As a young boy, I always felt like I held the ultimate trump card when the inevitable playground argument came up over whose dad was the best. Why? My dad used to be an F-15 pilot. 

As a professional pilot, my dad has logged countless hours in the air. One of the things we’ve talked about from his pilot training is the dangers of spatial disorientation and vertigo, which is the false sensation of movement that can lead to confusion and disorientation that is caused by fluid in the inner ear. The FAA estimates around fifteen percent of airplane crashes are caused by vertigo.

Training Against Your Feelings

In order to guard against this, one exercise pilots go through early on in their flight training is a kind of induced vertigo to get a feel for what it can do to your sense of orientation. I experienced this firsthand when I was attempting to get my pilot’s license. 

In this exercise, the pilot-in-training puts on a visor that limits his range of vision so that he can only see what’s inside the cockpit. Under this arrangement, the trainee must rely solely on his instruments and not what he can see outside the windows, which simulates nighttime and low-visibility flying conditions. Then with the visor on, the trainee closes his eyes and the instructor puts the airplane in a slow bank, descent, or climb, and holds it there for several minutes. This is when vertigo sets in. The trainee’s inner ear adjusts to the current flying conditions and the trajectory begins to feel normal — it actually feels like you’re flying straight and level. After a while, the instructor tells the trainee to open his eyes and check his instruments, because the visor prevents him from seeing outside. Herein lies the danger of vertigo. The trainee’s senses are telling him he is flying straight and level, but his instruments are warning him that he’s on a flight path that needs correcting immediately. 

What happens in that split second can be the difference between life and death. Does the pilot trust his subjective senses, or does he trust the plane’s objective instruments?

Beware “Moral Vertigo”

I think the concept of vertigo is extremely useful when we think about contemporary culture and the subtle and overt ways sin is normalized all around us. How many of us suffer from a kind of “moral vertigo” as we hurtle through the cultural darkness all around? And what instruments are we looking to, so to speak, in order to establish moral objectivity?

To play out the analogy a little further, the world has been askew since Genesis 3 when we all sinned in Adam. But we can also recognize eras when cultures were more or less aligned with God’s revealed will in Nature and Scripture. If “flying straight and level” is God’s design and revealed will, then every normalization of alternate trajectories contributes to moral vertigo.

In other words, we get used to greater degrees of immorality all around (and within), and this sets in as a kind of second nature and instinct. Then when we turn to God’s Word, the objective instrument in this analogy, and encounter a discrepancy between what it says and what we feel to be normal, we are faced with a decision. Either our inculcated instincts, feelings, and beliefs are wrong, or God’s Word is. 

The story of mankind in our fallenness is the story of us rejecting God’s revelation — do the instruments really say? — for what feels normal.

Just think about some of the many immoralities that are not only accepted, but currently legal in our time: abortion, gay marriage, no-fault divorce. Not only is our society telling us these things are good and should be celebrated, but our governments have extended them legal sanction. 

But we must also recognize that most “normalization” occurs upstream from politics, in what some have referred to as culture-making. Consider this graph comparing Boomers and Millennials:

What has been normalized from every avenue imaginable — pop-music, television, movies, Supreme Court decisions, presidents, pulpits — is self-fulfillment over love of others: namely God, country, and future generations.

This is only one facet of the fetid cultural air we breathe. None of us is immune to moral vertigo. Thus, when we come to God’s Word, we doubt and question it or, worse, we outright reject it. 

What is scary is how rapidly moral vertigo can set in. We live in the first society in history to sanction gay marriage, a society that is rapidly moving toward every form of LGBT normalization imaginable. No wonder people question and reject the Bible’s vision of sexuality, even going so far as to question Jesus’ sexuality. But step back and consider: the state of California amended their state constitution in 2008 — by popular vote — to ban same-sex marriage. That was the same year Barack Obama ran a presidential campaign on the platform that marriage is defined as one man and one woman. But in 2015, not even 10 years ago, public opinion began to change with Obergefell. And here’s the moral vertigo: what feels abnormal today — even in conservative evangelical circles! — is standing by a definition of marriage that nearly every human being who ever lived believed and the majority of those living in the most liberal state in the union voted to uphold not even a generation ago.

Ask for the Ancient Paths

What is to be done about moral vertigo? Jeremiah records the words of the Lord to a wayward Israel suffering from a kind of moral vertigo:

“Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.” –Jeremiah 6:16

What are “the ancient paths”? These are the roads that have been trod before and stood the test of time, because they are the ones that lead to and from God’s design and the created order of the Ancient of Days. We must learn to say with Jesus, “from the beginning it was not so” (Mt 19:8). 

This also helps us understand Paul’s command to the Romans:

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” –Romans 12:2

The one conformed to this world, to its loves and “truths,” suffers from moral vertigo and is therefore unable to discern the will of God. Instead, we must renew our minds by looking to the “instruments” God has provided that reveal His will: God’s world (Romans 1) and God’s Word (Hebrews 1). And even when our worldly senses are screaming at us one thing, we must develop a deeper gut instinct that distrusts anything that contradicts God’s revelation, which is instrumental to a transformed life.