Crisis of Cultures

I have been meaning to read one of the books of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, for a while. I once started one on liturgy but it was very dense and not well translated so I gave up pretty quickly. Finally I read the short but very dense Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures in one sitting at the book store. I was delighted to find the Pope saying some of the same things I have been trying to say (only better and more completely) about the nature of politics in the Western world. He argues that political decision making must be made on the foundation of collective moral and philosophical beliefs on the part of the whole society.

There has been a concious effort in Western Civilization to relocate the Western moral and philosophical foundations of society away from our Jude0-Christian heritage toward a post-Enlightenment worldview. This is why, he says that the EU's constitution can have no mention of God or of the Christian roots of European culture: not because this would offend Muslims and others, but because the secular philosophical foundations want no competition from God as a foundation. The problem is that post-Enlightenment modernity is simply incomplete and incapable of providing a foundation for a free society because of its rejection of metaphysical claims. It is also seeking to cut itself off from its own roots by marginalizing Christian thought.

The Pope goes on to point out that the over-riding value of secular Western culture, "freedom," when guided by no other principles, soon destroys itself since my freedom may conflict with yours (eg. my freedom to get an abortion may conflict with your freedom to live; my right to security with your right to privacy, etc.). So there must be some outside standards by which we can govern freedom or arbitrate the conflicts that arise. Otherwise we will simply descend into the will of the strong (of the majority) over-riding the will of the weak. This is "the law of the jungle." Political Darwinism.

At the end of the day we, as humans who naturally organize ourselves into society with others, must make decisions corporately. Those decisions will either be made in a manner that acknowledges a God who has a universal and natural law, or they will not. The attempt to compromise will increasingly become unacceptable to either world-view (discussions of legitimate sexual activity bring this problem to the fore like few other issues).

The Catholic (not just Roman) Christian intellectual traditon is vigorous (regardless of the anti-intellectual impulses of many fundamentalist groups, as well as some evangelical and Pentecostal groups in America) and has a potentially well-organized mode of dissemination (that being the various Churches themselves). I think we as the churches must consistently and loudly make this assertion to Western governments: "without God, you have no legitimate foundation upon which to legislate!" That is, without some kind of universal natural law that our laws seek to conform to for the good of all people, there can be no such thing as justice in our societies, which seems to me to be the fundamental reason for having law-making and law-enforcing governments in the first place. Some might want to argue that the purpose is simply to have "order" since there is no such God, no such natural law, and therefore no such thing as justice. This position might be logically coherent, but those who hold it would have to conceed that there is also no such thing as human rights and that we were wrong to invade Nazi Germany since there system was so efficient and orderly. The very fact that nobody is willing to make these concessions reveals that the natural law theory is the correct one. We know it "in our bones," as it were that there IS a such thing as justice and therefore there ARE natural laws that human laws may conform to (if they are good laws) or diverge from (if they are bad laws). If there were no such thing as natural law, there could be no such thing as a bad law, but we all know that there are.

I am most certainly NOT saying that the government must be Christian or must be theocratic (this is where I would want to challenge the direction that a great deal of the un-reflective political rhetoric sometimes used by conservative Christians of all stripes in my country seems to be heading). I am saying that there must be a higher authority than simply "the will of the majority" if our society really is good and legitimate, otherwise it is simply a sophisticated version of "might makes right" and a hypocritical one at that, since it would deny such an accusation. The founding fathers of the US certainly believed (according to the Declaration of Independence) that the people should have a say in government NOT because the majority can enforce its will, but because humans are created equal and endowed with rights by the God of nature. It is God who ensures the equality that serves as the foundational principle of democracy (that all people should have a say in government because all are equal).

And if there is such a higher authority, our government (if it is legitimate) must CONSCIOUSLY acknowledge that fact. This is what is so powerful about the monarch of Great Britain being crowned in a great Church and explicitly declaring in the coronation liturgy that God, not the king, is the highest authority in the realm.