We Who Wrestle With God: In the Image of God
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Thank you. Yeah, so I'm very curious about tonight's talk because I have a lot of things buzzing around in my imagination that are related to the topic of identity, and I'm very curious to see if I can weave them together. So I guess we're going to find out. It's a lot of fun to try to do something. I do a different lecture every night. I have a different question every night. It's a lot of fun to see if I can make something coherent out of a genuine investigation. It's kind of a high wire act, but it's very entertaining. It's fun to do it with an audience too because, and I can see simultaneously if I can manage to push my thought forward in a manner that's coherent, but also in a manner that's communicable and comprehensible.
It's a great privilege to be able to have that opportunity. So, identity. You know, we have identity politics. And that's a core element of the culture war. So identity has become political. It isn't necessarily the case that identity would be political. It could be psychological, it could be sacred, it could be patriotic, it could be national. There's lots of... Manners in which identity could manifest itself, and it's a mystery that it's become political. Now, it has something to do with what Jonathan made reference to, is when the sacred collapses, so that's the death of God, when the highest order of things collapses, it doesn't disappear, it's as if it plummets downward. And what's happened in our society is that the sacred has become political.
And that's really bad because there's a space for the sacred and there's a space for the political. That's why you render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. And you don't want to confuse the two because if you do, then God becomes Caesar and that's not a good thing. And Caesar becomes God and that is a much worse thing. And that's the situation that we're in. And so that means, and this is part of the conundrum that we have, You know, and maybe it's part of what Nietzsche prognosticated too, because he believed that the consequence of the death of God would be that human beings would have to create their own values. And I believe that's wrong. I don't believe we can create our own values.
But to give Nietzsche his due, which is always an important thing to do, because he was a genius, it certainly... is the case that we have to rethink, it seems to be that we have to rethink what identity is from first principles. Now, can we do that successfully? We're going to find out because the culture war is a war because of the difficulty of rethinking identity from first principles. What is it? Is it political? Is it ethnic? Is it racial? Is it economic? Is it desire? Jonathan pointed to that. Are you nothing but what it is that you want or what something within you wants? Is it subjective? Like is your identity only something that you control? All of those questions, that's like 10 questions.
Every single one of those questions is extraordinarily difficult and we seem to be stuck with all of them. So, We're going to try tonight to see if we can take identity apart from first principles and see where we get with it. So let's start with something basic. One of the things that I thought through deeply when I was a university professor was how to evaluate someone's writing. When you're evaluating their writing, you're evaluating their thinking. And the purpose of evaluating their thinking is not so much to grade them, to put them in the appropriate bin, but to provide them with the corrective feedback that would enable them to become better thinkers. When you're criticizing someone, if you're doing it
in a sophisticated way, you're helping them separate the wheat from the chaff. And one of the things I learned as a grader of essays, let's say, was that one of the most effective things I could do to students wasn't to circle what they did wrong, which was often 95% of the essay. But seriously, like our school system does a very bad job of teaching people to write.
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