Faith and Politics - "Post-Truth World" with Dr. Stephen Long
Shownotes:
We, as individuals and as a people, need to consider how we have let politics replace truth with power. In an age where the truth is increasingly being contorted to suit our agendas and desires, the challenge of a “Post Truth World” is more complex and difficult than we might imagine. It requires a response that isn’t driven by grasping for some earthly power, but rooted in deep discernment. How can the Church take a stand against the stranglehold of mistruths in our politics?
Joining us for the last conversation of our Faith & Politics series is Dr. Stephen Long, Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University. A scholar and United Methodist minister, Long works in the intersection between theology and ethics and has published over fifty essays and fourteen books on theology and ethics including the book “Truth Telling in a Post-Truth World.”
Dr. Long joins Chris and Eddie to engage in a frank, complex conversation that beckons us toward a deeper conversation on politics than is offered through the 24 hour news cycle and social media. Recorded the day after the insurrection at the United States Capitol, they reflect on the event as an example of the deep-seeded issue of prioritization of power and the depths to which truth continues to be under attack by the current political climate.
Resources:
Learn more about Dr. Steve Long here.
Check out Dr. Steve Long’s book Truth Telling in a Post-Truth World here.
Follow Dr. Steve Long on social media:
https://www.facebook.com/dstephen.long
https://twitter.com/dstephenlong
Episode Links:
Full Transcript:
Chris McAlilly 0:00
I'm Chris McAlilly.
Eddie Rester 0:01
And I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly 0:02
Welcome to The Weight.
Eddie Rester 0:03
We're glad that you're with us. We are in a larger conversation with this podcast around politics and kind of our conceptualis... That's a big word. Conceptualization of politics?
Chris McAlilly 0:17
I think that what Eddie is trying to say is that the church needs to be in conversation with the culture today, and what dominates our cultural conversations? It's politics. And it's a good opportunity, I think, for us to think more deeply about some of the sources of our current situation. And today we're talking to Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University, Dr. Stephen Long.
Eddie Rester 0:44
Dr. Long has written a little book called "Truth Telling in a Post Truth-World." And that is exactly what I was trying to say, thank you for drawing that out. He really helps us think about how politics replaced truth with power. And I think we see that not just in politics. We can, we could see that in market situations, we see that in church situations, we see that in our relationships, social media... I think almost everywhere we look, we have allowed power and our understanding of power to replace our need for truth. And I think we see its violence very, very clearly, though, in the political realm.
Chris McAlilly 1:32
Yeah, I think that we're in need of some historical context and kind of a deeper and more thorough conversation than the 24-hour news cycle or what shows up on Facebook or Twitter in any given moment. This is what this conversation does. It's not an easy conversation, I wouldn't say, in terms of... It required me to think more deeply about some of these questions than I typically do. But that's part of what we want to do on The Weight. We want to not just look at questions of great import, you know, on a surface level, we want to kind of dive deeper and go places that often the church doesn't go. So we hope that you like the conversation.
Chris McAlilly 2:20
We would love to know other folks that you think we should be in conversation with, or other topics that are of interest to you. And also we hope that you will share this episode with with your friends, leave a comment, let us know what you think about it. Subscribe on whatever the platform it is that you listen to. We want The Weight to find its way to more people in 2021, and you're an important piece of that. So I hope that you'll help us out.
Eddie Rester 2:47
Enjoy the conversation.
Chris McAlilly 2:48
[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.
Eddie Rester 2:56
There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.
Chris McAlilly 2:59
We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.
Eddie Rester 3:06
If you've given up on the church, we want to give you a place to encounter a fresh perspective on the wisdom of the Christian tradition in our conversations about politics, race, sexuality, art, and mental health.
Chris McAlilly 3:18
If you're a Christian seeking a better way to talk about the important issues of the day, with more humility, charity and intellectual honesty that grapples with Scripture and the church's tradition in a way that doesn't dismiss people out of hand, you're in the right place.
Eddie Rester 3:34
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Chris McAlilly 3:36
We're here today with Dr. Stephen Long. And we're going to be talking about the post truth-world and context that we live in today. Steve, thanks for taking the time to be with us.
Stephen Long 3:48
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
Chris McAlilly 3:51
A couple years ago, or maybe about a year ago, I came across your book, "Truth Telling in a Post-Truth World." And it was pertinent, you know, relevant...
Eddie Rester 4:02
A year ago...
Chris McAlilly 4:03
Yeah, I know, a year ago to the moment that we're in. And we wanted to, as we come into 2021 and as we consider what this year will look like for people of faith or people who wonder what the church is thinking about as it relates to the political environment in America, we wanted... We felt like you would be a good person to talk to here at the beginning of the year.
Chris McAlilly 4:26
And I wanted to just start by asking you, you're interested in Trumpism, not as a symptom or not as the cause of a post-truth political environment, but as a symptom. I wonder if you would just kind of flesh out a little bit what you mean by the post-truth world or culture or political environment that we're living in?
Stephen Long 4:47
That's a significant question. Thank you for it. There's really several dimensions to the idea that we live in a post-truth culture. In one sense, it's a loss of what was called the "transcendental predicates of being," to use a loaded phrase, and that is the idea that the world is rendered intelligible by what is true, by what is good, and what is beautiful. Those things no longer really have a kind of hold on us. We think we can conceive of the world as a mechanistic universe, without attending to them. And that's been going on really, since the origin of what we call the modern era.
Stephen Long 5:30
Related to that, is the idea that what really renders the world truthful or not truth, goodness, or beauty of the power. In one sense, that's the diagnosis of the old atheist. I much prefer the old atheist to the new atheist; I think they were better philosophers. The new atheists are just so dull and boring. But the old atheism, Nietzsche, he recognized that these things no longer had any pull for us. So his argument was, it was not that, you know, God is dead, yay, it was that God, along with truth and goodness, no longer did any work for us. What really does work for us is power and will.
Stephen Long 6:18
And so we created this society based upon, you know, free markets, where what constitutes the price of labor and goods is simply what someone wills it to be. And we don't want any regulation other than what a free market (which is an oxymoron. Markets can't be free; only people could be.) suggests. We even think about this in terms of education as the marketplace of ideas, as if all ideas are equal. We can put them on a commensurable sort of market, and students choose for themselves, which ideas they find attractive. Which of course, no one truly believes.
Stephen Long 7:01
If you approach questions like, well, should we really be close to slavery? You know, should we reconsider our opposition to slavery? The very reconsideration of it, it would be itself a denial of goodness, a lack of truth. So those are kind of large claims for a post-truth world. But it's also the case that now, especially with polling and data and opinion, that we've lost the notion of fact. Polling data and opinion gives you a snapshot of what people think, and often, especially in politics, it's polling data and opinion that drive people based upon their constituencies. So we don't expect politicians to tell us the truth.
Stephen Long 7:52
And in that sense, what Trump has done, I think, since he simply lacks the ability to tell the truth... I mean, Bill Clinton was a much better liar. Donald Trump doesn't really lie, because there is no truth to Donald Trump. He is completely a, I think, a man determined by market forces. So from one minute to the next, he simply assumes that the way the world is, is what his own will values. And that's all there is to it.
Stephen Long 8:24
What Trump does is bring the kind of post-truth world that has been around for a very long time to its conclusion, or at least if not its conclusion, it's going to stay with us for a long time. He shows us what it really is. And I think that's why it's just ugly, and you know, yesterday's events in the capital with seditious acts, just shows, I mean, it was just ugly, and a lack of truth will engage in ugliness. And we live in a very ugly time. So I hope that helps. Feel free to ask questions about post-truth.
Eddie Rester 9:08
I want to make sure our listeners know we are recording this on January 7, just the day after all the events happened in DC. So it really is an important moment for us to have this conversation. I'm going to get to something that Mitt Romney said in just a minute.
Eddie Rester 9:24
One of the things that another author I've read about this era that we're in, really talks about the loss of the meta narrative, and I hear a lot of that in what you're talking about: the loss of truth and the loss of fact and the culmination, kind of, where we are, that there's no longer a story that we will live under. Instead, we live under all of our own stories. And in those stories, we deny the truth and beauty and sustenance of life. Up against that, last night, Mitt Romney spoke from the floor when the Senate reconvened. And he said, "The best way we can show respect is by telling the truth." So how does, as you begin to talk about this loss of truth, this post-truth world, how does Mitt Romney's statement fit into that? Or how does it begin to maybe push us in a healthy direction? Or is it completely a different subject altogether?
Stephen Long 10:29
No, I think we get the politicians we deserve. And we don't expect politicians to tell us the truth any more than we expect advertisers to tell us the truth. We expect them to tell us what we want to hear, because politics at the present moment is about amassing significant numbers, mobilizing masses, to vote for you, which is really more or less an exercise of the will. I think we fundamentally think about politics as a war of all against all.
Stephen Long 11:05
We know that I believe that Ted Cruz really believed what he said yesterday in the Senate. I can't imagine he really believes that. And yet, we know that he will say it. Why? Because if he wants to maintain his position of power, he has to say it to mobilize the masses. So in one sense, we really do get the politicians we deserve. And the fact that Romney has been someone who seems to tell the truth, although I think there are qualifications to that, is endearing. But what would it mean for us to expect our politicians to tell the truth? I'm not sure they would be able to survive.
Chris McAlilly 11:50
One of the passages in in your book that I was drawn to is, really it sounds like, if I'm understanding your argument, and kind of what you would hope for, it really is a reconstruction of, or I guess, a recovery of an older understanding of what politics is. I just want to read this passage:
Chris McAlilly 12:10
"So if politics is a deliberation of common goods," that's kind of what it sounds like you would like us to move back towards, "and we have no means by which to reason about them and arrive at the truth as to what they are, then we are post-political. Politics is not a truthful deliberation about goods, it is the manipulation of data for the sake of maintaining and accruing power." That sounds like what you were talking about a moment ago. "We will no longer expect politics have any interest in truth or goodness. Politics is primarily about contenting interest within an adversarial system. Trumpisms' great value is, for contemporary politics, is that he shows full well what the system is."
Chris McAlilly 12:59
I feel like that, that does feel like where we are, that we see very clearly and it's not just this particular moment. It's been with us for a long time. I think back to Stephen Colbert's "truthiness" in 2005, or, you know, certain aspects of the Obama era. I mean, I think that it's not about one party or one particular politician. It's the cultural environment that we're in that is shaping us in ways that perhaps we, I guess, miss-shaping and miss-forming us. I guess, what's the role of the church within that? Or what wisdom is there within kind of the theological resources from the Christian tradition that you want to bring to bear?
Stephen Long 13:47
Well, I do think, and one of the things I do in concluding the book is to ask people, "Where did you learn to tell the truth? What are those forms of life, what are those practices? Where are those social forms, where telling the truth is something intrinsic to that form of life?" At its best--and it's certainly not always the case--at its best, I do think the church is a place where we expect to have the truth told. It's why on the whole, you can get away with it, as a pastor speaking to people, reminding them that they are sinners and that they need to confess. You know, there's not every context within which something like that can be said and people actually listen to you.
Stephen Long 14:33
So I do think one of the roles, one of the central roles that church must play is a willingness to look at the truth of our lives. St. Agustine said in his confession, "for love of your love, oh, God, I will retrace my wicked ways."
Stephen Long 14:51
And I do think that one of the things in writing a book on truth telling in a post-truth world is it could be construed as a sort of Make America Great Again project, as if somehow, like, as if there was a time in America when we told the truth, the 1950s, the 1930s, the 1880s, whenever. And now I sort of want to retrace some past, bygone era. I worked very hard against that in the book. I don't think that's true. I think on the whole, our society has had a hard time with the truth from its very inception, and there are things about the truth that we don't want to examine.
Stephen Long 15:31
I just did a lot of research about the lynching in the 1930s that gave rise first to Meeropol's poem, "Strange Fruit," which was then turned into a haunting song by Billie Holiday. And he talks about strange fruit hanging in southern trees, but they weren't southern trees, they were in central Indiana. And, you know, I grew up twenty miles from this place, and no one ever addressed it. They never discussed what it meant that people my grandparents' age, there were over 10,000 people present at what was called a spectacle lynching.
Stephen Long 16:12
You know, so I'm not arguing that somehow there was a truth telling, and we lost it. I think the virtue of truth telling is always difficult, because it makes us look at painful things in our lives. And that's not easy. I think the church is one place where we should learn to be able to do that. And if we don't, and here I think clergy have a real responsibility to tell the truth. If we can't tell the truth in the church, where are you going to learn it? Where are you going to learn it?
Stephen Long 16:46
I think the university has a role in this. The the motto at SMU, which nobody knows, because it's been replaced by an advertising slogan, which is like every other university's advertising slogan, it's something about leadership and making leaders for the world. I think. I don't remember. But the actual motto of the university is "veritas liberabit vos," Latin words from scripture from the Gospel of John, which say, "The truth will set you free." The truth will set you free. So what, you know, if we are to have freedom, freedom can't come from deceit. It can't come from the lie. Jesus taught us freedom comes from truth. I think that's a theological claim, but I also think it's a practical claim. If you don't know the truth about yourself, if you don't know the truth about the world, as difficult as that can be to come by--I'm not arguing it's easy--but without a discovery of the truth, there can be no freedom.
Chris McAlilly 17:42
Yeah, I think just allowing that to hang for a moment is something that... I think there's something about that, that is fitting, that feels right. And then I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about, I mean, given the state of the cultural reality that we're in, the way in which we conceive of politics is this adversarial system where you just mass and mobilize people on your side to accrue as much power as possible to impose your will on others. Is it realistic at this point in history, that that's something that we can recover or even live into? I mean, it feels,
Eddie Rester 18:25
Far away.
Chris McAlilly 18:26
It just feels... It's so difficult to imagine embodying that within anything more than maybe a friendship or... You know what I mean? Just with a couple people. It's hard to imagine doing it at any kind of scale. I guess, what keeps you motivated towards this kind of work? Or have you seen it done well?
Stephen Long 18:49
I have seen it done in communities. I've seen it done in university settings. I've seen it done in the church. I think I've seen it done in neighborhoods. I've seen it done in people who came together to discuss Black Lives Matters. I think you're right. It's done better at a local, at a smaller scale, but I do think it can percolate up. I think the pandemic has shown us the necessity for it. So perhaps crises that we are facing now and will face into the future might prompt a reconsideration of the adversarial politics, which makes people do foolish things like argue that the pandemic is a hoax.
Stephen Long 19:39
You know, we need people who can tell us the truth. We need wise people who can let us know what should be done and deliberate well with that, and that means they may not be the people who make the decisions, but they are people, whether it's a university president deciding to bring students back to campus or a business wants to open up. It's a political act, and those political actions require deliberation where you get people who will tell the truth and recognize that, you know, telling the truth isn't easy. And then we deliberate about it. What does it mean for us not to wear masks, to wear masks, to social distance? What are the downsides?
Stephen Long 20:24
What we have now, of course, is it's just mass manipulation, where so much of that is just rejected. It's because we assume that every claim to truth is really a hidden claim to power. And so once you assume that every claim to truth is a hidden claim to power, then you'll assume, oh, this must be a democratic hoax. You know, or, "Oh, this is done in bad faith, so I don't want to be manipulated." And you know, how do you change that? I do think it has to be done at a local level. It's easier in families and neighborhoods and villages, and even towns and cities. But I do think it can percolate up and we could have a different kind of politics. It's not completely out of the realm of possibility, even though I'm rather skeptical. Terry Eagleton wrote a book called "Hope Without Optimism," and I think that's exactly right. I am not optimistic. But I've never thought that hope was about optimism. You know?
Chris McAlilly 21:21
And I also think, I mean, in your book, one of the things that I see is that hopefulness is rooted in your understanding of who God is, and that, for all of our susceptibility to lies and deception, and for all of the ways in which we are marred by political systems and associations that are coercive and violent, that there is an original or a first truth that is God, that is rooted in who God is. And that theology really grounds the hope, rather than any political reality that we see around us and if God is truth, and if we have access to that, if we can discover a kind of wisdom that's born of the truth that is God, then it creates the possibility for something new in the world. There is a sense in which we can, if the truth is knowable, if God is knowable, if the source of all truth is knowable, then, you know, human communities can orient themselves in a different way, and create a different kind of politics.
Stephen Long 22:32
And I do think truth is inevitable. I mean, in one sense, you can have truth without deceit, but you cannot have deceit without truth. Because the ability to lie, the ability to be deceitful, assumes the ability to know the truth. If there were no truth, you couldn't lie. Well, if you knew everybody was lying all the time, it wouldn't work. So even someone like Trump, who doesn't have any moral compass about truth telling, even he will present what he says as truth, even though he just contradicted it five minutes ago.
Stephen Long 23:09
And I do think this is, in some sense, our participation in the life of God as God's creatures. God is the first truth, that Judaism and Christianity both, this is one of the names of God, "the first truth." And since we're created in the image of God, and language itself is one of God's most precious creations... The ability to use language assumes the ability to tell the truth. If you didn't have truth, you could not communicate. So I do think there's a push towards truth that we have to work against. You know, this is why in the Christian tradition, you know, the devil is the father of lies, precisely because there's a rebellion there against the goodness and truthfulness of God. So truth is more basic to our lives than I think we want to recognize. And that should give us some sense of hope.
Eddie Rester 24:01
But there's a seduction, I think, pulling us from that sense of truth back to power. I'm sitting here thinking about all the ways that we have been granted, now, individual personal power, whether that's, you know... I've got teenagers who follow all sorts of influencers who really haven't done a thing. But they have amassed huge followings that give them power. And they see that, you know. I went on a mission trip several years ago, and the teenagers on that trip, because we were in Costa Rica, and the only time you could get good internet was in the middle of the night. So they would wake up with their phones at 2 AM, to post pictures to Instagram, feeding that sense of power.
Eddie Rester 24:50
And when that becomes ingrained in us over the course of all of our formative years--and I think we have a generation now, that's been their formative years--the allure of continuing to gain power really works against this sense of how do we speak truth. Because to speak truth sometimes means you're going to lose followers, you're going to lose money, you're going to lose any sense of what you've invested your life to become. And I think that's, as we think about politics, the lure. I was reading an article this week, I don't know if you saw it, Yuval Levin in the National Review wrote an article about populism, and he talks a lot about populism always fights the fight between speaking reality or speaking fantasy. And right now, so much of our politics is living in a fantasy world, which is nice, and it motivates people. But it doesn't get anything done.
Chris McAlilly 25:56
I thought you were gonna take it in a slightly different direction, but
Eddie Rester 25:58
I probably was starting to take it. And I just went to...
Chris McAlilly 26:00
No, you're fine. No, I do think that the social media creates an environment where politics can... It is really about the mass mobilization of... accruing attention, the mass mobilization of your followers in particular directions to influence them. But also think I think there's a danger in this conversation about laying the fault and the problem at the foot of Trump or trumpism. Because I do think that what you see, part of why this environment is so difficult is that, and I think it's interesting to kind of go back and do this, you know, 100-year or 150-year journey back into, how did we get to a place where a post-truth culture? Because, you know, cultural anthropologists, cultural studies, critical theory, people that would think of like, left this intellectual life in France or America over the course of the last 100 years... Really it's all about the construction of meaning. The assumption that the world is inert, that there are no, there's no value that we don't create. There's a meaning that we don't impose upon reality. And if that's the case, then really, you know, everybody's just, everything is... All truth claims are just assertions of will.
Chris McAlilly 27:23
And I think that what's interesting about kind of the argument that you're making, Steve, is that you're trying to focus our energy back behind this conversation on the left or the right to a kind of prior way in which Christians have conceived of what is true, that God is true, that's rooted in this kind of transcendental truth, beauty, and goodness, that is not just imposed on reality, but is something that we can discover, that God makes discoverable. Does that make sense?
Stephen Long 28:00
Yeah, I think so. And I think there are multiple layers there. And it's why, I mean, again, I don't want to give a simplistic account of truth. Truth is demanding. There are more philosophical approaches to truth than probably any other one of the sort of aspects of our existence and there's a reason for that. It's that truth is complex. Aristotle said that, "To say of what is that it is, is true. To say of what is not that it is not, is true. To say of what it is that it is not is false. To say of what is not that it is, is false." I find that very helpful.
Stephen Long 28:41
But then the question is, okay, how do you apply that? And I think one of the things that's crucial, and I think you're both getting to this, is our culture, our politics, our society is defined primarily by the assertion of the individual will. If that's what makes me who I am, that I get to assert my will, then there's not an assumption that there's a truth which is discovered. Whatever the truth will be, is going to be a function of that assertion.
Stephen Long 29:13
So, you know, for Aristotle's claim, there is an is-ness to the world; there's something to be discovered. It can happen at the at the at the most basic level, you know. Did Adam Smith write "The Wealth of Nations" in 1776? Well, yes, he did. You know, if somebody says otherwise, you say, "Well, you don't have a right to just, you know, to say it's some other time. We can get to this." I was in a debate with the friend just today about what happened yesterday, and he said, "Well, maybe this was an ANTIFA false flag operation." And I said, "And maybe it was conducted by aliens from Alpha Centauri. I mean, anything's possible."
Stephen Long 29:56
But, you know, these are claims that can be adjudicated, but they can't be adjudicated if you assume that the assertion of your will is what constitutes the truth value of these claims. You have to be able to engage in rational deliberation. And in one sense, I think this is really hard, because there's so many people right now I just think that are incapable of rational deliberation. But I have to resist that. And I think it's a sign of the love of even my enemy, that I continue to try to engage in terms of rational deliberation. It's a way of saying to another human being, "you are created in the image of God, that God creates the world in truth. And even though I find you, you know, so irrational, I'm going to try to make an argument with you." And I've been trying to do that even and I think, for all of its faults--and there are many with social media--it does provide that kind of a possibility.
Stephen Long 30:54
Now, if we can't do that, if we can't engage in rational deliberation, then it seems like the only thing that's left is violence. And that's what, when I wrote this book, I basically had argued, if we can't find a way of engaging in rational deliberation about the truth, don't we see where this is going to end? This is going to end in violence. And, you know, I hope it doesn't. But we sure seem to be inclined towards that. So I think telling is actually part of the practice of non-violence.
Chris McAlilly 31:28
Yeah. And it seems like that's part of how freedom is related to truth, that there's a sense in which one of the things that you say in the book is that, "the truth that will set us free requires personal and intentional deliberation about the goods we hold in common with all creatures." And that assumes that there are goods that we hold in common with other creatures that can be knowable, on the basis of the fact that we're both just in the world. And I wonder if we, you know, perhaps... I think it might be helpful to just to talk through those a little bit. What are the things that the folks on the right, and folks on the left share as common goods? How do you begin to do that? What are some of those things that we hold in common that are good?
Stephen Long 32:15
Yeah. Here I think one of the philosophers who has done the best of this is Alasdair MacIntyre, which might surprise people because he's so often construed as a kind of relativist. But he's not actually. And he identifies certain things that are sort of ends, common goods that are in the rational deliberation, should be ordered toward, like, everybody should have a desire for food, shelter, clothing, you know, I mean, no, nobody doesn't. Nobody should be denying that. So if that's true, everybody should have access to those things, then the question would be well, how do you go about it? What's the best way to make sure everyone has food, shelter, sufficient clothing?
Stephen Long 33:03
I think another one would be the need for an education. Education is a crucial practice for the ability to tell the truth. And and not just education. It is, you know, based on what we now call the ROI, the return on your investment. Now education is an instrumental good. It really worries me about the modern university, that it's based upon this instrumentality of your education, how's it going to help you make money in the future? But education that's focused upon these kinds of questions? What is the good? How do I achieve it? I'm teaching a course next year called The Good Life. And it's a new course that we're doing at Southern Methodist University, and I'm really excited about what constitutes a good life.
Stephen Long 33:55
Now doing that in a pluralistic university like SMU is going to be fraught with all kinds of issues. But that's what makes it, you know, that's what makes it enjoyable. It's precisely the ability to have conversations about what constitutes good and truth without them having to devolve into, you know, "If you don't agree with me, I'm going to use violence against you." And I think we need to do that.
Stephen Long 34:20
Healthcare is another one. Everybody needs healthcare, right? I mentioned to you all before we started the conversation, I had a shocking cardiac incident a few months ago. I'm 60 and I have a pacemaker. Now, I might not want to look at the conditions that make possible my whole life, but pacemakers, the materials from them come from primarily Africa. And the difference between the medical availability of pacemakers in the US, the UK, and Europe, as opposed to Africa where five nations don't even have a cardiologist? I have four cardiologists that I go to. There are five African nations where there's not even a single cardiologist. Now, you know, that brings all kinds of questions into, you know, the conditions of my own existence. They're all there for food. They're also there for computers, cell phones, all of those things.
Stephen Long 35:19
But we have to, we have to know those conditions. We should have to ask ourselves, what does it mean to live in a world like this? And aren't there goods like health care that should be more widely available? Why is it that someone like me, rich and educated, has access to kind of healthcare that many people in a very similar situation wouldn't have access to?
Chris McAlilly 35:41
Yeah. And it seems that some of the others that MacIntyre mentions are productive, rewarding work, good friends,
Stephen Long 35:46
Yes.
Stephen Long 35:47
leisure
Stephen Long 35:47
Right.
Chris McAlilly 35:48
activities beyond work, the ability of a rational agent to order one's life and identity, and to learn from one's mistakes. And I think those are created goods, that, regardless of who you are, or whether you're a person of faith or not, that everyone can kind of agree upon. It seems like the the step further for people of faith is to say that if you're going to have freedom, if you're going to really orient your life towards not just create a good, but towards what is good... And that's the step that Christians would make, to say that God is the source of all goodness, and we want to orient our lives in that direction.
Chris McAlilly 36:28
But I think, you know, talking about the course that you're about to teach, it's... I think one of the things that Christians sometimes get wrong is that we can't have a conversation with people beyond the faith about what's good. And I think that this is a helpful account of, if we don't find ways of doing this in the common political life that we share with others in neighborhoods or cities or states or the nation, that we're bent towards an outcome that we wouldn't desire.
Stephen Long 36:29
Yeah, I think that's right. And you know, I'm, as a person of faith, as a theologian, I do believe that charity as friendship with God is the ultimate good, you know. That hope and faith will disappear, but charity will not because charity defines the very character of who God is, as triune. And I think the Triune God who has created the world has created it with the providence of charity that can be identified and appreciated wherever it's found, and also ordered and directed toward that good.
Stephen Long 37:41
So something simple, like, I've been a commuter bicycle commuter for 40 years. I share, you know, we have these signs that say, "share the road" now. When I first started, but when I first started commuting by bicycle, it was back in the 80s, the 70s and 80s. And people were, they weren't very appreciative. I remember once I had this old fellow in a truck pull up beside me and say, "Son, you better get that bike off this road. I'm gonna wear you as a hood ornament."
Eddie Rester 38:10
Oh gosh.
Stephen Long 38:10
I always thought it was so creative. It's always stayed with me. But now, I don't, I mean, in 40 years, it's changed. On the whole, I don't, I still have some of those incidents. But on the whole, I see signs, like, "share the road." I think that's really important. I think that's kind of, you know, you don't go into a bank and see a sign that says, "share the wealth." You don't go into a hospital and see a sign that says, "share health resources," you know, and yet these signs that say "share the road."
Stephen Long 38:37
The idea that people have to learn to drive their cars with charity, even if it's out of self interest, or even if it's motivated from something else, that we stop at four way stop signs. I mean, this is a providential ordering of charity, where we look out for one another. And I mean, obviously, it doesn't always work. There's, there's sin, and there's wickedness on the road. And, but something that's simple, that kind of a practice of a common, a road that has to be shared by multiple people, I think that's really key. And I think it's good. And maybe it can teach us other ways to share. Share wealth. Share health.
Eddie Rester 39:24
So I think about that share the road, though, that came from the reality, people talking about the reality of the danger. It came from small local communities that bubbled up to an institution that can begin to push that conversation larger. It's been real interesting, the work being done, Robert Putnam, again, I'm going to mention Yuval Levin's book, "A Time to Build," who both are on this trajectory now of, okay, we've torn everything down. But what we've lost isn't just the good. What we've lost are the institutions that have helped shape us into people who can live good lives. You know, we've lost Rotary Clubs, and the church itself has lost so much, so many churches, so many members, and even a sense of its role to play in shaping people's lives and conversations, so that we can talk about healthcare as a good or we can talk about the need for holy friendships as a good place where we can shape each other.
Chris McAlilly 40:33
I think one of the ways in which your book has helped me, Steve is it's just heightened my awareness of the extent to which the way that I view the world is through the lens of economics. And just the way in which we are all so shaped and formed to think about the world is just inert. It's just there. We impose value. We create value, rather than imagining reality of the world around us as being, you know, shot through with the glory of God, that there is there is a truth or beauty or goodness that's discoverable, and that we can order our lives in a particular kind of wise direction, towards a common life that would create flourishing.
Chris McAlilly 41:22
That's not going to be easy, it's going to be full of complexity and deliberation, because you're dealing with people and it's going to be messy. But that that activity is ultimately worth the engagement and the difficulty, because on the other side, what you end up with is something that is truly good and something that could provide freedom, not just for me, but for you, for others. I wonder if folks are interested in this conversation, where some other places that you would point, folks to go? What are other resources that you found helpful in this conversation?
Stephen Long 42:07
Well, we have a group called the Ekklesia Project, which brings people together, pastors, intentional communities, laity. We even have some small pamphlets that try to address some of these issues. So that would be one more sort of practical place, you can find it online, as called the Ekklesia Project--E-K-K-L-E-S-I-A. My friend Bill Cavanaugh's work, I think is really important here. His work especially on economics on a consumer society I find I find crucial. I mean, I don't think it's a surprise that Nietzsche has a madman declare the death of God in the marketplace.
Stephen Long 42:54
And I don't want to be misunderstood. We have to engage in market exchanges for our daily existence. This is not something that's bad. The question is, how do we engage in those market exchanges. And my fear is that they have become so determinative of our existence that quite frankly, they've replaced everything else. They've done away. You know, if you want to know where secularity arises, it doesn't arise from some left wing cabal and the university, good grief. Like somebody said, I can't get my students to do the reading, let alone turn them all into, you know, rabid Marxists.
Stephen Long 43:30
It arises in the marketplace with the idea that the market exchange should go on 24/7, 365. That there's no such thing as a sacred space or a sacred time. That there's nothing that relents us from this idea that somehow... Even the false idea: we find our dignity in work, which is a false idea. It's not a Christian idea, not a Jewish idea, either. I mean, work is a judgment, right? It's something that you're supposed to rest from work. And the idea that we have people who do work that's absolutely something that none of the rest of us want to do, and somehow we think that that's going to be how they find their dignity. I don't think so.
Stephen Long 44:18
My friend, a political scientist, Eugene McCarraher has just written a book on Mammon. And he argues that some people suggest the world has become disenchanted, and it happened in the modern era. He argues quite the converse, that the problem is the world has been enchanted by a kind of market economics, which has become our God, but it's an idolatrous deity, which demands so much from us. And he actually traces this, and he shows how the church has been complicit in this. And the name of the book is escaping me right now, but it has Mammon in the title. It's about a 700-page book. But it's a fascinating read. And I think everybody should have to read this book.
Stephen Long 45:09
I think a lot of what we think about church today, especially the mega churches, which I think have been really damaging to Christianity, and we've seen that under the Trump era, what they really are is the sort of marketization of the gospel. They're about this mass mobilization. And I think if you're not going to a church that's failing, you're probably not going to get genuine Christianity.
Chris McAlilly 45:41
I think one of the... I appreciate the ways in which you come back to Christ, to Jesus as the embodiment of truth in the world, and the subordination of power to truth. I wonder kind of, if someone is out there and wondering, you know, what is it about Jesus as the embodiment or the manifestation of the truth that you find so compelling, as kind of the embodiment of a right politics in the world?
Stephen Long 46:11
Yeah, and I do, I do depict Jesus, as I think the letter to the Hebrews does, as addressing this question, an age-old question that you find in Philo, you find in Plato, and the question is, what what do you need for a just city? What has to be in place for a city to be just? And you might know the answer for Plato is that you have to have a philosopher king. And although that has all kinds of problems in Plato, the best part of that is the king, the person who is given control of power, including the ability to use violence, must subordinate that power to truth. And if not, then you get tyranny. And I think this is a really important, it's an ancient problem, which currently exists. It was was called--Juvenal raised this when he said, "Who guards the guardians?"
Stephen Long 47:06
And it really troubles me that we have a militarization of the police, where it's now a problem to ask questions about what's the purpose of policing. Should police officers be guardians or warriors? And the idea that they should be warriors rather than guardians really makes them a kind of culture unto themselves, which is also post-political, because then we don't know what would limit their use of violence. As you can, if, you know, the same thing could be true of military, the same thing is true of the court system. People who are given power over your life, to what will they subordinate that power? And if you don't have an account of truth, you don't have any way to subordinate that power.
Stephen Long 47:51
Which brings me to Jesus as prophet, priest, and King. What does Jesus do? Well, He is, you know, I'm completely Chaledonian: He's fully God and fully human in one person. It's the one person who acts. Whatever he acts, it's a performance of what it is to be God, and what it is to be human at the same time. So I like temple Christology is where Jesus is depicted as the new temple, where God dwells, but God dwells with creatures, which is what in Scripture, God seeks. Jesus, as this, is the truth, as he puts it, as the Gospel of John puts it, but He's the truth, not as some kind of data. Sometimes we use what Jesus is the truth--if you don't believe him, then you know, you're going to hell. Jesus as the truth is some kind of datum that you just sort of say a single little prayer to and everything's cool.
Stephen Long 48:43
Jesus is the truth, because He's the way and the life. And you can't have truth without this way that leads to life. And this way is not easy, because it's the way of the cross. When he stands before Pilate, and he's unwilling to subordinate the truth of who God is, to the violence that threatens to undo him, I think that's really crucial. And you see it in his... So you know, I mean, it's not just that Jesus dies that we're redeemed. If that's the case, if Herod had got him as a child--and we just had the slaughter of innocents, as we do every liturgical year--if Herod had gotten him as a child, it would have been okay, you just get Jesus born and you get him killed and we're redeemed. No, no.
Stephen Long 49:27
The death, Jesus's death is a result not of God willing the death of an innocent, that would be immoral, as St. Anselm put it. St. Anselm's misunderstood on this. Jesus's death is because of his obedience. It's because he is the perfect performance of the harmony between God and creation, which we long for, which we wait for, which we hope for, but when it comes among us, we reject it and so we cry out, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" But what's beautiful about this, is that in every other situation, where when violence and power is it dominates truth and destroys truth. Right? It almost always buries truth, but here truth and lies have the last word.
Stephen Long 50:25
And that should give us hope. That should give us all hope. Truth and life have overcome even the power of death. A power, which I think people like Donald Trump want to use it to keep the rest of us in line. And that's the very definition of tyranny. And he's not alone in that, in terms of politics. It's why he so much likes what he calls strengths. And remember, it's Pilate who likes strength. It's Pilate who asks the question, what is truth? Which, oddly enough, Rudy Giuliani quoted verbatim in a discussion and you think, "Rudy, you were raised Catholic! You should know better than this. Your Bible for God's sake."
Stephen Long 51:10
Questioning truth puts you on the side of Pilate. And any person who has been to Vacation Bible School should know you don't want to be on the side of Pilate.
Eddie Rester 51:23
Amen. I think that's a beautiful place for us to end today, with a reminder that truth always wins over power, because it has to.
Stephen Long 51:37
Yes.
Eddie Rester 51:37
Steve, thank you for your time today. Thank you for sharing and teaching us today.
Stephen Long 51:43
Well, thank you again for the invitation. We theologians were popular in the Middle Ages, it's been downhill since. When we have a chance to speak publicly, it's a real gift. So thanks a lot.
Chris McAlilly 51:52
Thanks so much.
Eddie Rester 51:55
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Chris McAlilly 51:58
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Eddie Rester 52:10
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