The Crisis in Our Culture

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

Pope Benedict XVI's recent book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures is one that should not be missed. As I said in my previous post, it is a radical riposte to post-Enlightenment thinking which, for the foundational Christian insistence on the personal dignity of man, made in God's image, substitutes the absolute liberty of the individual to express himself freely ... as long as doing so mortally offends no other individual or group.

Unfortunately, that Enlightenment postulate contains its own internal contradiction. There is ultimately no way in which such radical freedom of our individual, personal self-expression doesn't run aground on the angry sensibilities of others who despise what we say. We in modern society, accordingly, devise laws to protect us vessels of radical freedom from each other's "hateful" expression. Laws then unavoidably proliferate to enshrine offended citizens' claimed needs for further protection, and state powers grow at the expense of liberty! Thus, the contradiction.

The Christian postulate, that human dignity itself lies at the root of all morality and justice, is grounded in the belief that God made everything, including man, upon which event he beheld his creation, finding "it was very good" (Genesis 1:31, quoted on p. 71). The key word is "behold": God sees us, includes us in his gaze, however small and weak we may be. Therein lies our unimpeachable claim to personal dignity.

And therein lies the personal moral responsibility we each have to use our own eyes in a way that validates the like claim to dignity of every other human person ... rather that to close our eyes to him or her and to treat that other human person as an object to be utilized and/or disposed of at our pleasure.


Secularists who prefer the Enlightenment credo to the Judeo-Christian one are not ogres who are snarlingly, universally blind to others' dignities. Unless and until, that is, the fact that they have put the individual freedom mandate they inherit from the Enlightenment at the center of their value system — in place of the erstwhile religious mandate to publicly circumscribe our own freedoms in deference the claims others make on us — forces them to choose the former credo over the latter, if only not to make liars of themselves.

This, the pope observes, is what happens when abortion rights are said to be within the province of a woman's private discretion, as a radically free individual. When a "privacy" justification for abortion rights is asserted in today's society, it necessarily forces all of us to avert our eyes from the unseen fetus, hidden away in a womb. And we are only too willing to look away, for when we decline to envision that the fetus has a face and eyes of its own, we avoid the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise spring from our instinctive readiness to accord a being with human face and human eyes some sort of claim to inviolability, if we but look upon that face and into those eyes.

The pope thinks our culture is in crisis because we accept abortion-on-demand's legality in the name of radical individual liberty. I find, somewhat to my own surprise, that I agree with him.


Throughout my life, including the last twenty years of it, during which I have called myself a Christian, I have nurtured a strong bias toward accepting unquestioningly the Enlightenment prescription of radical individual liberty. It is this very prescription which the pope says is a distortion of the Christian ethos that gave birth to it.

I have no intention here of giving a full account of the history of my libertarian assumptions, but my attitude in the 1960s toward the War in Vietnam gives you its essential flavor. If I am going to be completely honest with myself, I have to admit that perhaps the major reason I opposed that war as a late-teen and then a twenty-something had to do with the indignation I felt at the thought of being drafted and forced to fight in it.

The question, for me, was more than one of whether the war was right or wrong. It was a question of, "How dare they not ask me whether I think it's a right and just war, before they draft me?"

In other words, my assumption that my own liberty trumped any and all claims that my society made upon me — my assumption that I had no civic responsibility to serve — was something that I never called into question. And to avoid calling it into question, my psychological strategy was to call the war immoral on its very face.

Now, that particular war may indeed have been immoral and unjust ... but so too, I now see, was my assumption that the dictates of radical individaul liberty mandated my right to opt out, at my own personal discretion, from fighting in it.


For me to follow the pope and honor what he says in Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, I'll have to scrap that attitude. It's admittedly tricky to do, for there are indeed Christian justifications for pacifism and nonviolence, ones the pope would respect. And there are indeed Christian criteria for a war's being just, according to which the Vietnam conflict may not have passed muster.

Yet, the pope seems to suggest, when one argues against a war from Enlightenment-enshrined considerations of personal liberty alone, one is building one's house on moral quicksand. Hmmm ... tricky, indeed, to see that the moral conclusion may be the same — this war is a bad war, for example — but the justifications for that conclusion are nevertheless flawed and need to be jettisoned.

Yet this is what the pope is telling secularists. No matter how much religion and secularism (he calls the latter "laicism") may agree on a great many grand moral pronouncements, ultimately what matters is how you get to those pronouncements. Just as the end never justifies the means, the conclusion never justifies the arguments. If a system of argumentation — a philosophy — is flawed and contains an internal inconsistency, at some point morality itself becomes mutilated.