Thoughts About the Charleston, SC Shooting

Wednesday, June 17th, a man entered the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in the city of Charleston, South Carolina. He sat through the entire service.  He listened to the words spoken. It's said that he even prayed with the congregation.

At the end of the service the man opened fire on the congregation, reloading a total of five times and slaying (murdering) 9 people, sparing only 3. His purpose was plain: He was there to kill black people. His sole reason for sitting through an entire prayer service with 12 other people and then killing most of them was the color of their skin.

Some of the victims of the shooting.
I won't show you the face of the perpetrator.

People will want to know why he did it. They will talk about his reasoning, whether or not he has terrorist affiliations, or even if he was mentally ill. I've seen people on Facebook talking about it and I've read all the headlines. Many people are going to talk about it until the next thing in the news takes its place and I'm certain that no one is going to care what I have to say on the matter. (Truthfully, I've had quite a bit of thought put into what I was going to say and I'm still not sure where I'm finally going to take this, even as I write it.)

We live in the United States of America in the year 2015 and a man walked into a church, was presumably under the presentation of the Word, and then opened fire on a group of people because of the color. of. their. skin.  

As a South Carolinian, as a person, and as a Christian, I am definitely angry. I am also very sad. 

People are going to commit atrocities no matter how well-cultured, well-raised, or well-educated. That much is certain. There is something in humans that cannot be removed by breeding, learning, or by any form of punishment or threat. It is squelched in many people to the point that they can live productive lives in society, doing good things, and helping each other. But, it's still there and it's a ravenous and overwhelming poison that will overtake a person with expediency if the things that keep that person functioning are removed. Perhaps it's a job or a person or a dream, whatever that thing is, that if taken from a person can push them over the edge. 

Everyone has had a really bad day before. Heck, sometimes you have a couple of really bad days. But, what if you had a series of horrible days and there was no one to pull you out of it? How long could you hold on before you snapped?  How long could you fight that poison that lives deep inside you?

Please understand, I am not making excuses for this man. There is no excuse. This event was an act of evil.  And this evil is everywhere. This is a caution for all of you reading.  There is a beast inside waiting to devour you and anyone around you, if you let it.  If you are what people frequently refer to as "a good person," you will most often resist this beast-- you will fight it-- and, for most people, that will be enough to keep them from walking into a building and acting on whatever cruel and vicious thought has jumped into their mind for the day (week/month/year).  However, it will still whisper for you to do things in the dark... where other people cannot see and there is no fear of retribution for any wrong committed.  

"No one will know."  "Nobody is looking."  "You can get away with it."

Be aware: If you are not a Christian, feel free to read on, but be aware that this will likely conflict with your worldview (which I challenge all people to do.)

This beast is sin. It whispers to us at all times, urging us to do harm, pulling us away from doing good for others. It's something with which we are born and it is not something that we can ever escape with our own strength. It is only by the Grace of God that we can overcome such a relentless enemy.  It is only by the power of the Cross that we can resist sin and Satan, because we will eventually fail.  We will lose our strength and we will fail. 

If you have been redeemed; if you have been washed in the Blood of the Lamb; if the old man has been crucified with Christ and you are born again, then you don't need to worry about why this man did what he did. There are certainly reasons that present themselves in the form of racism, possible mental illness, and flawed reasoning, but these are merely symptoms of a larger problem: sin.  It's a problem to which you are not immune if you confront it on your own without the power of Christ. 

You have accepted Christ as your salvation, but do not ignore your need for Christ in your daily life. There will never come a time in your life when you can do this on your own. As believers, we must strive to rely on the Gospel and the finished work of Christ to resist the poison that lives within us and within the world.

You may find yourselves asking, as I often do,"What's wrong with people?" (I can hear my mother's voice in that.)

Don't wonder. You know what's wrong with people. We need Christ.

In the wake of this horrible tragedy, re-commit yourself to rely on the power of Christ.  Pray for your loved ones to come to a saving knowledge of Jesus. Pray for the families dealing with this pain.  Love your neighbor and your enemy.  Give to those in need.  And as much as you may not want to, pray that the shooter is confronted with the reality of his sin and wrongdoing and will humble himself before the Lord and ask for the forgiveness which we all deeply need and none of us deserve.  This man meant evil, but God can take this evil and bring about good.

In Christ,

Stephen

The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy

This is a response paper from my Philosophy senior seminar at the University of South Carolina. It is untouched and unedited from its original format, so I apologize for any potential errors.


1. “This need and principle… is the necessity of a deliberate control of policies by the method of intelligence, an intelligence which is not the faculty of intellect honored in text-books and neglected elsewhere, but which is the sum-total of impulses, habits, emotions, records, and discoveries which forecast what is desirable and undesirable in future possibilities, and which contrive ingeniously in behalf of imagined good.  Our life has no background of sanctified categories which we bay fall back; we rely upon precedent as authority only to our own undoing….”
-John Dewey, “The Need For a Recovery of Philosophy, pg 231 of Pragmatism, edited by Louis Menand




2.   Dewey is drawing the distinction here between a text-book philosophy and a real-word philosophy.  It is one thing to take one (or more, but less than the total) aspect of the intelligence or the human experience and raise it above all others in an attempt to explain human intelligence and function in terms of that one (or more) aspect.  Instead, human intelligence should be understood as an amalgamation of a variety of things, not subject to such distilling and, indeed, not limited by the past understandings or dogmas held by (supposed) thinking men.  Truly, this conglomeration should include every aspect of the human experience and every human discovery in order for this human intelligence to make cogent hypotheses about the world and, following that, in making the best decisions in all areas of human life, be they government, religion, education or whatever other endeavor human beings partake in.  If humans merely rely on the past as an answer to the future, at least according to Dewey, it will lead “to our own undoing….”




3.   When Dewey speaks of “the need for a recovery of philosophy,” it is not so much that he is saying that humans need to pick philosophy up again as a practice (although, if by philosophy it is meant “better philosophy,” then perhaps he is), but that the current state (in his time) of philosophy was such that philosophers had concerned themselves with things that did not necessarily matter to anything outside their discipline of taking dead men’s ideas on test drives and trying to apply outdated systems of thought to modern problems without thought of what that means in reality. 


What Dewey would mean by reality is what actually happens… and all things actually happen.  He says, “While all that happens is equally real-- since it really happens-- happenings are not of equal worth.”  What defines their worth are the importance human beings place on them, perhaps out of necessity to their existence or merely by convention (such as the use of money as a means of trade).  To speak of a reality (or consequences of that reality)  that is somehow greater than the reality that human beings directly experience is to speak of something which humans have no apprehension of and actually draws human attention away from the issues at hand, whatever they may be.  Philosophy then, need be concerned with those things which are of direct interest of humanity: that which happens.


It follows, then, that any attempt to magnify one aspect of the human experience above all the others will, of course, skew this purpose of philosophy, because it will not allow the fullness of reality to come to bear on human intelligence, but merely a caricature of reality in which the artist has taken a feature which he has noticed more than others and expanded it so that when other men look at the picture he has drawn, they can initially see nothing but the enormously deformed feature and will come to judge all other things in the picture they eventually stumble across.  


For Dewey, the creation of a view of intelligence (an it’s application) which considers all these things will lead to “our salvation.”  It is not to say that all people will be willing (or even perhaps able) to think and operate in such a manner, but what is important here is that philosophers strive to create such a reality and foster the growth and articulation of such a thing. 




4. Within the scope of Pragmatism as a whole, many things have been considered: Peirce discussed “meaning,” James considered “truth,” and, here, Dewey speaks of “intelligence” and “knowledge.”  For the most part (with James being a slight exception), the three men have really been shooting at the same target.  Peirce’s “meaning” concerned itself with the proper defining of the terms which people so easily throw around; definitions not in terms of other words but in terms of reality.  James’ “truth” is really a way of talking about belief, in which the “truth” of things to people is reliant primarily upon the idea “working” for them in a given situation.  


What that will be taken to mean, in the light of these two other pragmatists’ ideas (and for the sake of consistency) is that something “works” in that it is the logical conclusion of all pre-existent ideas within the person, e.g.- “Daddy loves me,” “the floor is solid,” “I am hungry,” etc.  However, just because it is the logical conclusion of all the pre-existent ideas within the person, it doesn’t make it true (at least not in the sense Peirce or Dewey would put it), but it does allow the person to live effectively within their surroundings.  It is a giant puzzle (in which the puzzle is reality), in which not all of the pieces are present, and it forces the person to imagine the remainder of the picture in light of the pieces which he does have.  Even false ideas about reality are part of reality, so they would count as pieces of the whole, but that is really just mentioned in passing and it of no importance for the remainder of this discussion. 


Dewey, then, when he speaks of “knowledge” and “intelligence” speaks primarily about the discovery of the remainder of reality’s picture.  It means an open-minded (not being held back by pre-suppositions or the fear of being wrong) look at the world around man and creating a developing (and developing is key) world-view founded upon the observations, interactions, and thoughts of human beings and bringing the full weight of all those things upon man’s perception of reality, which will, point to what Peirce calls “the one true conclusion,” also called “the way things really are,” or “reality.”   What both these men are considering is a situation where human experience, expanding in all direction ad infinitum finally comes to the ultimate conclusion, which is reality.  This is not the same thing as an ultimate conclusion about reality, because that conclusion would have to be included in itself.  It is instead, absolute understanding of reality or knowledge of reality.  


The question here is this: Has Philosophy made the recovery that Dewey so eloquently pleaded for?  The answer is a resounding, “Maybe.”  The fact that papers are being written, classes being given, and conversations being had regarding this issue is definitely a plus.  It is less and less that philosophers are arguing with each other over things of no consequence and more and more that they are discussing things, defining terms, and struggling to come to agreement, instead of coming to a victory in debate.  Philosophers in a variety of fields of philosophy are coming to conclusions based on the very terms on which Peirce and Dewey talked about.  However, while there are some very good things happening, there also exist the “point-counterpoint” arguments of those unwilling to seek greater levels of understanding (as if the point and counterpoint were the only two options!), endless rehashings of ancient systems of thought without consideration of what they really mean in the grand scheme of things, and the general unquestioned acceptance of ideas based upon things like religion or political party-lines.  A resounding, “Maybe.”


What then, is the next course of action?  To seek truth without bias, of course; for things to be said as they really are meant (which is to say, the meaning of what one is saying); and the laying of all ideas, discoveries, thoughts, and the like out upon the table so that the current conception of “things as they really are” can be as clear as possible.  Of course this conception may change upon the formulation of new ideas or upon the having of new experiences, but that is part of the process.  It is a steady maturing of humanity’s  conception of reality, where each new idea or experience point more and more to “the one true conclusion.”