Crumbling Concrete, Generous Attention, and an Edit that Changed the World
1776, RAAC, and feminine wisdom.
Welcome to Three Things.
This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbour and culture.
In two weeks, subscribers will get the monthly miscellany with updates about what we’ve been reading, thinking about and working on. In between, we’ll be sending out an exclusive excerpt from a forthcoming book that we’re looking forward to recommending to you.
But for now, it’s Three Things. Enjoy!
Human Rights Are (Not) Self-Evident
Andrew Wilson on how our world is (and isn’t) ex-Christian
In the initial draft of the Declaration of Independence, the equality and rights of all people were not held to be “self-evident.” That famous phrase was a last-minute addition by Benjamin Franklin, who crossed out Thomas Jefferson’s original wording of “sacred and undeniable.”
It was a significant shift. Jefferson grounded human rights in religious claims, but Franklin’s edit put them in the domain of reason. And despite Franklin’s edit winning out, the claim is fundamentally false. Here’s how Andrew Wilson puts it in a brilliant (and beautifully produced) new book:
We are inclined to see equality and human rights as universal norms, obvious to everyone who can think for themselves. But in reality they are culturally conditioned beliefs that depend on fundamentally Christian assumptions about the world.
In other words, Ben Franklin could only claim that human rights were “self-evident” because Christianity’s revolutionary view of human personhood had already won the day. Because of this, Franklin’s blithe stroke of the pen is just one of many metaphors for our ex-Christian society. Other metaphors abound, writes Wilson:
Consider the common academic practice of replacing BC and AD with BCE and CE, as if the Common Era was grounded in “self-evident” truth rather than “sacred” belief. Or take the 9/11 wars, in which Western nations were so convinced of the universality and “self-evidence” of their values that they cheerfully deposed foreign governments, on the assumption that equality, democracy, and human rights would flourish naturally in their place. We could look at Communist Russia, a murderous state committed to doctrinaire atheism, yet motivated by a desire to inaugurate a new world of peace and justice, according to the teaching of its founding Jewish prophet in which the first shall be last and the last shall be first. (“The measure of how Christian we as a society remain,” suggests Tom Holland, “is that mass murder precipitated by racism tends to be seen as vastly more abhorrent than mass murder precipitated by an ambition to usher in a classless paradise.”) Even the Beatles, announcing themselves to be bigger than Jesus while singing songs about the ultimacy of love and peace that could only have been written, let alone sold millions of copies, within a thoroughly Christianized culture, embody the irony.
Our culture is ex-Christian, yes. But there are many ways in which it isn’t. We love the fruit of Christianity while despising the root. The key question is how long the fruit can keep growing.
Read We (Do Not) Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident over at Crossway. It’s an excerpt from Andrew Wilson’s new book Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. For more of that surprising thesis, watch the video above or click here.
The Feminine Way to Wisdom
David Brooks on learning from Etty Hillesum, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil
Amidst the horror of the Holocaust, three women raised in Jewish homes—Etty Hillesum, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil—experienced a deep inner transformation, a change rooted in the way they saw other people. In a profound essay over at Comment, David Brooks introduces us to each of them and the quality of vision that changed their lives.
As you look deeper into the lives of Hillesum, Stein, and Weil, you begin to appreciate that attention is a moral act, maybe the primary moral act. The quality of attention you bring to the world determines what you see in the world, and ultimately what you do in the world. She who only looks inward will only find chaos, and she who looks outward with the eyes of critical judgment will only find flaws. But she who looks with the eyes of compassion and understanding will see complex souls, suffering and soaring, navigating life as best they can. And if she sees others rightly, with the eyes of reverence, she will begin to treat others differently, with generosity and understanding.
Brooks then comes around to a key question: Was their femininity part of what enabled these women to look at the world in this way?
Read The Feminine Way to Wisdom over at Comment for a compelling answer. For more from David Brooks, check out his new book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
The Tyranny of the New and Useful
Rhys Laverty on what crumbling British concrete has to do with God’s existence
English buildings are falling apart. Literally. Between the 1950s and 1990s, around 15,000 roofs on public buildings were made with a new, cheap compound called reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC). Concerns were ignored at the time — and now RAAC roofs are caving in, leading to school and building closures across the country.
It’s common to look at the RAAC scandal as a political problem, but behind it lies our modern assumption that “newer is better.” And that, writes theologian Rhys Laverty, is a spiritual problem. Watch where he goes with this:
Newness and innovation are not evils, but they are not positive goods either. Often, newness is needless. Our assumption that newer is better is ultimately a spiritual disposition, one that is entirely oppositional and negative, and something which makes us moderns unique in history. Any other era or culture basically defined itself in some positive sense. But to be modern is simply to be “not not-modern”.
“Newer is better” does not really positively orient you towards the future; it simply negatively orients you towards the past. And so it breeds hostility toward all that comes before us—our ancestors, our traditions, our history, and (and here is why it’s a spiritual disposition) to religion, since religion has come to be perceived as, in and of itself, something born of the past rather than something inimical to human nature anywhere and everywhere. There is but a short leap from the uncritical acceptance of new technology to the uncritical rejection of God.
It turns out that the RAAC scandal is a microcosm of our time — an instance where prioritising the new and useful produces structures that are ugly and dangerous. A world of structures and artifacts like this creates a culture where “whatever one believes propositionally about the question of God, God’s existence is not felt to be obvious” (to quote Joseph Minich).
Read RAAC and the Emptiness of the Cosmos at The New Albion. For more from Rhys Laverty, read Somewhere in Chessington over at Plough, a paean to his hometown.