A Fellow Pupil

I was a philosophy major at a small liberal arts college in Jackson, Mississippi before joining with two friends upon graduation and starting a software company.

That was over ten years ago. During that time, I mainly did presentations – presentations about how great our software was and presentations about how great it would be to sell more software, presentations about development cycles and presentations about market cycles, presentations to customers, salespeople, partners, analysts, journalists and investors. Sometimes I would present a plan to two people and sometimes I would present a story to a thousand. I traveled for many of the presentations, to glamorous places like Atlanta, Lincoln, Nebraska, and Roseland, New Jersey and occasionally San Francisco, Boston, London, and even Rome. My favorite setting for a presentation was in the american embassy in Rome. Potential customers were willing to endure a sales pitch in exchange for a peek inside the embassy and free (and quite good) hors d’oeuvres. Some of them looked disappointed that the president or at least the secretary of state had not flown in for the occasion. Towards the end, I presented for thirty hours in one week to twenty different potential investors – including the investors who soon thereafter bought the company.

By Mississippi standards, the company we started was a home run. By silicon valley standards, it was a solid hit, maybe even a double. The company is still doing well even without my presentations, as good as some of them were (they were mainly pictures).

Along the way, my family grew as fast as the company. My wife Rebecca has born us four children – two boys and two girls. We have also adopted twice from Ukraine – an eleven-year-old boy and later a ten-year-old girl. And so in less than eight years, we have found ourselves the parents of six children (between the ages of 0 and 16) not to mention our two ponies and a black dog named Blue.

All of this by way of disclosure. I am no expert in the things about which I write. I have not read a tenth part of what some others have and have forgotten twice as much of the part remaining. I have been been distracted monitoring website traffic and designing brochures, changing diapers and explaining responsibility, hygiene, and the facts of life to a thirteen-year-old boy whose diapers I missed by a decade. For much of the last ten years, I have given little thought to human culture and my Christian faith was a support rather than a subject to be pondered.

Then what, one may ask, is my purpose in writing. If, as Lewis in Reflections on the Psalms “I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself”, then like Lewis, I need some excuse. My excuse would mirror his: “The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago that he has forgotten.”

Cultural Experts

Furthermore, while merely a pupil of the subject about which I write, I would argue that it is a subject which casts off attempts at expertise. In the first place, one cannot step outside of human culture entirely unless one is not human and it is precisely this stepping outside (adopting the objective viewpoint) which we normally associate with expertise. One would have to be able to view the edges of human culture in order to study it as an object, and this we cannot do, no matter what distance from human culture we achieve. Even from the hermitage or the monastery, we have to acknowledge that our own reclusiveness is part of the subject we intend to study. We cannot get a sufficient distance from ourselves. This is something like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which (as I understand it) states that to in order to gain a more precise reading of a particle’s position, one must use shorter and shorter (and therefore higher energy) wavelengths of light, thus jolting the particle out of the position we found it in and muddying up our reading of its momentum. Our being in culture to study it muddies up our readings.

One can, to be sure, distance oneself from various aspects of culture in order to gain a vantage point for observation – to reduce the impact of one’s observation – but it is not at all clear that this makes one an expert. It is a catch-22. Either one experiences culture first hand without observation or one observes by distancing oneself from firsthand experience. The distance may be physical (like the hermit or academic) or psychological (like the anthropologist pretending to take part in tribal ritual), but it is distance nonetheless and with distance comes a certain obfuscation.

Most of us, of course, live life in-between taking part and observation, but on this spectrum, it is a supreme irony that we consider an expert on culture someone who has learned what they know of humans through books and silly experiments but do not consider the old farmer – who is so deeply ensconced in his culture that he is not even aware of it – an expert in anything. If a bear wanted to become an expert on bears, then how would it help for him to stop living and acting like other bears?

As to human culture, I write as a biased observer and a distracted participant not as an expert and my aspirations are merely that others may be able to recognize their own superposition between observer and participant and thus form some sort of contrapposto between the two postures.

Defending the Indefensible

Likewise, my reflections on Christianity are not those of an apologist or a theologian, although I don’t deny that such roles are needed. Christianity does not rest on my ability to validate it rationally. If I were to defend it, my arguments would have to rest on an underlying order to things only possible if something like Christianity is true. For instance, if the soul does not exist, then reason does not exist either since reason (to be a valid source of truth rather than merely another chemical reaction) requires something like the metaphysical soul as its origin. Thus, my reasoning would have to go in circles, assuming Christianity in order to prove it. Christianity cannot be defended in this way, and so I don’t try.

On the other hand, any attack on Christianity must assume an underlying order as well. Most of these attacks, though, are launched in mid-air, as though our thinking and seeing and loving and music making is not exceedingly strange but something banal and widely understood – “since we already understand that consciousness is a result of an abundance of potassium…” or some such. This sort of reasoning goes in circles as well, but it avoids the awkward moment of collision by continually ending the cycle prematurely – before the dial reaches “spin”. Christianity cannot be attacked from a solid rational platform unless one is willing to grant most of its premises.

This position is frustrating both for the defender of Christianity as well as for it’s detractors. Both proof for and against a Christian God is elusive. What is not elusive is the cycle of reason itself – the hopeless loops in which we spin off in various logical, physical and psychological directions based on no more existential proof than the fact of our existence. We have run out far ahead of our syllogisms and had a romping good time – or made a royal mess according to one’s timing and vantage point. You can’t prove the existence of a Christian God from either the good times or the mess, but both are quite peculiar without him. In my own way, I’m merely seeking to point out this peculiarity.

I have forgotten whether this perspective is Evidentialist, Van Tillian, or Classical, but my thinking is as follows: truth is big and variegated like a mountain. One can see it clearly, stump one’s toe against it, even die on it. What one cannot do is either ignore it or categorize it.

If you ignore it, you are dashed to pieces. We can talk all we want about making up our own morals. As soon as we actually succeed, we make a mess of it. Conversely, we can claim to have truth pinned down by empirical study and logical inference, but that is merely a cue for a hundred unexamined and inexplicable facts to emerge from around an alpine cornice or from within the darker reaches of a remote canyon. Thus, the Inquisition and the Third Reich arrived at the same destination by different paths. the Inquisition assumed it knew Christian doctrine so thoroughly that it could go ahead and execute the dissenters. The nazis, by a circuitous route (through Malthus, Darwin and Nietzsche) assumed they could make new rules now that humanity was a term without content – and so they did.

A Child or an Orphan

In seeking to chart a middle course between these poles (both positivism and fundamentalism lead to the same small view of truth), I believe that we must acknowledge that we are but children, dependent for our reason, our consciousness, and our being on something which, if not God, is very much like him. To the extent that we are willing to admit this, I believe that God invites us closer. To the extent that we are not, we are orphans, but no wiser.

I do not use the term lightly. The faces that go through my mind are of real children whom, I hope, still continue to grow and live outside my conscious awareness even though I knew them only for a short time. I remember a song I heard once in which a woman told her lover that she had never wanted as much to be loved as she longed to be known. We cannot separate the two. A love without knowledge is like a breeze without direction. The look of longing on those little faces was, I believe, to be known, and having been known, to be loved for herself, for himself. An orphan longs to be known because such knowing is the first indication that she is not alone. As the knowing deepens, she begins to realize that the knowing has formed an understanding – an image – of herself as the member of a family and therefore not isolated and floating upon her own perceptions but rooted and stable – quietly and humbly confident.

It is my hope that some of my musings would awaken this sense of knowing, of being known. It is often, I believe, in the recognition that another person knows us – names our thoughts and fears and eccentricities – that we first begin to hope that God might know us too.

– Nathan McNeill