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An Undeceptions Podcast.
Hey, John Dixon here. Sorry it's been a while since we've been in touch. We're making the final touches on the first episodes of Season 9 of Undeceptions, which will be dropping into your podcast feeds from next week. But first, I've invited friend of the podcast, Dr. Sarah Irving Stonebreaker, to share a few thoughts on a really strange attitude she's noticed developing in our culture about history and its value.
Sarah is a thoughtful speaker, and I'm thrilled to say she's also one of our speakers at the first Undeceptions conference coming up in July 2023 in partnership with our friends at City Bible Forum. You can get more details about the conference at undeceptions.com forward slash, you guessed it, conference. Anyway, I'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Sarah. In our culture today, there is a strange set of attitudes toward history.
On the one hand, there is a highly politicised approach to the past, in which people care passionately about history's symbols and what they represent, witness the recent protests about and tearing down of statues across the Western world. And yet, on the other hand, we know less than ever about history and are losing the ability to grapple with the ethical complexities of the past and
the entwining of good and evil in the same historical figure or empire, for example. As an academic historian, I fear that our society is losing its historical literacy. What I mean by this is that we are losing our ability to engage in moral reasoning about history.
This is in no small part because we live in what I term an ahistoric age. That is, in contemporary Western societies, which are underpinned by the idea that life is about self-invention and fulfilment, we have largely ceased to think of ourselves as historical beings. The past has little to teach us.
A recent conversation I had with one of my undergraduate university students is a good illustration. He said to me, why would I study the history of the British Empire? It has nothing to do with my life. Now, not long ago, perhaps only a generation, I was a student of the British Empire.
Part of the point of studying history was to understand the history of peoples, empires, countries, material processes and so forth, and then make sense of who I am and how to be a citizen in my society in light of these larger stories. But the premise behind my students' question is that we are largely autonomous, self-creating individuals with no larger story. Why is this?
In contemporary Western societies, the central idea of what constitutes human flourishing is self-expression and self-actualisation. Our culture's vision of what life is all about can be described as finding your personal happiness through being your true self.
This is a culture that emphasises the creation of our identities and lifestyles. The cultural axioms of today, which we see everywhere from advertising for clothing to private schools, embody the idea that your true potential needs to be unleashed. And this is the key to life, finding happiness, defined in highly individualistic and consumeristic terms as personal wellbeing through self-fulfilment.
It's live your best life. We have detached the individual from any transcendent story that gives an account of the big questions and any grounding for ethical and moral categories. Yet these are precisely the kinds of conceptual tools we need to reason about the past and to have a conversation in which we can genuinely, respectfully disagree.
We yearn, for example, for justice. We long for the horrific wrongs of history to be recognised and understood. But we can only engage properly with these kinds of issues if we have robust criteria for assessing justice and injustice, not to speak of good and evil, truth and lies, and so forth.
the more that we unhinge the individual from the larger stories that give an account of the big questions, the more we are ill-equipped to grapple with history. We reduce ethical reasoning to emotivism. We just assert our wills and feelings. We fumble around with crude ideological categories rather than engage in genuine conversation.
because a conversation relies upon a shared set of assumptions about justice and the good, for example, to which we can appeal. We have lost the meta-story that shows us what the proper use of power and authority ought to look like. This is why it is increasingly difficult to have those civilised debates and to disagree with each other in a healthy manner.
But it is possible, I think, to critique injustice, even injustice of the present, through the lens of a larger story. In doing so, we are drawing upon a vision of the just and the good, and this can give us hope. The abolition of slavery in the British Empire is a helpful illustration,
In the late 18th century, the British statesman William Wilberforce led a movement of evangelical Christians on a decades-long campaign for public opinion and in the British Parliament to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. Wilberforce and his friends argued the biblical principles that all humanity was created in the image of God, all were of equal moral worth,
and that slavery was incompatible with an empire that aspired to ground itself on Christianity. "Am I not a man and a brother?" was the iconic catch cry of the abolitionist movement, emblazoned on pamphlet and newspaper literature, medallions and even Wedgwood pottery. Samuel Clarkson, the Church of England deacon, who was a leading campaigner, wrote in his diary that
In the scripture, no national crime is condemned so frequently and few so strongly as oppression and cruelty and the not using our best endeavours to deliver our fellow creatures from them.
It took decades, but the abolitionists finally managed to persuade Parliament to pass the Slave Trade Abolition Act in 1807, which abolished the slave trade in the British Empire, and then the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which abolished the institution of slavery. The abolitionist movement held the British Empire to the standards articulated in the Bible.
Christianity explains that all human beings are made in God's image and therefore inherently precious and of equal value, yet that we are fallen and broken, and so we expect moral failure in human beings. As the Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who endured a Soviet concentration camp, expressed it, "...the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every man."
I believe it is possible to re-engage with history properly through reasoned, thoughtful and informed discussion. This is precisely the kind of discussion which is central to life in a liberal democracy. Moreover, we need to engage with history through the lens of a story that gives us a way of understanding and critiquing injustice, making sense of human failings, yet also giving a vision of hope, the good,
How good is Sarah? So you're going to want to come to the Undeceptions Conference to hear more from her and from other international speakers. Go to undeceptions.com forward slash conference. An Undeceptions Podcast.