Michael Novak’s attempt to buttress the notion that one either has to agree with Joseph Ratzinger or endorse complete moral relativism is less than persuasive. I won’t address all its flaws. But here’s an interesting digression. Novak wants to posit communism as a triumph of the post-Nietzschean relativism that Ratzinger is horrified by. Money quote:
Ratzinger experienced another set of loud shouters in the 1968 student revolution at Tubingen University, this time in the name of Marxist rather than Nazi will. Marxism as much as Nazism (though in a different way) depended on the relativization of all previous notions of ethics and morality and truth – “bourgeois” ideas, these were called. People who were called upon by the party to kill in the party’s name had to develop a relativist’s conscience.
This is a big stretch. The philosophical appeal of Marxism was and is, for the handful of fools who still cling to it, its claim to absolute, scientific truth. Similarly, Nazism asserted as a scientific fact the superiority or inferiority of certain races. These totalitarian ideologies allowed for no dissent because the truth had been proven. You see precious little relativism in Communist or fascist regimes. They created absolute leaders to embody and enforce the maintenance of their truths. And they believed in the conflation of such truths with all political life, the abolition of autonomy and conscience. In structure, they were and are very close to the structure of a decayed version of Catholicism that asserts one version of the truth, suppresses any and all open discussion of such truths within its power, and elevates a cult-like leader and mass demonstrations to reinforce its propaganda. Querulous, brave and ornery dissent – dissent designed not to obscure the truth but to understand it better – is quashed.
FAITH VERSUS REASON? Now who in the current religious debate reminds you of that? Of course, the Church is not a state; it’s a private, voluntary organization. So the analogy is not literal. The Pope does not have a police power. Ratzinger does not order his opponents murdered or imprisoned; he simply silences them or forces them out of the Church (and record numbers of theologians were silenced by the late Pope and record numbers of Catholics left the pews). But the structure of a blind, authoritarian and rigid Ratzingerian faith is very close to the blind, authoritarian and rigid secular totalitarianisms of the recent past. Which is why some former communists have now become the firmest supporters of a Ratzingerian-style faith. They have swapped public political totalitarianism for a private religious one. And like their totalist fellows, their inability to persuade others merely convinces them further of their own truth. Their references are never outside their own thought-system, and all fall conveniently back on the pronouncements of the supreme leader, who alone controls truth and thought. When pressed, they assert that history and nature will prove them right. “We will out-breed you!” they proclaim, in a horrifying echo of a eugenic mandate. Novak, I think, therefore gets things exactly the wrong way round. The alternative to relativism is the difficult process of reason, informed by faith. But that process cannot take place in Ratzinger’s Catholic church, because free thought is forbidden. When the conclusions are already dictated, how can you inquire freely? And if you cannot inquire freely, how can Catholics actually believe their own faith with the aid of their own reason? We are, after all, told to understand our faith, not merely swallow it unthinkingly. But how can we understand if we cannot question? And how can we fully believe if even asking the questions is forbidden?
FIGHTING BACK AGAINST FUNDAMENTALISM: Conservatives who believe in a strict separation of religion and politics and Christians who are saddened by the ascent of extremism and fundamentalism within their faith communities have options other than passivity. They have the blogosphere. Cardinal Ratzinger cannot silence us and the capitulation of the conservative media to fundamentalism also opens a space in the blogosphere for dissent. Here’s a great response to Eric Cohen’s attack on living wills in the Weekly Standard; and here’s a liberal Catholic’s responses to challenges from the Ratzingerian magazine Crisis. I should also recommend Bruce Bawer’s classic case against the fundamentalist attack on the core priorities of the Gospel message. The book is called “Stealing Jesus.” And how they have.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I think you are off ther mark on the attitude of social conservatives towards gays. The last thing they want is for gays to disappear; they desparately need them.
As long as these folks can point to ‘those others’ they are safe from confronting what they, themselves, have done to marriage and other social institutions. With gays available, they don’t have to look at their own divorce rates. With gays available they don’t have to look at the mess they make of their kids. And those who are Catholic don’t even have to look at the corrupt and incompetent bishops at the heart off the abuse scandal.
Gays fill the scapegoat role for these people, and that is even more of a danger than a policy of wishing they would disappear. the Nazis didn’t just wake up one day, decide they needed some scapegoats, and randomly choose Jews. The way was paved for them by hundreds of years of social conditioning. Anyone who doubts the social conditioning regarding gays need only look at the record of state constitutional amendments.
We should analyze these folks, not by what they say, but by what they do and what they avoid.”
The Dish 