"Everyone knows" (Part II)

... continued from yesterday.

8. When we first encounter someone who thinks or behaves differently from us, we can have varied reactions. There are of course those rare souls who are fascinated by difference. They want to learn more. "That's so interesting! So you actually eat the eyeballs?"

I'm not sure that curiosity is the most common reaction, though. For many of us, our first reaction is to think the other person is weird or strange. They're not normal. I suspect that the way I eat is unusual. So if "normal" is the way most people in my world do something, then I am weird.

The more sensitive the issue, the stronger the reaction will likely be. The instinct might be to attack. Someone might resort to name-calling. "You're stupid" or "that's stupid." If you have a different view or practice than I have ingrained in my head, I may consider you unintelligent.

There's actually a name for one example of this dynamic. It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It describes how people who don't actually know much about a subject may overestimate their understanding of it. They don’t know enough to realize how much they don’t know. I've seen a number of memes that capture this effect with a sarcastic comment like, "I didn't know so many of my Facebook friends were experts on economics!"

I'll confess that in my study of the Bible, my first reaction to a number of "strange" interpretations was to think the new interpretation was stupid. Often, the more I investigated these "strange" interpretations, the more I would realize that I was actually the one lacking in knowledge. Repeatedly, an idea I thought was crazy made more and more sense as I learned more about it. I have repeatedly ended up feeling pretty dumb after initially having a dismissive, somewhat cocky reaction. 

9. Let me give an example. When I first heard someone say that "inhospitality" was part of the Sodom and Gomorrah story, I may actually have laughed out loud. "Everyone knows" that the story is about homosexuality. "Seriously?" I would still say that homosexual sex is part of the immorality of the story, but there are other key dimensions to the story that weren't on my radar at all. I didn't know what I didn't know.

I should start off by saying that "hospitality" is something foreign to my personality. I think I'm friendly and quite nice to people, but "entertaining" is not my strong suit. The college I went to had a hospitality team for guests on campus. At the time, I thought that was one of the craziest things I had ever heard.

I still don't think it's a good word for what we're talking about in Genesis 19. What we're really talking about is not mistreating outsiders but rather looking out for them. As I'll mention in due time, we humans are a herd animal. We gather in tribes. It's a survival skill. Outsiders are potentially dangerous. We can more likely trust those in our own family and clan.

The downside of this defense mechanism is that fallen human nature is often violent or abusive toward those outside our group. Think "Mean Girls" in a high school. Think about the repeated phenomenon of some government trying to get rid of all the foreigners or immigrants in the land. Think genocide in Rwanda. It's fallen human nature 101.

The Bible is truly remarkable in this regard. A core value of the Old Testament is to treat the stranger, the foreigner, the immigrant with respect. This is highly unusual for any human culture. It goes against our tribal grain. "Remember that you were once foreigners in Egypt," Exodus 22:21 says. Treat others the way you wish you had been treated.

I totally missed this part of the Sodom story. It's helped me to compare it with the very similar story in Judges 19. In that story, a Levite debates whether to spend the night in a Jebusite city or in a town of Benjamin. He thinks it is more likely to be safe in Benjamin because at least they're Israelite.

But the men of the town want to rape him instead, show the outsider who's boss. They end up raping his concubine to death instead. The story isn't about homosexuality because they rape the concubine. It's about violence to an outsider. "Inhospitality" doesn't quite cut it, but you can see what the word is trying to get at.

Notice that when Jesus uses Sodom and Gomorrah as a warning in Matthew 10:15, the context is when his disciples are rejected by a village in which they are outsiders. At some point, it all clicked. I had missed this dimension to the story because it isn't part of my culture or personality. But it was absolutely part of the ancient world.

My first reaction was to scoff and make fun, but it turned out that I was the one with blind spots. There is a homosexual act that is contemplated in this story, but something bigger is going on that I knew nothing about. And even then, it's an act of violence that is attempted rather than homosexuality per se.

10. It is one thing to think that a different understanding is stupid. However, if a new idea or understanding is threatening enough to our sense of who we are, we may see it as downright evil. Of course, some ideas are very dangerous. Some ideas and movements are evil for sure. But it is also fallen human nature to call others evil or morally deficient more or less because they have a perspective that makes us feel insecure.

In these divisive times, we can see these dynamics especially when it comes to politics. If we like someone who is on the "other side," we might chalk their perspective up to ignorance. "They just don't know any better." We might try to give them information. We'll share something on Facebook. We'll email them an article, a link to a YouTube video, or maybe something on Tik Toc. We want to enlighten them. We want them to see the "right" perspective.

If they're an outsider to us, we are more likely to vilify them. They're of the Devil. You may have heard of the "ad hominem fallacy." This is when you attack the person expressing certain ideas rather than the ideas themselves. If someone disagrees with something we feel very strongly about, they must be either ignorant or evil.

There's a term for this way of thinking. It's called "binary thinking." There are two sides -- mine and the wrong one. There's the right perspective that the smart, good guys have. Then there's the wrong perspective that the other side has.

Usually, this way of thinking plays into what is called the "Either/Or Fallacy" or the "Fallacy of False Alternative." It says that there are only two options -- the right one and the wrong one. The options are black and white.

There are instances of two options. "No one can serve two masters," Jesus says (Matt. 6:24). When it comes to Yahweh, you must serve him entirely. Anything less will ultimately lead to a different destination. But most of the time, there is a spectrum of positions in between point A and B.

11. Sometimes, when we first encounter a new idea, we might initially be opposed to it, especially if it catches us off guard or we find it threatening. Binary thinking is a natural response. We can be defensive against the new idea, especially if it exposes our blind spots. 

In addition to "unreflective thinking," I have sometimes called our state of mind before we hear about new ideas "unitary thinking." We have one way of thinking, and we don't really know there are other possibilities. I am pre-reflective because I've never even realized you could think of the subject differently. I have blind spots, and I don't know it. I have unexamined assumptions.

Socrates is known for saying that "the unexamined life is not worth living." [1] I'm not sure I would go that far. Frankly, I think I'd rather live in ignorance than not live at all. But there is freedom in self-awareness. If I don't know there are other options, I am not free to choose or not to choose them. If I know other options, I may still choose the same one, but now I am choosing more freely -- because I have actually made a choice.

As we make this journey together, I will express a sense that the last few hundred years have opened our minds to possibilities that were not as clearly seen before. This is a somewhat unpopular perspective in my circles. Many around me think the world has gotten worse and worse. What's interesting is that there are different reasons for thinking this. On a popular level, many think we are in a state of incredible moral decline. But others around me seem to think that things have deteriorated since the Protestant Reformation. They long for some pre-modern past.

Me? I was born when it seemed like Martin Luther King Jr.'s moral arc of the universe was finally beginning to bend toward justice. I was raised in a time when progress almost seemed inevitable, even if might remind myself that it wasn't. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Science -- it all seemed like humanity was entering an age it had never entered before. Even at the turn of the millennium, we were in the digital age and now the age of AI.

We will eventually get to the question of history. Are things getting better and better, worse and worse, or just constantly changing? But that's a conversation for another day. These are all things we will discuss along this journey.

12. In the pages that follow, I want to take you on a journey through these reflections, "Ken's Progress," if you would. I have structured the path in terms of broadening awareness. In this first chapter, I have introduced the concept of unitary and binary thinking. 

The next four chapters will explore a shift from pre-reflective to binary thinking in five areas. We'll start with ethics (chapter 2). Then we look at political and economic philosophy (chapter 3). We'll ask about our philosophy of history (chapter 4). We'll explore the nature of humanity (chapter 5). In the last chapter of this section, we'll start thinking more deeply about God and the Bible (chapter 6). A key theme of these chapters is that there are usually more than just two options.

In chapter 7, we will cross an "epistemological bridge." That is, we will probe more deeply into the question of knowledge. How do we know that we know what we think we know? This will set us up for the second half of the book in which we'll dive into what I call "spectrum thinking." Chapters 2-6 will have opened up the door for these deeper discussions. Once again, we'll look at ethics (chapter 8), political philosophy (chapter 9), and the philosophy of religion (chapter 10). To take a breath, we'll also briefly touch on the philosophy of art and beauty (chapter 11).

The final two chapters will ironically end with two paths. Chapter 12 explores philosophy without God. What conclusions would we reach across the board if we assumed a naturalist or animist universe? Then chapter 13 sketches what a coherent theist perspective on the world might look like given the journey up to that point. 

We've packed our philosophical bags. Let the journey begin. 

[1] In Plato's Apology, where Socrates is on trial for not believing in the gods and corrupting the youth.