{"id":31217,"date":"2023-02-21T14:41:17","date_gmt":"2023-02-21T22:41:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=31217"},"modified":"2023-02-21T14:41:17","modified_gmt":"2023-02-21T22:41:17","slug":"tacit-knowing-culture-and-lived-values","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/tacit-knowing-culture-and-lived-values\/","title":{"rendered":"Tacit Knowing, Culture, and Lived Values"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe are goldfish swimming in Christian [I would suggest Judeo-Christian] waters.\u201d[1]<\/a> Tom Holland\u2019s colorful description of Christianity\u2019s influence on the western mind left me smiling. Throughout his Theos Annual Lecture<\/em>, Holland gave illustration after illustration of how the dogmas of Western, secular-humanism are implicitly rooted in the Christian narrative. What has been tacitly assumed by the West to be universally valued and simply part of human nature, is now coming under interrogation as the philosophical liberalism that has nurtured and sustained Western democracies is losing its place of authority in both scholarly circles and shifting global politics that give rise to increasing authoritarianism. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay explore the scholarly circle dimension of this in their discussion of \u201cCynical (Critical) Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity and Why This Harms Everybody.\u201d[2]<\/a> Jeffrey Sachs delves into the impacts this is having on global politics.[3]<\/a> But Tom Holland brings the wide arc of history from antiquity to the current era to bear on this topic. It is the focus of his book, \u201cDominion: The Making of the Western Mind.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

In his lecture, he focuses on the influence Genesis has had on the Western conception of human dignity and the development of universal human rights. He argues that though Genesis is held in contempt by secular humanists, their argument that universal human rights are self-evident in the human condition falls apart upon a closer examination of antiquity. Religions of the ancient world did not give any reverence to human beings. They were more typically understood to be slaves of the capricious gods of the times. This same disregard for human dignity is seen in more current times as well. Holland specifically quotes leading Nazi Party member Heinrich Himmler, \u201cThere is nothing particular about man; he is but a part of this world.\u201d This understanding rationalized the genocide of millions during World War II.<\/p>\n

Holland argues that the values and ethics of Christianity are so deeply imprinted into the bones of Westerners that it even influences atheists. Friedrich Nietzsche frequently lamented what he saw as the negative influence of Christianity on Western society. In Holland\u2019s article, \u201cThe Way of the Cross: The Debt of the West to Christianity is More Deeply Rooted Than Many Might Presume,\u201d he gives this example from Nietzsche: \u201cBecause of Christianity\u2026\u2019the measure of a man\u2019s compassion for the lowly and suffering comes to be the measure of the loftiness of his soul.\u2019\u201d[5]<\/a> Holland continues: \u201cThe commanding heights of western culture may now be occupied by people who dismiss Christianity as superstition; but their instincts and assumptions remain no less Christian for that. If God is indeed dead, then his shadow, immense and dreadful, continues to flicker even as his corpse lies cold. The risen Christ cannot be eluded simply by refusing to believe in him.\u201d[6]<\/a> Holland\u2019s convincing historical exegesis of Christ\u2019s death on the cross included in this same article is the grounding for his previously quoted assertion.<\/p>\n

In both this article and his lecture, Holland refers to the assumption in Western culture that those who are vulnerable or otherwise disadvantaged \u201c\u2026have claims upon the privileged.\u201d[7]<\/a> In his lecture he expands on this, describing a development in Medieval Christendom jurisprudence. It was widely understood that there was an ethical obligation on the rich to give alms to the poor. The addition was a recognition rooted in scripture that the poor had the entitlement to the necessities of life. This was called the \u201cmatching principle.\u201d[8]<\/a> One can see how Sachs\u2019 listing of the United Nation\u2019s sustainable development goals emerges out of this history of the church and its surrounding culture grappling with and seeking to embody the values and ethics narrated in scripture.[9]<\/a> At the same time, as one listens to the arguments over how to respond to those who are forced to migrate from their countries of origin by either human-caused or nature-caused disasters, it seems there is not agreement within current Western culture over the poor being entitled to the necessities of life. Even the arguments over how to work with and respond to native-born citizens who are caught up in poverty and homelessness reveals deep divisions over this supposed assumption in Western culture.<\/p>\n

It leaves me wondering about how the corrosive influence of anxiety, as articulated so well by Edwin Friedman in \u201cA Failure of Nerve,\u201d[10]<\/a> impacts what has been tacitly valued in Western culture. Michael Polanyi frames the challenge well when he wrote, \u201cWe must ask whether intellectual powers, grounded in tacit knowing and descended from evolutionary emergence, can exercise the kind of responsible judgement which we must claim if we are to attribute a moral sense to man.\u201d[11]<\/a> I think that Holland would respond to Polanyi that such a moral sense must somehow move from tacit knowing to an explicit acknowledgement and engagement with the influence of Christianity on how Westerners understand responsible judgement. \u201cThe wellspring of humanist values lies not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in the past, and specifically in the story of how a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire emerged to become \u2013 as the great Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin has put it \u2013 \u2018the most powerful of hegemonic cultural systems in the history of the world.\u2019\u201d[12]<\/a><\/p>\n

And, perhaps the challenge that lies ahead for Western Culture, and for those of us who lead in this context, is a return to those biblical texts and myths (to borrow from Joseph Campbell)[13]<\/a> in order to discover a way that can better guide and sustain us into a future where Christianity does not hold the same kind of overt hegemonic power and influence as it has for a significant period of time. Perhaps we need to sit more deeply with the weakness Christ chose in the cross, the rejection it meant, and listen for the implications this has for our posture in the world today. Holland writes, \u201cChristians in the Middle Ages, when they looked upon an image of their Lord upon the cross\u2026did not feel contempt, but rather compassion, and pity, and fear. That the Son of God, born of a woman, and sentenced to the death of a slave, had perished unrecognised [sic<\/em>] by his judges, was a reflection fit to give pause to even the haughtiest monarch. This awareness could not help but lodge in the consciousness of medieval Christians a visceral and momentous suspicion: that God was closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich. Any beggar, any criminal, might be Christ. \u2018So the last will be first, and the first last.\u2019\u201d[14]<\/a> The medieval church certainly did not translate this consciousness into action with consistency. Perhaps there is opportunity for our generation to take up this consciousness with refreshed commitment, sustained by the Holy Spirit. Perhaps this would open the way for a disentanglement of the bride of Christ from the power structures of politics so that the humble service of Jesus and his followers would once again be noted and wondered about by the wider society.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Theos Think Tank. 2022. Theos Annual Lecture 2022: Tom Holland<\/em>. https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bYGQ6FIFLps<\/a>. Accessed 02-20-2023.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Pluckrose, Helen, and James A. Lindsay. 2020. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity-and Why This Harms Everybody<\/em>. First Edition. Durham, North Carolina: Pitchstone Publishing.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Sachs, Jeffrey. 2020. The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions<\/em>. New York: Columbia University Press.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Holland, Tom. 2020. Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind<\/em>. Paperback edition. London: ABACUS.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Holland, Tom. 2019. \u201cThe Way of the Cross.\u201d The Spectator. April 17, 2019. https:\/\/www.spectator.co.uk\/article\/the-way-of-the-cross\/<\/a>. Accessed 02-20-2023.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Theos Think Tank. 2022. Theos Annual Lecture 2022: Tom Holland<\/em>. https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bYGQ6FIFLps<\/a>. Accessed 02-20-2023.<\/a><\/p>\n

[9] Sachs, 196ff.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Friedman, Edwin H., Margaret M. Treadwell, and Edward W. Beal. 2017. A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix<\/em>. 10th anniversary revised edition. New York: Church Publishing.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Polanyi, Michael, and Amartya Sen. 1966. The Tacit Dimension<\/em>. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 56.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Holland, \u201cThe Way of the Cross.\u201d<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> Campbell, Joseph. 2008. The Hero with a Thousand Faces<\/em>. 3rd ed. Bollingen Series XVII. Novato, Calif: New World Library.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> Holland, \u201cThe Way of the Cross.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe are goldfish swimming in Christian [I would suggest Judeo-Christian] waters.\u201d[1] Tom Holland\u2019s colorful description of Christianity\u2019s influence on the western mind left me smiling. Throughout his Theos Annual Lecture, Holland gave illustration after illustration of how the dogmas of Western, secular-humanism are implicitly rooted in the Christian narrative. What has been tacitly assumed by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2408,789,2627,2628,2568],"class_list":["post-31217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-m-polanyi","tag-campbell","tag-holland","tag-pluckrose-lindsay","tag-sachs","cohort-lgp11"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31217"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31218,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31217\/revisions\/31218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}