World Without Transcendence — Measuring Up.

One of the things that has become problematic here behind the lines is making moral decisions.  In the arena where transcendence has been excluded, a basis for evaluating anything has become very elusive.  It reminds me of a scene from one of the last episodes of the original “Battlestar Galactica” TV series.  Our intrepid warriors from space had found earth, contacted its inhabitants (their supposed colonial descendents) and were setting about helping them out of a jam.  After instructing the earthlings on the plan, they told them to wait ten centons before they acted, and started off to do their part.  Someone grabbed a warrior leader, and urgently uttered, “Wait — what’s a centon?”  Not having a metric can make life difficult.

It can also make for utter confusion in the material realm.  My first job was as a combat air crew officer in the Air Force (when Canada had one), and one of the things some of us were taught was how to interpret photographs.  Simple, right?  I mean, how hard can it be to look at a picture and say what’s there?  They disabused us of that notion in hour one of day one.  The instructor put a picture up on the screen, and asked us to describe the scene.  We allowed as it was a valley, curving to the left as it receded from the foreground.  Formed by rather rounded but perhaps a ruggedly surfaced hills.  As we proceeded to embellish our description, the instructor flipped a switch, and the image changed.  The scope widened, and we could see that we had been looking at a close-up image that was now pulling back, reducing in magnification.  We were silenced when it finished pulling back, because what we were looking at, had indeed been an extreme magnification.  When the picture steadied, there was a quite attractive young woman, reclined on a blanket taking a sun bath.  We had been interpreting a very extreme magnification of the surface of the skin on her thigh.  The silence was broken by the instructor’s voice.  “Lesson one: never — Never — interpret anything without a scale.  All you do is concoct a fairy tale.”  What leads to confusion in the material realm can lead to disaster in the moral realm, because to take away the transcendent is to take away the basis for a scale in that realm.

Now comes a rather interesting twist.  If you want to do something that might not “measure up,” or stop people from criticizing and attacking you for what you are doing, eliminating the basis of measurement — the scale — will do the trick.  Years ago when I finished high school in Ontario, we wrote a “Departmental Exam” in each subject.  The Department of Education set it, and it was written by every student, and marked anonymously.  No one knew if he was marking a paper from Metro Toronto or Sioux Lookout.  But after the marks were published, school boards could — and did — use them to publicly chastise the Department for denying them the resources they needed.  Their students were suffering, and the marks gave proof from an objective scale to measure.  Now this situation had to be dealt with, and it was.  Departmental exams were eliminated.  No scale, no basis for comparison — or criticism.  Soon, though, universities had to institute their own entrance exams, to screen out high school grads with high marks who could not read well or add consistently.  The Department, though, found a lot easier to do what it wanted to do.

One of the nasty side effects of the exclusion of transcendence has been the way people who do what they want to do are pummeling those who object to their plans and proposals.  In the moral realm, take away transcendence as a concept, and concepts of right and wrong follow it out the door.  Without the transcendent, something beyond us, and not dependent upon us, we end up unable to measure.  Moral measurement has a name, and the name is discernment.  It is the process of measurement that lets us determine whether or not something is morally licit or illicit.  With that taken away from consideration, through the banishment of the transcendent, those who might try to point out that something is wrong (ever notice that not many people attack others for deeming them right?)  are labeled “judgmental.”  “How dare you judge me?”  is the indignant cry.  And if the transcendent is gone, where can one find a scale or reference, independent of ourselves, to point to as proof we are not judging but measuring against a scale?

This is the situation much worse than simply making mistakes in measurement.  These mistakes can be avoided (“measure twice, cut once”), or discovered and rectified.  Remove the metric and rectification, like avoidance, becomes very complicated indeed.

So here behind the lines, we find ourselves trying to navigate a moral landscape without benefit of maps drawn to an objective scale.  And the step that destroyed the scale, the banishment of transcendence, has made much more complicated the process of reestablishing one.  But that is the Christians duty, and the duty of every human who aspires to moral decency.  The question is not whether or not there’s anything to put back.  It has never gone away, even though, by perverse convention, considerations of the transcendent have been excluded.  It will, though, be a tough fight, and step one is to realize it is, indeed, a fight.  We have only two choices: fight to defend the use of the scale, or cease to have it as a means to good moral order.  The people who threw it out won’t just quietly let it be brought back into the arena.  But it’s still there, just as the horses and chariots of fire that Elisha’s servant was able to see when his eyes were opened.  And the fight to bring it back into play is our fight, a guerrilla war, if needs be, here behind the lines.