Alexandra Petri’s satirical piece in The Atlantic reminded me of one those never-posteds, something from Nijay Gupta on the Slow Theology podcast.
Petri:
The terrorists are the ones without masks. They’re the ones yelling “No!” or “Stop!” or “Shame!” or blowing whistles. Sometimes they brandish cameras at federal agents. Sometimes they wantonly swallow whole canisters of pepper spray. These are just some of their diabolical tactics.
Gupta, on the 9th commandment:
It makes a lot of sense why this commandment meant so much to God to make it into the top 10. Because if God‘s people are intended to be the light of Yahweh in the ancient world, and they are not trustable — nothing matters. Nothing whatsoever matters if these are not people who can be trusted for their words. It is impossible to be a covenant of Yahweh, a community of Yahweh, and be a deceptive community, because this is a God who cares about reality.
I think this is essentially the same thing that Hannah Arendt was saying when she said, in defense of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, that much more meaningful than declaring “Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus” (“Let justice be done though the world may perish”) is to say “Fiat veritas pereat mundus” (“Let truth be done though the world may perish”).
“Is it not obvious,” she asks, “that [every virtue and every principle] become mere chimeras if the world, where alone they can be manifested, is in jeopardy?” She goes on:
[N]o human world destined to outlast the short life span of mortals within it will ever be able to survive without men willing to do what Herodotus was the first to undertake consciously—namely, λέγειν τα έόντα, to say what is. No permanence, no perseverance in existence, can even be conceived of without men willing to testify to what is and appears to them because it is.
Here’s how Arendt ends that famous essay “Truth and Politics”:
Since I have dealt here with politics from the perspective of truth, and hence from a viewpoint outside the political realm, I have failed to mention even in passing the greatness and the dignity of what goes on inside it. I have spoken as though the political realm were no more than a battlefield of partial, conflicting interests, where nothing counted but pleasure and profit, partisanship, and the lust for dominion. In short, I have dealt with politics as though I, too, believed that all public affairs were ruled by interest and power, that there would be no political realm at all if we were not bound to take care of life’s necessities.… From this perspective, we remain unaware of the actual content of political life—of the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new. However, what I meant to show here is that this whole [political] sphere, its greatness notwithstanding, is limited—that it does not encompass the whole of man’s and the world’s existence. It is limited by those things which men cannot change at will. And it is only by respecting its own borders that this realm, where we are free to act and to change, can remain intact, preserving its integrity and keeping its promises. Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.