It was late at night in a dodgy neighborhood of Athens, Greece. I argued with a cab driver who clearly wanted to be rid of his irksome passenger and call it a night. I’d arrived at the Athens train station after midnight after a long ferry and train trip from Brindisi, Italy. I clutched a piece of paper with the phonetic spelling of the address I wanted to go to, a house owned by the American embassy. The cabbie, probably thinking he’d get in one last fare before heading home, had put my luggage in the trunk and ushered me into his car.
Apparently my phonetic spelling and pronunciation were off the mark—it was, roughly, Popiomati Street—and the cabby started to unload my luggage on the corner of a neighborhood that was not the type the embassy would find amenable. No, I insisted, this isn’t right, pointing at my piece of paper and throwing my luggage back into the cab. (This was long before the days of cell phones.) He pointed to the street sign written in Greek lettering and, using volume to make up for my lack of comprehension, emphatically said … something. Unfortunately, it was all, quite literally, Greek to me.
I remembered that experience when I read about a new book by sociologist Christian Smith called Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. In it, Smith, along with his co-author Patricia Snell, interviewed thousands of “emerging adults” ages 18 to 23 for their views on religious and moral issues.
Long story short, when it comes to talking about these issues with many young adults, we might as well be speaking Greek. They literally cannot understand what we’re saying. Smith, a sociologist by trade and the director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, writes:
[W]hen we interviewers tried to get respondents to talk about whether what they take to be substantive moral beliefs reflect some objective or universal quality or standard [or] are simply relative human inventions, many—if not most—could not understand what we interviewers were trying to get at.
James Tonkowich of the Institute on Religion & Democracy, commenting on Smith and Snell’s study, writes,
Not only are they [emerging adults] moral relativists, they can’t conceive of a moral system that does not depend entirely on individual judgments. The implications of this level of subjectivism for American religion and the American republic are significant and disturbing since this makes meaningful consensus nearly impossible.
Take this example from one of Smith’s study subjects:
Morality is how I feel too, because in my heart, I could feel it. You could feel what’s right or wrong in your heart as well as your mind. Most of the time, I always felt, I feel it in my heart and it makes it easier for me to morally decide what’s right and wrong. Because if I feel about doing something, I’m going to feel it in my heart, and if it feels good, I’m going to do it.
This emphasis on feelings over reasoning, Smith says, is “a shift in language use that expresses an essentially subjectivistic and emotivistic approach to moral reasoning and rational argument,” meaning, he says, that such young adults “are de facto doubtful that an indentifiable, objective, shared reality might exist across and around all people.”
This is the world in which we live. Moral and religious judgments are based on personal preference and feelings, not objective truths. How many times have you listened to a conversation on a religious or moral topic and heard, “I feel …” instead of “I think …” or “I believe …”? To appeal to universal truths that are applicable to all people in all places in all times is the equivalent to speaking a foreign language: you get in return a blank stare of utter incomprehension.
In the 1960s Francis Schaeffer told Christians that they would have to rethink how they presented the gospel to a new, postmodern generation. Start with where they are, he said, and reason from there. We need to do likewise. A common language does exist. Everyone knows in his heart of hearts that some things are wrong, especially when they’re on the receiving end. Deeper still, they know that we’re supposed to do right and not do wrong, even if they can’t define why or what those things might be. This is part of what it means to be created in God’s image. There are core truths that everyone lives by, whether or not they realize it. Start with those core truths and build from there. It’ll often be a laborious project, and many will bail out along the way. But as Mother Teresa so wisely said, “We’re not called to be successful, just faithful.”
Epilogue: So, did I ever make it to my destination in Athens? I refused to get out of the cab, and the driver started circling around, probably looking for a policeman. Only a few minutes later, though, we came upon two men standing on the corner, talking. (You have to realize that at this point it’s about 2 a.m.) The driver got out and talked to them, and one of the men came over and started talking to me … in German.
“Sorry,” I said, “but I don’t speak German.”
“Oh, you’re American,” he said in perfect English.
After picking up my jaw from the ground, I told him where I needed to go, showing him my scrap of paper with the phonetic spelling. He knew exactly where I was talking about, gave crisp directions to the cab driver in Greek, and 10 minutes later I was dropped off at the correct house. I gave the driver a large tip in drachmae—at least I think I did—and went into the house, wondering what were the odds of finding a trilingual man at 2 a.m. in the middle of Athens who also happened to know where I needed to go.
May 16th, 2011 | 10:08 am
“A common language does exist. Everyone knows in his heart of hearts that some things are wrong, especially when they’re on the receiving end. Deeper still, they know that we’re supposed to do right and not do wrong, even if they can’t define why or what those things might be. This is part of what it means to be created in God’s image.”
This is a very clear and straightforward description of the “practical knowledge” of natural law. As such, it will not get off the ground around these parts. :)
May 16th, 2011 | 10:54 am
The driver got out and talked to them, and one of the men came over and started talking to me … in German.
Oddly, I’ve had this exact same experience, though in Paris (at the Louvre, actually), in my case. I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t look stereotypically German.
Maybe there are just a lot of German tourists?
May 16th, 2011 | 12:23 pm
We do all depend on the principles of the heart, whether we acknowledge it or not.
As Pascal says “We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them. The sceptics, who have only this for their object, labour to no purpose… For the knowledge of first principles, as space, time, motion, number, is as sure as any of those which we get from reasoning. And reason must trust this knowledge of the heart and of instinct, and must base every argument on them. The heart senses that there are three dimensions in space and that the numbers are infinite, and reason then shows that there are no two square numbers one of which is double of the other. Principles are intuited, propositions are inferred, all with certainty, though in different ways.”
May 16th, 2011 | 1:08 pm
This reminds me of my torts professor in law school. Whenever some hapless student let slip an “I feel . . .” he would always immediately interrupt and say (actually, nearly shout), “Mr. X, neither I nor your classmates are interested in the condition of your viscera. We want to know what you think, not how you feel!”
May 16th, 2011 | 1:09 pm
Ugh. I like not Pascal’s definition of “reason”.
May 16th, 2011 | 1:21 pm
Jon W.
Said in best Yoda voice, presumably.
May 16th, 2011 | 8:24 pm
Just tell Smith and Snell to give those same students Fs on perfectly fine papers and see how long it takes them to appeal to an objective notion of right and wrong.
And really, does “I feel it in my heart and it makes it easier for me to morally decide what’s right and wrong” sound all that different from “Everyone knows in his heart of hearts that some things are wrong”? It may be that those students just don’t have the vocabulary to express an objective view of morality, not that they don’t have such a view. It seems to me that a much bigger problem is what contemporary students (and the culture at large) take to be right and wrong.
May 16th, 2011 | 9:21 pm
We do all depend on the principles of the heart, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Yes, if your heart says go to New York, there is no point ignoring it and going to Tuscon.
So just listen to your heart. Don’t worry about logic or intellect or “reality”. Forget about road maps. If you really want I-10 to pass through St. Louis, it will. If you want it badly enough.
May 16th, 2011 | 10:15 pm
Certainly, there seems to be an alarming lack of logical thinking. But we also must remember that, humans evolved as emotional/rational hybrids, if you will. We must make a conscious commitment, to exercise our reason, more effectively.
May 17th, 2011 | 1:03 am
[...] It’s All Greek to Them: Young Adult Moral Illiteracy – Tom Neven, First Things [...]
May 17th, 2011 | 4:02 am
Blake
You miss Pascal’s point: reason can only draw conclusions from premises; all its premises are assumed (and all its conclusions are abstract)
As he says, we cannot arrive at the notions of “space, time, motion, number” by any process of deduction, because there are no principles more basic from which they can be deduced, nor language more simple in which they can be defined. We can only trust this “language of the heart.”
In moral reasoning, this is equally obvious. We cannot define all our terms and prove all our propositions, in a perpetual regress. Moreover, in concrete cases, probable inference can never rise to certitude, unless we possess some faculty (Newman calls it the Illative sense; Pascal would have called it the heart) that enables us to see the convergence of our inferences, rather like Newton’s celebrated Lemma of the circle and the inscribed polygon.
May 17th, 2011 | 11:21 am
Blake
You miss Pascal’s point: reason can only draw conclusions from premises; all its premises are assumed (and all its conclusions are abstract)…We can only trust this “language of the heart.”
The current “language of the heart” employed by today’s “progressives” is the language of THEIR heart…THEIR feelings…as if they were the only one with feelings.
They want something, so they “employ the language of the heart” – that is, they employ fallacies: argumentum ad hominem, ad misericordiam, ad populum.
They build arguments that rely on focusing (zooming in!) on one stakeholder’s feelings. All the other stakeholders are ignored. If someone tries to bring up one of the other stakeholders’ points of view, they are shouted down. The most glaring, obvious example of this is the abortion debate, where we are told to empathize with a fictitious girl under a particular set of circumstances (chosen to maximize the sense of injustice and/or her suffering). We are not supposed to consider the situation from any other perspective – as if the only feelings that could possibly be relevant to the abortion debate were the feelings of this particular girl, and girls like her.
That’s what “the language of the heart” is, when it is divorced from knowledge, reason, logic, or reality.
May 17th, 2011 | 11:50 am
While it may be that the natural law is “written in our hearts” and cannot be totally eclipsed, I think it’s correct to be concerned that the language in which that law is written fails to be taught and explained.
Human beings depend on each other to help to translate the universal law into practical judgments that conform with that truth. On our own we are much more liable to twist that language to serve our other passions and whims.
Bad example (or “scandal” in traditional terms) is a terrible injustice for the very reason that we all need encouragement in living a life in conformity with the natural law, and are susceptible to temptations to depart from its rigors. This is all the more true in a culture unable to explain and defend the very idea of universal truths.
I think it’s likely that this is a trend that is self-limiting, and that eventually the force of truth will exert itself to right this problem. There may be much un-necessary suffering in the meantime, however.
May 17th, 2011 | 9:18 pm
In 1979, a year after graduating high school, I was in Portugal, just north of Lisbon, visiting my aunt and uncle. I had wanted to spend a few days in Fatima and a dear friend of mine here in California, a Dominican priest, had made arrangements for me to stay with the cloistered Dominican Nuns of the Perpetual Rosary in Fatima. While there the nuns surprised me with what turned out to be a huge blessing. They had a Dutch priest also staying with them, and had made arrangements for him to celebrate a private Mass in the Fatima basilica. And the nuns had come to me to introduce me to this priest and to ask if I would like to serve at his Mass in the basilica! I was blown away!!!
Now the problem of a common language. He did not speak Portuguese or English, and I do not speak French or Dutch. So it was decided Mass would be celebrated in Latin (Novus Ordo -thank God I had the opportunity in the San Francisco bay area to learn and serve this Mass in Latin!)! I came so close to missing out on what became one of the most brilliant events and memories of my first stay in Fatima. I have not had an opportunity to serve a private (or public) Mass there since that first visit in 1979.
May 18th, 2011 | 5:41 pm
“Moral and religious judgments are based on personal preference and feelings, not objective truths. How many times have you listened to a conversation on a religious or moral topic and heard, “I feel …” instead of “I think …” or “I believe …””
Oh well…I have yet to see a world were religious judgments are based on objetive truths, and not on subjective or personal preferences (and please don´t tell me about the existence of religious philosophers, apologists and such…I mean, most people in human history were commited to their religion just as a matter of tradition or emotions….thinking is more the exception for that case).
May 19th, 2011 | 12:59 am
michael ps and pascal are correct. at the end of all honest inquiry into the grounds of our knowledge, i suspect we’re left with something like “rational intuition.” which is plenty, if you ask me.
May 19th, 2011 | 2:50 am
Andrew
You are right. Unless we accept that acts of the understanding are specified by their object, no process of discursive reasoning will get us there
May 19th, 2011 | 7:51 pm
I have yet to see a world were religious judgments are based on objetive truths, and not on subjective or personal preferences
Conservative religions are neither subjective nor based on personal preferences, but are based on clearly defined authorities, interpreted according to formally defined processes.
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