The Dictators of Relativism

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BY Mark Shea Show me a person who cannot distinguish cleverness from wisdom or a good brain from a good heart, and I will show you somebody who is a fool. These words to live by returned to mind a few weeks back when I read a complaint piece on Apocalypto by a scholar specializing in Mayan civilization. She protested: "They’re shown as these extremely barbaric people, when in fact, the Maya were a very sophisticated culture." A quote like this can only mean that somewhere in higher education impressionable minds are being formed by somebody who knows all about the Mayans — and nothing about elementary common sense. For, of course, barbarism and sophistication are not mutually exclusive. Hitler enjoyed Richard Wagner’s work; SS troops in his death camps listened to great classical music to unwind after a hard day of slaughter. Nazi Germany, Stalin’s U.S.S.R., and Mao’s China were none of them Stone Age societies just past the level of bear skins and cave paintings. They were all highly sophisticated, technologically accomplished, scientific civilizations with a developed literature, a huge legacy in the arts, law, philosophy and architecture, and an extremely complex and well-functioning governmental structure. All of that enabled them to, among other things, handle the complex and difficult task of putting to death millions and millions of innocent people. Indeed, the fact that civilizations can be both highly sophisticated and utterly barbaric is the whole point of the film. How do such civilizations get that way? The scholar on Mayan civilization unwittingly points us to an important clue when she declares, "It’s offensive to those of us who try to teach cultural sensitivity and alternative world views that might not match our own 21st-century Western ones but are nonetheless valid. … We have evidence to suggest that there were group sacrifices. But it would probably have been done as a pious act with solemnity." In the dictatorship of relativism that Pope Benedict warns against, tolerance tends to mutate into moral idiocy. That’s because the relativist is forced, by his own principles, to abandon the notion of the good (except in the sense of "what I happen to like personally"). In the old days, it was possible to say that because God is good and human beings are made in his image, then acts which respect the dignity of the human person are good and acts which do not are bad. The goal of life was to "approximate his perfections" and to guard the fact that every person, no matter how poor or weak, was likewise a creature in his image. So, for example, liberty and justice were good things, not just for rich robber barons but for poor widows, too. That was not "imposing values." It was "defending the alien, the orphan and the widow" because the Lord their God was their special friend and avenger. Of course, even people who professed to live in that moral universe did not always live up to their principles. Such violations were called "sin." But when we embrace relativism, the first thing to go, of course, is our belief in God’s goodness — because God himself is a mere construct of Western culture. The next thing to go is belief in human dignity. After all, that is simply one more relic of a Christian civilization that has no more or less merit than any other. And so, suggesting that group human sacrifice might be intrinsically evil is "privileging 21st century Western culture." All moral judgments — all attempts to condemn a particular act as evil (such as, say, solemnly and piously cutting open an innocent man’s chest and ripping his beating heart out while he breathes his last) — are out. We cannot impose our values. We cannot say that anybody "ought" to do anything, because that would imply we are subject to a judge who blesses or condemns certain acts. We must give up all pretense that God exists and that our duty in life is to approximate his perfection. Our duty — our sole duty — is not to make value judgments. The problem with all this, as C.S. Lewis points out, is that when all that says "We ought" is silenced, what says "I want" remains, for it has no pretensions to transcendent authority. It simply asserts naked force against the weak. And so, once conscience is silenced by relativism, those without consciences will be only too happy to shout down all remaining opposition to their designs. They may even cloak their worship of power as a kind of piety. For as we have already seen, Nazi, Stalinist and Maoist civilizations also engaged in group sacrifice (of extremely large groups), and they too considered it a pious act of devotion to, variously, the sacred purity of the Volkish blood and the sacred glory of the proletariat. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Mark Shea is senior content editor for CatholicExchange.com. http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/the_name_that_is_above_every_name/

The Dictators Of Relativism

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BY The Editors In his homily before the conclave that made him Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger coined the phrase "dictatorship of relativism." When Rome’s La Sapienza University proved too hostile an environment to allow him to speak, he learned just how apt that phrase was. "Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism," he said in that 2005 homily. "We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires." If those words seemed harsh or extreme, they shouldn’t anymore. Sapienza University is a Catholic school founded by Pope Boniface VIII in the 1300s. But its student body, and many of its professors, have strayed far from its charter. When the university’s rector invited the Pope to speak at the school to inaugurate the academic year, Benedict accepted. But the school proved too antagonistic to academic freedom to hear someone challenge its own worldview. Protesters immediately threatened to deny the Holy Father the freedom to speak. They pledged to drown him out with loud music. Other students — about 100 — staged a sit-in in the university rector’s offices, determined to silence the Pope on their campus. Italy’s transsexual activists planned to mock the Holy Father during the visit. In short, Western students who refused to allow the Church’s message to be heard were able to do what Muslim extremists in Turkey weren’t able to do: They forced the Pope into a situation where he had to either cancel or spend a fruitless, frustrating day being shouted down. As Legionary Father John Flynn points out at Zenit, the incident is only the latest in a trend toward "Christianophobia." He compiled a number of examples. "Each year in December, there is a replay of the banning of Nativity scenes and Christian carols in public places and schools. In Europe, past years have seen numerous attempts to remove long-standing crucifixes from classrooms and public buildings. "In Britain, an employment tribunal just upheld the 2006 decision by British Airways to prohibit Nadia Eweida from wearing a small cross on a necklace to work, the UK newspaper the Independent reported Jan. 9." Bishop Donal Murray of Limerick, Ireland, wrote about the phenomenon in a publication of the Pontifical Council for Culture. "Many voices tell us that religion has no place in the variety, complexity and sophistication of modern life," Father Flynn quoted him saying. Society’s "religion-free zones" are rigorously enforced. Only religious controversies, scandals and personalities can be allowed to be heard. Bishop Murray said this has two consequences: First, that religion has no place in public discourse and that religion may be ignored. Second, that if a person’s views on social issues are inspired by a religious tradition, they can have no place in a rational discussion. What we’re seeing, said the bishop, is not a conflict between religion and the secular — but between those who think God is irrelevant and those who think questions about the Creator just might relate to questions about his creation. In other words, it isn’t secularists who are the "dictators of relativism." Open-minded secularists aren’t the problem. It is extreme, radical secularists who want to snuff out any thought but their own. Science certainly isn’t the culprit, says Father Flynn. He cites God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? in which Oxford mathematician John Lennox argues that science does not go hand-in-hand with atheism. Galileo, Newton and most of the other great scientific figures of the past did not find belief in God to be inhibiting, Lennox points out. The idea that faith is completely irrational is also false. "Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence," he commented. Science, Lennox continued, should neither be regarded as the only way to discover the truth, nor capable of explaining everything. For example, explaining why the universe exists, and why the laws of physics have the structure they do, is beyond science. Science can answer the question "how?" but never "why?" Perhaps it is the moral authority of the Pope that really frightens the dictators of relativism. In his conclave homily, Cardinal Ratzinger explained that all the Church offers is Christ. "It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth," he said. Perhaps it is Christ, and not the Pope, that the extremists are really afraid of. "Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way?" Pope Benedict said after his election. "If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that he might take something away from us?" He said the opposite is true. "If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. … Open wide the doors to Christ — and you will find true life." We can pray for the dictators of relativism. But we should also see to what degree they have duped us into thinking that the tiny closeted worlds of our own minds are our own fenced-in boundaries. We know better. God became man to expand our horizons more than we ever thought possible; and he will, if we have the courage to follow where he leads. http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/the_name_that_is_above_every_name/

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