Pronouns, Facts, and Why Phillip Doesn't Enjoy Writing this Newsletter
Plus, another chance to sign up for the upcoming Esther Meek day.
Welcome to Three Things.
Before we begin, here is a reminder of our upcoming day-course with philosopher Esther Meek on Sunday, September 17. Don’t miss it!
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The Birth, Life and Death of Facts
Jon Askonas on the world before—and beyond—facts
“The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”
That’s the twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, stating his very modern view of the world. The strange thing is that if Wittgenstein wanted to evangelise many of our human ancestors with this view, he simply wouldn’t be able to do it. Why? Because they didn’t know what a fact was. They didn’t even have a word for it.
The fact is a modern invention. For most of human history, the world was not understood in terms of facts. The temperature, for instance, was not a quantity you measured, but a quality you (and others) observed. Your understanding of the world was not determined by the facts you knew, but by your experience, your context, and the testimony of trusted authorities about the way the world was.
After the fact was born, knowing reality through experience and trusted authority was replaced with knowing facts established through procedural reason or scientific consensus. A world of abundant facts was born. We live in a world that is superabundant with them, so much so that we’ve lost a shared sense of reality.
Jon Askonas’ new essay What Was the Fact? traces the birth, life, and death of this novel human invention. It offers an endlessly interesting, paradigm-shifting, and very important history, especially in a time when “fact-checking” can be used to establish almost any narrative. Here’s the payoff:
The fact had abolished trust in authority (“take no one’s word for it!”), but the age of the database returns trust in a higher authority to center stage. You’re going to have to trust someone, and you can’t make your way simply by listening to those who claim the power of facts, because everyone does that now.
The temptation will be to listen to the people — the pundits, the politicians, the entrepreneurs — who weave the most appealing story. They may have facts on their side, and the story will be powerful, inspiring, engaging, and profitable. But if it bears no allegiance to reality, at some point the music will stop, the fantasy will burst, and the piper will be paid
Read What Was the Fact? over at The New Atlantis. It’s a continuation of Jon Askonas’ important series “on why everyone but you is going insane” — Reality: A Post-Mortem.
How the Internet Deforms Us
Samuel D. James on the digital liturgies that shape our lives and loves
I (Phillip) don’t enjoy writing this newsletter.
Let me nuance that a bit. What I really don’t enjoy is more time spent in front of a computer, trawling the internet for worthwhile things to put in this newsletter. The things I find are great (at least I think so), but I sometimes feel like the time spent finding them is zapping some of my humanity.
This should not come as a surprise, writes
. We tend to think of our technologies as neutral tools for getting what we want. But our technologies form a habitat that teaches us certain values and shapes us into certain kinds of people. Radically isolated ones, for instance:The GPS means that knowing a neighborhood is never mandatory. The backward-facing camera means we never need to ask someone else to take a picture. During the COVID-19 pandemic, billions of people around the world experienced a severe disruption to their lives through enforced isolation. … We have become exceedingly good at replacing human beings with technology. But even as our performance at work and media intake have kept apace, our spirits have not.
In his new book Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age, James unveils the kind of habitat created by the internet and digital technology. This habitat involves us in five liturgies that spiritually form us, even if we are not religious: authenticity, outrage, shame, consumption and meaninglessness.
But there’s more on offer than a dark diagnosis. James also highlights pathways of resistance, rooted in Christian wisdom, that are often difficult to see or desire in online life. As one reviewer summarizes,
We’ve neglected the importance of attention, patience, and thoughtfulness, because the primary vehicle of contemporary speech is distracted, hurried, and emotive. And this is precisely why thoughtful Christians and ministry leaders must attend to Digital Liturgies. Shallow solutions to our digital addictions, however helpful they may be, do too little to confront the deep habits scaffolded by online life.
To resist, we must make our churches into epistemological environments deeply committed to the ancient biblical wisdom tradition, with its slow-burning commitment to listening, understanding, civility, careful speech, and enemy love.
Check out Digital Liturgies in print or audiobook. You can also read the first chapter online or check out the author’s key reasons for writing the book.
Should I Offer My Pronouns?
Kara Bettis Carvalho on Christian responses to a controversial question
“What are your preferred pronouns?” Ten years ago, this question would have made most of us scratch our heads and ask for clarification. Now, it’s a ubiquitous query with profound social, political, and theological implications.
In a helpful cover story over at Christianity Today,
maps out these implications. Even more helpfully, she surveys the terrain of Christian responses to the question. Here’s a taste of various responses to whether a Christian should use another person’s preferred pronouns when the pronoun does not match the person’s biological sex:No. It amounts to lying about the nature of created reality, which is a violation of the Ninth Commandment.
Avoid. Don’t lie (see above), but also don’t cause unnecessary offence. Use proper names instead.
Yes for personal relationships, no for institutional settings. “Love is due to persons, not to ideologies” (Abigail Favale).
Be hospitable. Use self-identified pronouns to show grace and build relationship.
Yes. Refusing to do so is a condescending power grab.
With these five divergent responses, is there are any common ground on which Christians can agree? Yes, writes Bettis: “Everything is changing so fast, we’re figuring it out together, and we should give each other grace.”
Read Should I Offer My Pronouns? over at Christianity Today.
SUCH a fascinating one (they're all great)! It's made me want to chew this over but as I have no one to talk about this with, here is one point of engagement.
The Fact Framework has put words to something I've been noticing more of in my own life in relationship to music. While I'm sure there are studies on the impact of different kinds of musical arrangements on the brain, the 'why' behind the power of emotion invoked by music feels like one of those 'beyond fact' entities. Empirical assessment can't touch why Wait For It from Hamilton or Into the Unknown makes me weep every time I hear them (they could try, but I think they would be fundamentally lacking). But that emotional movement speaks to a bit of reality that sits beyond fact. Those beyond-words spaces feel sacred and worth protecting.