Rickety Absolutes

So we are talking about a populace in which nearly everybody is needy, greedy, envious, angry and alone. We are talking therefore about a politics of estrangement, in which the two sides go at each other with the fervor of extreme righteousness in defense of rickety absolutes that are indefensible and therefore cannot be compromised.

-Wendell Berry, Caught in the Middle (2013), from Our Only World: Ten Essays

I read Wendell Berry for the sake of my sanity.  I read him because he is sternly and sometimes crankily on the side of humanity, being a human, being connected to land and community.  I read him because I think he is a prophet of common sense, of living within limits, but of living full and rich lives.  I read him because he cares about the things that I care about: stewardship of creation, the community of human people, sober and clear headed (some might say bracing) criticism of the violent, greedy darkness that surrounds us every day.

I read him, because more often than not, he hits the nail on the head.  I had a friend once who introduced me to the common grammatical error of modifying an absolute.  The most common one he felt was saying something was "very unique."  Unique means one of a kind, without peer, entirely differentiated from other things. Something is either unique or not, using the modifier "very" is therefore redundant, and from a grammar perspective, wrong.  This is not earth shaking information, in fact, whenever I have passed this on to others, they usually give me a little smile and look that implies I may not be getting an invite to their next cocktail party.

Absolute positions, like absolute words tend to resist modification or compromise.  As I discussed yesterday, if the right to bear arms is, in your mind, an absolute god-given right, if that absolute belief can survive the random killing of children, then you are probably not going to be able to work with anyone who suggests limitations on that right.

Likewise with abortion, if you believe either that a woman should always have the right to terminate a pregnancy for any reason, or if you believe that abortion amounts to murder, you are probably not going to be willing to modify or compromise those absolute positions.

The problem is that the world is not made of or for absolutes, everything is more complicated than we allow it to be, down to the most basic structures of matter, there are high degrees of variation and even a seeming randomness to everything.  If we are to take Scripture seriously, even God changes his mind, when confronted with a valid argument (sometimes even when confronted with a silly argument).  In Exodus we read about God and Moses getting frustrated with the Israelites on several occasions.  In Exodus 32, God is ready to be done with them and consume them in wrath and Moses says, "Why should the Egyptians say, 'It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains and consume them from the face of the earth?'"(v. 12)  He then proceeds to remind God of the covenant with Abraham and the promise, and it says, "The Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people."

God was holding an absolute position: the people are wicked and idolatrous, this is not what I want, I'm going to be done with them.  It's true, by the way, they were pretty wicked and idolatrous, and we remain so to this day.  If there's anyone who is justified in holding an absolute position, it would be God.  But Moses changes God's mind, even though, as we find out, Moses is pretty cheesed off as well.  What happens at the end of the chapter is a compromise, a plague, a punishment for idolatry.

Eventually what happens in the course of the Hebrew Scriptures is that God starts to realize that there is only one defensible absolute position, and that position is love.  Out of that absolute flow justice, mercy and grace, absolute love allows for faith and freedom, and is utterly unassailable: Love is stronger than death.  Any absolute position short of that, is flawed and rickety.  If you can define your position as truly and honestly loving, you stand a chance of defending it, but beware you will also be willing to compromise, forbear and forgive, because those are things that love does.

A defensible absolute can be compromised, because it has merit and strength and flexibility, in other words it acts less like an absolute idea and more like a living being.  That's why love is the greatest.