13 – CONTRADICTION, HORIZONS AND CRASHES

November 11, 2024

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense.  Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t…

Lewis Carroll

I have a certain admiration for Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll.  Dodgson had a lively sense of humour and a great eye for satire.  The quote above is taken from his children's classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Alice in Wonderland is meant to be a fun read, but let me push Alice’s envelop by asking this: How would you navigate in a world where everything is nonsense?  How would you – could you – get from A to B, if A is not A and B is not B?  I eagerly await answers, but sensible answers only, please!!!

In the previous post I noted that we need external reference points to navigate our way through life.  Pairs of opposites give us two external reference points – which provide the objective norms by which we can judge our actions.  In doing this, these pairs create “horizon lines,” if you will…

Consider, for example, Up and Down.  Do you see the invisible “line” that divides one from the other?  It’s there, just as it is literally there in a bar magnet, where a line crosses the magnet to differentiate the poles.  That “line” acts as a horizon!  This is another application of the Principle of Non-Contradiction.  Applied to all manner of opposites, it helps us make sense of the world.

When it comes to physical (i.e. material, tangible) things, most of us tend to respect the created “horizons” that are out there.  We try to not collide with stuff that is, or would be, in our way; when we cross the street, we understand that it’s either the bus or me1 – this is how we use external reference points to navigate!

But… in the realm of intangible things – ideas, thoughts, reasoning, the mind and so on – the secular culture has come to believe that external reference points are not necessary or relevant when applied to ethics, politics, and society; in fact, they are not just unnecessary, they imaginary and pointless.  To consider external reference points, the culture holds, is to place a burden on one’s self-definition.2

This is what passes for conventional wisdom in the secular West today.  I think the Apostle Paul had this kind of “wisdom” in mind in his letter to the church in Rome, “Claiming to wise, they became fools…” (Romans 1:22)

To do away with “horizons” is to normalize contradiction and that comes with costs, for without “horizons” what we “see” is nonsense; therefore, we become confused and lose our way.  The reference points that allow us to know our true “direction” disappear; the “compass” we need to reason properly loses its “magnetic North Pole” and so we go in whatever subjective “direction” our feelings tell us.

Let me end with a bit of history that illustrates the cost of losing external reference points…  

On July 16, 1999, a light aircraft piloted by John F. Kennedy Jr. crashed in the Atlantic Ocean off Martha's Vineyard killing him, his wife and his sister-in-law.  Kennedy did not have an instrument rating and was flying under vision flight rules (VFR).  In the weather and lighting conditions that developed that evening, he lost the ability to see the landmarks – the external reference points – that he needed to locate the horizon.  Without an objective way to (literally) distinguish Up from Down, he became disoriented and, unwittingly, flew the plane into the ocean.

To normalize contradiction is to create, in the realm of thought, the same kind of hazard that JFK Jr. found himself in on that fatal flight.  His error quickly proved costly.  Normalizing contradiction in a culture may not prove so costly so quickly, but the cost will come.

In the next post, we will shift our gaze – our horizon? – from Lewis Carroll to George Orwell…

1     I owe this illustration to the late Ravi Zacharias and a story he told about a dinner conversation where he defended the Either/Or realism of Biblical Christianity against the Both/And claims of a professor of Eastern religions.

2     An example from the USA: “The Democratic Party moved away from moral condemnation of abortion because Democrats now believe that human happiness is rooted in subjective self-definition, particularly with regard to sexual activity; that biology, particularly pregnancy and childbearing, is an active imposition on such a vision of human happiness; and that abortion is therefore a sacrament to be protected.” 

Ben Shapiro in Jewish World Review, June 29, 2022

https://www.jewishworldreview.com/0622/shapiro062922.php