For two days last month, the Godless university was no more. Christians crawled out of their hovels and sallied forth out of Anabel Taylor Hall to take over Ho Plaza for nine hours. They displayed the 7,000 (or hundreds, in the case of Cornell) who had not bowed the knee, who had refused to acquiesce to the intellectual suicide of the Godless university.
In mid-March, Christian pastors and apologists (i.e. defenders of Christianity) Cliffe and Stuart Knecthle came to campus, the closest thing to Socrates in Plato’s dialogues coming to fruition. Hundreds of students, not just from Cornell but from all over, gathered together in the center of campus not to hear someone drone on about their worldview but for dialogue. As I watched, mesmerized that such an event could occur at a modern-day university, a friend remarked, “This is the first time I have seen the college circle.” In the college circle, a prominent trope in many college movies, students from different majors and walks of life gather together for discussion.
But why did it take two Christian pastors to bring about this hallmark of the university? We have world-renowned professors and intellectuals. It is simple: The circle is a truth-seeking enterprise. Everyone comes with preconceived notions, which are challenged until contradictions are resolved through reason. This is the genuine Socratic method, not mere proof of claims by authority (e.g. educational background) but reasoning together to find truth. The University no longer seeks the truth because they have bought into the lie that it does not exist.
The only truth is that there is no truth: a statement seemingly copied from George Orwell, but might as well be the modern university’s motto. This thinking has seeped into almost every classroom, poisoning the pursuit of education. Its fruits were on full display when people who did not buy into the myth finally took center stage.
Why does Christianity have to be the only right answer? Many other ways of life also claim to be the way to God. Why are those claims not equally valid? The pastors give an enlightening answer: Christianity claims an exclusive pathway to God; if any other way of living also led to God, that would raise a contradiction. Christianity would be false, and if it were false, why follow it? A similar question the pastors received: Why can’t all religions have some truth? The Apologists explained that such a question could only come from the hubris of an educated Westerner. To think that they would somehow respect all religions by lumping them together as if they did not make exclusive and contradictory claims is incredulous.
Truth is an inherently restrictive exercise. Why care about truth? The post-modern misconception that truth is about one’s perspective is freeing; in this, humanity is unbounded. But a problem arises with this idea, which answers not only why we should care but also why truth forces us to care: objective truth exists whether we want it to or not. Even if all of society were to say that the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east, the next day, the Sun would still rise in the east and set in the west, no matter how much one yells at it.
This is not a bug of truth but a key feature of it. This is what allows us to have meaningful conversations with each other. If everything is based on perspective, then reasoning is useless. If everyone is their own arbiter of truth, how can one be wrong and need correcting? If all the rulers are faulty and there is no true ruler, how can one even correct the scales?
This is not something to mourn over but to celebrate. It allows appeals to be made even above the heads of even the world’s most powerful people. It allows people like Martin Luther King Jr. to say and mean, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” In a world where truth is relative, the universe has no arc, the only burden on humanity is its own imagination. All you can say to Southern slave owners or Adolf Hitler is that personally you think they shouldn’t be doing that. The same as you would say to your drunk friend who wants to go up on the roof during St. Patty’s weekend.
Finally, to address a common refrain against objective truth heard on campus, many people claim to have the truth, so how can we know it? If I say two plus two equals four, another says two plus two equals five, and you say two plus two equals three, does that mean that two plus two does not have an answer? No, it just means that some people cannot do math. But no matter what, two plus two will equal four because lies cannot alter truth; the truth is always true. It used to be the job of universities to seek the truth. Earlier last month, we caught a glimpse of what it looks like, and hopefully, we will see it again.
Armand Chancellor is a fourth year student in the Brooks School of Public Policy. His fortnightly column The Rostrum focuses on the interaction of politics and culture at Cornell. He can be reached at achancellor@cornellsun.com.
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