John Robson: Finding Light in the Darkness of Charlie Kirk’s Assassination

Commentary

In the darkness of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, where are we to find light? Perhaps in the fact that so many people, from so many different perspectives, are urgently asking that question. It is clearly not where we want to be, and by we I don’t just mean my tribe.

This glimmer brightened slightly when, in one of those coincidences that was nothing of the sort, I then encountered this G.K. Chesterton quotation:

“The muddle is not merely due to the sin of anger; that is, to people losing their tempers with each other. It is also due to the sin of sloth; to people not taking the trouble to listen to each other, or take note of what each other really says. My first point, therefore, is that sloth, intellectual sloth, as well as mere emotional anger, is a great modern foe to charity.”

He spoke these words in 1933 about a superficially different “muddle” during another dark decade featuring intense ideological polarization. But when someone’s advice a century or more old illuminates a current problem, it surely indicates sagacity.

Obviously, people are increasingly losing their tempers in the public arena, in America and elsewhere. And I do not romanticize the past, including head-banging debates on everything from Free Silver to slavery. Indeed, my own doctoral dissertation concerned an almost complete failure of minds to meet, or even try, on the “Jackson-Vanik Amendment” (zzzzzzz). But if it was bad then and worse now, it’s no excuse for drifting into catastrophe.

Nor is it an excuse for drifting into mushy relativism that attempts to dissolve disagreements by denying truth and singing “Kumbaya” instead. I’m no fan of Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States, militant progressive and rigid bigot. But I do sympathize with his response to “two sides to every question,” namely “a right side and a wrong side.”

Also obviously, if finding out which is which and getting there together were easy, we wouldn’t be where we are now. But I quote in all my opening university lectures a passage from the late historian John Lukacs that might pry slightly wider the crack through which the light gets in.

In his youth he believed in a naïve Ayn Rand-like objectivity, an epistemology where his own opinions were so obviously right that anyone raising objections must be a dunce, a villain, or both. And this attitude is painfully widespread and obnoxiously expressed today.

When Lukacs matured sufficiently to appreciate that ideas different from his own had their own internal consistency, he slid into radical relativism. But when he matured further and realized it cannot be true that nothing is true, he concluded that “it is possible … for any thinking man to present evidences, from a proper employment of sources, that are contrary to his prejudices, or to his politics, or indeed to the inclinations of his mind” without ceasing to think at all, or to reach firm, important, valid conclusions.

As he explained, “I prefer not to name this kind of intellectual (and moral) probity ‘objective’ (or even ‘detached’). ‘Objectivity’ is a method: I prefer the word honesty, which is something else (and more) than a method: within it there resides at least a modicum of humility (and in history, being the knowledge that human beings have of other human beings, even a spark of understanding, of a human empathy).” And it’s vital because we don’t just want to avoid turning the public arena into a literal, bloody battlefield. We want to wrestle with ideas so that many of us, including intellectual foes, ultimately reach the truth.

Semi-fortuitously, I was concurrently reading a former hostage negotiator’s book, “Never Split the Difference,” that also stressed empathy. But not, again obviously, to end up sympathizing with the methods or goals of hostage-takers. Rather, understanding what took them to that dark place was key to getting them back without anyone getting shot.

When Lukacs accused so-called conservative proponents of progress of “a bellowing optimism that is imbecile rather than naïve,” he was not offering to split the difference any more than I would with Wilson on race, or those who would destroy Western civilization and Israel. But I want them to see the error of their ways and repudiate them, not expire horribly in a pool of their own blood while I dance a jig.

As Whittaker Chambers wrote in his autobiography “Witness,” in exposing Stalinist espionage within the U.S. government, he went so far as to perjure himself to protect communist ex-comrades because he himself had wandered so long in the dark that he recoiled from doing anything that would keep others from finding their way back to the light.

So before we speak or act, let us all ponder whether we’re really trying to rescue others lost in darkness dangerous to themselves and others.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.