On Debate: From An “Ancient” Perspective
By Sam Weaver (06/04/04)
Every night, it is a ritual of mine to read the comics in my local paper. My favorite strip is “B. C.” by the great Johnny Hart. Several weeks ago, Mr. Hart wowed me with yet another artistic masterpiece.
With apologies to Mr. Hart, I’ll try to describe his work from memory. The first panel, as I recall, had two characters walking down a path. A sign post proclaimed, “Debates Tonight.” The second panel had one of those two characters asking the other, “I wonder what that’s all about?” The third and final panel showed two other men standing on separate pedestals upon a hill further down that path. One pedestal was inscribed with the word “Truth”, and the other was marked “Lies”.
Art, of course, is an expression of the artist. Interpretation of art is ultimately in the eyes of the consumer. If you are among the elite, then interpretation is the job of the connoisseur, or the “professional critic”. I’m not so snobbish to consider myself a connoisseur—even of a comic strip! I may be completely wrong, but I believe I know Johnny Hart well enough to understand the gist of his expression in that particular strip. [After years—no, decades!—of consuming “B. C.” and “The Wizard of Id”, I still cannot ascertain Johnny Hart’s politics; whether he is liberal, conservative, or somewhere in between. I suspect the latter.] If my interpretation is wrong, then I urge Mr. Hart to tell me where and how I have erred in deducing his representation.
In my mind, that “B. C.” episode was a profound commentary on how the entire concept of debate has been perverted in the world today.
Debate has been around since that point in time when there were two human beings capable of rational, intelligent, independent thought. [We can even debate on whether or not those two humans were Adam and Eve or some offspring of Australopithecus!] However, not until March 4, 1789, could people truly and freely debate the ways and means by which they should governed. Before that day on which the United States Constitution was officially adopted, all people had been governed by kings, tyrants, warlords or some form of democracy that had always devolved into either tyranny or anarchy.
What was the impetus of the American Revolution? If you say “freedom”, or even “liberty”, you are really only about half right. The driving force of the American Experiment and the American Ideal was Truth. Truth is nothing more and nothing less than the Word and the Will of God (a/k/a, “Divine Providence”, or “the Creator”). Knowledge of the Truth will set you free. America’s Founders, for the most part, understood both the definition and the promise of Truth, but they had a great deal of healthy debate on how to codify it. They fully realized that no one man, no one relatively small group of men, or even necessarily a majority of the electorate could ever be allowed to claim a knowledge of law and truth and be able to wield such “knowledge” over society. America’s Founders knew tyranny when they saw it! They knew very well that this debate would and must go on.
I discussed the two concepts of truth in the first article of my ten-part series on this site. [See http://www.americandaily.com/item/2633.] America’s framers were far from perfect! Like every human being, they had their flaws and their selfish interests; but they founded a great nation upon the idea of Absolute Truth. [If you dispute this, then please read the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence!] In the twenty-first century, the concept of relativism dominates Western society and American culture.
A worldview philosophy that is rooted in relativism is a theory of knowledge and understanding that is founded upon human “wisdom”. Whenever human wisdom rules, tyranny is the ultimate result. Human wisdom, or the “wisdom of the world”—“conventional wisdom”, as I like to call it—is the opposite of Truth. The concept of relativism is Clumsy’s pedestal of “Lies”. [Clumsy is the guy with the horn-rimmed glasses in Johnny Hart’s “B. C.” strip.]
The Fox News Channel (FNC) bills itself as “Fair and Balanced”. Conservatives like FNC because it is a refreshing break from the monotonous, relativistic din of just about every other news outlet. Liberals ridicule and condemn FNC as an arm of the “right wing” of American politics.
Please allow me to be presumptuous for a moment and to consider myself a “critic” of the Fox News Channel. Sure, most of the commentary and much of the analysis on that network leans heavily toward an absolutist view of the concept of truth. However, FNC is “fair and balanced” because it works very hard to counterpoise the concept of Absolute Truth with the idea of relativism. The other 24-hour cable news networks before FNC—and all of the “Big 3” broadcast networks even to this day—report and analyze the news strictly from a relativistic, Franco-German, secular viewpoint. FNC has made a name for itself by telling the truth, yet it feels the need to “balance” the truth with a “fair” share of relativism (LIES!).
I’m still looking for a 24-hour cable news network that has the courage to report and analyze the news exclusively from the perspective of the absolutist, Anglo-American, Judeo-Christian worldview! That would only be fair to the American people and the world because it would balance the relativistic psychobabble and PC gobbledygook that we hear 24-7 from every other “news” outlet—including, albeit to a lesser degree, from FNC.
The encroaching influence of relativism on American culture over the last half century plus has obscured the original purpose of good old American debate. In the beginning, debate was focused upon how best to reach for the Word and the Will of the Supreme Creator—the Giver of Life and the Author of Law. Today, debate has become the vehicle by which to “achieve” human knowledge, human happiness, and human safety sans God. Like Shangri-La, this idealistic fantasy exists only in the minds of wishful utopists. Thanks to the very concept of relativism, the search for religious, political, economic and scientific understanding has degenerated into shrill, vitriolic arguments between Truth and Lies.
American liberty will not last for long if her schools, media, and popular culture continue to preach relativism. American liberty is based upon the idea that rights come from a Creator and that law is ultimately authored by that Creator. When the people become convinced that rights come from government and that law is what legislators or judges say it is, then liberty is no more and tyranny rules the roost. Because even the very mention of the Creator—God—is all but outlawed in most public schools across America, I fear for liberty! Without a Supreme Creator and Author of law, man is free to establish law and to grant or take away rights. Without God, there is tyranny and abuse.
Let us not continue to pervert the idea of debate in our schools and our mass media. Let us return to the basic idea of debate in America. We must allow God back into our schools and our public debates. Otherwise, liberty has no chance. When we reject the authority of a Higher Power, we are all at the mercy of a handful of judges, bureaucrats, and/or legislators who can and will grant or remove rights and enact laws according to their own personal whims.
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