Friday, September 30, 2005
No Place for Reality in this country
It is clear that the public discourse in this country simply does not allow for reality. I cite the Bill Bennett controversy as an example.
He is absolutely right- his comments were distorted. The only thing necessary to determine the rightness or wrongness of the statement that aborting all black babies would lower the crime rate, is simply to determine whether or not blacks have a higher crime rate than whites. This is objectively true, and therefore Bennett's statement is objectively true. The statement of itself says nothing about whether other costs incurred by doing such a thing would be greater or less than the benefits, and in fact, in the context the statement was made, he made it clear that it would be a terrible thing to do. He was using a hypothetical argument, a reducto ad absurdum, in order to refute another statement.
But none of the public comments on Bennett's statement have at all dealt with the factual truth of his statement. They simply call him a racist, and that's the end of it.
"Truth has fallen in the streets, and equity cannot enter" (Isa. 59:14). If we do not deal in truth, then the hard-fought battle for equity will be lost. Blacks will never have equity in this country, and neither will anyone else, as long as we ignore truth. The postmodernist idea is that a statement is true if it has the desired effects. But the Bible passage quoted above says that it's the truth that causes the right outcomes, not the other way around. If minorities in this country want to be treated with equity, then they should be fighting for the truth, both about themselves and about others.
He is absolutely right- his comments were distorted. The only thing necessary to determine the rightness or wrongness of the statement that aborting all black babies would lower the crime rate, is simply to determine whether or not blacks have a higher crime rate than whites. This is objectively true, and therefore Bennett's statement is objectively true. The statement of itself says nothing about whether other costs incurred by doing such a thing would be greater or less than the benefits, and in fact, in the context the statement was made, he made it clear that it would be a terrible thing to do. He was using a hypothetical argument, a reducto ad absurdum, in order to refute another statement.
But none of the public comments on Bennett's statement have at all dealt with the factual truth of his statement. They simply call him a racist, and that's the end of it.
"Truth has fallen in the streets, and equity cannot enter" (Isa. 59:14). If we do not deal in truth, then the hard-fought battle for equity will be lost. Blacks will never have equity in this country, and neither will anyone else, as long as we ignore truth. The postmodernist idea is that a statement is true if it has the desired effects. But the Bible passage quoted above says that it's the truth that causes the right outcomes, not the other way around. If minorities in this country want to be treated with equity, then they should be fighting for the truth, both about themselves and about others.
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