The Culture of Assertion
24 Oct 2006
Do you remember Dragnet’s Sergeant Joe Friday, the stone-faced detective who always insisted upon “Nothing but the facts”? Like Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, Joe Friday limited his criminal investigations to facts alone. There was a time when everyone agreed with the likes of Friday and Holmes, supporting the contention that the only reliable evidence in crime solving was the facts. Indeed, anyone dismissive of the facts in their decision-making was once roundly ridiculed as foolhardy.
Alas, Joe Friday is dead and today’s world sees facts as barriers to its preconceived and prejudiced ideas. Having already made up its mind what to believe, today’s world doesn’t want to be confused with the facts. Therefore, anyone daring to introduce facts into public discourse is frowned upon for their lack of forward thinking.
In today’s politically correct world, the truly enlightened among us are no longer considered to be the world’s great thinkers (figurers), but the world’s great feelers. Truth is no longer an intellectual pursuit, arrived at by making sense out of compiled facts and data, but an emotional pursuit, arrived at by sheer feelings. Whatever makes us feel better, especially about ourselves, is truth for us. Furthermore, our felt out “truth” is incontrovertible, regardless of how much it is contradicted by factual evidence.
All of this was clearly illustrated recently by Donna Shalala. Shalala, a former Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton Administration, as well as the current president of the University of Miami, is under fire for merely slapping the wrists of her university’s football team for its participation in one of the worst brawls in college football history. Shalala admits that she has refused to view the film of her team’s on field antics, insisting that she did not want to judge her players’ misbehavior on the emotion generated by “the hard cold facts.” By refusing to view “the hard cold facts” of her team’s atrocious actions, Shalala has enabled herself not only to be soft in her team’s reprimand, but also to retain that warm fuzzy feeling toward her players.
I once asked a woman who confessed to leaving the Baptist Church for a Kingdom Hall, “Whatever possessed you to become a Jehovah’s Witness?” I’ll never forget her answer. She said, “I didn’t want to believe in Hell.” Well, I don’t either, but I have to in order to believe the Scripture and my Savior, who, by the way, had more to say about Hell and judgment than He did about Heaven and forgiveness. Moreover, Hell’s reality is unaffected by whether or not I believe in it. Refusing to believe in it does not render it nonexistent or any less real.
Today’s world irrationally believes that truth can be altered to accommodate our feelings by refusing to confront it and concede to it. Yet, the truth is the truth regardless of whether or not we believe it. The only thing our unwillingness to face the truth affects is our ability to deal with it. So regardless of how Jehovah’s Witnesses and Donna Shalala feel, Hell is real and the University of Miami has a bunch of thugs on its football team.
Several months ago I read an interesting article in the L. A. Times by Tim Ritten. Mr. Ritten proposed that the problem with today’s America is our “culture of assertion.” According to Ritten’s article, truth is determined today by whether or not someone believes it. If someone believes something, no matter how insane or insidious it is, we all must respect it as the truth, because it is what someone believes. Consequently, truth is no longer determined by logical argument, but by the fickle emotions of a lone enthusiast in today’s feel-good society.
Although I can’t speak for others, as far as I’m concerned, lots of people believe lots of things that are totally undeserving of my respect. Not only are many people’s beliefs loony, but they are lethal as well. Thus, no matter how sincerely some beliefs are held, they are still totally undeserving of my deference. Instead of demanding respect, many of today’s beliefs demand repudiation.
This business of disclaiming the erroneous and egregious beliefs sincerely held by others in the world today is not conducted without cost or consequence. All who dare to stand for the truth and against the lie will inevitably suffer at the hands of a truth-hating world. To pursue this calling of telling others what they need to hear—no matter how disconcerting it may be—rather than telling them what they want to hear is to both prove oneself faithful to Christ and to follow Him outside the camp at the forfeiture of popularity and worldly reputation (Hebrews 13:12-13). Granted, such a course flies in the face of many of today’s church growth gurus, who insist that church growth is dependent upon sensitivity to people’s feelings. Yet, to avoid the fate of becoming end time ear ticklers of those to whom the truth is intolerable, you and I must become far more concerned about people’s souls than their feelings (2 Timothy 4:3-4). How do you feel about that?
Don Walton
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