WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The WRFH Interview: Carl Trueman

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Carl R. Trueman, Professor of Biblical & Religious Studies at Grove City College, joins WRFH during a visit to Hillsdale's campus. He's interviewed by Mark Den Hollander.From 09/27/24.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Markden Hollander. With me today is Dr. Carl Truman, Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College and author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Great to be here, Mark. Thanks for having me on. Thanks so much for coming. Now, you grew up in England, and I'm curious to hear what actually made you want to come to America before we get started here. Well, there are two parts that story. One, what made me want to become an academic and a teacher. And that was oddly enough a lecture I heard when I was about 14 or 15 from the Monty Python member, Terry Jones, who gave a lecture at a local school where I grew up, where I went to to hear him on a very controversial book he'd written on Chaucer's Knight's Tale. And I remember sitting in the audience that afternoon thinking, I want to be that guy. I want to be a generalist. I want to be able to teach and communicate as he does, and I want to think and write widely. Whether I've achieved any of those things competently is not

for me to judge. So there was the teaching dimension. And secondly, the America dimension was my first came to America in 1996. I was teaching at the University of Nottingham in the UK at the time. And I had a six-month visiting professorship at the meter center, then Calvin College, now Calvin University, in Michigan. And my wife and I and I had two young boys at the time, enjoyed our time there. And then around about the year 2000, Westminster Seminary, approached me about the possibility of a job. And it was the right time for myself and my wife and the kids to move. And yeah, we emigrated in 2001. and have enjoyed our time in America on the whole.

America's been very good, very kind to our family. So we're very glad to be here. Today I'm interested really in hearing some of your thoughts on individualism in education. First, I'd like you, if you could, to briefly summarize what you mean by transgression for our listeners, and then we can move into how this applies to education. And then we can move into maybe some specific example

on what you think this looks like within a specific curriculum, and then also how this connects to being a human. So if you could first talk a little bit about individualism, what this is and where it comes from. Yeah, individualism, of course, is very dear to the American heart in many ways. But the narrative I give in my books on expressive individualism is really that after the Reformation, what one sees emerging over time in Europe and North America.

For a variety of reasons, not merely intellectual but also material reasons, is an increasing emphasis upon inner feelings of the individual as authoritative for who we are. It's both a reaction, I think, to the collapse of authority that one sees in the centuries after the Reformation, where the world becomes more fluid and liquid, where the church, no longer has the dominant authority within society that it once had. And take for Descartes, for example, it raises the question of, you know, where can I find certainty? What is the constant factor in my life? And that tends to focus on the individual. And my argument relative to transgression is this, that as soon as you start arguing that the individual is constituted by

his or her feelings and desires and finds their authenticity in being able to outwardly perform those desires and leads to a great suspicion of cultural norms. And you see this expressed most dramatically say in Friedrich Nietzsche when he's talking about nihilism and he says, you know, one of the aspects of nihilism is herd mentality. People go with the flow. They conform to the way society is. And the problem with that, of course, is how do you know it's really you? Or why is it not, why do you not simply become, in the words of Oscar Wilde, somebody who's living the life of somebody else? And so my argument, my recent argument is that in the modern world, we tilt towards transgression. Now, often Christians, of course, give a specific biblical content

to the idea of transgression. It's the breaking of God's law. What I mean by transgression is perhaps less loaded and broader than that, and that is the need constantly to break with whatever has become the established or sacred norm of the previous generation. How do you know that you're a genuine person? Well, you can only really know that by breaking with the hurt, by stepping outside the bounds of what has previously considered proper behavior or proper beliefs, for example. We see that both on the left and the right today. When you think of the, for example, the 1619 project, which is a very iconoclastic take on the American founding.

That's, I would say, it's a very transgressive project. I'm not making any comment in saying that on whether it's true or false. I'm saying that its significance does not lie in its truth or falsity. Its significance really lies in the fact that it's thumbing its nose, the founding stories of America. And we're also seeing that on the right now, where we have. again, sort of consistent attacks on old classical liberalism. Well, for somebody of my generation, the values of classical liberalism, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, these were obvious truths. Now they're being fundamentally challenged, not just on the left, but on the right.

So without at this stage saying those are immoral positions to hold, I do think they're transgressive positions because they define themselves by, you know, sometimes in an almost adolescent way, holding naughty views and opinions that our parents would have disapproved of. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Markton Hollander and I'm talking with Dr. Carl Truman from Grove City College. Now, what do you mean when you say that society today is all about discussion and I want to connect this to yesterday when you had talked about graduation and how you were required to wear the black socks because I think this is this is really connected and I want to draw that analysis out what are some of the benefits of laying out very

specific strict rules in in society in education and why are we looking to build a team mindset Yeah, it's a good question and it goes really to the heart of what you think human beings are. If your intuitions are that human beings are defined by their individuality, their freedom and their autonomy, you will tilt towards a transgressive mindset. You will come to think that anything that imposes a kind of set of values upon you is inhibiting of your authenticity. So the example you've given of my graduation for those who are listening in, when I graduated at university, everybody had to dress the same for the graduation ceremony. And the reason for that was graduation was graduation was not so much a celebration of individual achievement as it was a rite of passage whereby one joined the team. And I joked to students at Grove all the time that my education was not like theirs. My education, an English grammar school, was all about having my individuality destroyed. Unheard of today. So that I could be made part of the team. When you think that that goes to, some ways, a massive shift that has taken place in our institutions over the last 30, 40, 50 years.

And Yuval Levine of the American Enterprise Institute, I think, nails this rather beautifully when he says, you know, institutions have moved from places of formation to places of performance. And we might draw a contrast, say, between what Aristotle considered to be. be education and modern concepts of education. For Aristotle, we were born kind of as little savages. We have all the right instincts, but education is about allowing us to corral those instincts in a way that prepares us to fulfill our role in the life of the polis or the life of the community. Whereas today a lot of education is about personal, individual, you know, finding your calling, finding your gift, becoming who you already are.

That's the kind of language that, you know, even schools like Hillsdale and Grove City are not innocent, I think, of using that sort of language when we make our pitch to recruit students. And that reflects an interesting shift in how we think about education that can to a lot to this sort of pervasive. Education is about allowing the individual to perform, not about forming the individual for something greater than his or herself. So that's where I would see a big difference in, say, educational institutions today. In my restoration literature class, we just were reading through RASA list right now.

And there it's very interesting how, yeah, kind of thinking through what the impact of choices are and how that's all connected. So I think there's an interesting connection to be made here with how kind of the abundance of choices that we have today in society. Like, yeah. I mean, your work in theology and in history, you probably have a much better understanding of that than many in our culture do today of what we. we've gone through in the past. We've never had so many opportunities and experiences at our fingertips flying across the globe, right? Yeah.

Yeah, it's very interesting that I taught at a Samurai for many years. We had quite a lot of sub-Saharan African students at the Samarine. And sometimes just talking to them about their experience of going into a supermarket was interesting. That when they first arrived in America, they would stand in front of the, say, the pain killer aisle in the supermarket and not know what. to do because they had so many choices. That's a trivial example. But even think about religion. I'm a big believer in religious freedom. But religious freedom is not an unqualified good

in that when you have religious freedom, religion becomes a choice. And this leads to what Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, says, he makes this very interesting comment where he says that, you can believe the same things as somebody believed in the year 1500. You can believe that the tomb was empty on the third day. You can believe Jesus performed the miracles. You can believe Jesus for the incarnate son of God. But you cannot believe in the same way because today you choose to believe in a way that nobody in 1500 would have experienced the choice to believe. And it's always, it's kind of haunted me as a comment that has that goes to the heart of, yep, even even religion itself has become subject to consumer choice.

And I'm not a Catholic, but I have Catholic friends who say, that's why you shouldn't be a Protestant. Well, my response to that is, but even Catholics, they choose to be Catholics today. And I twist the knife a little bit by saying even Catholics are Protestants today because they choose to be Catholic. We cannot escape this framework of choice. And as you correctly say, that does shape how we experience the world

and how we understand our own place within the world. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Markton Hollander. I'm talking with Dr. Carl Truman from Grove City College. Now, I'm really curious about what the implications are of what you're saying and how it really relates to what we should be thinking about when it comes to really

being human, right? Like, this is something that you talk about. What does it mean to be human? How are we teaching this to people? What are some very specific examples that you've found to be able to help teachers think about how they're working on their curriculum to really address this modern kind of phenomena that we're dealing with today? Yeah, that's a great question.

And it's something that I've wrestled. with, as I'm sure many Hillsdale professors have wrestled with, you know, for all of our own traditional conservative convictions. We know that the kids coming into our classrooms, they've grown up in a world of smartphones. They've grown up in a very, very different kind of world to the one we grew up in. So I think as a teacher, you're always looking for, you're looking for that point of contact. You're looking for that thing that speaks to young people, but can then be used to draw them towards the truth. And one of the things that I've found helpful, I teach a capstone humanities course at Grove, which is in some ways it's supposed to be a way of making a good

pitch for traditional Christianity in the modern world. And I played around with various ways of teaching this over the years. But one way that I found that has had significance for the young people I teach is this, to set it up as a question of human beings, we all want to be free and we all want to belong. How do we tie those two things together? Because the great thing in the post-COVID world is most of the kids we teach experienced a certain lack of freedom in their high school year. So it's pretty easy to say, anybody here enjoy lockdown during COVID, nobody ever puts the hands up. So why didn't you enjoy it? Because you intuitively experience the world as a free person. And when somebody inhibits your freedom, that's uncomfortable.

You don't like that. On the other hand, I would say to them, you know, who here wants friends? Who wants to get married? Who wants to have special people in their lives that they can turn to in times of trouble? Everybody puts up their hand. So you want to belong. You want to be free and you want to belong. And then I go, well, it's kind of tough to do those two things because to belong is to sacrifice

some freedom. to be free is to risk not belonging. And what I do in my class is I then look at the sort of the history of modern thought from the perspective of, okay, let's look at it to see how adequately these different thinkers answer the question of tying together freedom and belonging. And what I eventually do is make the pitch that it's actually in the church that we find freedom and belonging most harmoniously connected. And I draw on the analogy that scripture makes between marriage and Christ and the church. And I say, you know, the interesting thing about a marriage is, what are the longest and happiest marriage is characterized by? Well, it's where freedom and belonging become one and the same thing. The desire of each spouse matches the desire of the other spouse.

And therefore, doing what I want freely is actually doing what my wife wants to do. So we belong to each other, but we're also free. And it takes time to get there. If you're married, you're constantly moving towards that ideal. And then I move to Christ and the church. And I say, and that's what Christianity is saying when it says, the marriage of Christ and the church, what is that? That's where true humanity is realized in union with Christ.

Now, do you think there's any way to kind of merge that? So like you place a lot of emphasis on the church, but how like do you have any suggestions for thinking about this conversation within the context of like the public school setting? There are teachers there who are really grappling with some of these larger questions. How do you do that on an angle that accurately represents what we're trying to do and try. trying to understand humanity as we're going through such a crisis in culture. Yeah, it's very hard. Because the public schools is a very hard place to do that because there's a lot of very explicit ideological drives at play now in the public school system.

But if there's a public school teacher listening in and first of all, I'd want to say, what an amazing calling you have. You know, you can make a difference in the classrooms where you are. Secondly, I would say set it up in such a way. that it, you know, to quote Jeremiah, which the bit from Jeremiah that Augustine uses in City of God, Book 19, seek the welfare of the city. There are ways you can talk to kids in a completely non-religious context where you still speak to things that they experience. So, for example, you know, everybody wants to live in a town where it's safe for people to walk the

streets without fear of violence. Everybody wants friends. Everybody does want a good community, or at least everybody who's sane wants a good community. I would say to public school teachers, latch onto those things that most people intuitively regard as goods and see if you can move your pupils, your students to thinking about how to attain that. You don't need to be a Christian, to think that there is a, in the Aristotelian sense, strong political dimension to being a human being that we are part of a polis, we're part of a community. And I think, you know, odd to tell some of the most obnoxious ideological pathologies today are sort of perversions of that desire. And I think what we need to do is show that, yeah, so-and-so is pressing for this thing.

through their use of whatever theoretical framework they have, actually we can achieve that good without having to engage in the perverse ideology that's being used there. Now, at a younger age, kind of at the K-12 level, what advice would you have for teachers kind of thinking about this in their classroom because they don't have access to that range of experience? I would say, on one level, fire your kid's imagination.

I could be making the terrible error here of extrapolating from what worked for me to what's good for everybody. But I'm very grateful that I grew up in a home. Neither of my parents went to college, but they encouraged me to read books that fired my imagination because they'd never had the opportunities that I was going to have. They encouraged me to read books that fired my imagination, fiction and nonfiction from an early age. I was lucky to have teachers at the schools I went to where they fired my imagination with great literature. And sometimes not such great literature.

I love the Sherlock Holmes stories. They're not great literature. But they gave me a love for detective fiction, a love for mysteries. They made the world a bigger and more interesting place for me. So I would say to parents teaching K to 12, Okay, you don't get some of the great social opportunities that those of us who teach the sort of 18 to 22 year old bracket get. But don't allow that to lead you to think that what you do isn't vitally important.

Again, my later intellectual academic cultural life was profoundly shaped by my years at grammar school, what you would call high school. I mean, going back to my first answer, you know, that Terry Jones lecture. set my imagination on fire. Teach the kids that the world is an exciting, an exciting place. Thank you so much for joining us here. Our guest has been Dr. Carl Truman and I'm Markton Hollander on Radio Free Hillsdale 1017 FM.