MetaCatholic

After a short break, Stephen comes back swinging in response to this post. Fascinatingly, he seems to me to be just as good, if not better, at putting words into my mouth as he claims I am at putting a caricature of his argument into his. I won’t attempt to sum up his argument this time: just read it for yourselves. (Read John Hobbins’ comment also.)

I do, however, offer a few notes and observations in response. Obviously, the existence or otherwise of “objective truth” whatever exactly that is, is a matter of belief, but a case can be made that such a belief is reasonable., rather than blind. I haven’t offered an argument on my About page, so much as a mini-creed.

Believing that truth is external to our perceptions of it, and that in seeking to perceive truth, we are seeking to discover the meaning and reality of what is rather than invent it, seems to me to be a corollary of believing in a God who is exterior to our being, and the being of the universe. Again, you can’t prove or disprove God, only offer more or less reasonable accounts of those beliefs.

Failure to perceive something does not mean there is nothing to be perceived. There are long-tried accounts of why our knowledge of God is (to say the least) inadequate that also have something to say about our knowledge of the truth.

Failure to agree in practice does not mean agreement in principle is impossible, only that it is hard to achieve. The empirical observation that people do come to agreement through apparently intractable disputes is as important to any grand theory as the regular and all too frequent disagreements that are often more noticeable and more intensely expressed.

The existence of different community histories leading to different paradigms of thinking (a rather overused concept) fails to prove anything about the nature of reality. To assume otherwise is to collapse ontology into epistemology. In practice we do communicate across paradigms, but with severe difficulty and frequent misunderstanding. All we can do is tell stories that invite people to enter a different paradigm and find it a more satisfying story. The possibility of events that disrupt paradigms can never be discounted. Sometimes the paradigm will absorb the event, sometimes the accumulation of events will explode the paradigm. The fact that this happens suggests that “reality” as an external something can indeed impinge on, and transform, our ways of knowing it.

It is, I suspect, almost impossible not to be either tempted by postmodernism if you inhabit Western culture. We are, loosely, shaped by late or post- modernity. But my recent conversation with Stephen has left me surprised that my resistance to it has strengthened rather than diminished over the years.

I think there are two reasons. The first is that I struggle, as I struggled with relativism beforehand, to see any way around the paradox at the heart of the post-modern vision. The rejection of meta-narratives grows out of a meta-narrative. And if the truth of “it depends where you stand” depends on where you stand, then sometimes (at least) it’s not true. Of course, it is always uttered as the truth that doesn’t depend on where you stand. I sometimes feel that postmodernists miss this paradox much as the author of Titus seems to miss Epimenides’. (See Titus 1:12)

I have been attracted to post-modernism’s ability to encourage us to notice the unheard voices of the minorities in history and the present. On the other hand, I am unconvinced by the unrelenting post-modern meta-narrative which interprets all lost voices as those marginalized or suppressed by the people with power. Sometimes ideas die out because they’re bad. Sometimes communities die out because they’re unhealthy and dysfunctional. And there are myriad other explanations, which do not necessarily compete, but may complement each other. It is another curious paradox that so many disparate groups, culturally and historically simultaneously have their diversity noticed and celebrated, while their disappearance is described by the same unified and overarching story of power.

I do think post-modernism chastens us moderns, though I suspect in a hundred years time we will see it as late modern rather than postmodern. I don’t think it has sufficient coherence to stand on its own feet, but is a symbiotic parasite with the preceding modern culture, through which relationship both can benefit. The paradoxes at its heart, however, seem to me to be inherently unstable.

That’s just from where I stand.