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September 15, 2008

The way of the worldview

A theologically-trained friend writes in about my recent post on Sarah Palin's seemingly left-field use of the word worldview. Long but worth it:

Very nice column on "worldview," informed and witty as always. But probably you know from your travels among the Evangelicals that the reason we say "world view" a lot and "Weltanschauung" not so much has to do with one Francis Schaeffer, a bearded, turtlenecked Christian sub- or pseudophilosophical writer who was popular especially in the 1970s. (He went by Dr Francis Schaeffer, but Wikipedia, in a worthwhile article, says it was just an honorary D.Div.) Francis Schaeffer, not to be confused with son Franky Schaeffer, was a prolific writer on, and doer of, Christian apologetics, Protestant division. The distinctive part of his apologetic shtick was to reject certain epistemological, aesthetic and logical doctrines (or let's say his caricatures of such doctrines) that he regarded as preventing meaningful theological faith. He seemed less strongly opposed to atheistic positivism than to relativistic doctrines that promote neo-orthodox fideism, because neo-orthodox fideism quietly voids faith while pretending to espouse it. This made the notion of a world view (dropping the scare quotes now, okay?) important to him, and thus important to people he influenced, because he created a narrative about world views that was meant to explain why Jesus is having such a hard time getting through to you. He pushed a decline-and-fall account of philosophical or ideological history under which world views pervade cultures and, in our Western culture, began to make us all hopelessly irrationalist at a certain point during one of Hegel's more catastrophic lectures on logic. Or something like that. Schaeffer used the term "below the line" (never mind why) to designate people and eras and cultures and works of art judged to have suffered such irrationalist degradation. He suggested that Christian faith may be logically voided if held within the framework of these irrationalist world views. (Kierkegaard, for example, might not really have been a Christian, in spite of all he ever said on the subject, because he had an inadequate view of truth, one not sufficiently stringent to make his faith meaningful.) Therefore, having a "Christian world view" (sorry, getting hard to breathe in here, need my scare quotes back) in our modern world apparently may require exposing and rooting out some basic elements of our thinking that are not objectionable for any specifically theological reasons, but rather because they undermine the Law of the Excluded Middle, or do something equally disastrous to our asserting-and-denying mechanism.

These world-view inadequacies might be consciously held or not, and in fact Schaeffer, who was a man of very broad cultural pretensions, seems to me to have derived a lot of his fun from looking at infected artists in diagnostic spirit and intuiting whole irrationalistic world views on the basis some not obviously content-laden aspect of their work. If I remember correctly (I can't look it up as I threw away his book The God Who Is There away long ago and still feel irritation and resentment that an otherwise very good New Testament Greek professor made me read it), he once suggested that when you look at a painting by Marcel Duchamp, it makes you dirty. Not because of any sort of naughtiness in the content, but because if you look at it too long, all that aesthetic nihilism will seep into your brain, ooze like some kind of disgusting parasite from your aesthetic faculty to your inmost God-given Aristotelian reason and make you a world-view zombie in the depths of your mushy brains.

Schaeffer was really awfully influential, not least because a generation or so of Evangelical college students have been persuaded to rely on his potted history of ideas as their Petersen's field guide to nineteenth-century philosophy and twentieth-century theology.

Before the Lord called him home, Schaeffer took a political turn. He had acquired fairly broad popularity within a certain world and so he went on the road. His last stand was a campaign against eugenics, euthanasia, infanticide, abortion, environmental pollution and other variants of genocide; these all have the same cause and the name of that cause is world view. He made a film (or more than one?) and toured around showing it in person (I saw the road show at Opryland 25 years ago), lecturing on it in an irritating voice and telling how come folks are all so eager to euthanize Granny and and the mongos these days; our inadequate view of man is about to make us into just a lot of Nazis, is what it is.

And of course the second part of that is true, at least, so give him that.

I assume the activist phase of Schaeffer's career is how come his world-view talk percolated down to the George Bush and Sarah Palin stratum. When Sarah Palin talks about George Bush's world view, she may not know it, God bless her, but she's talking about an implicitly held framework of beliefs about rationality that supposedly conditions all a person's thinking, whether or not the person is really aware of said framework, and fixes a great and invisible gulf between two people who apparently are talking about the same thing, such as faith or humanity.

So Daniel: if you hear a dog whistle nobody's blowing, in what way is that proof you're a dog? Sounds more like proof you are faking being a dog.

Posted by Daniel Radosh

Comments

she's talking about an implicitly held framework of beliefs about rationality that supposedly conditions all a person's thinking, whether or not the person is really aware of said framework, and fixes a great and invisible gulf between two people who apparently are talking about the same thing, such as faith or humanity.

I tried to pay strict attention to the whole foregoing, but having arrived at that summation, I don't see how - other than perhaps the limiting phrase "about rationality" - this definition is different from what the rest of us took her meaning to be when she said "worldview?"

Also, I wasn't aware you were trying to prove you were a dog. I thought you were saying Palin was the dog.

As a former student of both Philosophy and German I refuse to allow these creeps to have either "world view" or "Weltanschauung." They can have "Sturmbandfuehrer" and "demiurge."

My friends, that's not Änderung we can believe in.

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