kerravonsen | Heresy and Truth (Reply)

Found an interesting article yesterday: What You Can't Say, which is about heresies and taboos and how to detect them (so as to open one's mind and escape from the common herd).

It's almost ironical that one of the examples he gives of heresy -- Galileo -- is usually talked of in a context of conformity: he is the Martyr for Science, all hail to him, boo to the evil anti-scientific Church. At least this article points out, further on, that Copernicus, who did the heliocentric thing first, had no trouble at all with the Church -- he even dedicated his book to the pope.

In fact, if you examine reactions to the Galileo debate, just applying one of the criteria in the article might make you realize that there is a taboo that surrounds it. Why? Because heretical beliefs aren't things that are obviously untrue; they are things that might be true. Thus a flag that an opposed statement might be heresy is if the word used to label it isn't "untrue" or "mistaken", but some
negative word which completely sidesteps the truth or falsehood of the statement -- like "unamerican", "sexist", or "homophobic".

Or "anti-scientific". Thus the whole Galileo-martyr thing; the plain facts were that the Church was mistaken, it wasn't anti-science (indeed, it was its love of science that had made it embrace the terracentric view of the universe in the first place, since that was the prevailing scientific theory of the times) -- but (a) there was something which made it declare Galileo heretical when Copernicus wasn't, and (b) there is something in current culture which insists on using emotional terms about the Galileo mess rather than the more neutral terms such as "mistaken".

What it it?

The article goes on to say that things tend to be declared heretical by a group "poised halfway between weakness and power", a group which is "nervous". Which makes sense. If a group is weak, nobody would listen to them anyway. If a group is strong, they can afford to be generous to their opponents, since they aren't a threat. Which, going back to the example of Galileo, explains why Galileo didn't get away with expressing the theories of Copernicus when Copernicus did get away with it -- the Church at the time of Copernicus wasn't feeling threatened.

And it also explains why the Bush administration -- and Microsoft -- have been bandying about words such as "unamerican" about anti-war protestors and Open Source Software.

Now, some people might wonder why a Christian would be interested in heresies and open-mindedness, but those who do are falling under conformist thought and are hardly being open-minded themselves. It is only logical that I should not be afraid of the truth, because, after all, wasn't it Christ himself who said "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free"? (John 8:32)

While the article does at one point, make an assertion about the correctness of some taboos, most of the time it is interested in simply detecting them, to enable one to examine them for oneself, instead of conforming to unthinking rejection. The assertion was that if you examine different cultures (both in time and space) and one culture thinks something is okay, and another is shocked by it, then the shocked one is probably wrong. This might be useful as a rule of thumb to determine the commonalities of humanity, but I don't think it's necessarily an acid test of truth or falsehood.

I think another reason why I'm not shocked at the thought of examining taboos in general is that I belong to a subculture which is less than mainstream -- at least if you were to believe the media, people like me don't exist. Yes, I am a product of my culture, but I'm partly not, too. There are many ways in which I'm an outsider, and therefore am inclined to view certain things with more detatchment. Even within the Christian church I'm not as culture-bound as many, since I've participated in a number of different denominations and thus different sub-cultures in the Church itself. That doesn't mean that I don't have my own blinkers -- I just haven't seen what they are yet.

One of the things the article points out is to be wary of labels -- they are a convenient way of sidestepping thought and debate. To quote Chesterton: "Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought." I ran smack bang into this early on in my time with my current church: I made some remark in biblestudy, and my bible study leader (who happened to be the minister of the church) said "That's Arminianism," as if that was the end of the story. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about, of course. Let's just say that my time with this particular denomination has been a challenging exersize in thinking for myself, since this particular one seems to have more taboos than any other I've been with.

Being tossed into different cultures is a good way of being forced to think about one's own assumptions.

One thing one learns about taboos -- choose one's battles. It's fine to think heresy in ones own mind, but there's no point in arguing about it when the person you're arguing with is not going to listen. In that case, its only your own pride that's arguing. At best, its wiser to just say you don't agree, but refuse to be drawn.

Debating with open-minded people is a different matter. And someone can be open-minded on one subject and closed-minded on another.