The Age of Meaninglessness

Yesterday, just hours before Cardinal Josef Ratzinger was elected pope, Michael Novak's column was posted on NRO.

April 19, 2005, 8:39 a.m.

Culture in Crisis

Cardinal Ratzinger has diagnosed relativism’s evils, and offers an alternative.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s sermon on relativism at the Mass for the Election of a Supreme Pontiff hit the note most important both in his own life and in the coming life of the Church, in an age calling itself "post-modern" but perhaps more accurately described as the Age of Meaninglessness.

In his most formative years, Ratzinger heard Nazi propaganda shouting that there is no truth, no justice, there is only the will of the people (enunciated by its leader). As its necessary precondition, Nazism depended on the debunking of objective truth and objective morality. Truth had to be derided as irrelevant, and naked will had to be exalted.

To anybody who said: "But that’s false!" the Nazi shouted, "That’s just your opinion, and who are you, compared to Der Fuehrer?"

To anybody who said, "But what you are doing is unjust!" the Nazi shouted louder, "Says you, swine."

Relativism means this: Power trumps.

...In today’s liberal democracies, Ratzinger has observed, the move to atheism is not, as it was in the 19th century, a move toward the objective world of the scientific rationalist. That was the “modern” way, and it is now being rejected, in favor of a new “post-modern” way. The new way is not toward objectivity, but toward subjectivism; not toward truth as its criterion, but toward power. This, Ratzinger fears, is a move back toward the justification of murder in the name of “tolerance” and subjective choice.

Along with that move, he has observed (haven’t we all?), comes a dictatorial impulse, to treat anyone who has a different view as “intolerant.” For instance, those (on the “religious right”) who hold that there are truths worth dying for, and objective goods to be pursued and objective evils to be avoided, are now held to be “intolerant” fundamentalists, guilty of "discrimination."

In other words, the new dictatorial impulse declares that the only view permissible among reasonable people is the view that all subjective choices are equally valid. It declares, further, that anyone who claims that there are objective truths and objective goods and evils is "intolerant." Such persons are to be expelled from the community, or at a minimum re-educated. That is to say, all Catholics and others like them must be converted to relativism or else sent into cultural re-training camps.

On the basis of relativism, however, no culture can long defend itself or justify its own values. If everything is relative, even tolerance is only a subjective choice, not an objective mandatory value. Ironically, though, what post-moderns call "tolerance" is actually radically intolerant of any view contrary to its own.

...No great, inspiring culture of the future can be built upon the moral principle of relativism. For at its bottom such a culture holds that nothing is better than anything else, and that all things are in themselves equally meaningless. Except for the fragments of faith (in progress, in compassion, in conscience, in hope) to which it still clings, illegitimately, such a culture teaches every one of its children that life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
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Pope Benedict XVI has been the head of the Roman Catholic Church for less than 48 hours, yet he's already been maligned as a Nazi, a dogmatist, an absolutist.

Yesterday on Nightline, Ted Koppel spoke of the "forboding and anxiety" being felt by Catholics and others around the world as a result of Cardinal Ratzinger being named pope.

Enough!

Michael Novak has an op-ed piece in the New York Times, defending the new pope.

THE election of Cardinal Josef Ratzinger as pope was John Paul II's last gift to the Roman Catholic Church. No cardinal was closer to John Paul II, or talked at length with him more often. In his sermon at the memorial for the late pope, Cardinal Ratzinger, with perfect pitch, praised his predecessor's gifts in poetry, drama and art, and the sweep of his vision and accomplishments. The sermon was interrupted many times by hearty applause, especially from the young.

Cardinal Ratzinger's selection as pope, however, has been less heartily welcomed by many commentators in Europe and the United States, who have quickly characterized him as an "authoritarian," a "watchdog" and, most peculiarly, a "neoconservative."

But this is a severe misreading of the man and shows that his critics paid little attention to that sermon, how he connected with the million or so young people who turned out, led not by enthusiasm, but by a remarkable sense of prayer, devotion and respectful silence.

...One of the characteristics the new pope much cherishes is "openness to the whole" - to the whole of history, to the whole of the human race. He boasts of never having wanted to start his own "school" of theological thought - though as a renowned professor in Germany he could well have done so - but rather to have opened the minds of his students to whole vast fields of human thought, in all traditions and places and times.

He is praised for just such warmth and openness by Protestant and Jewish leaders with whom he has long been in scholarly conversation. (Again, his behavior is the very opposite of the stereotypes invented by his critics.)

The world will discover the true man behind the stereotypes soon enough...
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In short, give the man a chance.