In a time of big questions, do we want answers?

OPINION:

More than 60 years ago, in “The Abolition of Man,” C.S. Lewis challenged all thinking people to ask questions with honesty, humility, and a hunger for truth.

He argued that in failing to do so, we would become a nation of “men without chests,” a culture of heartless people satisfied with our own subjective constructs and divorced from any common agreement of what is right and wrong, a society of disconnected individualists who care little for anything but their own opinions.

Lewis warned of a time when questions would lie fallow in a field of disingenuous inquiry with little interest in a harvest of answers.

Who can argue that today is not a time of big questions — questions such as:

• Life: When does it begin and end, and who has the right to define it and take it?

• Climate change: Is its premise principled or political? Does science drive this agenda, or is it laden with emotion and manipulation

• Sexuality: What is healthy and best for body, soul, family and society?

• Tolerance: Are all worldviews morally, epistemologically and ontologically equal? Do all paths lead to the same summit, or are some bound for the cliffs of despair, destruction and death?

• Justice: If Marxist presuppositions of critical theory are canonized, then isn’t the concept of justice arbitrary and meaningless? It’s all about class conflict and survival of the fittest, isn’t it? The strong should subdue the weak, shouldn’t they? Let the evolutionary circle prevail. There is no moral reason to object to those with power canceling those without it. We all know that morality is really nothing more than the subjective imposition of bourgeois rules upon their powerless victims, don’t we?

So many questions, but are we honest enough to want answers at the expense of our personal or political agendas? Do we assume the existence of right and wrong in our asking, or do we care more about silencing our opponents than correcting ourselves?

In “The Great Divorce,” Lewis challenged such intellectual laziness and political expediency.

“Our opinions were not honestly come by,” he said. “We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. … You know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause.”

He continued: “You and I were playing with loaded dice. We didn’t want the other to be true. We were afraid of a breach with the spirit of the age, afraid of ridicule. … Having allowed [ourselves] to drift, unresisting … accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed [the truth]. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend.”

Lewis concluded: “Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers and were glad when you found them. Become that child again. … You have gone far wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.”

So, I ask again: Do we want answers? Or are we more interested in what seems “modern and successful,” seeking “good marks and saying the kind of things that win applause”?

Do we embody the childlike sincerity admonished by Lewis, or do we look more like manipulative teenagers hungry for popularity? Do we want our arguments to be true, or would we rather they just be “fashionable”?

In his book “Time for Truth,” Os Guinness challenges this adolescent tendency to prefer fads over facts: “Truth does not yield to opinion or fashion,” he says. “It is simply true, and that is the end of it. It is one of the Permanent Things. Truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it.”

Both Lewis and Mr. Guinness make it clear that confidence in what’s popular often has little to do with an argument’s veracity. Truth is not determined by vim, vigor or votes.

If we really want answers — If we genuinely want our ideas to be confirmed if they are right and corrected if they are wrong — then maybe we should humbly set aside our adolescent desire for “good marks” and instead seek what is true, even if it is dreadfully unpopular, and give up what is false, even if it is a dearly loved passion.

The integrity of real questions demands nothing less.

• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.