Embracing (and Rejecting) Contradiction

Last updated on: February 7, 2010 at 10:34 am by Sam Rocha

Embracing (and Rejecting) Contradiction 2010-02-07T10:34:06-05:00 Sam Rocha

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Contradiction is widely seen as a sign of indecency. This makes some sense when we consider it as a matter of honesty. “Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no'” is very to the point. Insofar as rejecting contradiction means something like “always tell the truth,” then, it seems like a worthy problem to try to eradicate.

Things become more sticky when we begin to unravel the requisites of truth-telling. What if the truth itself is contradictory? After all, ‘contradiction’ isn’t much more than the psychological limit of the imagination. In physics this is the problem of dealing with things that don’t behave as our intuitions tells us they should. In theology this is the deep paradox of Christianity: the excessive nature of God.

In both cases (physics and theology) any account that wants to tell the truth must embrace contradictions while rejecting the desire to say too much. Saying too much, of course, contradicts the excessive foundation of the material universe and God.

In other words, while we should never see an embrace of contradiction as a reason to lie or become dishonest, we might admit that honesty demands that we embrace the excess of things that contradict our intuitions, i.e. the intuition that light beams ought disappear—not expand—when they are refracted and the intuition that God must be ‘good’ under my experiential terms of goodness.

Regarding politics, this simultaneous embrace and rejection of contradiction is scarce. We often find “gotcha” politics in the presumed taboos of contradiction. If a social order is anything like the the excessive phenomena we find in physics and theology—and I think it is—then perhaps we ought to apply the same rigor to our thinking about politics.

What this might offer is the ability to consider contradictions as potential cases for simple dishonesty or as evidence of the excess of the subject-matter. Or both. Or niether.

With regard to “life issues,” we see this confusion often. Many times we find this discussion breeding a great deal of uncharitable assumptions about contradictions. When we sift through the issues that become salient to questions of life and death we find that in order to tell the truth we need to embrace the beautiful tragedy of contradiction: the raw fact that life is messy and cannot be tamed or sterilized.

In this flux, we might begin to realize that reducing “life” into a mere political issue is itself anti-life and that attention demands that we focus on things one-at-a-time. Moreover, we might also begin to see that in order to treat the phenomenon—the persons themselves—with any sophistication we need to learn to seek truth by embracing the inherent contradictions without letting them make us complacent or dishonest.

When we embrace the contradictions of a world that is beyond our ability to order or comprehend, we might also find that we begin to reject the naive and dishonest opinions that seem to distort the portions of the world that we can see.

For exampe, with abortion we find a deeply complex situation. Something like a case of Russian dolls: a person inside a (more powerful) person. In a nation-state, we find the same layered situation: persons existing inside the deliberative power of a structure of persons and things.

In both cases the answers to these puzzling situations are at once easy and difficult. Easy because we must never contradict the sacredness that is the dignity of the human person. This is something we can never compromise. Difficult because persons and their communities are riddled with complexity that bends our intuitions and forces us to face the deep contradictions within.

Contradiction, then, may be our only hope for restoring some sanity into politics so long as it does not license us to do contradict the eros of truth, the imagus Dei itself. Embracing contradiction is a more—not less—rigorous way to conduct science, theology, and, I would argue, politics.

In more practical terms, when we begin to play contradiction as a card of obvious indecency, perhaps we will find that the contradictions that plague politics—especially when it comes to “life issues”—are a sign of fecund potential, not of corrupt hypocrisy. Or both. Or niether.

Sam Rocha

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