So I was hanging out at Borders yesterday (as all Washington yuppies do on a Saturday), and started reading The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard. I knew it was a good book, but for some reason his first chapter about the loss of moral authority struck home with me.
Indeed, in the current world of accepted knowledge one can't even know the truth of a moral theory or principle, much less a specific rule. You could never grade someone for holding Utilitarianism or Kantianism to be true or false. One can only know about such theories and principles, and think about them in more or less clever ways. You can brightly discuss them. For that the young man got his A's. But that, of course, had no bearing on his character or behavior because it is only literary or historical or perhaps logical expertise, not moral knowledge. And if you are already flying upside down and you don't know it, your cleverness will do you little good. (Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy. Chapter 1, p. 5)
Maybe its Washington, or grad school classes, but the idea that you have to "distance" yourself from something in order to really understand it is very pervasive these days. Its the idea that someone who is in the middle of something doesn't have the ability to grasp what is "really" going on. And I guess I underestimated the poisonous effect that this type of thinking can have one one's soul. Suddenly, you can be attached to nothing, because in doing so you give up your claim to be able to truly understand it. Its a life where points are scored for a clever argument or twist that someone else hadn't thought of yet, but where both parties go away from the discussion leaving all that was discussed behind as well. And thats not the kind of life I want to live...
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I read this quote in my reading for my culture theory class and it seems to relate.
"It is true that the path of human destiny cannot but appall him who surveys a section of it. But he will do well to keep his small personal commentaries to himself, as one does at the sight of the sea or of majestic mountains, unless he knows himself to be called and gifted to give them expression in artistic or prophetic form. In most other cases the voluminous talk about intuition does nothing but conceal a lack of perspective toward the object which merits the same judgement as a similiar lack of perspective towards men."
-Max Weber
We talked in this class about Marx's idea of how our world would soon become so specialized that no one would be thought of as able to understand it and pass any kind of moral judgment on whole issues--because none will be able to be expert enough in every field. It's interesting because we now see (and scoff at) politicians trying to talk about environmental science, child psychologists talking about politics, and religous leaders talking about biological anthropology--most of these people are too specialized in their own fields to be taken seriously in anything else or to pass any kind of moral judgement on anything besides their small, specialized field. There is, according to academia, too much information out there for anyone to make a "right" decision anymore--one that considers all of the information and perspectives of all the related fields.
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