Polemic Against the "Privilege" Video

I am surprised by what many Christians take to be thoughtful analysis of a subject. There is a video that I have seen posted by many of my friends on social media that is a perfect example of dreadful reasoning on an important topic. In no way do I intend this to be a smack down on anyone. I merely want to encourage discernment. 

You can find the video here. 

And you can find my logical analysis of the video below: 

As a summation, I must dismiss the argument as ineffective on the grounds that it is among the worst analogies I've ever seen. It is in the same neighborhood as Judith Jarvis Thomson's argument from analogy for abortion. We should remember that arguments from analogy are meant to connect two relevantly similar states of affairs, and say that what is true of one therefore must be true of the other. So what is the comparison here? The comparison is between a fictional race for a $100 dollar bill and the "race of life," or life itself. How does the analogy fare? Here are several serious defects in the comparison between the race scenario and life:

1. The analogy communicates a Marxist worldview. Envy and greed are palpable in the video. The envy of those without the head start is made to be understandable. And the winner is lectured to remember that he got there easily and many others are without his advantages.  

Note well that the goal is some uniform commercial outcome (the $100 dollar bill… presumably undefined prosperity, probably something like suburban bliss). What if one of the runners said, "I don’t need to run that far because I can be content with $60 as a coach." And not only that, if the analogy is real to life, then one shouldn’t arbitrarily exclude athletic talent (or any other talent) that immediately catapults a person to the front for no other reason than they have a natural talent. And is that fair? 

2. Note the title is “privilege” and not “white privilege,” but the editing means it to be an attack on “white privilege.” Obviously the people who made the video know that the term “white privilege” is going to be received as morally reprehensible by many, but the creators of the video still believe white privilege is the issue, and so they say the same thing visually and trim the word white from the privilege. Clever, but also predictable and pedantic. All of the shots of the advantaged are white kids; all the shots of the disadvantaged are people of color. At one point the lecturer calls everyone's attention to "some of the black kids" in the back who could "smoke" the rest in a race if the race were fair. 

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3. We know nothing about the sample chosen. Where do these kids come from? One could conceivably do this very exercise at a predominantly black school or Hispanic school and you will still have considerable disparities of advantage there.  

4. The assumption is that everyone should be equal. And if the pressure on the privileged works well, then the ultimate utopian vision of equality can be reached. But what if the video only shows us that we can expect inequality from the complexities of life. Is everyone born with equal intelligence, or equal physical stamina, or equal emotional or spiritual strength? Are the complexities of moral training and parental guidance ever going to be equal even in intact families? Again, people who make videos like this seem to be calling for what Thomas Sowell calls, “cosmic equality.” To illustrate, let’s assume I could forcefully take the $100 dollar bill from the winner of the race, then distribute it to everyone in the group so that equality was the outcome of the unfair race. Say everyone received two dollars as a result. Are we sure that after two years everyone will have an equal increase in their wealth? And then are those with more going to bequeath those advantages to their children? 

5. Note also that he says, “you are here for nothing that you did…” That is true, but they are there for many things that their parents and grandparents did for them. Should those contributions be discounted? Why not conclude from this not that the privileged should feel guilty about that privilege, but instead that the people who put these young people in positions of disadvantage through miserable moral choices should feel all the guilt?

6. It makes the assumption that there is only one prize. In life, it is possible for me to get the $100 now and someone else to get a different $100 later.

7. Work can provide compensations for the advantages listed. The point here is that if this is meant to be an analogy to life, then it is silly to say that regardless of starting position, everyone runs at the same speed or even cares to run at all or runs in the same direction. Some will just sit there while others run. Some will run towards different goals. Also, it is meant to be an analogy to life, which means every person brings their whole life to the race, and others with them as well. What if the race started with a math puzzle? What if it starts like the Iditarod, with family providing our mush team ahead of us? What if it started with a person’s ability to form a team? The race of life is infinitely more complex than a 100 meter dash and arbitrary factors placing people in various positions of advantage all headed in the same arbitrary Marxian direction.

500, Part 2: Depravity

This doubtless means man's mind can become spiritually wise only in so far as God illumines it.

Christ also confirmed this most clearly in his own words when he said: "No one can come to me unless it be granted by my Father" [John 6:44 p.]...But nothing is accomplished by preaching him if the Spirit, as our inner teacher, does not show our minds the way. Only those men, therefore, who have heard and have been taught by the Father come to him.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

The Reformed doctrine of salvation begins in humility! Human reasoning itself is deeply impacted by human sinfulness. You will not reason your way to God! In fact, you will not reason your way to yourself! I have known so many people, and read others, who truly believe that their drift into secular compromise was ultimately authored by their own dispassionate and superior intellects. It is a lie! It is not the mind that exposes the alleged want of Christianity and then lives accordingly; it is the sinful heart that moves the mind to rationalize its choices. We love to arrogate control over our lives to our own reasoning minds, but surely it is possible that the self-assured master is a slave.

It is an interesting question to probe how well our reasoning works as fallen creatures. In the quote above, John Calvin obviously had a low view of human reason, especially in its capacity to provide a clear moral assessment of its own state, much less a clear understanding of God and His ways. Human reason, left to itself, invents such measurements as utilitarianism, pragmatism, relativism, and general secularism, and we always come out smelling like roses. In other words, we measure ourselves by ourselves. It is attractive to do so because as long as you measure yourself by another human being you will never feel anything like condemnation, and you will never see a problem greater than human reason can repair. This is the "darkened understanding" to which Paul refers.

We have many moral teachers in our day, but perhaps they all have in common the singular belief that human reason is, or can be, our savior. Aristotle was the father of all of this. Secular thinkers may grant the need for a congress of the intelligentsia to fix more complicated problems like poverty, but nothing is beyond the reach of human reason.

Calvin and the other Reformers were less enthusiastic of the idea. For them, our condition is beyond desperate. It is not as if we are merely incapable of repairing the ruin of the world; we don't even have a clear knowledge of what is really wrong or right. Consider the moral disunity of our nation at this time in history as ample evidence of the point. Who is our moral authority when the moral epistemology of the age is that there is no higher authority than man? We are left with a gaggle of voices all shouting at or past each other. Students in schools today are encouraged to "find their own moral voice," which is a perfect recipe for the tyranny of moral confusion.

God did not leave us in this condition. He revealed His glory, His truth, His law and His Son clearly to us in the pages of His infallible Word, without which there is no true north for the internal compass of human reason or human conscience. More than that, He has graciously provided His Spirit in His people, who repairs and calibrates the internal compass itself. He has provided the standard and He has provided an internal witness to the standard.

The point here is that the first effect of our depravity, of our fallenness, is that we can no longer reason clearly about our fallenness. We are deceived as to who we are, our native powers, our understanding of God. And if that is the case, how can we be saved? Even if God comes to mankind in all of His glory and entreats them to receive Him and His healing grace, what is going to happen to them in their blinded and corrupted condition? No, as Calvin suggested so long ago, depraved people need the internal teacher of the Spirit, and the external teacher of the law and the Son just to understand their own fallen condition, much less flee to the savior because of it. The true gospel teaches that every resource for salvation comes from a source external to the individual. He is not helped or supported in his own well-reasoned efforts to fix himself. No! He is given utterly foreign knowledge of himself, God, sin, the hope of the gospel, and all!

The Reformers indeed cherished no high view of man or his powers, but that made all the more room for a high view of the Savior!

500 Years

For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. Ephesians 1:4-6

This Halloween will be the 500th anniversary of the great protestant Reformation, which of course had its beginnings before the actual date of October 31, 1517.

I thought I would write a few posts to honor the memory of the Reformers who went before, and to affirm the great doctrine of the founders of the Reformation. Some of my favorite sites and podcasts are doing tributes to the Reformation as well, and I especially recommend The White Horse Inn. Their series is also complete with "man on the street" interviews of various Protestants at local churches throughout the country. It is shocking, appalling, and altogether unsurprising, that self-professing Protestants know virtually nothing about the faith they claim to hold.

Perhaps the best way forward for me is to offer a simple apologetic for why I am compelled to believe as the Reformers did.

I start with Soli Deo Gloria, a latin phrase meaning, "Glory to God alone." The typical Protestant today doesn't really believe this idea. They might say it, in dutiful conformity to pastoral or group pressure, but they don't really believe it.

To illustrate, I will share a story of one of my brightest students. He was giving his testimony in class, and effectively persuaded his classmates that the brightest among us must, of course, accept Christianity, because after long study and careful deliberation, it is obvious that Christianity makes the most sense and is the most ethically noble system. In short, if you were to ask the young man why he was a Christian and others are not, the answer would be something along the lines of his moral courage and wisdom. There was not the faintest hint of humility in the presentation.

You could enrich the illustration by putting it thus: Imagine identical twins, raised by the same Christian parents, both with superior intellect, in the same Christian school, same moral exemplars, etc. And now imagine one commits to Christ and the other commits to a totally godless life, even to the point of ridiculing his twin without mercy. Why is the one a Christian and the other is not?

Here I want to caution you! How you answer this simple scenario will tell you much about whether or not you affirm Soli Deo Gloria. And if salvation is dependent even in some small measure upon mankind, then God is less glorious in salvation. Will He share His glory in His most glorious act with any person outside the Triune community? Is it that He cannot secure the salvation of His elect without their help? Is He impotent? Can He only save the wise and brave among us, those whose faith as a quality in them is sufficiently strong?

In my theological past, I used to say that God does the bit that we cannot do. I used to affirm that faith is a self-originating quality, in blatant defiance of Ephesians 2:8. What I didn't see at the time is that this nonsense turned salvation into something about which I could claim a share of glory. I was saying that I was a Christian and others with similar intelligence and teaching were not because of something that glimmered more brightly in me. I was like my former student.

Or an even simpler way of putting this: When someone asks you why you are a Christian, do you lead with self-assuring and self-promoting pronouns. Do you say, "I came to believe...," or "I saw the truth...," or "I finally found the courage to believe...," or "I follow Jesus' example," or "It makes the most sense," etc. Or do you say, in reverence, in tremulous gratitude, "God gloriously gave this underserving and helpless sinner everything!"

I know now that God chose me while I was busily choosing everything else but Him. I know that my pathetic faith is not why I am saved. I don't put faith in my faith to keep me securely saved. I am saved by the object of my faith, the glorious Jesus Christ, and my faith is one of the many gifts of that total salvation that flows from the objective source. If my faith is a self-originating quality, then of course I must presumably keep it alive, and keep its quality of a sufficient depth or strength as to maintain a hold on what Christ has done. But what if my faith shrinks to a mustard seed, what if it fluctuates, so that I must always pray, "I believe Lord; help my unbelief?" If my salvation is in any measure dependent on my subjective hold on it, then it is in some measure dependent on me, and I am hopelessly unstable. But catch this, if that is true, then God's plan of salvation rests upon the tentative hope that mankind will rise to the challenge of belief. God is made a desperate actor, passionately taking the stage for the stirring penultimate monologue, hoping to stir the faith response in each of us that is our lone contribution to salvation, which is the true climax of the story, giving us the ultimate glory.

If, on the other hand, my faith is a part of the objective package of salvation granted to me by Christ, then no matter how small it becomes, I will never lose it. Put simply, I will never be able to do anything other than trust in the all sufficient person and work of Jesus.

I believe the claim is true! How glorious it is that Christ has given me all of His righteousness, and any unrighteousness in me is already forgiven because of the cross! It is truly finished! I deserved damnation and instead He gave me every good gift, including the gift of faith. And no matter how weak my faith is at various times, it is a comfort beyond words that I am assured not by the relative strength of my subjective faith, but by the objective place from which my faith originates and on which it always rests. I am assured that, in all my damnable imperfection, His perfection has become mine, and more that He will make me actually perfect in the end.

That is the singular glory of salvation! Christ has not merely initiated salvation; He has fully accomplished it. What Jesus did is not merely a necessary work; it is an all sufficient work. Soli Deo Gloria! 

A Philosophical Look into "White Privilege"

What exactly is "white privilege?" Does it mean that the privileged have ancestral advantages passed to them by nothing more than their skin color? Does it more specifically mean that anglo-European immigrants invaded America, thereby conferring to their progeny a set of advantages as the alpha group?

Like any ambiguous term, there are surely various ways to define the term. For example, we could start with the question; How white counts as white? The real question, however, is whether some definition is ubiquitous of arbitrarily defined "white people" or not in our day and age, and if not, whether the term is useful at all.

The story of America is filled with examples of various people imposing burdens upon other people. The unjust things that were done are great evils, and if any vestiges of it remain, it is our responsibility to root them out.

But the issue of "white privilege" is far too nebulous to know how to address it. For example, is there a difference between active white abuse (something like slavery) and passive white privilege (something like inheriting a white father's money)? Surely there is a difference between white privilege sought by force or not. Slavery was clearly an effort on the part of certain white people in prior ages to subjugate another race for their own advantage. But am I offending against morality by simply being born mostly Swedish, having never even remotely suggested that others should not have access to the same advantages, and having never unfairly extracted capital from others? No doubt if you trace my lineage back four or five generations, you may find various sinful behaviors affecting others, but how far back must we go to make culpable the children for the sins of their fathers? And can we do the same with all races, in which case our evils may be mutually self-cancelling?

It seems obvious that the kind of white privilege that actively seeks, through force of law, to subjugate others, is no longer systematic, and in some cases laws are passed to make active reparations, or to advantage previously disadvantaged groups by force of law through things like affirmative action. How successful can liberals really be in charging conservatives with coercive white privilege, such as Jim Crow laws or other discriminatory acts of legislation?

No, the kind of "white privilege" people are charged with now is the passive variety, so vague that almost anyone can be accused of it. It basically means this: If you are white, then you have an advantage that no black person, or any person of color, has or even can have. It immediately discredits all accomplishments of white people as expected of people with such advantages, and immediately excuses all people of color for any failure as expected of people with such disadvantages. It is a psychological mood. And how on earth can one argue with a mood. I recently saw an exchange between a black "intellectual" (a lawyer) and a conservative host, and the black man concluded, "You can't understand the plight of the young black man. You can never understand me. That's white privilege!" Indeed! If we cannot in principle understand people of other races or cultures, then I want to know why on earth we are even attempting to talk to each other! Surely such a sentiment can lead only to more animosity. And I think this kind of thinking is rooted in the postmodern insanity all around us. There is no truth! There are only experiences and perspectives. And if that is true, then argument is reduced to power. Whoever is loudest, most emotionally persuasive, has the most guns, wins.

Another point: As a student of history, I'm impressed by the fact that this is not a new story. Every generation has people with various hereditary advantages, and vice versa. Before Europeans arrived on this continent, there were chieftains whose families enjoyed various privileges that others in the tribe didn't enjoy. There were conquests, and dispossessed people, even among the American Indian tribes.

After the civil war, there have been blacks who became rich and blacks who did not. And these rich black families were able to confer those benefits to their children and grandchildren. Success and failure both often increase at compound interest. Did the child raised by rich black parents enjoy "black privilege?"

It seems to me that we need to distinguish "cosmic inequality" and "inherited privilege" from "white privilege."

For example, my great-grandfather was a farmer and my grandfather worked in meat processing. They were white and produced white children, upon whom it is difficult to see any real socio/economic advantages that were conferred. There were many black families that shared a similar social status during both generations, even in my grandfather's own neighborhood. Being white did nothing more for them than being black did for their neighbors.

The brilliant Thomas Sowell, in his discussions of race, points out that most liberals today are seeking something that never was, nor ever could be true. They desire "cosmic justice," or "cosmic equality." They demand that the universe no longer deliver inequalities of any kind. Their real issue is with God, or evolution. They want reparations from God or nature for not making the world wholly equal. Why is it that some people are born fast or clever or able to sing and others aren't? Why are there inequalities in the way people work? Identical white twins, born in advantage, can be totally different from one another in the end; one a disaster, and the other a success. Does "white privilege" explain their differences?

In the end, this term "white privilege" is irresponsible and imprecise and useless, unless its meaning is made clear. It's apparent cultural meaning (the passive variety) is used as a bludgeon, and the coercive notion already considered applies to virtually no one today.

It is interesting to see that the groups most sensitive about generalizations and stereotypes with respect to race are the groups most likely to generalize about white people today. When was the last time you heard a liberal scholar make a distinction between a French immigrant descended from aristocracy versus an Irish immigrant raised in poverty? No, they both descend from "white privilege."

(I'd like to finish this ranging piece by probing a simple metaphysical question: Does the secularist (that is, the person who believes there is only human authority granted to it by virtue of evolutionary status) have any intellectual right to claim that there should be equality? One of the strangest incoherencies in all modern debate on the question of privilege is that the ones most likely to advance Darwinism are the ones most vociferous in denouncing any conferred advantages to conquering peoples. Perhaps I'll simply put it this way. If I firmly believed that we are nothing more than animals adrift in a vacuous black ocean, then I would be the first to assert that if my people won, then we get the spoils! If others don't like it, then they can fight for their reparations instead of attempting to make us pity them for being weaker. In short, I would be a Nietzschean secularist.)

America Sucks

Is it me or are there a lot of professing Christians down on America these days? And when I say down, I mean openly hostile to many aspects of American life, especially its political life, its wealth, colonialism, racism, etc. In this piece, I want to consider the relationship of Church and state from a different angle.

There are two equal and opposite errors on the question of Church and state: One would be to affirm that the Church and her members should have nothing to do with the state; the other would be to affirm that the Church should attempt to coerce control over those who resist its teaching. The Church has tried both, and neither has been in accord with God's plan and purpose for His Church. In other blog pieces, I've emphasized the distinction that ought to exist between America and The Church. Here I want to counter the frenzied cries of leftist Christians asking us to hate America.

A self-professing Christian today can without much criticism attack America as an evil nation, or at the very least a deeply compromised nation. On various media Christians complain about nationalism, white privilege and xenophobia of all kinds. One can score immediate points with the new pseudo-Christian intelligentsia (or is that pseudo-intelligent Christendom) by pointing out, with stunning depth of insight I might add, that Jesus was not white, or a Republican, or 'Merican.

I'm more than pleased that many Christians are no longer defining themselves uncritically as simply Americans. But I wonder how it is that they do define themselves? From all I can see, they merely define themselves as against America, because of all the flaws of course. Many of them are merely using America cheaply as a foil. America has surely fallen into disfavor among many college grads in particular. Many of their classes erect a long list of grievances against this country. The peculiar thing is the mass of self-professing Christians that uncritically join in the chorus. Christians are supposed to view things from a position of fidelity to Jesus and His teaching, and evaluate all things through that singular lens. Of course that means we must evaluate America according to Christianity, but that also means we must evaluate criticism of America according to Christianity as well.

The unanimity of the present vitriol against America should cause more of us to pause. Is there really nothing to see here except racism, classism, misogyny, and all the buzz words? Should we all really move to Finland? Is America's defining act the genocide of the Indians? No, that's right, our defining act is slavery. Well, both actually! I'm sorry, don't forget about colonialism either, and then there is abortion and...

Is there any real and lasting good in the idea and execution of this grand experiment called America?

Perhaps it is just too easy, too lazy, too "American" in the worst sense, to write posts about how awful America is. There is a time for thoughtful critique and comparison, but that doesn't seem to be the tone or goal with much of what I am hearing. Perhaps Christians can think about the unique good that America as a nation has brought to the world, or can, and address its evils through words followed by meaningful action. Stop looking to politicians to fix what ails a democracy. If you see a problem, do something that appreciably moves the nation towards a solution. I'm not sure that kneeling during the anthem or marching or the endless noise of Twitter do anything except make people feel good about themselves for aligning with some cause that often only, yet again, highlights something that is wrong, and only in the abstract safe space of ideas. Of course this comes back around on me as a Christian. What am I doing to seek the good of my land other than writing blog posts?

The Scriptures make it clear that Christians are to pray and work for the good of the land in which we reside. That injunction came from Christians living in the Roman Empire, where they were despised. I sometimes wonder what might happen if you could take some enlightened leftist Christian from America and magically transport him to Nero's Rome, leave him there for a few years and then transport him back. What might he say about the comparison of America to Rome? I dare to speculate that such a person would still think that America is worse. Nero, at least, knew how to separate Church and state, and, after all, the persecution was more about the dogmatism of the Christians. If they were more open to other perspectives, then they could have joined the larger polytheistic conversation. Exposure to the raw reality of Roman's murdering Christians would not be persuasive either, because cops are killing black people in America, and slavery, and Indians, and poverty, and...

One last point that is crucial. What is the point of helping people see that America is the worst nation in the history of man? Is the Christian motivated to expose human sin so that he can introduce the savior? Or is it some self-congratulatory act of theater for social media "friends?" Is this effort to expose the failure of America an effort to encourage redemptive action? Is he artfully calling people away from this imperfect nation and into fidelity to Christ and His kingdom? Or is he only critiquing one party within the wicked nation and affirming the other as The Kingdom? Or is it merely egoistic mockery of those naive rubes who still hold feebly to the belief that America is a good country? Let me just say that if his motivation is to promote the gospel, it is entirely unclear that this is his aim.

"You Just Don't Get Us!"

There is nothing more annoying about "intellectuals" than their pedantic smugness. (A close second is the rhetorical incontinence, pinched inflection and rapid cadence of self-important public intellectuals, as if everything they say is triumphal--think of the way Rachel Maddow talks).

And then there are the academics. Hearing many of them speak in the fraternal language of their discipline, usually at or over people not in their group, just reinforces the common charge today that they have become a society of pretentious parochialists, perfectly content to speak to each other rather than doing the work of education--namely, communicating with the world in a common, perhaps even tolerably robust, language. Even in universities today, many top intellectuals don't have to speak with students, at least all that much. They are hired as researchers in some highly specialized niche. Helping the world understand the value of this niche is wholly uninteresting to them, especially as long as the funding keeps flowing.

What ever happened to people like Lewis? Yes, he was obscure at times, but it seems to me that his ultimate aim was to be able to communicate the deep things of his discoveries in a way that most people could access, perhaps with a little work.

Education, as it was classically conceived, seems to me to have been an effort to train people to send them back to people. It was done as an act of service to people without the means or time to study various subjects. It has become an instrument of segregation of the elites from the great unwashed masses, or even worse a bully pulpit from which they cast down their judgments upon others rather than communicating with them.

I offer three interesting cases on this matter:

Case 1: Recently the internet satire site "The Onion" did a brilliant piece on Judith Butler. Butler is a Berkeley feminist scholar, who has written on the topic of gender performativity and other topics related to sexuality and gender. Her language can only be described as thoroughly confined to her discipline. The Onion piece didn't so much make fun of her as it made fun of the manner in which she communicates.

The way they did it was by putting the words of Butler into the mouth of an "everyman" iron worker, whose conscience was mock sensitized by reading 800 pages of Butler's gender theory. It's pretty funny if you haven't seen it.

"If I had known the foundational texts on intersectional theory I would have never chanted ‘lock her up, lock her up!’ We were told that Hillary Clinton was the enemy, but it’s clear now that the true enemy is a patriarchal capitalistic society that maintains its ascendance by making powerful and ambitious women appear threatening, only to protect my status in a system purposely designed to benefit cis-het white men like myself.”

He goes on to read a classic example of the genius opacity of Butler. He reads, "Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as prediscursive, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts." Well, obviously!

I recall one of my professors once critiquing Hegel along the lines of what I'm saying now. He pointed out that there were schools of thought around Hegel's work that interpreted his opacity in exactly contradictory terms. He was either so brilliant that he was opaque, or so opaque that he was opaque. The wonder of the man is that you can interpret him in any way you like. One thing you can't question is that Hegel and Butler are geniuses. And you know that because you don't know what the hell they are saying.

Case 2: A few years ago I was privileged to listen to a lecture on science and religion. The lecturer was, to put it kindly, frustrated with us common folk. At one point, there was a Q and A session, in which one of the attendees asked a good question, essentially asking the speaker to make himself clear on a particular point. The speaker assured us that he could not make it understandable to the audience, because it requires years of science training and knowledge of all the current studies to be able to understand what is happening in science on the question. He went on to say that everything the "average" person thinks about science is already outdated, and that only the top few scientists in the world really know what is going on in the sciences. This of course was meant to endear us to the speaker and to the sciences. I was left to wonder why he would ever accept an invitation to speak to us rubes. Nevermind, I'm sure he got a nice speakers fee for insulting all of us.


Case 3: Until he unfriended me, I had a friend on Facebook who was fond of promoting lectures on things like, "Liberation of Racial Tension Points in the Hegemony of Evangelical Sub-Structures through the Pan-Gendered Norms Leveraged by the Feminist Hermeneutic of Quine." Sounds like a rip-roaring good time! He was always speaking about "ecumenicism" and "inclusivity" and "missional creativity" and "intersectional theology:" he was a master of all the buzz words. What he stopped talking about was sin and redemption. It was clear that he, like so many other intellectuals, found himself more comfortable in the ever shrinking world of academia rather than studying in order to expand the world of others.

Case 4: A few years ago, I engaged in a discussion with a Stanford liberal studies MA grad on the question of feminism. I decided to turn the thing into a kind of Socratic dialogue, with me playing the role of Socrates. She insisted at the outset that I didn't know what feminism really is, and that I was not engaging true feminism. I asked for the source of true feminism. She said there were many. I asked for the series of claims that set forth what true feminism is. I was looking for propositional claims. She insisted that feminism is ever evolving and complex and involves various schools of thought. I asked if that meant that there is no defining truth of feminism, that it is merely dependent on the women defining it in a particular cultural niche. She said I was playing word games. I pressed that it is unfair to try to hold me accountable to some true feminism when she didn't know what it was, and that according to a group of Christians I might count as a feminist. In the end, I demanded that she define feminism for me and she said she could send me some book titles, so that I could "join the conversation." It was an utterly infuriating conversation.

In closing, let me say that there is clearly a place for intellectuals to remove themselves from others in order to study various highly specialized fields, but if these fields cannot be related to a larger world, if they cannot be harmonized with language that connects them to an interpretive framework, then they become background noise for most people. Perhaps that is enough for many people in the highly specialized postmodern university today, but it is not enough for me. I want to see how the pieces of the puzzle come together. I don't just want to study the pieces. The sad truth about the people I discussed here is that they could have been a resource to the end of finding the whole truth, but instead they lock up their discoveries either in elitist condescension, or they march about in a kind of oblivious academic solipsism, which uses special language to live on a tiny isolated island of ideas.