It is not, of course, a new thing, for one generation to grumble about the weaknesses of the next generation. Indeed it isn’t uncommon for the complaints to be essentially the same- the younger generation is lazy, disrespectful, slovenly, self-indulgent. That the same complaints get made generation after generation, that the accused, sooner or later become the accusers, however, doesn’t make it not so. CS Lewis, in the true first story about Narnia, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, speaks through his alter ego, the professor. Lucy had claimed to have entered another world through a wardrobe in the professor’s house and to have spent hours therein, only to reappear in our world just minutes after her disappearance. Edmund had shared some of that experience, but wickedly denied such. Peter and Susan, the oldest of the four were befuddled. The Professor helped them see that it was more likely than not that Lucy’s story was true, in part for its very oddity, in part because of Edmund’s character. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” he asked.
The answer, in our day, is that we are a sensate culture, rather than a rational culture. We are more interested in how we feel than we are in what we think. There is no more potent illustration of our weakness here than where we are right now, in cyberspace. The typical online “argument” follows the same course- person A declares that he feels this way. Person B shows up and agrees that he feels the same way. Person C then chimes in that the feelings of persons A and B have caused person C to feel something unpleasant. Person D comes and scolds all three for their insensitivity to others, and person E explains to person D why A, B. and C were compelled by their feelings to be insensitive to the feelings of others.
The whole argument not only isn’t an argument so much as a complaint, but it all begins without an argument. Person A didn’t even have the courtesy to make a claim about a reality outside himself. He merely reported how he felt. And that makes me feel nauseated. Self-reports are inherently solipsistic. That is, they tell us nothing at all about reality, save for the internal emotive experience of the speaker. If I say, “I believe Howard the Duck was the highest cinematic achievement of our age” and you say, “I feel Earnest Goes to Camp is vastly superior not only to Howard the Duck but is the equal of Shakespeare” we aren’t in the midst of a disagreement. Both can be true because both say nothing whatever about the movies, only what each of us thinks of them.
But because my feelings don’t match your feelings we still feel put out and so pile on still more self-reports that are actually intended to be accusations but without sufficient courage. We are entitled solipsists, insisting that our convictions are safe from challenge because they are ours, but must be accepted by others because, well, because they are ours. And in my own little made up world, everyone ought to have the courtesy to bow to my wisdom.
This, in the end, is the elephant in the room to our relativist culture. The beauty of relativism is we can all have our own truth. But the horror, and the objective truth is that our truths collide. People intrude into our solipsisms, either affirming their fav is better than ours, or worse, insisting that our ethic submit to their own. And everything reduces down to issues of power rather than truth. This we have the audacity to call a more humble discourse. Humility, however, isn’t in the end, reducing your truth claims down to your own feelings, but submitting our feelings to the truth and our ideas to actual scrutiny. At least, that’s how I feel.