Getting to the Point: progress

Showing posts with label progress. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Seeing (and Loving) Things as They Are

…The sensation connected with Bernard Shaw in recent years has been his sudden development of the religion of the Superman. He who had to all appearance mocked at the faiths of the forgotten past discovered a new god in the unimaginable future. He who had laid all the blame on ideals set up the most impossible of ideals, the ideal of a new creature…

The truth is that Mr. Shaw has never seen things as they really are. If he had he would have fallen on his knees before them. He has always had a secret ideal that withered all the things of this world. He has all the time been silently comparing humanity with something that was not human, with a monster from Mars, with the Wise Man of the Stoics…

It is not seeing things as they are to think first of Briareus with a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two… it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demi-god with infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots. And this is what Mr. Shaw has always in some degree done.

When we really see men as they are, we do not criticize but worship, and rightly so. For a monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs, with strange dreams in his skull, and a queer tenderness for this place or that baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter…

After belaboring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered.. that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being can be progressive at all… [and he] decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake… It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw that baby out of window and ask for a new baby.

Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable and lovable in our eyes is man—the old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, falling, sensual, respectable man. And the things that have been founded on this creature immortally remain; the things that have been founded on the fancy of the Superman have died with the dying civilizations which alone have given them birth.

GK Chesterton, Heretics

Reflection – This chapter proved to be rather hard to excerpt in a coherent fashion. Earlier in the chapter GKC had established George Bernard Shaw’s consistent rejection of any ideals whatsoever, his absolute constancy in mocking and deriding any and all creeds, values, ideologies, principles, in favor of some absolute realism, some sterling quality of seeing things, not as they should be or as we would like them to be or as our ideals demand they should become, but as they really are.

He goes on to point out that Shaw’s rejection of any kind of idealism or binding law or absolute value was meant to be in the service of liberty—that by saying ‘the one rule is that there is no golden rule’ (a quote from Shaw), is supposed to free us simply to accept people ‘as they are’ and judge and act accordingly.

But, of course people ‘as they are’ are inherently idealistic, moralizing, law-making (and yes, law-breaking), wholly ordered towards finding out what is good and formulating this good into general statements of principle and law. People ‘as they are’, humanity ‘as it is’ has from its first movements until today been ineluctably dedicated to articulating what is good in the form of law and moral order.

Shaw’s Superman has come and gone and left behind merely the DC comics light parody of itself. But the progressive idea is alive and kicking in our world today—that is, the idea that it is so utterly important to be ‘progressive’ that we must throw out everything that is retrograde, up to and including humanity, in service of progress, whatever that means.

This is not fantasy—the post-humanist manifesto can be found on-line, and trans-humanism is a viable scientific project, the crafting of an ‘new and improved’ humanity through various forms of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and cybernetics. I don’t know enough science to know the extent of this movement’s real world viability, but the spirit of Shaw is alive and well in it, and GKC’s critique holds firm.

Namely, what does progress mean if it is at the expense of the human person as he or she is? When we talk about improving the human race by making it other than what it is, whose standards of improvement are we talking about? Who says it’s better for us to live 200 years as opposed to 100? Who says we would be ‘better’ having our consciousness downloaded into digital hard drives, or the various other modifications proposed by the trans-humanists? What does ‘better’ mean when we are no longer talking about serving the good of the human person?

The same holds true with all the ‘progressive’ ideals that are no longer grounded in the truth of humanity. The people who want to save the environment by slaughtering the human race (yes, they exist), the people who want to uphold the value of gender identity by draining gender identity of any coherent meaning grounded in the body, the people who want to promote the ideals of peace and tolerance by denying the existence of any ideals at all—these all fail miserably as logical coherent systems, and so collapse into sheer unreasoning voluntarism.

In other words, “I will do what I want to do, and if you even suggest I ought not, I will destroy you.” This is the inevitable end point of ‘progress’ valued in itself, as opposed to progress towards a clear and coherent moral good, at the service of humanity. As GCK says, it is man who we value, who we love, the human person who is the cherished thing, both by God and by ourselves, and it is this human person, as we are, who we are, that is the great good we are called to serve and love in this world, as God serves and loves us in this world.

Friday, June 21, 2013

Unreliable Reason

In the meantime, yet another form of power has taken central stage. At first glance, it appears to be wholly beneficial and entirely praiseworthy. In reality, however, it can become a new kind of threat to man.

Man is now capable of making human beings, of producing them in test tubes (so to speak). Man becomes a product, and this entails a total alteration of man’s relationship to his own self. He is no longer a gift of nature or of the Creator God; he is his own product.

Man has descended into the very wellsprings of power, to the very sources of his own existence. The temptation to construct the ‘right’ man at long last, the temptation to experiment with human beings, the temptation to see them as rubbish to be discarded—all this is no mere fantasy of moralists opposed to ‘progress.’

If we have noted the urgent question of whether religion is truly a positive force, so we must now doubt the reliability of reason. For in the last analysis, even the atomic bomb is a product of reason; in the last analysis, the breeding and selection of human beings is something thought up by reason.

Does this then mean that it is reason that ought to be placed under guardianship? But by whom or by what? Or should perhaps religion and reason restrict each other and remind each other where their limits are, thereby encouraging a positive path? Once again we are confronted with the question how—in a global society with its mechanisms of power and its uncontrolled forces and its varying views of what constitutes law and morality—an effective ethical conviction can be found with sufficient motivation and vigor to answer the challenges I have outlined here and to help us meet these tests.

Joseph Ratzinger, “That Which Holds the World Together: The Pre-political Moral Foundations of a Free State,” in The Dialectics of Secularism: On Reason and Religion, 64-65

Reflection – OK, after this, one more day of this essay and then we’ll move on to something else. Personally, though, I find this subject endlessly fascinating, and could blather on about it world without end.

Yesterday Ratzinger reported that religion is not without its problems, its pathological expressions. Violence, intolerance, and in the furthest extreme terrorism are the diseased forms of religion, religion detached from a human and humane context.

But we see here that unfettered reason has its own pathologies. Scientific technological reason can do amazing things, can open up paths of action and mastery that have simply never been available to us. There is little in Aquinas about the morality of in vitro fertilization. Science can do amazing things… but it cannot tell us what we should do, what is the good thing to do, and what things are wholly evil and to be avoided no matter what.

It is odd, the attitude you still run across sometimes that to simply say this or that technological development is immoral is to be anti-science or anti-progress. What a strange train of thought. Science and technology are simply ‘powers’ given us. Human beings have always been able to use their strength, their power to do great good or to do great evil. Human muscle and brains built the cathedrals of Europe; human muscles and brains have slaughtered millions in war. To say that the one is good and the other is evil is hardly to be opposed to the use of human muscles and brains.

So the use of medical science to cure cancer or heart disease is a great good. The use of medical science to mutilate the human body so as to render it sterile, or to create human beings in a petri dish, randomly select one of those humans to implant in the womb of his or her mother and kill the others, discarding these human beings as medical waste—this is a great evil.

But it is not science and technology that tell us it is evil to treat a human being as a medical by-product to be taken out with the trash. That information, if we really need to have it proven to us, is proven to us along other lines altogether. Science needs to be modified and instructed by morality and (perhaps?) religion.

And for anyone reading this who has had in vitro fertilization or has a family member who has had it – I am sorry if my words are hard, but please reflect that your beloved child who you went to such great lengths to have, and who you love and cherish so much—this child could just as easily have been the medical waste discarded, and that the other five or six or whatever children who were created in the process were also precious beautiful creatures of God.

Tough stuff, I know, but these things need to be said. Human beings are not technological products, and to reduce a human being to a product of technology is a deep offense against that person’s dignity and freedom. We are gift and mystery, and the gift of mystery of the person must be safeguarded from conception to death, and that is what the right to life is all about.

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

The Shaping of Reality

The essential problem of our times, for Europe and for the world, is that although the fallacy of the communist economy has been recognized… the moral and religious question it used to address has been almost totally repressed. The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on: the crumbling of man’s original certainties about God, himself, and the universe.

“The Spiritual Roots of Europe,” in Without Roots: Relativism, Christianity, and Islam, 73-4

Reflection – Communism may seem to most people today to be, outside of a few small enclaves like North Korea or Cuba, a historical phenomenon. China, ostensibly communist, has a thriving free market economy combined with a repressive central government: problematic for sure, but not exactly Marxist.

Ratzinger rightly points out, though, that while communism collapsed as an economic system in the 1990s, its spiritual and moral underpinnings have never collapsed, but take new and strange outward forms in the world today.

Who or what is God, or is there a God? Who or what is man, the human person? What is the relationship of man to the world? Underneath the specific tenets of Marxist theory lie certain answers to those questions, namely, that there is no god, that man is the sole shaper of reality, that this shaping of reality is wrought through seizing control of the levers of power. Along with this can come a certain historical determinism, a sense of inevitability of social progress along this or that line, which can then be used as a pretext to rather ruthlessly suppress dissent.

Might makes right! This is the crude expression of the underlying stance of Marxism. Whatever group has the upper hand is thereby endowed with moral probity and can punish its enemies as it sees fit.

And so… opponents of same-sex marriage routinely receive death threats. Those who question the ‘consensus’ on global climate warming (oops, I mean change), are compared to Holocaust deniers who should be jailed. And yes, those who question the ideology of sexual libertinism by suggesting that contraception is not a good thing are to be driven out of public life, by way of government mandates.

Underneath all of this is a sense that is fundamentally Marxist, that the whole point of the human project is to seize control of reality and shape it to our unfettered will. The corrosive crushing power of ideology, when man himself, the human person is to be shaped and fashioned according to the agendae of those who are in power.

This is indeed, as Ratzinger says, the central problem of Europe and of North America in our days. The answer—well, I’ve written a whole book about that! Suffice to say we need to recapture a vision of humanity that is first and fundamentally receptive and contemplative. Only from this receptive contemplative humanity can we fashion the world in peace and in love. That is our response.

Friday, January 20, 2012

What Science Cannot Do

Up to [the dawning of modernity], the recovery of what man had lost through the expulsion from Paradise was expected from faith in Jesus Christ: herein lay “redemption”. Now, this “redemption”, the restoration of the lost “Paradise” is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between science and praxis. It is not that faith is simply denied; rather it is displaced onto another level—that of purely private and other-worldly affairs—and at the same time it becomes somehow irrelevant for the world. This programmatic vision has determined the trajectory of modern times and it also shapes the present-day crisis of faith which is essentially a crisis of Christian hope. Thus hope too, in Francis Bacon, acquires a new form. Now it is called: faith in progress. For Bacon, it is clear that the recent spate of discoveries and inventions is just the beginning; through the interplay of science and praxis, totally new discoveries will follow, a totally new world will emerge, the kingdom of man. He even put forward a vision of foreseeable inventions—including the aeroplane and the submarine. As the ideology of progress developed further, joy at visible advances in human potential remained a continuing confirmation of faith in progress as such.

Spe Salvi 17

Reflection – This passage brings up once again one of Pope Benedict’s perennial themes: the substitution of human progress for salvation in Christ in the modern era. The age of discovery and inventions (still ongoing, of course) held out at one time an assurance that in time, human beings would solve every problem, crack all the riddles of existence, and be able to eliminate suffering from the world.
It is truly hard to see how anyone can maintain this attitude today. I’m not sure anyone does, really. For myself, growing up as I did in the world science created, a world that in my childhood was continually threatened by the prospect of nuclear destruction, the ideology of science holds little appeal.
As Ratzinger has always underlined throughout his writings, the problem is that scientific and technological progress tells us how to do things; it does not and cannot tell us what we are supposed to do. It certainly has no faculty at all to tell us what we must not do if we wish to remain human at all.
It can tell us how we might alleviate the suffering of a given disease, but cannot tell us that experimentation on murdered human fetuses is a crime against all justice and goodness, a callous destruction of human life that calls into question the entire human project.
It can tell us everything about fetal development, and the delicate bonds that connect the life of the growing child to the life of its mother; it cannot tell us that we must not deliberately sever that bond and end that life, and that to do so unleashes evil into the world beyond our comprehension.
It can tell us so many things… except the things we most urgently need to know if we are to live happy lives of dignity, freedom, and joy. Science has nothing to say, nothing at all, about these matters. And we have to be clear about that.
So we cannot put our ‘faith’ in scientific progress. It is valuable indeed, and who would want to live in a world without the discoveries of the past 500 years? But it is not the source of happiness. For that, we must go somewhere else: to the quest for perennial wisdom, the deep plunge into the wellsprings of human thought and understanding, the challenge to penetrate and contemplate the meaning of life and existence.
In the Christian religion, we understand that God has offered Himself in Jesus Christ to humanity to open the path of wisdom and goodness to us. Clearly, not everybody feels they can accept that path or believe that God has done this. But for those who are not or cannot be Christians, there is a call nonetheless to find a path of truth and wisdom that is deep enough, persuasive enough, to shape the development and use of technology and scientific invention. Without this, we are truly at the mercy of the powerful elites who control the levers of the world… and they may not know anything more than we do about what they should do, but they certainly seem to know what they want to do… to us.
And this is among the most urgent tasks of our time – to provide a rational and persuasive basis to resist this exaltation of power and control over the whole of our lives. This is what Pope Benedict has labored hard to provide; this is what this blog is about.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Tag! You're (an) It!

Another form of power has become prominent…. Man is now capable of making men, of producing them in test tubes, so to speak. Man becomes a product, and this fundamentally alters man’s relationship to himself. He is no longer a gift of nature or of the Creator God: he is his own product. Man has climbed down in to the wellsprings of power, to the source of his very existence. The temptation now to construct the ‘correct’ man at last, the temptation to experiment with human beings, the temptation to see them as garbage and to get rid of them – this is not some fantastic notion of moralists inimical to progress.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 36

Reflection – Yesterday the Pope and I reflected together on the need for faith, on how human beings need to be open to what is bigger than ourselves, to what transcends our utilitarian practical capacities and knowledge. I went so far as to say that without faith, man becomes sub-human.

Today, we look at what this ‘sub-human’ life might look like in real world terms. Looks quite a bit like the world we live is, doesn’t it? It reminds me of the poem “For the Time Being” by W.H. Auden. A Christmas poem, he describes that moment in the stable at Bethlehem where “Everything become a Thou/And nothing was an It.” The intense personalization and communion-character of all reality touched by Incarnate God.

The modern world increasingly resembles a sort of anti-Bethlehem: a place where everyone becomes an It, and nobody is a Thou. Every human life is stripped of mystery and gift and wonder and awe and instead is evaluated on strict utilitarian socio-economic calculations.

We see this in the pre-natal diagnosis and aborting of disabled fetuses; we see this quite openly in the more radical strains of the euthanasia movement; we see this in the increasing and alarming tendency in psychiatry to pathologize any behaviors or thought patterns occurring outside a strictly defined norm.

This latter may be unfamiliar to people. I have a humorous example. When I was a seminarian, I discovered that priests and seminarians scored highly on the test diagnosing Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Now that sounds alarming—who wants a bunch of narcissistic priests, right?

But it turns out that the reason for this test result was that we answer yes to the question “Do you believe God has a plan for your life?” According to psychiatrists (so learned!) only narcissists believe that. That the same seminarians and priests would add that God has a plan for every human life, that each person He made is precious in his sight… well, that doesn’t come up on the test. So it’s not relevant. I guess.

Underneath all this, however, is precisely what Ratzinger is describing. Without a transcendent sense of things, without a sense of the mystery, wonder, awe, gift, marvel that human beings are, that life is—without all of that, we reduce humanity to one more ‘thing’, one more product, one more object of scientific study and technological manipulation.

This is what it looks like to live without faith, to live without a soul, as I put it yesterday. Everything is an It and nothing and no one is a Thou. This is why Down’s Syndrome children and bed-ridden elderly and hyper active boys and narcissistic priests (hee hee) are so important today. We have to reclaim the mystery, reclaim the wonder. We have to humble ourselves before one another and remember that there is something in each human person before which we can only bow low in reverence. We are not the masters here. And without a sense of God, of the Master of all, it may prove very hard to do that. Don’t you think?

Saturday, October 29, 2011

The Next Hundred Years

These hells [of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot] were constructed in order to be able to bring about the future world of man who was his own master, who was no longer supposed to need any God. Man was offered in sacrifice to the Moloch of that utopia of a god-free world, a world set free from God, for man was now wholly in control of his own destiny and knew no limits to his ability to determine things, because there was no longer any God set over him, because no light of the image of God shone forth any more from man.

Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 284-5

Reflection – One of the things Catherine de Hueck Doherty found rather difficult about living among North Americans for most of her adult life was that most of us didn’t have a clue, really, about the experience of Russia and Europe in the first half of the 20^th century.

Oh, we might know the history—and of course, in her earlier years most of the young people with her had lived through the history themselves, but from this side of the Atlantic.

She, meanwhile, had been there. She had been shot at by Communists, bombed by Nazis, heard Hitler and Lenin speak, had to run for her life more than once. She was a witness to the rampages of Moloch that the Pope describes in this passage.

And of course, so was he such a witness, growing up in the horror of Nazi Germany. We who are either too young or from another part of the world simply did not witness it, however well we may have tried to study the history of things.

Both of them, then, speak with a certain intensity and seriousness about this question of building a world without God. The idea that we can toss God out the window and somehow keep on being nice sweet people to each other had been shown to be a lie in their own countries.

The truth is, super-nature abhors a vacuum. If God is dethroned, something else rushes in to fill the void. And that something else has not had a good track record so far: the Soviet worker’s paradise, the Aryan supremacy, the Maoist great leap forward… and tens of millions of corpses later, here we are.

To live without God on a society-wide scale ultimately turns against man; without God, some temporal social good is elevated to the level of the highest good, and since it is strictly temporal, it must be achieved at all costs. And so we kill anyone who stands in the way. This is the simple tragic history of the 20^th century. Other centuries have other tragic histories, and some of those tragedies have to do with the dangers and distortions of religion, but the story of the past 100 years has simply been that of the insane outcome to the project of modern atheism lived out in a society.

Atheists will object that all of those massacres derive, not from atheism, but from ideology, and that atheism does not necessarily lead to ideology. What they fail to understand is that atheism does lead necessarily to ideology, for the simple reason that human beings need to have a reason to live. If our reason to live cannot be found in some transcendent, divine sphere, it must be found here and now; if the kingdom is not to come, it must be here, or we will do everything and anything to make it here. And without a God who watches us as Judge, there is no real reason to stay our hands from any monstrous deed to achieve it.

As I say, this is the simple sad story of the last hundred years in much of the world. Will it be the simple sad story for the next hundred years, and maybe not only in ‘those places over there’, but here too? I guess that’s our decision.

Monday, October 24, 2011

What May We Hope?

Let us ask once again: what may we hope? And what may we not hope? First of all, we must acknowledge that incremental progress is possible only in the material sphere. Here, amid our growing knowledge of the structure of matter and in the light of ever more advanced inventions, we clearly see continuous progress towards an ever greater mastery of nature. Yet in the field of ethical awareness and moral decision-making, there is no similar possibility of accumulation for the simple reason that man's freedom is always new and he must always make his decisions anew. These decisions can never simply be made for us in advance by others—if that were the case, we would no longer be free. Freedom presupposes that in fundamental decisions, every person and every generation is a new beginning. Naturally, new generations can build on the knowledge and experience of those who went before, and they can draw upon the moral treasury of the whole of humanity. But they can also reject it, because it can never be self-evident in the same way as material inventions. The moral treasury of humanity is not readily at hand like tools that we use; it is present as an appeal to freedom and a possibility for it. This, however, means that:

a) The right state of human affairs, the moral well-being of the world can never be guaranteed simply through structures alone, however good they are. Such structures are not only important, but necessary; yet they cannot and must not marginalize human freedom. Even the best structures function only when the community is animated by convictions capable of motivating people to assent freely to the social order. Freedom requires conviction; conviction does not exist on its own, but must always be gained anew by the community.

b) Since man always remains free and since his freedom is always fragile, the kingdom of good will never be definitively established in this world. Anyone who promises the better world that is guaranteed to last for ever is making a false promise; he is overlooking human freedom. Freedom must constantly be won over for the cause of good. Free assent to the good never exists simply by itself. If there were structures which could irrevocably guarantee a determined—good—state of the world, man's freedom would be denied, and hence they would not be good structures at all.

Spe Salvi 24

Reflection - This is such a brilliant, lucid passage from the encyclical that little commentary is needed. We cannot create structures that will ensure a good world, a world where people will do what is right. This is impossible: 'doing what is right' must come from human freedom, and it cannot be compelled.

Whether we opt for an increasingly de-regulated society where the free market more or less is allowed to run its course, or a highly regulated society where government's heavy hand keeps firm control on the movement of goods and services, the reality of human freedom and human choice will still have the last word on whether or not our society is a cold, grasping fight to the finish where (to take a current example) two year old girls are left to die on roadsides, or a human place, never perfect, but where a measure of love and charity softens the hardest blows of fortune's ill wind.

There is no economic or political system that will make people be kind or gentle or giving. There is no religion that will 'make' them do that, either - human freedom is an awesome, irreducible fact. But it is the individual choices that we make to be kind or gentle or giving... or cold, selfish, and mean... that make the world what it is.

And so Pope Benedict leaves us at this point in the encyclical to ponder our choices, to take our freedom seriously, and to shoulder the burden of creating a more human, more loving world, not principally by agitating for social change or political reform, but by choosing today to love my neighbor as myself.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

We See It Over and Over Again

[Reason] becomes human only if it is capable of directing the will along the right path, and it is capable of this only if it looks beyond itself. Otherwise, man's situation, in view of the imbalance between his material capacity and the lack of judgment in his heart, becomes a threat for him and for creation. Thus where freedom is concerned, we must remember that human freedom always requires a convergence of various freedoms. Yet this convergence cannot succeed unless it is determined by a common intrinsic criterion of measurement, which is the foundation and goal of our freedom. Let us put it very simply: man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope. Given the developments of the modern age, the quotation from Saint Paul with which I began (Eph 2:12) proves to be thoroughly realistic and plainly true. There is no doubt, therefore, that a “Kingdom of God” accomplished without God—a kingdom therefore of man alone—inevitably ends up as the “perverse end” of all things as described by Kant: we have seen it, and we see it over and over again. Yet neither is there any doubt that God truly enters into human affairs only when, rather than being present merely in our thinking, he himself comes towards us and speaks to us. Reason therefore needs faith if it is to be completely itself: reason and faith need one another in order to fulfill their true nature and their mission.

Spe Salvi 23

Reflection – So we continue our journey through Spe Salvi and what it has to say about human hope and modern progress. It is fascinating, and very telling, that the Holy Father focuses his discussion of hope on the question of human freedom: certainly, our true hope as human beings is that we enter into deeper and deeper expression of freedom in our lives.

What a lie this gives to those who speak of Catholicism as a repressive, totalitarian religion! The whole good of human beings, in the Catholic understanding, is found in total freedom. But this freedom cannot, Pope Benedict reasons, be a matter of everyone doing just what they want. This model of freedom is self-destructive, as what I want may prevent you from doing what you want; what you and I want together may prevent him and her from doing what they want… and so on. If this vision of freedom is the only one on offer, we are stuck… well, pretty much with the world we have now, where all are caught in a battle against all, and it’s winner take all and the divil take the hindmost. And, as the Holy Father say, we see this over and over again.

‘Freedom to’ do this and that has to be held in the deeper reality of ‘freedom for’ – what are we made for, what is the good of life, where do we find it, how do we attain it? Without this we degrade to the animal level of competition and mutually assured destruction. With it, we become human. And this humanity is a matter, then, of being on a pilgrimage of truth and love, justice and mercy. A pilgrimage towards what is real and life-giving, a pilgrimage towards God.

This is what he means when he writes that man without God has no hope. We have to be going somewhere that is bigger than our own selves and their needs and wants. But in the material universe there is nothing bigger than us, except in the unimportant matter of physical dimension. So if we are headed anywhere at all (that is, if there is hope) we must be heading towards something greater than the material universe, and this (as Aquinas would put it) all men call God.

But of course Pope Benedict would not be true to Joseph Ratzinger’s lifetime of reflection if he did not point out that this God we are on pilgrimage towards has Himself made a pilgrimage of sorts towards us. We could never walk to heaven on our little stumpy legs; instead, heaven has come to us, and this is where faith meets reason to make it possible for reason to attain the goal that alone makes reason meaningful and good.

Deep stuff here, eh? And as we look at a world where Gadhaffi is gunned down like a rabid dog, protestors ‘occupy’ any street they can get their hands on, stock markets reel and rock with the latest turn of events, and we all furrow our collective brow with uncertainty and anxiety—well, we have to go into these depths. We are living in deep waters right now; the world is in trouble. Maybe it always is, but we just see it really clearly now. But as the psalm says, ‘deep calls upon deep’—the deep waters we are treading call us to enter the true depths of God, faith, freedom, and hope. Only thus will we attain our safe harbour.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

To Make a World Worthy of Us

As far as the two great themes of “reason” and “freedom” are concerned, here we can only touch upon the issues connected with them. Yes indeed, reason is God's great gift to man, and the victory of reason over unreason is also a goal of the Christian life. But when does reason truly triumph? When it is detached from God? When it has become blind to God? Is the reason behind action and capacity for action the whole of reason? If progress, in order to be progress, needs moral growth on the part of humanity, then the reason behind action and capacity for action is likewise urgently in need of integration through reason's openness to the saving forces of faith, to the differentiation between good and evil. Only thus does reason become truly human.

Spe Salvi 23

Reflection – We’ve been talking about human progress these past few days on the blog, and of course my motivation in going to the encyclical Spe Salvi and seeing what the Pope has to say there about that topic is the current climate in the world of unrest. Whether it is riots in Greece, Italy, or England, ‘occupations’ on Wall Street and various other cities in North America, or just a persistent feeling of malaise shared by many people today, the question of progress – where are we going? – is becoming an urgent one.

My heart goes out in all this to young people today, speaking as a not-so-long-ago young person. The world does seem to be, if not on the edge of a collapse, at the very least pretty darn creaky right now, and prospects for the future are not terribly bright at the present moment. None of us know what is coming, but there are many signs of impending hardship and the political and social turmoil that will bring.

It was a similar atmosphere in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries that wrought the twin horrors of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and all the human tragedy that came from them. So it is important for us to reflect on where we are going and how we can face the (possible) hard times ahead.

It is in this context that the need for reason, for human reason applied to the problems of the day, arises. God gave us this great gift, the gift to not only be immersed in the immediate present, its stimuli and appetites, but to take in the whole of reality, to behold, to analyze, to determine, and to act in accordance with the knowledge that comes from these acts.

The Pope here underlines that reason detached or opposed or indifferent to God is reason that has fallen short of its task. Human reason empowers us little frail material creatures to be in relationship with cosmic reality, to embrace, to take in the universal truth of Being. So when we ignore ultimate questions – God, morality, love, justice – in favor of mere technical prowess, we become less than human. Reason becomes for us in that way nothing much more than the crocodile’s jaws or the grizzly bears paws: a blunt object to be used to get us what we want.

Reason, to be truly human, must reach out to the ultimate realities of truth and goodness, the origin and end of the universe. But these ultimate realities are not themselves entirely accessible to us through mere analytical technical rationality. There is no laboratory test that will determine the meaning of life, the demands of justice, the measure of love, the beauty and goodness of my brother or sister, or the existence and nature of God.

To limit reason to what we can do in a laboratory cuts us off from everything that makes life good and human and meaningful. And to do that condemns us then, to merely thrash around in the days ahead, struggling to get what’s ours before someone else gets it, to carve out some little personal fiefdom where I and mine, at least, can have an OK life – and the rest of the world can go to Hell, frankly (excuse my language).

We have to do better than that, but the only way to do better than that is to plunge ourselves deeply into the ultimate realities of life: faith, hope, love, justice, beauty, God. And from that we can rebuild our world into something more truly human, something that is worthy of the goodness and beauty God has implanted in us.

Friday, October 21, 2011

If Saint Francis of Assisi Had an Atom Bomb...

Again, we find ourselves facing the question: what may we hope? A self-critique of modernity is needed in dialogue with Christianity and its concept of hope. In this dialogue Christians too, in the context of their knowledge and experience, must learn anew in what their hope truly consists, what they have to offer to the world and what they cannot offer. Flowing into this self-critique of the modern age there also has to be a self-critique of modern Christianity, which must constantly renew its self-understanding setting out from its roots. On this subject, all we can attempt here are a few brief observations. First we must ask ourselves: what does “progress” really mean; what does it promise and what does it not promise? In the nineteenth century, faith in progress was already subject to critique. In the twentieth century, Theodor W. Adorno formulated the problem of faith in progress quite drastically: he said that progress, seen accurately, is progress from the sling to the atom bomb. Now this is certainly an aspect of progress that must not be concealed. To put it another way: the ambiguity of progress becomes evident. Without doubt, it offers new possibilities for good, but it also opens up appalling possibilities for evil—possibilities that formerly did not exist. We have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth (cf. Eph 3:16; 2 Cor 4:16), then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.

Spe Salvi 22

Reflection – Well, this paragraph is a bit heavy, isn’t it! A bit cumbersome, a bit dense, and I’m afraid the next few posts will have this quality – it’s a dense part of the encyclical. But it’s vital – in this current era we seem to be moving into when people are so discontented and there is such a sense of crisis, of looming disaster, we need to clarify our thinking about questions of progress and hope and the Christian view of these matters.

Really, what Pope Benedict is saying here is quite simple. Catherine Doherty, in her inimitable way used to say the same thing all the time. Whenever the subject of nuclear weapons came up, Catherine had one basic thing to say: “If St. Francis of Assisi was in charge of the atom bomb, nobody would worry!”
This may sound simplistic, silly even (what a great picture, though: the Poverello entrusted with the nuclear football, the launch codes that only the president holds!). But actually what she is saying is exactly what Pope Benedict is saying: “If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man’s ethical formation… then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.”
The Pope is clearly not anti-progress here. The Church throughout its history has been a great engine of human progress: so much of the Scientific Revolution can be traced back to the sponsorship of the Church, and indeed from the rational world view that springs from Christian theology, properly understood.
But he is criticizing the ideology of progress – the view that a simple expansion in technical capacity is an unambiguous and sufficient good for mankind. That the hope of the world lies in expanding our human powers, our human control of the forces of nature.
This needs to be critiqued, and he does a masterful job of it here.
The truth is that we have to be something before we can know what to do with whatever power we have accrued to ourselves. And this being is by necessity a question of personal choice, freedom, the decision of the individual to seek the path of righteousness and love.
Pope Benedict is going to proceed to develop this thought, so I will stop here. But I will return to what I’ve been saying, one way or another, in post after post lately. If we want to change the world for the better, if we do say we want a revolution, if we do want a more just and free and charitable society, we have to look to… well, to St. Francis for starters, perhaps. To the saints. To the ones who allowed Christ in to their inmost hearts, allowed him to take them and break them and refashion them according to his own heart. This is what changes the world, this and nothing else.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

You Say You Want a Revolution?

The nineteenth century held fast to its faith in progress as the new form of human hope, and it continued to consider reason and freedom as the guiding stars to be followed along the path of hope. Nevertheless, the increasingly rapid advance of technical development and the industrialization connected with it soon gave rise to an entirely new social situation: there emerged a class of industrial workers and the so-called “industrial proletariat”, whose dreadful living conditions Friedrich Engels described alarmingly in 1845. For his readers, the conclusion is clear: this cannot continue; a change is necessary. Yet the change would shake up and overturn the entire structure of bourgeois society. After the bourgeois revolution of 1789, the time had come for a new, proletarian revolution: progress could not simply continue in small, linear steps. A revolutionary leap was needed. Karl Marx took up the rallying call, and applied his incisive language and intellect to the task of launching this major new and, as he thought, definitive step in history towards salvation—towards what Kant had described as the “Kingdom of God”. Once the truth of the hereafter had been rejected, it would then be a question of establishing the truth of the here and now. The critique of Heaven is transformed into the critique of earth, the critique of theology into the critique of politics. Progress towards the better, towards the definitively good world, no longer comes simply from science but from politics—from a scientifically conceived politics that recognizes the structure of history and society and thus points out the road towards revolution, towards all-encompassing change. With great precision, albeit with a certain onesided bias, Marx described the situation of his time, and with great analytical skill he spelled out the paths leading to revolution—and not only theoretically: by means of the Communist Party that came into being from the Communist Manifesto of 1848, he set it in motion. His promise, owing to the acuteness of his analysis and his clear indication of the means for radical change, was and still remains an endless source of fascination. Real revolution followed, in the most radical way in Russia.

Spe Salvi 20

Reflection - I think, in light of the current protests going on in various cities, that it would be good to reflect with the Holy Father from this part of his encyclical on hope on the nature of progress, revolution, and our response to social unrest and injustice.

I have heard (obviously, "Occupy Combermere" is a no-go so far, so no chances to observe directly!) that there is a fair amount of Marxist literature and rhetoric present in these protests. I do realize that the organizers and the attendees are coming at the situation from a host of different perspectives, but nonetheless it does seem that there is a revolutionary current at least present enough to be noticeable there.

I'm not sure what to make of that. Marxism came out of the deep sufferings of the Industrial Revolution and the suppression of the working class of Europe, yet was more widely embraced by the intelligentsia and cultural elites of the day. The phenomenon of persistent Marxism into the present day, besides being evidence of a truly alarming historical amnesia, bears witness to something deep in the human soul, I think.

We want a world without suffering. We want justice. We want things to be what they should be. And we know the present state of affairs is not how it should be.

So - tear everything down! Reduce it to rubble! The revolutionary impulse goes deep in us - I think it actually has deep connections to residual Christianity and the promise of the kingdom.

But, a kingdom without Christ. Justice without a Judge. An end to suffering imposed by human fiat, not by the transforming power of Love.

It doesn't work. It never has. And it has brought calamitous suffering and evil in its wake, wherever and whenever it has been tried.

At the same time, we who are Christians, who do (we say) love Justice and long for the kingdom and have compassion for the suffering - we have to do more than just critique and mock the OWS movement. They are longing for something, and at least some of them are looking to, of all people, Karl Marx for answers.

We have another answer, and so I will be continuing to lay out the Holy Father's vision of things over the next few posts. It seems timely.