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Reality so Grim, Buffering Seems Good (Reading Alan Noble as a Distracted Me 3/8)

Reality so Grim, Buffering Seems Good (Reading Alan Noble as a Distracted Me 3/8)

Last updated on: October 7, 2018 at 6:22 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Reality so Grim, Buffering Seems Good (Reading Alan Noble as a Distracted Me 3/8) 2018-10-07T18:22:44-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Alan Noble has written a book to give us hope in distracted times. Too much distraction, perhaps, causes us to lose hope, because it presents the worst of us to us. The result is a sense that redemption is not possible, mercy is missing, and grace has been replaced by the mic drop moment.

What is that feeling?

God help me, every day the news seems worse. People are wretched and I lack the faith that I am better. Who that is sane does? We are somehow, someway getting more foolish every day. We must look outside self for hope, but when we we look, we find hucksters selling us stuff. Jesus is Lord, but just now Paradise seems distant. Yet part of my problem, and Professor Alan Jacobs gets this, is that technology, media, and plain old busyiness buffers me from what is.

Imagine that what we should do is know who we are, really are, but we live in a culture designed to distract us, because product must be sold. The person who knows self will not need products to create an image. If I could know myself, then nothing external to me will ever be necessary for my happiness. I will be safe from a changing world, since my interests are what is and what I need, not what some company says I need.

God help us to never exist, distracted by edutainment, as a means to a tyrant’s ends. Instead, we are beautiful souls created in the image of God made to be liberated. We choose, because we are children of God.

Alan Noble tries to help us to live, to speak, in a more secular age. He does not mean we are atheistic:

By secularism I don’t mean “atheism,” although atheism plays a role here. Instead, I’m using the term as defined by the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, who has argued that we live in a “secular age,” which differs from the past not in that most people do not believe in God but that not believing in God is a live option: “The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” 1 In the secular age, all sorts of beliefs are live options. The one truth we accept about belief in our secular age is that there is an endless number of options, and all of them are contested. In addition, our understanding of these beliefs tends to be more “fragile” than beliefs held in the past. 2 Whereas people traditionally kept the beliefs of their parents and community, today it is normal and even expected for each contemporary individual in the West to choose their own, personal beliefs. And it is common for people to change beliefs multiple times over their lives.

This is worrisome as secularism is merely to have live options and to explore them over the course of life. While this is difficult, this seems good and the very essence of the Faith. One can choose Christianity or choose something other than Christianity: there is a reason Aquinas wrote against the gentiles.

We are tolerant enough, most centuries, to have faced wobbly beliefs before now.

The difference is, as Noble eloquently argues, that just now we are distracted. We have been tempted by (let’s say) spiritualism in the nineteenth century. “Let’s invite the Rev. Vale Owens to our parish to do a seance!” ) Syrian Christians have been tempted by Islam and Catholicism for centuries. We have always had options and the just have lived by faith, not certainty, we kept going forward. Yet now we are not interested in arguments, evidence, or reason, we just choose and too often we are not going anywhere.

Have we shifted the balance too far from doing in both our internal world and the external world to merely be focusing on the internal? Choice is critical, but perhaps that first strip in doing has replaced completing the tasks.

What would this mean?

Our choice is suffient. Our truth is our truth, even if our truth is what reality would call stupid. We are distracted from deep thought . . . And this distraction allows us to treat the culturally shallow hedonism of our time as serious. The man who could not produce and cannot understand the culture he exploits and the rules he demands be modified is unserious, but in a distracted age the serious are losers.

The winners in an age of distraction are less secular than grazers . . .shallow men repeating what they have heard, once, in some seminar, sometimes, back when they were in class in some college. As Noble says:

A lack of reflection makes it easier for us to hold contradictory beliefs, but now we see that our secular age contributes to this condition by leveling beliefs.

Yes.

Professor Noble is correct: we do profess trust in reason, but are too distracted to learn to think logically. We call reason our God, the divine Logos comes, but we are apathetic in worship. Logic is rigorous and we are latitudinarian to the core when it comes to our intellectual habits.

We are secular if secular means isolated from the community of the dilectic, mentally lazy and factually fuzzy. If secular means “makes me feel rainbow goodness” and do not “disturb my preferred narrative” then we are secular, but this is similar to being badly educated. I wonder, Professor Noble, if a buffered self is one kept from the hard rigor of logic or experience.

Just when reality might bite, we binge our way through The Good Place. We see this in the religious as well as the atheist. Noble’s buffering happens to us all. If as Noble claims, the Englightenment and Reformation made us morally responsible to find the truth for ourselves, then everyone must be a philosopher. This is Utopian in the extreme, but we have undercut authority. We know we don’t know and we know we have not invested the time, so:

Being open-minded, refusing to draw conclusions, the idea that diversity of belief is a good unto itself—these are all results of a fundamental shift in our basic beliefs about the world. Thus, we aspire to be noncommittal.

Somebody may be right, but who can know?

Noble points out that this leads to signaling belief being more important than arguing for or practicing our belief:

Our focus shifts away from practicing our beliefs to signaling our beliefs to ourselves and others. In a world where all beliefs are possible, our attention turns to contending about beliefs, and the terms and conditions of those beliefs matter less, except as fodder.

Many of our beliefs are thin, Noble suggests, lightly adopted, fiercely defended, but not considered. We have others that are thick, deeply embedded in our thought and behavior, but the thick and thin are jumbled together.

Perhaps it is too offensive to say, but how is this different from our being merely shallow and badly educated? We adopt (as Noble says) an attitude or position and then defend it knowing we might be wrong, but most interested in seeming an ok person to our circle of friends.

We are so sincere, the Great Pumpkin surely will choose our pumpkin patch. Our views identify “us” not truth. Professor Noble isn’t the simplest solution that we have decided we are all intellectuals, capable of developing a world view, when we are not? We dismiss the “package” of Rome, Constantinople, Geneva, or some other well thought out set of ideas, but then are incapable or unwilling to do the work of developing a set of coherent thick and thin ideas to which we will submit.

Professor Noble rightly lacerates the lazy “world view” thinking in some Christian circles that parodies the opponent and explains too much. Instead, of presenting intellectually rich packages from which to choose, these shallow men make the choice easy by presenting parodies versus the preferred “Christian” option.

Noble says:

James K. A. Smith has demonstrated that traditional worldview studies overemphasize rational, intentional, and cognitive beliefs over the way habits shape our desires.

I would be curious to know where Professor Smith demonstrates any such thing with rigor. Smith says things like this, but a footnote to an argument would be nice here. We certainly should not overemphasize rational, intentional, and cognitive beliefs , but what exactly will that look like?

We are, Noble suggests, living in an immanent framing of reality that makes the transcendent possible, but only as an exception to the very human reality. Here I demure: is this true of most Pentecostal Christians? Is it true of most people? Many students live as if demons and angels are at war in their world. They over divinize what happens to them. In fact, within a few miles of my house here in Houston there are far more churches seeing too many miracles, than there are churches seeing too little of God’s action.

I wonder if Noble is not living in a bubble, academic, a touch-anti-analytic in philosophy, and fairly well off. Yet Noble is on to something and there are millions who live in this world he describes.

Noble brilliantly states the bottom line:

Talking about Christ’s death and resurrection for our sins is categorically different than talking about the importance of conservative politics or the pleasure of some musical album. But if we are born into a culture that sees belief as first a performance of identity and thus something we can easily slip on or off, then it’s only natural that when we share the gospel we will be inclined to treat it as a performance of our identity.

Buy the book.

_______________________

Alan Noble is the “co-founder and editor in chief of Christ and Pop Culture.” If you are not reading Christ and Pop Culture and you are interested in Christ and/or Pop Culture, then bad. Go and subscribe.

I am slow reading his new book. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3,

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