Wednesday, March 24, 2004
(10:21 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Prolegomena to Any Future Political Discussion
A recent post on Olivet Nazarene University's dialog listserv reminded me of one reason that I hate the right wing: every conversation about politics degenerates into a discussion of the etiquette of political discussions. Example:
Right-winger: I support a stupid policy.
Me: I don't support that policy, because it's stupid.
Right-winger: Oh, I see! You're all in favor of free speech as long as it's the radical left-wingers who are speaking, but when a Republican says something, all you want to do is shut him down.
Attentive readers will note that the right of the right-winger to hold and express political opinions was never in question in this conversation at all. Interestingly, though, by bringing up the topic of free speech in this way, he is effectively trying to "shut down" the left-winger by characterizing the left-winger's sincere, good-faith political disagreement as an opposition to free speech -- without, take note, actually addressing the content of the left-winger's speech.
The same general trend can be seen in the response to those who leave the Bush administration, then write critical things about it. Very seldom do right-wing hacks bother to address the substance of those officials' remarks. Instead, they discuss the many ways in which the speaker is discredited in advance. It doesn't matter what he's saying, because he does not have the right to say anything and be heard.
In short, with the right wing, every conversation degenerates into a discussion of the grounds on which some future conversation would be possible at some point in the future -- with the right wing being the responsible custodian of such meta-discussional princinples.
This is where Karl Barth would jump in and say, "Nein." As a socialist, he was already well-acquainted with the sloppy rhetorical tricks of the right wing -- reading some of the responses he got from the local business community during his "Comrade Pastor" period is deeply disturbing, in that nothing has changed. The insinuation that Barth is completely uninformed, the insistence on pointing out small factual errors without addressing the substance of what he said -- it's like Rush Limbaugh is responding to Barth. This context gives us a way to understand Barth's insistence that no prolegomena to theology is necessary or desirable. The theologian must simply begin by affirming the content of God's revelation in Christ, rather than speculating about the grounds on which such a revelation and our knowledge thereof might be possible. His prolegomena is the doctrine of the Trinity.
How arrogant of him! How presumptious! Does he not recognize how irrelevant that doctrine is to the world, how much ground he has to cover before someone could possibly even begin to imagine thinking about affirming that doctrine? Barth suggests that some arrogant presumption is necessary. The best apologetic is a good systematic theology. Letting the world set the terms for the Christian proclamation will lead to an inevitable misshaping of the Christian proclamation -- and I believe that this is strictly equivalent (in my mind as in Barth's) to the distortion introduced by allowing the right wing to set the terms for a left-wing proclamation.
In conclusion, a proposed experiment: when we decide to take a year to read Church Dogmatics at a pace of 30 pages a day, perhaps we should be reading Capital alongside it.
