Human Life Straddles Two Realities

 

Human beings were created in the image of God.  Classical philosophers stated that the human ability to reason was the key to understanding what that meant.  After hundreds of years of searching the bounds of reason, philosophers became frustrated.  Following reason alone did not produce the solutions they sought.  As a result, during the 17th century some philosophers in the West started to emphasize emotion.  Our intellectual and political elites have walked us down this other path for another couple of hundred years.  Society in the 21 Century has reached the end of that journey.  It has lead us to a place of confusion, division, and despair.

I propose that the problem is both efforts considered only one aspect of  the human soul and neglected the other.  God demonstrates both reason and emotion in the Bible.  As His image, both constitute our substance.  We live simultaneously in two worlds, the objective and subjective.  Therefore, in order to make right decisions, come to accurate understandings, and create the best world possible, we must properly appeal to each world.

In order to better understand what I am writing about, I provide two word groupings synonymous with objective and subjective. The word group referring to objective things is universal, logic, reason, same, and all.  The word grouping that refers to what is subjective is particular, personal, emotion, desire, different, and special.

There is a list of things that are important to all people in all times like security, prosperity, freedom, belonging, and purpose. These all pertain to the concept of universal natural law.  The human institutions or organizations that provide those things are government, laws, economics, family, nationality, art, and religion.  People living in particular nations and in different times value the components of natural law differently.  They also meet those objective needs in particular or subjectively different ways.

When you consider natural law, several topics can be categorized as either totally or principally objective and others subjective.  Existing squarely in the objective world is the nature of God, morality, necessities of physical life, scientific observations, and mathematics.

We enter the subjective world when we talk about an individual's uniqueness and preferences about types of music, types of food, genres of literature, cultures and places.  On the totally subjective side of the spectrum is economic value. Think about a piece of art.  Some are willing to pay millions for it and others would not spend one dollar.  Maybe the most purely subjective concept is an individual's personality, the sum of their interests, talents, weaknesses, emotional responses, and choices.

Several truths about humanity exist because of these dual realities.  One common example is the fact that there are many "good" dads in the world and in most ways they are indistinguishable from one another.  However, you can find a variety of "#1 Dad" or "World's Best Dad" mugs online to purchase as a gift.  "How can there be so many #1 Dads", you say?  The answer is that every time a father loves his son and daughter well, it is subjectively true that he is the best in the world, at least for them.  This example captures the principle of particularity very well.  It should be applied to your family, friends, and neighbors.  It should even be considered as a factor when building broader social organizations like businesses or legal systems.

Many times the problems of the world are caused by rejecting a universal when one is needed or forcing everyone into a universal standard when personal preference should be allowed.  In other words humans suffer when they treat an aspect of life incorrectly, confusing what is subjective for what is objective and vice versa.

These errors can be very dangerous.  The example par excellence is perspectival epistemology which teaches that knowledge isn't objective and a person's understanding of the world is fundamentally shaped by one's race, class, religion, or sexual identity. Marx believed that truth could only be understood by the proletariat, or that the only way for the proletariat to enjoy freedom was to determine their own truth which had to be separated from bourgeoisie notions of truth.  Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises adroitly named this polylogism.  Today's woke social justice leaders encourage adherents to attain Critical Consciousness.  This is simply a new form of polylogism based on racial and gender identity.

Once a person denies the existence of objective truth, he will accept no constraints on his life whether they be logical, biological, moral, or ethical.  Perspectival epistemology flings wide the doors to uncontrolled passions.  All that matters is what an individual wants and their ability to make it happen.  As a result it also justifies any level of deceit and violence to gain power over others.  We have seen its disastrous effects throughout the 20th Century and up until today.

Morality must be objective since we are all equally human.  It isn't acceptable to judge behavior through a lens of subjectivity.  God calls this partiality throughout the Bible.  It states that God shows no partiality when discussing the issue of justice.  The only way to avoid partiality is to have one universal standard by which to judge all humans.

Since the 1990s I have heard people on the Right warning about moral and cultural relativism.  Both are forms of partiality.  They justify wrongdoing by one group or nation by applying a different moral standard.  It should be clear that objective morality is a tool for fixing the societal chaos we see all over the Western world.

This is why natural law is such an important concept.  Natural law represents the latest understanding of humanity's universal standard.  I believe a huge chunk of the natural law is explicitly stated in the Bible.  It is also true that reason must be applied to the Scriptures on some topics in order to uncover the universal principles it contains.  Sometimes the Bible makes a universal statement.  Sometimes it describes a particular expression of a universal principle.  The Bible speaks on some topics voluminously and on others it offers a few whispers, therefore much effort and wisdom is required to fully define it.

Then on top of natural law are natural rights which spell out the protections each individual must be given to live out natural law.  Natural rights define which violations of natural law justify punishment with violence.  Natural rights are always negative.  They state what others are not allowed to do to me.  They don't say I have a right to receive things from other people  The difference is subtle but very important.  Saying natural rights require others to give things to me is injustice.  Its full expression is slavery.  Other violations can be discouraged by other means.  In general terms, natural rights reside in the political sphere and natural law resides in the sphere of Christian theology.

One way to abuse objectivity is to assume all people groups should exist under the same kind of governmental structure.  You hear this error when President Woodrow Wilson said World War 1 would, "make the world safe for democracy".  The presumption was that rule by democracy was a universal good because it was working well for the US.  To be sure, humans need social organization, security, and justice.  However, even if you grant that democracy works, it isn't the only way to provide those things.  Samuel Rutherford writing Lex Rex in 1644 stated that monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy were all acceptable options.  I suggest the list is even longer than that.

To further demonstrate the problem, I want to focus on a current example where people confused a particular type of government with the universal need for organization, security, and justice. Neoconservatives believe that everyone should live under a liberal democratic system.  They assert that it is an objective good that applies to all people. In reality, it is, at most, a specific way of applying the natural law of good governance to a specific polity at a specific time.  This error has contributed to the start of multiple wars in the Middle East with up to a million lives lost.

Another example of this is the idea of theonomy which states that the legal system found in the Torah should be applied to all people for all times.  This is a more understandable error, since the Bible is the ultimate objective standard.  However the legal system which God commands Israel to live under is for them particularly.  Therefore it exists in the subjective realm.  To be sure, there are principles we can derive from the Old Testament which are objective.  For instance we get a clear picture of what God considers a sin.  However, we shouldn't apply everything in Leviticus directly to ourselves.  What we should do is identify those principles which are universal and include them in our definition of natural law.  Then taking those principles, we should modify our own system in order to more closely approach that ideal in a way that fits our culture and circumstance.

You can also abuse objective standards by applying them to economics.  For example, prices are subjectively derived.  Each individual values goods differently and ranks them according to personal preference.  Prices are a way of comparing those subjective valuations and rankings across all of society with mathematics.   Whenever authorities intervene in those personal economic calculations bad things happen.  Economies slump, as in the Great Depression.  Societies collapse, think of Venezuela.  Empires fall, Rome being an important example.

When looking at families you see the outer limits of subjectivism.  Treating a person in an absolutely subjective manner creates individuals isolated from all others: society, friends, even families.  Humans don't thrive in that existence.  For a human to live his best life, others need to respect his individuality, while at the same time he must fulfill the obligations he has to a matrix of relationships.

We also saw the importance of subjectivity during the Covid epidemic.  Objectively everyone needs physical health.  But different people needed different levels of protection and different treatments to restore their health.  Using a one-size-fits-all approach for everyone lead to more deaths than would have happened if everyone enjoyed the freedom of assessing their specific needs and acting accordingly.

To end, I would like to summarize how the objective and subjective fit together.  Think of statistical variability or the idiom "variation on a theme."  The theme is universal since it connects all objects together.  Individual expressions make up the variations which are subjective in nature.  There is also the example of a data set. 

  

The objective facts about the data set are those which describe the whole set.  There is the average which is the middle line in the chart, µ.  Standard deviations, σ, describe how the data is distributed within the set.  The range communicates how big and how small the edges of the set are.  While each data point is subjective, meaning it is has properties or values that no other data point has.  From this comparison we learn that things that are subjective fit within that which is objective. As I said before it can be difficult to understand which is which, so you better be careful because a mistake on that point will lead to many others.  By understanding what aspects of life are objective and subjective, we can avoid those mistakes and build better lives, families, and communities.