Tom Cruise recently gave a well-publicized interview in Playboy, quotes from which made the rounds in all sorts of other news outlets. The 49-year-old actor held forth on a variety of subjects, but the comments I found most interesting had to do with his religious beliefs. He basically said that regardless of what he says about his faith, Scientology, someone finds fault:
“If I don’t talk about my religion, if I say I’m not discussing it or different humanitarian things I’m working on, they’re like, ‘He’s avoiding it.’ If I do talk about it, it becomes, ‘Oh, he’s proselytizing.’ … I have respect for what other people believe. What I believe in my own life is that it’s a search for how I can do things better, whether it’s being a better man or a better father or finding ways for myself to improve. Individuals have to decide what is true and real for them.”
At the risk of sounding like one of those haters Tom denounces, I want to think critically (though not, hopefully, crankily) about something he’s said here, something I think is profoundly representative of the postmodern spirit of our age.
One of the hallmarks of postmodernism is the denial of any overarching truth that applies to all of us. Instead, there is only individual, subjective “truth,” i.e., “what’s true for you.” In this way of thinking, every individual is a sovereign agent, crafting his or her own version of reality as it suits that person’s unique purposes.
Now, let’s set aside, for a moment, how ludicrous this perspective is when it’s examined for more than a moment. (Nobody gets to decide, for instance, that they don’t think, say, gravity is true.) Philosophically untenable though this stance may be, Tom Cruise has boiled this mindset down to its purest essence when he says, “Individuals have to decide what is real and true for them.”
Every individual does have decisions to make about what they believe to be real and true—and there are plenty of competing claims out there in the world vying for our attention.
Where Cruise embodies the distilled essence of postmodernism, however, is in the way he tags the two little words “for them” onto the end of that sentiment. In doing so, Cruise affirms and reinforces the prevailing and cherished cultural idea that truth is something we construct individually, subject only to our own shaping will and attitudes, values and perspective.
It’s an alluring idea, a lie that goes all the way back to the serpent in the Garden of Eden trying to convince Eve that God didn’t really mean what He had said about the consequences of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. “‘You will surely not die,’ the serpent said to the woman. ‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil'” (Genesis 2:4-5).
Even though postmodernism is a relatively recent philosophical development, then, the fundamental deception at its core goes all the way back to the dawn of creation. Tom Cruise is just the latest in a long list of people who’ve fallen for the seductive, self-centered idea that we, not God, get to decide what is true and what isn’t.
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