INTP Thoughts: From Sherlock to Lecrae - Post-postmodernism

I have several posts on their way to being finished, but here's what's on my mind these days.

What Sherlock Holmes Missed

"The world is woven from billions of lives, every strand crossing every other. What we call premonition is just movement of the web. If you could attenuate to every strand of quivering data, the future would be entirely calculable... as inevitable as mathematics." - Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock, Season 4 Episode 1)

As an INTP, I am constantly analyzing how everything in the world fits together, in an increasingly complicated model, which means my default state is a deep curiosity about everything, especially areas where I have no experience or knowledge (wikipedia was dangerous for a while until I got used to its existence), since it's all helpful for building the model of how everything works and and is influenced by everything else. Despite not being a dominant intuitive type, for areas of the model where we have a lot of experience/data, INTPs can still sometimes make leaps of intuition like Sherlock Holmes (though obviously not as dramatically and not enough to base a legendary fictional career on) because we've understood something deeply enough that we can make educated guesses according to its nature with some degree of accuracy, what Sherlock was expanding to all of reality in his super-INTP-ness. (Must have access to... ALL the data)

What Sherlock missed, however, at least in the context of the quote above, was inevitable, given that his character in the (deservedly) popular series is written as a dismissive atheist. Without factoring God in, it really all becomes math, because there is no greater Mind and Will behind observable reality. People are ultimately predictable, in this worldview, because in the end everything does come down to clockwork... the big bang was when the unthinkably immense wound-up spring was released (For many physicists who are not believers, their definition of God is "Whoever or whatever wound up that spring the first time"), and everything is simply energy falling downhill from there, and all people who ever lived are merely a curious by-product of radiant energy from our star striking a body in space with the right collocation of elements enough times that it started an extremely complicated and impossibly unlikely (except that we can observe it happened) self-sustaining chemical reaction which somehow got more and more complicated as it went along, unlike the way anything else works in nature.

If all that were true, then yes, we could at some point design a vast quantum supercomputer which would be a (lowercase) god for all practical purposes, which could model enough of the universe to know the future and predict natural phenomenon and human behavior.

What those atheists (including people like Neal Stephenson, author of books like Cryptonomicon and Reamde which I enjoyed a great deal) and the character of Sherlock Holmes in the popular current series have in common, is an almost charming anachronism: they are loyal modernists in a time when we are already leaving postmodernism behind for what comes after.

Post-postmodernism: I identify as a genius

The Legacy of Modernism, and the end of Postmodernism

To oversimplify, Modernism rejected traditional values and authority in favor of a grand forward-looking narrative in which we could throw off convention and become whatever we want. It became increasingly turbulent, however, and as Postmodernist thinking emerged there was doubt and rejection toward various premises previously taken for granted. In postmodernist thinking there could be no uniting narrative, no objective truth, all was constructed by one's context ("you only think that because ____"). In the popular consciousness, it was the age of subjectivity, "truth is relative."

Now that postmodernism has peaked and gone into decline, we are entering the new age of Post-postmodernism (no better term has been agreed on yet, my favorite so far is "metamodernism"). As with previous shifts, we preserve some remnants of previous ages while rejecting the current unifying idea and seeking a new "center" to hold things together. It will be a very interesting time if we don't all kill each other in ideological civil wars first.

In a nutshell: At the change of each thought-age in the West, people have rejected something that kept society at peace (common tradition under an aristocracy, common trajectory under a bureaucracy, common tolerance under a plutocracy) as the sins of each ruling group become too obvious and unjust to ignore. As the times shift, whatever was "the center" that held everyone together begins to give way at the same time as the group in power loses legitimacy, and there is a massive societal shift. Modernism: Reject Unifying Tradition - Find your own path
(What keeps us from fighting - a story that unites us)

Post-modernism: Reject Unifying Narrative - Find your own viewpoint
(What keeps us from fighting - living and letting live)

Post-post modernism: Reject Unifying Tolerance - Find your own identity
(What keeps us from fighting - good fences make good neighbors? the jury is still out)

What Comes Next: Messiness

The advent of post-postmodernism can be seen with the focus on identity recently. First we lost the unifying traditions, then we lost the unifying story, now we're losing any unifying identity labels too. When Lecrae decides that he's been trying to put aside his blackness to be Evangelical and says he doesn't want to do that anymore, he's responding to the shift where a deeper part of his identity he calls his roots (the racial/subcultural identity) calls more compellingly than a shallower one (Evangelicalism emerged in response to certain factors, like Fundamentalism before it, and the Church will remain long after both are merely part of Church history). Leaving evangelicalism because associations or aspects of it start to conflict with another part of one's identity doesn't mean leaving the Church, but it demonstrates when cognitive dissonance gets too strong, we "pull back" to less ambiguous identities.

Ironically the same phenomenon is at work with Southerners resisting attempts to purge Confederate flags and statues from the public eye. "Southerness" for many is an identity deeper than an Evangelicalism that says to keep things comfortable, Lecrae shouldn't be "too Black" and Southerners shouldn't be "too Southern." But the world is tired of playing nicely with others a little too different from us for comfort, and "the center is failing to hold," as in Yeats' famous poem. "We do" is no longer a quick answer to the question "who benefits?" because the "we" is getting really iffy.

In the Church, selfless love is supposed to be the glue that holds us together. When by the Spirit's help we manage it, it does work beautifully. In the world outside however, once tradition was found oppressive, and the narrative deconstructed, a broad-minded tolerance was preached as the new glue that would keep us all together. It has failed.

So How Do We Engage an Age of Post-Postmodernism?

For Christians, every change of thought-age is both troublesome and helpful. Modernism was sure there could be no supernatural, but people went to church because that's what good people did; post-modernism wasn't so sure, but it fractured the basic concept of absolute truth and people began to lose the church habit. Post-postmodernism is thirsty for the divine again, and searching for truth, but it wants to fracture us into identity groups at the same time, and a generation is growing up largely unchurched but ready to embrace causes and identities that don't compromise.

So on the one hand, our marching orders have never changed: Speak the truth in love, make disciples of all nations. Actually do that, don't talk about doing it or hold conferences about doing it. On the other hand, understanding and enduring the next decades will require a lot more wisdom and boldness than the Church has shown in recent decades. Do a little reading on the times; a storm is coming. Some have predicted the nation itself will get fragmented into groups that align based on those deep identity fault lines that have slumbered under a wealthy and tolerant age but never went away. That may never happen, but it's clear we are not entering an age of stability, but of things being pulled apart in seismic shifts. When the center can't hold, to continue with Yeats' poem, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The Church, built on a rock against which the gates of hell may not prevail, has been acting like an eager-to-please kite, blown here and there by popular secular trends. ("We can do feminism too." "We can care about climate change too." "Please acknowledge our relevance in the areas you've developed." "Notice me, Senpai." -- Meanwhile there's a steady trickle of evangelicals to Catholic and Orthodox churches) Now weak-conscienced church leaders are debilitated by every accusation of collective guilt the world throws at them. Commanded to love proactively, we are passively nice. Directionless except for inertia, we have expressed our dismay at the state of society either silently in the voting booth or loudly on social media, but not often made disciples of our neighbors. Even when we've strayed perhaps too far into politics, we've mostly chosen the label "Conservative." (What, exactly, are we trying to conserve at this point? It's a lose-lose proposition, wading into the political arena primarily concerned that we come across as respectable folk who know how to retreat with their honor intact. But I digress.)

The choice to be passive, tolerant, and easily swayed, damaging to the church in the best of times, will not even be a choice in the days to come. Belief is coming back into fashion to an almost alarming degree, and institutions with weak and yielding faith will simply not endure. Houses built on the sand will not survive the storm, but the Church as a whole is antifragile. She has survived every tumult of history, for Christ sustains her. The Kingdom will advance, but it may advance without you.

So: Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, not just the belt and shoes that can be coordinated with your Sunday outfit. In the post-postmodern age, believe unapologetically and they will come, and see whether we truly do have life abundantly and the words of eternal life. If we truly believe Christ is the only hope for a sin-struck world sinking into chaos and clinging to dreams of the latest reincarnation of Babel, now is the time to start acting like it.

The "Courage" of Bruce Jenner

Pain on Display

I have noticed something about what people post on Facebook. Every so often, some people will post a status that is basically a cry for help: "I can't handle this situation." "Please pray for me, today was really horrible." "I don't know what to do."

This kind of status is not all that common (compared to say, pictures of food) not because people don't have problems all the time, but because most people have to arrive at a place of particular pain, emotional discomfort, or desperation, before they are willing to "go public" in this way. Some people might be dealing with even greater problems, but feel they have enough resources to handle it, or simply have the kind of personality that hides the pain instead of seeking the comfort of others. They don't want to announce it to hundreds or thousands of people on a social media site.

I neither condemn nor approve of this practice; I did it pretty often in darker, younger days, and tend not to share so much now. It's not that millennials aren't tough enough to be the strong, silent type, it's that the social conditions which produced strong silent types are much less in play in 2015. We share our lives online, and that means sometimes sharing the pain too. Being strong is great, even in a time when weakness has never been more celebrated, but being silent just means you are not participating in what has become an integral part of life for developed-world internet generation kids. (Every age has its benefits and drawbacks. One day the value of silence will be rediscovered too.)

So the sharing itself is not the problem; it's a method or channel for communicating the pain someone is dealing with, a kind of pressure valve. But the more the pain, the longer it hurts, the more desperation creeps in, the less anyone cares what other people think. The pain longs to be expressed. It can't be held inside forever. It breaks out and becomes obvious to everyone.

What Courage is Not

Bruce Jenner's very public act of doctor-assisted self-mutilation (regardless of what you think about his "true identity," physically speaking that is what occurred), is being presented, even awarded, as an act of great courage. Not caring what anyone thinks, the story goes, he (My pronouns are chosen in light of genetic realities) was willing to do something still considered extremely outre, making a spectacle of himself and being held up in many cases to derision and the ogling of the general public, in order to be "true to himself/herself," and in doing so is held up as an example. I imagine some parallels to the courage required to "come out" as homosexual (into a society where lgbtetc people currently enjoy most-favored status and can shut down businesses for not recognizing that) are in play here.

The most consistent online reaction to this idea, and to the idea of his being presented with an ESPN courage award, was the sarcastic comparison of his act with soldiers of the US military, many displaying the wounds and disfigurements they have received in the line of duty. The implication is that this, by contrast, is what true courage looks like. My Facebook feed was half-filled with this kind of post for a few days.

I want to suggest this is not a very effective reply (not addressing the real issue, anyway). We all know, I think, that there are different kinds of courage. Yes, our soldiers are an excellent example of one kind, really a collection of different kinds of courage. But there are other kinds of courage, of course: a Muslim daughter's willingness to face her parents' wrath for accepting Christ; a young pianist getting up in front of everyone for a recital; someone suffering deep and damaging depression just deciding to get up and live another day. Robin Williams not killing himself; that would have been courage. To live would have been an awfully great adventure.

We do know this. And personally I don't doubt that what Jenner did involves some level of courage, though as I'll explain below I don't think that was the primary issue here. Courage is not a trait which bestows goodness or evil on those who exhibit it, it's simply a positive trait which we admire. However, if the person is clearly using their good courage to do evil, we no longer admire that in them. We may be tempted to say it's not courage at all, but give it other names, like madness. We call our friends "full of desperate courage" and our enemies "frenzied." They themselves would call it courage, of course, we just don't want to honor their motives by recognizing they too partake in common grace and can exhibit positive character traits, even while serving a cause we find repulsive.
(tl;dr- Some of the Nazis were brave too. Doesn't mean bravery is bad or they were good.)
 
So following the analogy C.S.Lewis uses at the beginning of Mere Christianity, courage is like a note on the piano, and our sense of morality tells us when to play it. To continue his analogy: we are tempted to call it the wrong note when we don't like the song, but in reality it was the same G we liked in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, just serving another purpose.

What people are really saying, when they post those contrastive examples of soldiers, is that they feel the cause for which the soldiers exhibit courage and risk the consequences of physical mutilation (or even death) is Right and Just, and the cause for which Jenner exhibited courage (if it was courage, more on this below) and risked the consequences of his physical mutilation is wrong, weird, and sad. I think it would be more honest and courageous to just say this, rather than

It's not a question of courage. It's a question of what ideals courage should serve.

Despair and the Blade

That being said, I believe what motivated Jenner was not primarily courage. Going back the first section of this post, I believe the identity crisis and moral confusion raging inside him for years, and tendencies of which people around him were apparently aware, finally reached a head, and in despair he no longer cared what society's verdict might be. (Perhaps some interpret this as bravery because, lacking any received truth, what society's verdict might be is the final authority for them) That's not what courage is. Despair is not courage, it's the opposite of courage. Acting with courage is doing something despite the consequences; it's brave because you do actually care very much about those consequences and are willing to suffer them for a higher purpose. Acting in despair is doing something because you no longer care about those consequences.

There are those who would say I'm being too generous, and that the media circus and worldwide attention showered on Jenner is one of the reasons he did it. Maybe it's true; maybe the real battle was fought and lost many years ago, and this was a calculated decision to profit off the resulting debacle. It's impossible to know for sure. Whatever the case now, there must have been years of mental self-torment and deep delusion to even consider doing this. And the torment and the delusion have not been "resolved" with this act, but exacerbated. Letting the inner unwellness out only increases the totality of its bondage in the end; the chains of the mind are now engraved in the flesh.

Self-mutilating in an effort to force physical reality to reflect inner brokenness comes in many forms. Cutting, for example, is an epidemic which with nearly any Millennial is all too familiar. When it hurts too bad inside, many students are driven to hurt themselves on the outside too. Now imagine if, instead of trying to help those who cut and get them to stop, to bring healing to that brokenness, we glorified it. We celebrated it. We put scarred and bloodied wrists on the front page of newspapers, on the morning news, and proclaimed it a beautiful act of courage which should be praised and awarded. Wouldn't that be sick and twisted?

But that's exactly what is happening with Bruce Jenner. This is Cutting, taken from the wrists and extended as broad as the whole body and as deep as one's sexual identity. Slice it up to make the outside match the messed-up inside. But it won't stay feeling like that. There's a reason for the sky-high suicide rates after this kind of surgery. Yet we see that many of those with the authority and ability to do so are promoting this to the world's youth. Woe to them.

Sin is not a Choice

As distracting as the controversy him has become, Bruce Jenner is a symptom of a deeper problem. There is much we don't know about his motives, but the gender confusion with which he struggled would not even have to be his own choice to still be wrong; we live in a fallen and corrupted world. Flesh-eating bacteria don't ask permission to exist and wreak deadly havoc in your body, mental disorders don't ask permission to exist and corrupt your mind or psyche. Sin certainly doesn't ask permission to corrupt your soul, that's already the default state of mankind.

A particular sinful decision is a choice, but sin overall is no more a choice than being human is a choice; an unregenerated person can't refrain from sinning. That's what it means to be in bondage to sin. Sin is not freedom, it's an inescapable prison. The new life Jesus Christ offers is freedom from that prison, and friendship with Him. And who the Son has made free will be free indeed.

Bruce Jenner is not free, he is in total bondage to sin. He cannot escape by any effort of his own. That the expression of his sinful bondage is abnormal is itself not that strange. Sin breeds more sin, deeper corruption. We have simply arrived at the point in our culture where particularly unsettling forms of sin aren't being kept out of sight anymore.

It was inevitable that this would occur. Every nation, America at every point in history, every earthly culture, is entirely composed of sinful people. All cultures, all nations, eventually decline, decay, and fail. Nothing but the Kingdom of God, a kingdom not of this world, endures and remains unstained.

So if these damaged individuals were regarded as examples of unhealthy people especially needing love and patience and reinforcement of a Biblical idea of selfhood and identity in Christ, that would be the Church acting as it should. What we see in our society today, however, is a rush to exalt this deviance and praise the people who practice it. Let us not take our cues from them and think we need to fight over this issue with hopes of "retaking our culture." We never actually had it. It's pointless to try to fight a battle with society, since: 1) Society defines its values by common accord, so you will automatically lose by definition. 2) According to scripture this is the wrong battlefield. Society was a lost cause when Adam accepted the fruit from Eve. Christ will make all things new. Our job is not to make them look like that now, but to proclaim that fact. (And in doing so, some things will start to show signs of their future glorification even now)

So How Should We React?

 

One thing the Church must do, and only the Church can do, is to speak the revealed truth of God with the indwelling love of God. That means we very firmly reject the idea that what is wretchedly wrong can be called right, and that one man's confused self-nihilism should be put on display and celebrated as a model for others. At the same time, we must show sacrificial love, as Christ did. That means caring more and doing more for damaged souls than seems safe or prudent, while never legitimizing the damage itself.

If any condemnation is deserved -and indeed, the uncomfortable, twisted wrongness that is so obviously present in this situation does deserve and demand condemnation- let it be directed toward and fall on those who approve of this sin, promote it, and lead others into similar deception:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
Who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
Who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
(Isaiah 5:20)

The deceived will sin and certainly receive their due punishment, but it is the deceivers for whom scripture reserves special condemnation. It is from them that a love of deviance spreads through our society. We all have a sinful nature, but there are those who go further, who are described by Paul in Romans 1 as "those who invent new ways of doing evil," or those Jesus speaks of as leading children astray and for whom drowning is too soft a punishment. These people are not the misled sheep, but the misleading shepherds, themselves misled by their father, the Father of Lies.

A culture cannot be saved, only individual human souls. But if a reaction is proper, let us push back against those who are actively seeking to deceive, rather than giving in to kneejerk reactions against those who have been deceived by them. In recent years this is a typical trap set for the Church, and we have a bad habit of falling right into it. Make sure you are not simultaneously condemning those who are themselves partially victims and unwittingly supporting those who promote and push for acceptance of the lies in which an entire generation of youth are being daily saturated.

Instead, pray for those youth, disciple them and model Christ to them. (You yourself may be a youth, you can still do all of those things) Pray that God would give you wisdom in how to love sacrificially while also speaking truth and not condoning sin. And pray for Bruce Jenner. He is a soul God created, one that is wrong, confused, exploited, and statistically speaking may be on suicide watch soon. But imagine the witness he would have if he was delivered from his bondage to sin into the freedom of Christ and the light of truth.

It's time for the Church to once again fearlessly proclaim the grace and freedom and power of Christ into a world burdened with disorder, violence, and falsehood.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch... like me
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see