QUESTION of the DAY: What do you say to that man who boasts of rejecting all orthodoxies after he rebukes you for asking the wrong kind of question?
(Perhaps that's the wrong question to ask.)
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Is orthodoxy possible anymore? Does it matter? Or is even heterodoxy a form of orthodoxy? Isn't it evident: that the new orthodoxy is to be heterodox?
I attended a lecture two nights ago at an Ivy League college. I heard a man say this: The best of humanity can fix the worst of humanity. The man was a believer in the inherent goodness of humankind, and he believed there wasn't a problem the best of us could not fix. But I left with more doubts than when I arrived. His faith, he said, was strictly humanistic. Man is the measure of all things; the very zenith of conscious and moral life. There is nothing that the "best" of us could not correct, fix; tidy up.
Behold, we can make all things new. The best of us.
3 comments:
Orthodoxy was the first casualty Postmodernism's war on the human soul. I'm afraid those of us who embrace an orthodoxy are fighting, at best, a delaying action in the inevitable decay of human society.
Dear R. Sherman,
Is there nothing more to do than fight -- and wait?
Orthodoxy. I wonder if you'd agree that we are not seeing the loss of orthodoxy, but merely the wars between many orthodoxies.
Of course, I would stand, historically, at least, rather solidly within what would be called Christian orthodoxy, both in theory and practice. But my position is not attacked by some sort of random amalgam of thoughts, or some barrage of disjointed ideas. Rather, my foe is rife with orthodoxy; it is because, compared to this orthodoxy, my beliefs fall short and are to be either subsumed at best or eradicated at worst.
But what we are definitely seeing, at least I am, is the demise of reason that is indefatigably reasonable. There is the appearance of reason, a prima facie reasonableness. But this is so thin, so emaciated; it is so tenuous and frail and fatigued that it is not REALLY reason.
It is something else. Something devilish.
The boasters are legion, proud in their many sophistries. But they are not disciples of reason. They are its abusers.
I think.
Peace.
I don't know, perhaps orthodoxies have a life cycle, particulary when they are untethered to an objective truth. And as people flail about, trying on all sorts of philosophies, orthodoxies and heterodoxies like so much discardable clothing, those orthodoxies that are not rooted in the foundational concrete of truth, find their way into the dustbins of history, really nothing more than fads. In the end, I am comforted by the fact that Christianity was once a fledgling cult. :)
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