Crumbs from a Bum: Exploring the Intellectually Stagnant Impulses of an Inattentive Age

By Matthew B. Wincowski

Finding a coherent set of answers to lifes age-old questions can be an onerous undertaking. Yet the questions abound in our culture, and a rational collection of answers is seemingly ungraspable. Commoners have been led to believe that beliefs are irreversibly inconsequential. Youngsters are boldly instructed to merely seek success. Teachers unblushingly preach to students that there is no such thing as truth.
With uncountable opinions and beliefs put forth, who ought we to trust? Should we give credence to the preachy words of secularists who do not even have the backbone to adhere to a logically consistent worldview? Are we to trust the pop psychologists who unmindfully and unabashedly bypass lifes essential questions? Would it be shrewd of us to subscribe to the pluralists who lack the decency to study incommensurable worldviews, yet absurdly accept contrasting worldviews as equally valid? Whom shall we trust?
In a culture where common sense has commonly vanished amongst commoners, we would do well to welcome common sense into our lives. Thinking episodically has become the modern routine, and yet, such a routine suffocates us in the ruins of our own lack of thinking, for thinking episodically is really no way of thinking at all. Perhaps, just perhaps, the answers to lifes most pressing questions are within our reach, but first we must be willing to embrace common sense.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Sep 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490851112

Matthew B. Wincowski

Matt Wincowski is a reluctant landscaper who prefers to landscape his thoughts rather than land. A self-proclaimed bum, Matt seeks coherent answers, not money. He spends his time reading books on apologetics, polemics, and logic. Matt lives with his beautiful wife in Nyack, New York.

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Copyright © 2014 Matthew B Wincowski.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-5112-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-5111-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014916083

WestBow Press rev. date: 09/16/2014

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part 1: Examining Culture’s Thoughts

Chapter 1:   Truth and Relativism

Chapter 2:   Atheism and Absurdity

Chapter 3:   Agnosticism, Skepticism, and Ignorance

Part 2: The Silly Business of Busyness

Chapter 4:   Diversion, Busyness, and Small Talk

Chapter 5:   Sin: Real or Unreal

Part 3: Discovering Truth in Common Sense

Chapter 6:   The Uniqueness of Jesus

Chapter 7:   A Condensed Defense of Christianity

Chapter 8:   A Call to Biblical Christianity

Conclusion

End Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

To the thinkers—those who value the life of the mind, those who ache for truth, those who valiantly turn off the television and turn on their mind periodically. Yes, to those who lose sleep, throb inwardly, speak straightforwardly, and seek passionately—all for the truth. For the bums who don’t merely seek comfort in the superficiality of the—squeamishness!—American Dream, but rather explore for something a bit more adultish like, say, truth! For the bums who are brave enough to search for truth, find truth, accept truth, and then spend the rest of their days resting in the truth.

INTRODUCTION

No one dares to be a genuine self; everyone is hiding in some kind of ‘togetherness.’¹

—Soren Kierkegaard

When the life of the mind is no longer valued, it inevitably follows that the most mindless ideas will not only be highly believed but also viewed as entirely mindful. A generation swept away by relativism is a generation that is consistently degenerating. The uninquisitiveness of moderns is reflected by their decision to expeditiously accept illogical beliefs. The clumsy-minded man is routinely awestruck by the stalest ideas. It is here in our culture that we see mindlessness seemingly triumphant over all else. The modern mind is being shaped by those who think it unwise to believe in absolutes. Thus, millions are being deluded into unthinkably thinking there is little or no difference between logical and illogical thinking, intelligence and unintelligence, truths and untruths. Man’s desire to live in a world of fantasy is evident from the world of ideas he comes up with for disbelieving in God. That is, man goes above and beyond in order to ultimately believe in nothing above or beyond himself.

One thing readily noticeable about modern thought is that it is enmeshed in contradictions, for moderns think they can come to credible conclusions apart from logic. They cannot. Sensu stricto, logic always defeats the illogical arguer, not the other way around. The intellectual incuriousness of moderns is quite telling. What exactly does it tell us? For starters, it tells us that moderns are really not interested in the reasonableness of reason or coming to logical conclusions about logic. This is evidenced by the growing number of individuals who unabashedly state that reason, logic, and truth do not exist.

Relativism is the abandonment of thinking, reasoning, logic, truth, etc. And when logic has been stripped of its value, you can bet the shirt on your back with confidence that the only thing left for people to believe will inevitably be illogical. The very rejection of absolutes is self-defeating, as any logical logician (or novice thinker, like myself) would tell you, for in the renouncement of absolutes there is an implicit positing of an absolute. A worldview that is strictly horizontal is one that is intellectually bankrupt, for it is only a vertical worldview that can begin to hold intellectual weight.

To an easily impressionable culture like ours, it can be put down as fact that most moderns will come to believe in any idea that isn’t a logical one. It is unsurprising, then, that many moderns dimwittedly regard belief as inconsequential, for the only thing modern about moderns is that they typically think nonsensically, and nonsensically don’t think much.

And in this age of intellectual sleepiness, it is inevitable that irrationality will rise to new heights. Where logic is unwelcomed, senselessness will necessarily be worshiped. Intellectual sloppiness produces what it has always produced: stodgy conversation, chaotic thought, and restless wanderings of an unmindful mind. One of the first steps toward a coherent worldview, which is both a babyish step and a courageous one, is to unlearn much of what you have learned. In fact, oftener than not, learning begins once we unlearn the nonsense the world has taught us. In a culture that heedlessly overlooks the relevance and cogency of coherence, one must untwist the messy philosophies the world has emphasized so that one can have a philosophy that is logically consistent. Yet modern man sloppily adheres to unreal views of the real world.

When the laws of logic are quick to be ignored, relativism is quick to be embraced. When orthodoxy is not taken seriously, orthopraxy will inevitably be set aside on a shelf to be untouched. Flummery is believed when one no longer seeks truth.

Because our age has bound itself to drivel, it should be unsurprising that our age has come to believe in everything illogical. This self-inflicted incoherence that moderns have come to believe wholeheartedly is very compelling to the man who feels uncompelled to be logically consistent. Again, when logic is left behind, there is nothing left to believe but nonsense. When the modern man decides to argue that there is no such thing as truth, we ought to ask him why he is arguing against himself, for his claim that there is no truth is itself a truth-claim. The point is this: it’s a rare happening to find a man who still has an aching desire for truth. Today’s man doesn’t want to find freedom in the truth but rather wants to free himself from the truth, for he prefers to live a fantasy.

One of modern man’s weakest weaknesses is his unwillingness to delve into life’s crucial questions, and this is evidenced by his willingness to make a comfy home out of small talk. One needn’t wonder why small talk has become the chosen mode of communication, for incessant small talk itself reveals its reasons for the abandonment of authentic conversation, which is this: diversion.—In a relentless attempt to not truly think about life’s crucial questions and the implications of how we respond to the crucial questions that face us, moderns (small talkers) divert themselves by blathering about the inconsequential. That is, they attempt to reduce the significance of life’s vital questions by dodging them, while also overvaluing the trivial by incessantly treating the trivial as though it were the significant. In other words, moderns will come up with unreasonable reasons to avoid the unavoidable, while also creating unreasonable reasons to treat the insignificant as the significant. They will talk about everything trivial, as if the trivial were the significant: money, popularity, power, etc. Ravi Zacharias said, As a sloganeering culture, we have unblushingly trivialized the serious and exalted the trivial because we have bypassed the rudimentary and necessary steps of logical argument. Reality can be lost when reason and language have been violated.²

Small talk coupled with busyness is the precisely perfect recipe for mindlessness and ignorance. Like the saying "Minus solum quam cum solus esset", so this is also true of our age: man is most bored in his busyness. Yes, believe it or not, busyness is often the abuse of freedom, for there is no freedom in ongoing activity, but merely active acting, which has become the standard mode nowadays, and the seemingly irrevocable love we have for outward movement, perpetual preoccupation, and the urge to be unceasingly hasty—tremble!—only evinces our inward laziness. Along with small talk, busyness produces unproductive thinkers. Put small talk and busyness together, and what you end up with are men who really have no interest at all in being men, id est, men who prefer to bypass both the intellectual and moral realities of life—men who would rather busily speak endlessly on topics of little relevance, such as—fret!—money, success, and successfully acquiring more money, rather than thinking passionately and honestly about this undeniably fragile life we have been given. Have you ever noticed (you surely have) that men who are strictly money-oriented do not really own money, but money owns them? Alas, those who dimwittedly believe that they possess money are those who are undoubtedly possessed by money. To put it another way, those who think they are possessors and owners and largely in control of money and, consequently, think money will take them somewhere, are those who are quite bankrupt and controlled, indeed, very much controlled by money. G. K. Chesterton wisely said, To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.³ Putting much of one’s energies and efforts toward acquiring large sums of money and large dreams of dreaming that such money will deliver you to your wishful destination, is to deem oneself daffier than a one-sided stick.

The Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, said, People who are talkative certainly chatter away about something and, indeed, their one wish is to have an excuse for more gossip…⁴ The traffic of small talk inevitably puts us at an intellectual standstill. It isn’t until we break through the barriers of small talk that we can begin to see the grandness of life. Perpetual small talk is perpetual escapism from life. Oftener than not, people do not deal with the grand questions because they do not want to deal with life itself. Kierkegaard said, They never use the freedoms they do have but demand those they don’t have; they have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.⁵ It is useless to speak swiftly without first thinking deeply. The babbling man will not babble about babbling, for he often is unaware that he is a babbler. If modern man were to reach into the dusty drawers of his mind, he would inevitably find himself confused on how to operate this tool which has gone unused for far too long. Thankfully, the mind is like a muscle, as one person put it, and therefore hope still exists for this mindless age. The tall oddity of today is the unwillingness to see our conversations as quite odd. Those who embrace small talk are those who hardly embrace life. Small talkers talk in such small and insignificant ways, that it can truly be said that they think life is much, much smaller than it happens to be. Today’s man can be described in one word: insouciant. Trying to get a grown man to move away from small talk and toward somewhat of an actual and honest conversation is as difficult as getting a baby to move out of his diaper and onto the toilet: the more you suggest he takes this step, the fussier he gets.

G. K. Chesterton succinctly described moderns about a hundred years ago when he said, But the moderns…have no connected theory that can be stated at all. Their view of life is a hotch-potch of human and superhuman and sub-human ideas, collected everywhere and connected nowhere. The modern muddler likes to think he is the superhuman.⁶ There is a highly nonsensical thought floating around nowadays, which thoughtlessly states that moderns are somehow more progressive and educated in their thinking, but, of course, only an unprogressive and uneducated man would think so highly and admiringly of himself. Chesterton wrote, We talk, by a sort of habit, about Modern Thought, forgetting the familiar fact that moderns do not think.⁷

With the increasing rise of small talk, we should inevitably see a decline in common sense. Unsurprisingly, common sense isn’t all that common nowadays. Chesterton was not slow to comment on common sense, pointing out that common sense is that extinct branch of psychology.⁷ Commenting on Chesterton’s comment, Dale Ahlquist said, The only thing surprising about common sense is how uncommon it has become.⁸ Commenting on Ahlquist’s comment to Chesterton’s comment, I say this: The reason there is little common sense is because man has chosen to believe in a lot of nonsense. It is, then, unbewildering that man has commonly lacked common sense, for he has always been quick to believe nonsense.

One of the most obvious reasons that modern man has lost his common sense is that he commonly watches the news, while he uncommonly reads a book. Modern man’s definition of learning has become nothing more than listening to some dull chap on television read some words from a screen that he has been told to read from a group of even duller chaps. Modern man treats the television as the ultimate authority, as our greatest outlet for unearthing earthly mysteries.

Modern man is a wonderless wanderer—always moving about and never thinking about life. Due to a lack of thinking, modern man thinks it’s unimportant to do any amount of important thinking.

Man thinks it’s crucially crucial to remain busy in his ways and days, but that is precisely his predicament: busyness is not the solution but the problem. A man who is busy in his ways will undoubtedly have a mind that is slow in its ways. A man paves the streets of his chaotic future by running unhesitatingly through the streets of the present. That is, the more busily a man moves through today, the more lost he will become in his tomorrows. And that is why he must precisely ride the brakes, in order that he can come to a screeching arrival into reality. Man is traveling through life at twice the speed the back roads of life are meant to be traveled, and he then wonders why he can’t taste the beautiful air he is passing through. He is traveling too fast to enjoy the smells, the scenery, the beauty, and even the people around him. He is passing by everything so swiftly that he doesn’t see anything. A man who runs as fast as modern man runs inevitably has no destination in mind. He thinks he is running everywhere, doing everything, and accomplishing much, yet he hasn’t even experienced his own experiences. Modern man cannot see much of anything because he is going through life with such rapidity. One must occasionally stop so that one can see something, though this is unobvious to modern man. To treat life like a highway is to travel through life the wrong way. To go through life the wrong way is to not deeply think about life. And to not think about life is to not truly appreciate life.

Busyness should never be a substitute for introspection, but, of course, only a man who lacks introspection will delve into busyness. A man of great introspection will not fall into busyness, for such a man understands enough to understand that less and less will be understood by modern man becoming busier and busier.

The boredom of busyness and the busyness of boredom are commonly caused by one’s aversion to truth. Boredom isn’t cured by becoming busy. In fact, boredom is multiplied by becoming busy. If busyness didn’t cause boredom, we should be the least bored age of all, for we now have countless gadgets to entertain us: phones, computers, tablets, televisions, video games, iPods, on and on. Ah, but the busier we become with these gadgets, the emptier we shall be. Contrary to popular opinion, you cannot eliminate boredom with endless activity. That, of course, is why boredom was a word not to be found in ancient times, but rather a word that recently came on the horizon. Ernest Van den Haag said, Though the bored person hungers for things to happen to him, the disheartening fact is that when they do he empties them of the very meaning he unconsciously yearns for by using them as distractions. In popular culture even the second coming would become just another barren ‘thrill’ to be watched on television till Milton Berle comes on. No distraction can cure boredom, just as the company so unceasingly pursued cannot stave off loneliness. The bored person is lonely for himself, not, as he thinks, for others. He misses the individuality, the capacity for experience from which he is debarred. No distraction can restore it. Hence he goes unrelieved and insatiable.⁹

Along with small talk and a lack of common sense, indifference has become widespread. And today, many attempt to make a virtue out of indifference. They claim that to be indifferent on matters of faith, God, sin, heaven, hell, salvation, and truth, is to be loving and accepting. Neutrality is the position which doesn’t want to position itself on any side other than the side of neutrality. When it comes to the biggest questions of life, remaining neutral is to demonstrate a lifeless life. Neutrality must exist, if for no other reason, because cowardice exists. Neutrality is cowardice. Nothing is so monstrous as the man who gives his soul to neutrality, a man who won’t pick a side due to fear of being wrong. That is, a man who is neutral fears siding with the wrong side