Surpassing Truth Theory, Pt. 6: Oceania Has Always Been at War with Eastasia
If you’re coming in fresh to this series, I highly recommend beginning at the beginning:
Today, let’s look a little closer at Proposition #2 of Surpassing Truth Theory. Here it is as written:
At any given time, Surpassing Truths are considered eternal, immutable, unchanging, and both universally applicable and binding. Understanding of these Surpassing Truths does and has changed over the course of time, but that is considered to be a function of the fallibility of the individual to perceive Surpassing Truths, not of any flaw in the Surpassing Truths themselves.
The inherent paradox in this is the idea that Surpassing Truths are (1) considered to be eternally and unalterably true, while (2) understanding of these truths and their significance evolves considerably over time.
While it’s true that this is a paradox, it’s really not a particularly uncommon one, and certainly not one that’s unique to any particular group of people. I’ve never met anyone, regardless of how firmly they believe in free market capitalism and deregulation, that I think would truly desire to turn back the clock to The Jungle levels of worker conditions, (un-)safety, and disenfranchisement. Understandings, not only of physical reality but of the moral reality that has always existed, change over time.
Honestly, the paradox is only a problem if you’re highly emotionally and intellectually invested in the idea that the past and tradition are a generally and uniquely reliable guide to understanding and ethical construction.
For a tangible example of #2 in action, let me go ahead and touch the third rail of American Evangelical discourse: abortion and the pro-life movement.
First, a crucially important background point: when a group arrives at a conclusion has no bearing on the truthfulness of that conclusion. None. Zero. For that matter, the reasons why a group arrives at a conclusion has no bearing on the truthfulness of that conclusion. None. Zero. To give an (I hope) non-controversial example, the Fourteenth Amendment and the ethical principles that undergird it are perfectly sound and right in my opinion. They were adopted a century too late. And one could argue it was adopted for reasons of cynical political expediency. That may well change how we view the adopters and their worthiness of our congratulations, but neither affects the ethical rightness of the Amendment. If one of my students wanted to give a persuasive speech against the 14th Amendment (bad idea), and they used the timing and motivation behind it as a rationale, I would not give them high marks for logical argumentation.1
I doubt it needs to be demonstrated that the proposition “Abortion is the killing of a human child and is, therefore, murder. Legal abortion is state/cultural complicity in those murders” is held, often at the level of a Surpassing Truth, by many if not most American Evangelicals. It is, at very least, a bedrock of American Evangelical rhetoric. If American Evangelicalism is, indeed, marked primarily by a religiously embattled identity, than abortion has been one of the key battlegrounds.
How long has abortion been the widely-held object of evangelical Surpassing Truth? As Fred Clark points out, more recently than the creation of the Happy Meal, and years after the Roe vs. Wade decision, although it’s impossible to pinpoint an exact date. The Southern Baptist Convention’s official news publication The Baptist Press praised the Roe vs. Wade decision at the time as advancing “religious liberty, human equality, and justice”. Christianity Today published an article in 1979 by a professor from Dallas Theological Seminary explaining, biblically, why a fetus is not a human being. Clark outlines how this had shifted completely by 1984. And it was not just a shift in abortion as a political position, but as a Scriptural position of what the Bible has always said. Want more historical data? Randall Balmer, historian out of Dartmouth, brings the receipts.
What changed between 1973 and (circa) 1984? One could argue that the main thing that changed was the political situation at hand. Francis Schaeffer’s video series Whatever Happened to the Human Race seems by all accounts to have played a major role. In any case, if you’re my age (1982) or younger and came of age in American Evangelicalism, you don’t have living memory of a time before opposition to abortion was a Surpassing Truth-level bedrock principle of evangelicalism.
What’s the point? At this juncture, my point is simply to argue for Proposition #2: although Surpassing Truths are viewed, at the moment they are held, as eternal and immutable, they can and do change and evolve over time, as understandings of the world—including the political situation around us—changes.
Although I will tell you, for free, as a rhetorician, that the when and why a conclusion is adopted can—for perfectly good reasons—affect the ethos appeal of the rhetoric used to advance it. Particularly when it appears a group is less than forthright about that when and why. It’s one thing to say “Oceania is at war with Eastasia.” It is quite another thing, both ethically and rhetorically, to claim, “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
I would most likely critique the student for employing a Red Herring Fallacy; or, depending on how the argument is deployed, a Poisoning the Well Fallacy.