To be clear, what follows is not meant to be a political rant, but an astute observation and a simple solution to one of the enormous and complex social problems in America today, the censorship of public discourse—usually via social media sound bites, legal spin, and public shaming.
As just stated, the problem in view is not one of the problems typically bleated across the public square, wherever that is today.
It’s not the issue of legalized abortion, the morality of same-sex marriage, the socialist left-wing agenda, the nationalist right-wing agenda, the “swamp” in Washington D.C., second-amendment rights, laissez-faire capitalism, the communist (and fascist) agendas threatening academia, the corruption in corporate America, the feminist, transgender, and LGBTQ agendas, the demise of the American church, the atheists, the attorneys, or the anarchists—or one of the plethora of agendas belonging to any one of the myriad culture-warriors and ideologues gracing primetime television and your Facebook newsfeed.
The problem in view is much bigger than all of these explosive issues that routinely make the headlines. While it is true these various competing truth claims are pulling at opposite sides of the very place where the nation’s fabric is sewn together, and it appears all of the seams may tear at once, the one to blame is the nefarious censorship of rational and meaningful public discourse whose ominous shadow looms over the fabric of society holding a seam ripper behind its back and pretending to be innocent.
By censorship, it should not be taken to mean legal censorship, though that is not an issue to be ignored, for that would be going after the wrong culprit at the moment. What is meant here is social censorship, both direct and intentional and indirect and unintentional. This is our bad guy.
It may seem a fool’s errand to attempt to treat such a problem in a short blog post, but one of the small pleasures of writing is attempting to say what needs to be said in as few words as are necessary.
Note that I did not say as possible, as such a notion is an essential part of the problem.
In any case, if there was ever a living person who thought it could be done, this is just the generation to raise him up, given the enormous success of social media platforms like Twitter, which limit the number of characters one can use to communicate to one hundred forty. “Ah, and there’s the rub,” as Hamlet quipped.
Should it be any wonder that a culture which reduces its normative manner of public discourse to sound bites, memes, and emojis would not also have its cultural cohesiveness threatened by myriad social and intellectual upheavals, none of which can be adequately addressed in a tweet?
And what if that was true of that nation’s own president, first and foremost? That might be worth looking into.
In essence, this generation is a lot like the animals of Orwell’s famous farm, “literate in some degree,” but “unable to learn the Commandments by heart.”
Because they have failed to acquire a level of rational and emotional intelligence adequate to properly understand and discuss competing truth claims, this generation satisfies itself with mantras and maxims, believing clever pith to be a substitute for substance.
Anyone willing to look up from his iPhone long enough would see every platform that could be used for rational public discourse is awash with polemic memes and deconstructed sound bites, pages of social media filled with the wit and wisdom of a generation whose children eat Tide Pods for fun.
The solution I propose is simple, and of course, simultaneously, extremely difficult.
By simple it is meant it is not a complex one. A few simple steps could effect great change. In medieval terms, all the gold and treasure we need—and then some—is in the dragon’s lair at the top of the mountain.
Climb the mountain, take the gold, and we solve the problem. Simple as that.
By extremely difficult, it is understood that there is a dragon that will have to be slain to acquire the gold. And as C.S. Lewis remarked of Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, those that have read the right books know things about dragons, namely that they guard their gold closely, breathe fire when threatened, and do all that other nasty stuff dragons do.
Said another way, implementing the simple solution will be extremely difficult because the nature of the human heart is to resist renewal any way possible and defend its loot to the death, ill-gotten or not.
So, first things, first. The simple solution is to revive the Christian liberal arts tradition, even more than has been accomplished to date.
Gregory Wolfe rightly notes as much in his introduction to The New Religious Humanists, when he writes, “It is necessary to sink deeper wells if we are to strive for authentic cultural renewal. Those wells can be found, I believe, in the tradition of religious humanism.”
The fact that Christian humanism focuses on “the primacy of rhetoric, a return to the sources (Ad Fontes), and the development of a historical sensibility” means all the gold and treasure needed—and then some—to cultivate in the next generation the rational and emotional intelligence adequate for profitable public discourse, to the end they may solve their wrong-headed problems, is safely tucked away in the cave of historical Christian humanism.
Solving the extremely difficult problem of slaying the dragon to get to the gold, however, requires robust elucidation and so will be addressed in following posts.
But here is a quick hint: its implementation does not begin with political rants on Facebook or Twitter; it begins in the home, by reading the great books, and the greatest book, to your children. And it must begin sooner than later.
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