If Nothing is True…

The Modern Context: Relativism and the Cult of Experience

There’s a strange phrase floating around with the power to deflate all sorts of debates; you often hear it in the context of a disagreement where one party claims personal victimhood. “Victim-blaming” is a cardinal sin in our culture, and so you’d better be quick on the draw if you want that upper hand.

A debate will be progressing normally, and one side even seems to be making a logical case. Suddenly, an appeal to personal experience is made, in which a victim bravely comes forward to say how they may have been personally affected by the topic. The appeal to emotion is so strong that any attempt to contradict it would be met with accusations of mercilessness, and so the logician waves a white flag in the form of the phrase: “Well, I can’t question your personal experience.” They then proceed to attempt to work around this bulwark, but the trap has already been set, and now they’re walking on egg shells in order to make their point.

In a culture where objective truth and logic are seen as “colonialist impositions,” appeals to emotion and personal experience are the only dogma. Got a statistic? Well my anomalous personal experience refutes you, sir. In a culture of inversion, the exception is preferred over the rule. Who’s to say what’s true? This modus operandi leads to strange scenarios, especially in the realm of politics. Recently an evangelical college student pressed Vivek Ramaswami on his Hindu beliefs. Specifically, what would it mean if our country–founded by Freemasons, Protestants, and deists–were run by a Hindu?

Vivek politely asked the student: “Do you think it’s inappropriate for a person who is Hindu to be, say, a US president?” The kid, understandably, feeling enormous pressure to seem fair and totally-not-a-bigot answered in the negative (albeit under duress). Except he wouldn’t have pressed Vivek in the first place unless he had some trepidation about the idea. 

“I love having spiritual conversations. We can continue this another time. What I’d like to focus on today is actually where that leads us with… the shared values of this country.” The conversation will likely never continue.

Where are our values derived if not from religion? And are the founding fathers infallible? Were they mistaken about anything? We certainly don’t think they were infallible re: slavery. Many in this country think they were mistaken about freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, etc. What about freedom of religion? What about Liberty as an unquestionable virtue in general? Is there such a thing as divine authority? Do we have the right to disobey it? 

“I’m not here to justify my faith to you any more than you are to me.” Except you are here to earn my vote, and if the validity of Hinduism as a guiding set of values is questionable in its compatibility to what I and the vast majority of your potential constituents believe, what right do you have to disregard that question? Why shouldn’t you justify your religion to me, and I to you? What would happen if we stopped trying to justify our deepest held values? 

In Christianity, one of the most essential callings is to evangelize. In Hinduism, evangelization is a largely irrelevant value; because of its lack of orthodoxy, dogma is largely nonexistent and therefore unimportant. It’s actually seen as quite hindering, in most cases. 

I’m not here to bash Vivek: in general I think he is an OK guy, as far as politicians go (albeit a bit racially tribalistic in his leanings). But he has a right to that, I suppose. After all, who am I to question his personal experience? What I am here to question is the unquestionable nature of so-called “personal” experience and belief as some sacred cow we ought not slay. 

When truth is reduced to relativism determined by personal experience, we cease to reason together–this is where the real trouble starts.

The political and the metaphysical, as much as we might like them to be, cannot be divorced; and when every man is his own oracle, holy war is inevitable.

The Illusion of “Shared Values” and the Need for Metaphysical Clarity

Conversations like the one above often must proceed via a sort of sleight of hand. “We both believe in one God,” is pacifying enough to an agreeable person who knows very little about their own theology, and even less about the theology of strangers. The problem, though, is that we may both believe in one God, but that doesn’t mean we believe in the same God, and so therefore our values and directives are bound to be different.

For example, if my one God is the God of Christianity, and yours is Satan, do we then assume we are going to get along on account of shared “political” values?

Hindu “ethical monotheism” as the belief in one God is also very misleading, and perhaps intentionally so. What Vivek refers to specifically is a later Hindu philosophy known as Advaita Vedānta, a system positing that the Self (Ātman) and the Absolute (Brahman) are identical. This is a far cry from the Christian Trinitarian view, in which God is distinct from His creatures, and the self is a separate person than the Persons of the Trinity. In other words… Newsflash: You Are Not God.

Are these systems compatible? You’ll find at every step of the way they are fundamentally not so, and yet Vivek and others would have you believe that you’re bad for focusing on these differences, or insisting they exist at all. 

Advaita Vedānta is not really Trinitarian monotheism at all, but rather monism. There are other modes of Vedānta, and so there’s a chance some may attempt a refutation by accusing me of not refuting the real Vedānta. But no orthodox Hinduism exists. Everything is very subjective, and so even within their own system it is impossible to say one way or another. The goal-posts are maya (illusion) and therefore totally subject to shifting.

The Trinitarian view, by contrast, can be found in an Orthodox context and is therefore claiming a sort of objectivity. Unity and distinction are both real, and not merely illusory. 

Another place in which sleight of hand occurs is to say “we both believe in compassion as the highest virtue,” except this doesn’t really work either. The Christian definition of love is precise and exclusive, whereas love in a monistic system is again, relative and therefore subject to change. And how can love exist in a system where All is One, considering love is a relation between two subjects? I suppose there could be love in a monistic system, but it would be a sort of self-love (which is not love at all, in the Christian view).

Of course you’re never likely to hear this at a political rally. Many would grow weary of such argumentation, insisting it’s beside the point. The problem is it’s inside the point. After all, particularity is hard; especially because you actually have to believe your beliefs.

The Fragility of Belief and the Arbitrary Self

But conversations on the particularity of belief are rare, and that’s because so much of our belief is arbitrary. Ask anyone why they believe what they believe, and you’ll find few have ever thought about it. True justification requires a caliber of psychotechnology most don’t possess, and the ones who do often fall dormant.

We often stray from the exercise of this art because of the felt inherent danger in fiddling with ideas. We allow the currents of our unconscious to carry us along because we think we escape culpability thereby. And besides, who wants an awkward conversation?

But because of this laziness and/or cowardice we fall victim to a totally arbitrary view of reality. This is by default: subjective experience is, by definition, arbitrary. We do not choose the circumstances of our birth, and rarely possess the courage to choose the circumstances of our death. Our existence is nonconsensual.

The line of thinking looks like this: “Why should I justify my beliefs to you when I never bothered to justify them to myself?” There’s a problem anytime we really get down to justifying our beliefs in things unseen. Many of us simply follow whatever religion/worldview we were raised in. Others, on the other hand, cite mystical experience as a source of knowledge. 

This opens up another can of worms: if I’ve had a mystical experience confirming my religious presuppositions, are we allowed to question that personal, mystical experience? Can we question someone’s personal experience? 

The Pitfall of Mysticism: Sentimentality and Self-Deception

Of course we can, because miracles actually don’t prove anything. All worldviews possess their own miraculous occurrences. In terms of verifying a claim, the miraculous is rather low ranking in terms of credibility, at least in the Christian worldview. 

That’s because, unlike many other forms of mysticism, the existence of malicious, deceiving spirits is a great focus in Christian spirituality. The reason is because we possess a concept known as prelest or spiritual self-deception. The humility of the Christian tradition even warns against seeking mystical experience before one is purified enough to discern its truth or falsehood. 

Unequivocal trust in something like the appearance of an angel is thought to be very foolish. Scripture even says “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed.” And to discern whether an angel is good or evil is, again, not very easy. “And no wonder! For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light.” The humble thing would be to disregard it and say “I am not worthy that I should see such things, this is likely a trap.” 

Many, I think, do not possess the manliness to sustain such a thought–that there are exceptionally unseen, intelligent, powerful, malicious beings preying on us, whom we are only able to escape by obedience to God’s law and humility in His protection. 

This is why mysticism so commonly devolves into a mealy-mouthed feel-good philosophy. “You have your opinion, I have mine–no one is wrong, no one is in danger. Being is Good and Cares for us— there’s no way to go wrong.” The problem with saying “Being is Good and Cares for us” is that it is a fundamentally Christian notion, and the attempt made in modern mysticism is to divorce that from the Christian answer to the question: “then what’s the deal with Evil?” 

And you can say Evil and Good are really part of ultimate reality, and therefore non-dual, and therefore the same (yikes)... or you can say we are the origin of Evil, but then again if we are part of the one, we fall back into that problem of non-duality, in which Good and Evil are the same. And if in fact Evil is different from Good, and I am the origin of it, wouldn’t that call into question my ability to know if my mystical experience which is feeding me all this is even trustworthy, or am I helplessly trapped in illusion (read: maya)? 

The Hindu, in this case, may hand wave all this Western logic as beside the point. “It’s ineffable,” he says. “It doesn’t matter whether we understand it or not.” But apparently it matters if Christianity makes claims about its exclusive claim on truth… 

Heretics, you’ll find, often refrain from even attempting to justify beliefs they recognize inwardly as inherently repugnant and contrary to what man in his conscience knows to be true. Even atheists will sometimes admit, in moments of radical honesty, that deep down they know God is real, they’re just mad at Him for something.

The Question of True Mystical Knowledge

So how can we know what true religious or mystical knowledge consists of? Because within mysticism, we are faced with a real problem in terms of epistemology. How can you prove something which resists proofs? Too often when we speak of “mysticism” or things considered “spiritual,” our definitions trail off into something representing nothing in particular. 

Ultimately the decision of what to believe may well be criterionless. Perhaps this is by design. Time spent debating colleagues has shown that even a logical dismantling of someone’s position never really results in much; it’s as if the logic of the position never really mattered for them in the first place. It’s as if what they’re claiming to know is dependent on sentiment–what they’d like to be true–and strange cognitive dissonance occurs in direct proportion to how honest we’d like to be about our own beliefs.

Kierkegaard said all knowing is recollection. Quite the assertion, honestly. But if you consider it within the context of what we’re discussing here, it makes a lot of sense. In terms of a mystical framework, it means the nature of mystical knowledge is hidden beneath some willful forgetfulness. Humility, in this case, would be to get out of your own way, epistemically speaking. Stop trying to bury what you know to be true.

But how could that be? And what exactly did we forget? What do we happen to be suppressing?

Maybe mystical insight is related more to remembering than discovery. What if in the same way we repress in order to preserve our self image, we suppress what we already know because we’re afraid of what it will mean for the truth to be revealed? This is obviously a far more sophisticated, albeit difficult, method of investigation than a gross stacking side by side the so-called “miracles” of every religion.

The Limits of Subjectivity & Christianity’s Unique Discipline

It would be a mistake to reduce mysticism to pure subjectivity. Just because we already know it deep down doesn’t mean we can go get it this second. Such haste would place us squarely into a worse confusion than we started in. 

Is a total suspension of disbelief what the religious/mystical task requires? Ought we believe every proposition? I don’t think that’s required, unless our goal is naivety. It’s difficult to pin down, but chiefly the mystical task is to transcend: reason, experience, self, desire, identity—ad infinitum—without abandoning any one of those things. The difficulty of this can’t be overstated. Contrary to popular belief, it can’t be achieved through narcotics (alone) or muscling your way into insight. Its recognition of this fact has made me want to be Christian, in part.

If mysticism is aimed at transcendence, and we think of transcendence as approaching a sort of healthfulness, then religion is the discipline in which patients and physicians submit themselves. In a study of comparative religion, or even philosophy, you’ll find Christianity’s physicians are ruthlessly manly. They test spirits rather than indulge them, and rather than sighing with resignation to Fate, they positively aim toward a total love of God and a radical acceptance of the way things are.

To compromise this– to dilute this medical procedure– for the sake of a false unity, or the abstract idea of “shared political values,” would be a betrayal of what lies at the heart of a Christian. So if a unity with Christians is what they want, that’s alright, but it won’t come at the cost of our particular. Perhaps we can agree that both our religions, Hinduism and Christianity, are correct about their view of Christianity. Hindus, for the most part, would say that they believe all religions (including Christianity) are true. We Christians believe only Christianity is Truth, and that the gods of the nations are demons. As long as we can agree on that, I’m sure we will get along swimmingly.