Introduction
So let me begin with a brief discussion of the correspondence view of truth and the coherence view of “truths.” Pilate famously asked “what is truth?” when the Incarnate Truth was standing right in front of him (John 18:38). In an analogous way, sophomores and sophists ask what is truth? when the answer is screaming at them from every leaf of every tree.
The correspondence view of truth is that an objective, external world exists, existing out there in a common sense way, and that a proposition is true when it aligns with the facts as they are out in that objective world. If I say “the book is on the table,” and it is objectively the case that there is a table right there, and that a book is on it, and it is the same book and table I am talking about, then the statement is true. Seems simple enough.
The coherence view of truth(s) holds that a statement is true if it coheres within a larger system of beliefs. Truth is thought to be an internal property of that particular belief set. And at the end of the day, this idea, after it germinates, is why people can say things like “well, I am glad for your faith in Jesus. I am sure that it is true for you.” But instead of feeling affirmed by this, the believing Christian shakes his head. That is because if Jesus did not rise from the dead, objectively, out there in the world, independently of whether I think He did or not, then we Christians are of all men most to be pitied (1 Cor. 15:19).
And so the reason I want to fight for the right to say truly that “the book is on the table” is because everything depends on it. If I cannot say something like that, then we are all still in our sins. Lewis put it well in his essay “Is Theology Poetry?” where he said this: “Unless reason is absolute, all is in ruins.” And by reason, we are not talking about high-flying brain spasms in the philosophy department, or anything discussed down at Sophistry Central. We are talking about right reason, common sense, and Bob’s yer uncle kind of stuff.
Does any of this make a practical difference? You betcher.
A Bad Week for Candace
As the prosecution laid out its preliminary case against Tyler Robinson this last week, every American with a nodding acquaintance with the correspondence view of truth realized that Candace has been blowing misty vapors for lo, these many months. She has not acknowledged this yet because she has gone to ground somewhere in the tall weeds of the coherence view of truth, which can be summarized as “that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”
Here are a couple of round-ups of the debris field that is now Candace’s, um, case—here and here. The first is a BBC article, and the second one does not pretend to be objective, and is full of chortling. But do you know what? Between us girls, I think that Candace has invited a chortle or two. And this write-up of Data Republican is also worth a read. But please be aware that these analyses do not address any arguments involving the helicopters of time-traveling Sumerians, as those arguments have not yet occurred to Candace.
One of the skills that conspiracy theorists must develop is the most essential skill of making everything cohere. They insist on putting the jigsaw puzzle together in a particular way in order to get the picture that they demand and want, and they are not at all distressed by the fact that they need to use a pair of scissors and a mallet to get the job done. They always manage to get it done somehow.
Every analogy has its limitations—because I am starting to feel like we are at the place where all the pieces are still in the box, and we are now arguing about what the picture would be if Candace’s team ever got around to assembling it.
The Postmodern Right
Candace has provided us with a pretty gaudy example of how postmodern relativism can afflict someone on the ostensible right. It is not the exclusive possession of deconstructionist English professors anymore. If you want to float off away from objective reality, keeping only the vocabulary of your most recent point of departure, you can float away from the right side as well as from the left side of things.
When someone gives up on conforming their views to the way things actually are in the objective world, and settles for making them cohere within whatever system they have adopted, it does not matter if that system is a communist one or a reactionary right wing one. Left and right area not the fundamental units of measurement anymore. That does not matter any longer. Whether it is a Nietzschean black pilled guy with a black heart or a commie with a black heart, to detach from the world of objectivity is a postmodern, relativistic, and rootless move, and is profoundly anti-Christian. It is the epistemology of the Void.
When someone will only affirm that which will be applauded from within the system they have adopted, their only interest is in making their statements cohere. Now this can be challenging on a practical level, but because people tend to forget what you were saying three years ago, and the objective world is always right there, just outside your window, it is comparatively easy for someone in the grip of this delusion to make minor adjustments as they go along. I say “comparatively easy,” but this was more true back when there were fewer recording devices. It is much harder now. So when die-hard defenders of Candace try to say, as they will try to say, “Candace never said that Erika Kirk was in on the plot to kill Charlie!” or “Candace never denied that Tyler Robinson did it!” the reply should be, “Roll the tape.”
And the way you can tell that radical relativism is the captain of their mental ship now is that rolling the tape does not matter to them in the slightest. This is the story that they are currently sticking to. “She never said that.” The common sense guy will scratch his chin and say, “But we just watched her say that.” To which the reply comes, “That’s not my interpretation.” By which is meant that he really believes that he has a right to his “truth.” Well, he can have it. The bad news is that his truth never saved a damned soul.
Basic Options
This is why all this matters way beyond how it matters to Candace herself. Now it does matter to Candace individually because “what does it profit a woman to get millions of clicks, and lose her own soul” (Mark 8:36)? That’s one thing. It matters to her because of the state of her soul, not to mention the incoming lawsuits. It is true that Candace is currently putting on a freak show, but it is also true that she was created in the image of God, and her enemies should be praying for her disintegrating soul . . . more than she is, apparently.
But there is another aspect to this, having to do with those other folks who wanted to ride on her rocket to the stars. I mean, look at all her millions of views. But, as the saying goes, something can go up like a rocket and come down like a stick. While Candace was doing her unhinged thing, which remains unhinged down to the present, others were standing around her in various unbecoming and unsavory ways. Their stances ranged from full-throated approval, to qualified nods that merely said “I think she’s on to something,” to those who maintained she was just “asking questions,” to a culpable and guilty silence. There were degrees of culpability in these stances, but all of it was unsavory at the least, and despicable at worst.
Our responses to these fellow travelers should vary in accordance with what they were doing. Motives were certainly mixed. Some were just click whores. Others were cowards—if they said what they ought to have said, they feared they would get the treatment that Erika was getting. Some thought prior friendship with Candace meant that they owed her more than they actually did owe her. People who would never claim to be relativists at all can still be maneuvered into functioning within that relativistic frame, and a number of them did so. For all of the people in these various categories, it is way too late to manage this. But there is another way. It is never too late to seek forgiveness. We are now at the crash portion of the crash and burn arc of Candace’s mendacity, and her enablers, from Megyn Kelly down to Joel Webbon, need to do something about it.
To those who offered some sort of active support to her, we need to look to them for an acknowledgement of complicity and a plain rejection all that delusional stuff. Something like “I was wrong about everything, please forgive me” will do.
To the ones who were silent or kinda silent, we simply need to make sure they do not manage to sidle away quietly, now that the winds have shifted, as they try to say something like “I always thought something was suspicious and fishy about the whole thing. I remember thinking so at the time.” Reminds me of that old song about the Vicar of Bray.
Such will say that Wilson and Co. got off the bus “too early.” My response would be that we never got on that bus in the first place, and said so loudly at the time. But their argument is that we should have waited as long as they did, because the right time to get off the bus would be to crawl out of the wreckage after the maniac driver wrapped the whole thing around a tree. They stand up slowly, brush themselves off, and intone solemnly, “I always thought she was driving somewhat erratically.” Yeah, yeah. Roll the tape. Some people know how to make cats laugh.
Now to break this down to a clash between the correspondence view of truth and the coherence view of truth, as I have done, does not mean that everyone who was swayed by Candace, or who were afraid of her, would embrace the coherence view as a matter of declared principle. They may say that they have no formal allegiance to that way of thinking at all. But on this entire issue, from soup to nuts, they have been functioning within that framework.
Bathtub Admirals Win All Their Battles
When everything you are doing is occurring with your stipulated framework, you can always make it all cohere within that framework, at least for a time. Bathtub admirals can win all of their great sea battles. They can have an unparalleled career of success until the objective world breaks in. In this case, the objective world arrives in the form of mom coming in with a warm towel and your jammies.
Another great purveyor of such daydream frameworks is a devious device called “the movies.” In these movies, a petite little 120 lb. spy-person, so long as the camera work is adroit, can dispatch four or five former linebackers thugs who meant to do her harm. People who were educated in the government schools, and who have watched a lot of movies like this, and who somehow found an audience willing to applaud crazy statements made plausible within a stipulated framework . . . went up like straw in a barn fire.
Now all societies have plausibility structures, which shape and direct the way most people in those societies think. And it is true that these plausibility structures can sometimes be seriously wrong. So healthy societies and subcultures are those which invite correction from outside—from scriptural correction to scientific correction to historical correction. Diseased societies and subcultures are those which are insular and self-referential. The bottom line here is a variation on “facts don’t care about your feelings.” It is also important to note that facts don’t care about our feelings either.
“For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise” (2 Corinthians 10:12).
Take Heart Therefore
When people detach themselves from reality, that is always deeply unsettling to ordinary folks. When you are riding on a subway in a major urban area, you never want a person who is detached from reality to sit down next to you. You don’t want that even if he promises to be a lively conversationalist. And now you are watching it on the big screen that is our culture. So are you rattled yet? Anxious? Frightened? Then let’s go the opposite way for a minute.
Starting with the basics, the coherence view of truth is incoherent. As such, in the short term it can be a real chaos agent in stable societies. This is being done, not because chaos is a long term strategy for anybody, because it isn’t. It is important to note that the people fomenting the chaos know that it isn’t. What they are doing is destabilizing the older order so that at some point they can introduce a new order, the one that they want, which is one that is suffused with a spirit of totalitolerance. The crazy bits are just weaponized tools in the hands of adversaries conducting Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW).
The only great weakness in their strategy is that during such destabilized times, it becomes possible for vertebrate Christians to propose going back to an earlier period in our older order, going back to the time when we really meant it. Peter Berger has acknowledged that we are living in a time of “desecularization,” and there should be absolutely no reason why believing Christians should not take advantage of this. Jesus really did rise from the dead, and this really does have ramifications for nations, who must be taught to obey Him. If you join us you will be called all sorts of names, but let’s face it. Worse things have happened.
So these destabilizing lies and incoherent falsehoods only work in their direction insofar as Christians refuse, for whatever reason, to take their swords out of their scabbards. You have the swords. You have the truth. Let me say it again—you have your swords. You have the truth—and the truth you have corresponds to the world as it is. You know, the world God created. The world God told us about in the Scriptures.
We would have legitimate reasons to be discouraged, despairing, frightened or panicked if we were limited in the same way our adversaries are. They are without God and without hope in the world. But their limitation is not—glory to God—our limitation.
So what I have actually been describing for you—you dear saints, you soldiers in the Lord’s great army—is the sad state of the enemy’s defenses. We are coming to the point, we are on the edge of battle. I have been telling each of you—each of you who are in possession of a true Jerusalem blade—that the adversary no longer believes in objective things like armor, or weapons, or in sharpening any weapons they might have. All they have is numbers and lies. They make faces at us. They grimace fearfully. They have smoke machines. They have engines to make the sound of thunder that they borrowed from the theater department.
And so here is God’s encouragement for you, as you receive that encouragement by faith.
“And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. And five of you shall chase an hundred, and an hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight: and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword. For I will have respect unto you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, and establish my covenant with you” (Lev. 26:7-9).
There is a marvelous phrase from Philippians 1:28 in Moffatt’s translation—“your fearlessness is a clear omen of ruin for them.”
When God shakes a culture down, He does it so that what cannot be shaken may remain.
“And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain” (Heb. 12:27).
What is it that remains? Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, and Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. This has implications.