Right, wrong and objectivity

Definitely won't tie this one up in a tidy package in one essay, but let's start a conversation

The earth is flat.

Hemingway is important to understanding the human condition.

Hopefully, you’re able to see that these are categorically different kinds of assertions. The first can be disputed by empirical data that would have to be ignored to conclude otherwise. The second is open to either agreement or disagreement, depending on the context in which one places Hemingway’s life and work.

Granted, there is a theme - the code hero - running throughout his work that seems to be ennobling:

Hemingway’s code hero is defined by a static set of characteristics. These characteristics remain essentially the same throughout all of his novels, though each of these code heroes is expressed differently. This code hero is someone who after facing too many problems is able to withstand all trials. He is free-willed, self-disciplined, typically an individualist and lives up to the richness of life. He knows that in the end, he will lose because we are all mortal, but he believes that the true measure is how a person faces death.

According to Hemingway, the Code Hero as a-

man who lives correctly, following the ideals of honor, courage and endurance in a world that is sometimes chaotic, often stressful, and always painful.

We find this particular set of characteristic in Santiago (The Old Man and the Sea), Frederic Henry (A Farewell to Arms) and Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises).

On the other hand, Hemingway’s measure of nobility - how one faces death - is pretty devoid of transcendence. Hemingway had rejected his parents’ Christian faith, and is generally regarded to be in the forefront of a twentieth-century view that puts the individual human being at the center of whatever meaning there is to be derived from the universe.

He would have made a good inclusion in my essay from February, “Art and Dissolution.” His contributions, from a craft standpoint, to the development of American literature are undeniably important, but personally, he was a mess. His man-of-adventure persona was to a considerable degree a posture. After Fitzgerald had acted as his agent and helped him edit The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway pulled an alpha male-beta male relationship arrangement on him, bullying him mercilessly. It wasn’t helped by the fact that they were both alcoholics.

So the second assertion above doesn’t lend itself to answers we might think of as correct or incorrect.

But is the realm of art off-limit when it comes to right-wrong discussions?

Plato didn’t think so. The dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon in The Republic delves rather deeply into the distinction between opinion and knowledge, and also ennobling vs. degrading literature.

This is interesting because, with regard to the literature question, Plato, through his conversants, wishes to keep the ideal state’s young people from being led astray by poems and plays about the gods going at each other. They must see the gods as relating harmoniously. Two things about that: it seems to be rank censorship, which would run contrary to the development of a mind able to handle whatever it encounters in an even-handed fashion, and it accepts the polytheistic framework of Greek society of the time with no attempt to prove it on any kind of grounds. Yet, with regard to the knowledge-opinion question, he sees self-referential conclusions as inferior to those based on an acquaintance with the workings of the world outside oneself.

The period between the Renaissance and the modern era was full of crosscurrents that require some sorting out. Geographically, as its naval powers went on the move, Europe extended its influence over areas of which it previously had only an inkling, at best. The Scientific Revolution, as exemplified by the contributions of Da Vinci, Descartes, Newton et al presented humankind with facts about the physical universe that had to be confronted. The Age of Enlightenment, ushered in by the works of Bacon, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith et al supplanted many of the supposed givens that led societies to be structured the way they were. The sovereignty of the individual and the notion of intrinsic rights gained a foothold. This roughly coincided with the introduction of Protestantism, which changed the face of Christianity. On the other hand, a different strain of Enlightenment thinkers, as exemplified by Rousseau and Voltaire, paved the way for collectivism, which really got underway with the French Revolution. This strain paved the way for the Romantic poets, who exalted feeling above reason, and can in turn be seen as paving the way for Freud’s sexual-impressions view of human development and Nietzsche’s ubermensch. (That, in turn, can be seen as paving the way for Hemingway’s notion of nobility.)

In the 1940s, with a cataclysmic global conflict raging, a series of talks that atheist-turned-Christian C.S. Lewis gave on the BBCwere compiled in a book called Mere Christianity. It’s a brilliant work of apologetics. It meets the modern Westerner where he or she is. It builds its case slowly, starting with a premise for morality that we can all pretty much agree on:

Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: 'How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?' -- 'That's my seat, I was there first' -- 'Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm' -- 'Why should you shove in first?' -- 'Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine' -- 'Come on, you promised.' People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: 'To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the 'laws of nature' we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong 'the Law of Nature', they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law-with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.

We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.

I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to-whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

He goes for several chapters in hang-in-there-with-me fashion, not even getting specific about Christianity until he has shown that pantheism and atheism are without solid foundations. He finally gets to the person of Jesus and says he can only be one of three possible things: a liar with some agenda of earthly power, a lunatic, or the son of the creator of the universe.

In January, I had a piece at Ordinary Times entitled “Notes on the Delicious Art of Arguing,” in which I adopted an admittedly smart-aleck writing voice, as if I were coaching someone who relished being right above all for its own sake. The underlying point is important, though. There is indeed much that deserves to be argued about in this world. Ask the attendees of the Council of Nicaea.

I hope readers got that my point was that arguing, done in good faith, is meant to arrive at irrefutable premises.

The contemporary Westerner, steeped in the material preoccupations of the past several centuries, can’t be reached in any other way. Even an overwhelming emotional experience in a worship setting is going to fade.

The message that God is real and loves you must be delivered convincingly, else it will drown in the tide of distraction and cacophony that keeps us from even thinking about such things.