Yes Virginia, There is a Truth Fairy
Welcome back to the good idea fairy, this Monday Musings quote is provided by an excellent post to Facebook by Thomas Krannawhitter. Though I do not know Dr. K personally, through the magic of Facebook and the “Idea Pull System” I wrote about last week, his post was shared by an Army green beanie zero buddy of mine (Army Special Forces Officer for the civilians in the room), and I found it to be both interesting and well worth the read. I am posting the entire thing below out of respect to the author, and because I wouldn’t want my ideas taken out of context either.
My interest is on the post-modernist angle and less about the culture war stuff. Given that my “expertise” is on organized group violence, it should not be surprising that I am somewhat ambivalent of group projects in general. Regardless of your politics I think it is worth thinking about the idea of objective and knowable truth itself. If you are wondering, yes, the culture war is a flavor of organized group conflict that has sometimes escalated into violence, and if you want to know why – I have an idea.
Also, for those who do not follow college football, Dion Sanders is a retired hall of fame professional Football and professional Baseball player who has become a standout NCAA football coach in a very short time at Jackson State University and now Colorado University. He is truly one of the greatest to ever play the game of Football, and now we are going to see if he can add “Coach” as well. He is also the only human athlete to play in a Super Bowl and a World Series.
Now, onto the show!
Thomas Krannawhitter wrote:
If you want to understand the growing division in America, there’s a fascinating case study unfolding right now at Colorado’s largest public university.
The University of Colorado hired a high-profile, high-salaried, football coach, Deion Sanders.
By all measures, including today’s blowout victory over Nebraska, Coach Sanders has already remade, strengthened, and greatly improved what was merely a year ago one of the worst college football programs, ever.
Sanders is a football coach, yes. A big part of his time and energy is focused on, well, football. But football, by his own account, is not his main priority.
His main focus is the moral character of his players. He’s very open about this. He wants to influence and inspire young men to become good men—good sons, future good fathers, good citizens. He wants them to be personally responsible, carry themselves well, be respectful to others, and expect nothing they haven’t worked for and earned. He thinks winning football games will be among many good results.
The thematic motto for Sanders is simple: "Smart. Tough. Fast. Disciplined. Great character." That's what he tells his players every day.
Coach Prime’s strategy is an old strategy. It’s ancient. It is, I might argue, Aristotelian. His strategy can be distilled down to this slice of classical wisdom: Before you can be happy, you must first practice being good. Be a good person—exercise all the virtues, strive for excellence in everything, make good choices—and good things are more likely to happen, including winning rather than losing football games.
None of this is to suggest that Deion Sanders is or needs to be a perfect human being. He’s not. He is simply and rightly challenging students who play football at CU to be better, more moral, more excellent human beings. In doing so, he cannot help but challenge himself to be better, too.
To all the cynics who pounce on the hypocrisy of anyone who extolls virtue but fails to be perfectly virtuous himself: One need not be perfect in order to strive for self-improvement while encouraging others to improve themselves and aim for something higher.
The premise of everything Coach Sanders is doing is that there IS a good—a fundamental, objective, transcendental good—by which human beings, human actions, and human choices can be judged.
Here’s the fascinating case study: The greatest opposition to what Coach Sanders is trying to teach and instill in young football players comes from within the very university that hired him, and the many other universities like it.
CU football players don’t need to go far to have the lessons of Sanders mocked, ridiculed, and dismissed. They need only walk into any of the social sciences or humanities in the academic buildings surrounding the athletics department. There they will hear erudite academic sophisticates, many with PhDs, promoting philosophical nihilism and moral relativism, usually with a chuckle: “Who is to say what is right or wrong?” they ask with contempt for anyone who dares to answer. “Who is to say what good character is?”
There’s the case study. There’s the division in our modern world: One party says, “Be good, work, and appreciate the good things that result from having good character.” The other party rolls their eyes and laughs at the mere suggestion there is a good that can be discovered and known by the human mind.
The division of our modern world is the difference between the moral-character-building and personal responsibility Coach Sanders is promoting versus the nihilism peddled by academics who don’t much care about the human suffering caused by the ideas, policies, programs, and ways of life they promote.
It's neither incorrect nor uncharitable to assess this conflict by the different results they produce. It appears Coach Sanders is well on his way to forming an excellent football team composed of young men learning what excellence is, many of whom will likely go on to do many wonderful things after they graduate, whether related to football or not.
It should surprise no one if the experience of playing CU football for Coach Sanders turns out to be a pivotal, life-changing experience for many of these young men.
Meanwhile, university social sciences and humanities will continue to infect young minds with toxic philosophic doctrines and woke slogans that fuel all kinds of social pathologies, including more young university students than ever dependent on prescription (and non-prescription) drugs because they are deeply morally confused (they quite literally do not know what a man or a woman is), depressed, and suicidal. These are the same students who lack any sense of purpose or meaning, flocking in record numbers to see therapists, psychologists, and counselors.
As a general rule of thumb, anyone who references or quotes Aristotle is cool in my book. Those readers who read my Selfishness Exercise article might remember that I am “team Aristotle” with maybe more Hedonism than is probably healthy, well maybe more than maybe. But when one looks at post-modernism and all its various flavors, one can see where is DOESN’T work and draw some conclusions about its value as an ideology for human life. Sports and combat are decidedly objective competitions and tend to make or attract Stoics. Where winning is important, you typically do not find post-modernists. If there is indeed anything we can call “winning”, “truth”, “justice”, etc. then the entire foundation of post-modernism collapses. The human debate has historically been how one can define these fundamental truths, not to reject them outright as meaningless. Which is another gripe I have with these folks, they are consciously or subconsciously lazy, cowards, or both. They aren’t having a debate; they are simply leaving the argument altogether.
“My truth” means that I never have to defend my ideas, simultaneously giving me some air of superiority for being “right” while also forever placing my idea into some special box where I never have to defend its logic to anyone. Marcus Aurelius DID NOT write "Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth", though perhaps that is one take away from Plato’s allegory of the cave. Understanding that each person has an entirely unique perspective based on the totality of their life experiences is not denying objectivity, it’s a warning that while we may reach for truth, we must be cautious about our own biases and how they impact our definition and understanding of objective truth. As I mentioned in the Selfishness Exercise it’s funny how many times one's solution to a problem just so happens to benefit them as well, weird right? Post-modernism also invariably turns into the “Victim Olympics” which does have a direct tie to increasing in-group violence, so there’s that.
Great read, thanks!