“Just as man is the best of the animals if perfected in virtue, so, if he is separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all, for he owns the weapons of reason.” -Aristotle, Politics 1.1.1253a
“For where sharpness of mind is joined to evil will and power, there is no defence people can make against them” -Dante’s Inferno, Canto 31
"Why should a fool have money in his hand to buy wisdom when he has no sense?” -Proverbs 17:16
The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, three of the leading academic institutions in the world, sat before congress and were asked a very simple question that desperately needed a simple answer. The question was “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your school’s code of conduct?” Astonishingly, not one of these intellectual elites were able to provide a simple “yes” answer. One by one they pontificated nuanced non-answers that contained words like “depends” and “context”, each with their own awkward and unconvincing smile. If you have not seen this portion of their testimony, I would encourage you to stop reading, click here and watch it, and then come back to finish reading. Elise Stefanik, the congresswoman who asked the very simple question later wrote in the Wall Street Journal,
“What constitutes bullying and harassment at Harvard? A mandatory Title IX training last year warned all undergraduate students that ‘cisheterosexism,’ ‘fatphobia’ and ‘using the wrong pronouns’ qualified as ‘abuse’ and perpetuated ‘violence’ on campus. But when I asked Harvard President Claudine Gay at a congressional hearing whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s rules on bullying and harassment, she answered: ‘It depends on the context’”
How could someone so brilliant, someone with the intellectual caliber to head one of the most prestigious schools in the world fail to answer such a simple question? It is the moral equivalent of 2+2. But alas, these intellectual elites were unable or unwilling to offer a “yes” to the congresswoman. On the surface, it looks like bitter irony. Underneath, there is a deeper cultural pathology at work.
A few years ago, theologian Joe Rigney wrote a series of articles called “The Enticing Sin of Empathy”. As you can imagine from the title, this article was met with a good amount of outrage and criticism. People intuitively had a difficult time understanding that empathy could be a bad thing. But Rigney’s argument was straightforward, when our emotions and passions (whether empathy, love, fear, anger) are not governed by biblical truth or in their proper place, then chaos is a natural result. Later in another article called “Dangerous Compassion”, Rigney pushes this even further and explains that the greater the moral virtue, the more corrupted and sinister it can become. To make this point, Rigney discusses C.S. Lewis’s “The Great Divorce” and the theme of mother-love,
“Lewis takes pains to remind us that the corruption of such loves is greater because their natural goodness is greater. Mother-love is a grand and glorious virtue. Therefore, when it goes bad, when it becomes a god, it becomes a terrifying demon indeed.”
Rigney, using C.S Lewis’s Screwtape Letter format in another article expands on this, “Compassion, like all of the Enemy’s qualities, is corruptible. In fact, the sheer intensity of its goodness means that, when corrupted, it becomes a most potent demon.” Rigney and Lewis are not arguing that emotions or virtues are bad. Both are natural, useful, and very often good. But when our passions are untethered from a biblical moral order, they can wreak havoc. And as Rigney and Lewis both point out, the greater the virtue, the more dangerous and damaging it can be when it runs amok. With all this in mind, my question then is: what happens when we apply Rigney’s framework not to untethered emotions or passions, but to an untethered intellect?
The eloquent non-answers of the Ivy League elite perfectly illustrate what happens when you have an enormous amount of intellect that is not governed by biblical truth or a universal moral order. To clarify, when I say “universal moral order” I am pointing to a collective understanding between people across different cultures, religions, and backgrounds, that there are some things that most people would agree are universally good or bad. For example, most would agree it is always bad to rape, murder or openly call for the genocide of a people group based on their race or religion, sometimes this is called Natural Law. So, what happens when a person has a powerful intellect that has been decoupled from an objective moral order? Here is a simple equation: knowledge, minus morality and wisdom, equals an educated fool.
Today, we are witnessing the rise and triumph of the educated fool. Whether it is these Ivy League presidents, or supreme court justice Ketanji Jackson unable to define the word “woman”, or justice Elena Kagan employing the neologism “sex assigned at birth“ to explain that a man was actually a woman in the Harris Funeral Home case; the highest echelons of our intellectual elite have descended into educated foolishness.
Going a step further, in the spirit of Rigney and Lewis, one could say the more educated and less attached to morality one is, the more dangerous and destructive one can become. I made a simple visual and put it below to illustrate this. When knowledge and education are decoupled from an objective moral framework, the more knowledge one has, the more immoral and corrupted one can become. Rather than simply being a fool, one becomes an educated fool, which is even worse because he has been empowered and emboldened with a wealth of knowledge. What follows is this: just as untethered passions can lead to the enticing sin of empathy, the untethered intellect of the educated fool leads to the enticing sin of nuance.
When you have no universal moral standard to appeal to, everything is shrouded in grey. The words chosen by the Ivy League presidents in their testimony make this clear. Almost everything, including the open call for genocide is “context-dependent”; one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, depending on the context. This is the enticing sin of nuance1. When the answer to a simple question depends too heavily on the context, it is like removing a load-bearing wall without installing a support beam, the room caves in on itself. To be clear, I am not saying things cannot be very complicated, they obviously can be and often are. But the sin of nuance declares that all things, even simple things, are complicated. And like Pilate before Christ, we are all left asking, “what is truth?”
A couple things in conclusion. In an interview between Josh Daws and Joe Rigney, they discuss shifting the language away from “nuance” and towards “clarity”. “Clarity” signifies a moral framework, helpfully suggesting there is a right and a wrong. “Clarity” discourages confusion and encourages us to sort through both what is simple, and what is complex. Untethered nuance blurs what is simple and suggest everything is complex, creating a world colonized by the grey. Just after the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, I remember feeling a sense of exhaustion from hearing Christians overuse words like “complex”, “nuanced” and “grey”. Some of that was good and forced me wrestle with the hard edges of the pro-choice side of the debate, cases where rape, uterine cancer, ectopic pregnancies and rare genetic abnormalities demand a heavy dose of thoughtfulness and compassion. However, the language of nuance greatly misleads us when it complicates things that are very simply wrong, like routinely, systematically, and electively aborting upwards of a million innocent and healthy babies every year. I remember during that time feeling like I was starving for clarity, and suffering from an overdose of nuance; like the demand for clarity heavily outweighed the supply. It was confusing and disorienting and I spoke with many who felt the same. This points to Rigney and Daws’ claim that just as we need to welcome complex conversations that require nuance, we must not complicate simple things. We need to seek clarity, an investigation of what is complex, and what is not. 1 Corinthians 14:33 says “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.” The enticing sin of nuance breeds confusion and division, clarity breeds unity and peace.
Finally, all of this points to a deep and abiding truism: there will be a moral order. In America, we cherish our ideals of freedom, liberty, and a pluralistic society. But the testimony of the Ivy League presidents reminds us of the limits of these ideals when they are absent a true moral framework. Untethered liberty becomes licentiousness. But nonetheless, they remind us that there must be some version of a moral order, the only question is, which one? As the Wall Street Journal report quoted at the beginning explains, the social order or “code of conduct” at these Ivy League schools express clear do’s and don’ts, their speech codes articulate clear taboos and standards that answer the question, “what is ok, and not ok, for people to say?” In the religion or moral order of these secular elite universities, as witnessed during the testimony of their leaders, it became clear that the lesser taboo of openly calling for the genocide of Jews is “context-dependent”, where other taboos like using the wrong pronoun are clearer violations. The intellectual elite of our day remind us that we were made to be religious and there must be a moral order. We were designed to express and externalize religion, again, the only question is, which religion will be expressed? Which moral order will be authorized?
Just as a virtue like empathy, when untethered from a true moral framework, can become a cruel and brutal vice, an untethered intellect produces a dangerous and feckless educated fool. The currency of the educated fool is an over-dependence on nuance and context, sometimes complicating things that are very clear and simple. Knowledge and intellect will only lead to flourishing when they are ordered around a true moral vision. It would do us well to press for clarity and constrain our visceral instinct to always “contextualize” and “nuance”. Also, we must remember an eternal truth, we are religious by nature, so there will be a moral order. The only question is, which one? We are coded towards religion. If it is not Christianity, it will be veganism, CrossFit, your girlfriend, liberalism, take your pick; Whether we are aware or not, our lives must be ordered around and oriented towards something, that much is inescapable.
Thank you so much for reading. If you read this and have a thought, please leave a comment here or email me (below). My primary motivation for writing is to create more good conversation around cultural, theological and political issues. I would love to hear your thoughts.
jeffreycharlescaldwell@gmail.com
During the mentioned interview with Joe Rigney and Josh Daws on Daws’ podcast “The Great Awokening” Rigney mentions he wanted to write a follow up article called “The Enticing Sin of Nuance”. I wanted to give him credit for the title. I also hope I am doing some justice to the topic. Side note, $5 to anyone who gets him to read this, repost it or retweet it.
My dad explained this to me years ago when I asked why the left didn’t understand certain rights from wrongs. He said because they have no biblical foundation. When you don’t have the word of God guiding you, your “feelings” and your environment become your basis for making decisions, like they said. Chaos , death , and sin
Great article Jeff. Says exactly what I was thinking, but much more eloquently