Al Gore, but the reason for that disagreement shouldn’t be his house’s conspicuous consumption. If it were, then I’d think that we’d be making a mistake.
November 11th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
I don’t think John was saying that we should disagree with sound propositions because they are put forth by hypocrites. Quite the opposite, in fact.
November 12th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
I appreciate the expansions that you made, Paul. I did not really address the issue of whether or not hypocrisy should effect a position’s credibility. I was satisfied to say that it did and leave it at that, but the thought did cross my mind. That’s why I mentioned that people live with inconsistencies in their own lives. If people are so completely opposed to them, then why do they live with them in their own lives? Nevertheless, it seems that hypocrisy is a heavy burden to an argument. I wanted to argue for consistency in our own lives, both because it will give our arguments more weight and because I think that’s a major solution to a lot of the questions that we have raised in other essays such as how do we fight the decaying sense of personal responsibility in American culture.
As for the politically organized Christians, I suppose I had a different breed of politically organized Christians in mind. The ones who fought for abolition and prohibition and the like seem to have had more of a sense that their cause was naturally right, not necessarily just right form a Christian perspective. They would not necessarily consider themselves to be a Christian minority lobbying for their cause, just people on the side of the cause that they was right. They would be less inclined to reject non-Christians who agreed with their cause. The politically organized Christians that I was thinking of are the ones who decide to support particular candidates and boycott companies and things like that. They seem to be a little more on the side of fighting to get their way rather than fighting for what is right. (That was a rather broad generalization, but hopefully it gets the point across.) This entity seems to have fueled a lot of the backlash against Christians that we see in the culture. So, I had this group in mind when writing the essay.
I don’t know what to say about Catholic Christians. The Catholic church has been a dominant political force for years, but I don’t trust them with the amount of compromise they have used to try to remain relevant. I can’t say that I know how well Catholics vote in-line with what the church supports.