On contigency

I've recently gained a new appreciation for the ability to hold one's tongue in the midst of contentious and controversial discussions. Part of this appreciation is a direct function of the reality that many of my friends are intellectuals who are engaged in the consciousness of being human. This often means that arguments and agreements often abound in our conversations.

Sometimes, one can only listen and contemplate, left behind in the debris of fast moving conversation. I found myself in such a place yesterday.

The topic at hand was the issue of the multiplicity of doctrine and dogma in Christianity. "Why can't we all just understand things the same," was the question that was asked. Why is "truth" so contentious? Being the rhetorical scholar, this got me thinking about the possible value that contingency has in spurring engagement.

The value, in fact the very existence of rhetoric (however you want to define that term), relies on the existence of uncertainty. Politicians and marketers can spin messages at us in attempts to influence to vote for them because they cannot guarantee they have our support. Conversely, people don't by ad time during prime to broadcast their views over the possibility of the sun rising tomorrow. Once an understanding of the earth's orbit around the sun was established, that issue spoke for itself. Gone were the days that people sat around and debated the issue. In other words, rhetoric (regarding that particular matter) became obsolete.

Rhetoric imposes on us in ways that we cannot avoid. It invades our psyche with a pervasiveness that our best rationalizations sometimes cannot outlast. Rhetoric transforms our emotional state. This transformative nature of rhetoric demands we engage it; that we find reasons of our own either to go along with rhetorical appeals or resist them. In short, reasoned thoughts are the antidote to rhetoric. However, when rhetoric evanesces the needed to protect oneself from it dissipates too. You and I don't go around conjuring ways of rebutting arguments that the sun won't rise tomorrow because no such appeals are addressed at us.

It is this engagement, this need to respond to contingency that makes contingency valuable. If there was no variance of vision for what the ecclesiastical community ought be like, why would we care about engaging the question of what the church ought to be like? If, hypothetically speaking, this country knew for sure that Ralph Nader is going to be the next president, what need would there be to listen to any of the other candidates?

It is precisely in the contingency, in the uncertainty that you and I find impetus to engage in the issues of our day.