The Self-Contradictions of Liberty

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

Today I finally got hold of a copy of Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, a book I originally mentioned in Reason and Love. Written just before its author, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, was elected pope, it argues that Europe and the West are experiencing a cultural crisis for a very deep-seated reason: we Westerners have bought into a crippled, incompletely rational philosophy that has an internal contradiction at its core.

At the root of the philosophy that grew out of the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment in Europe, a stance that continues to dominate our Western culture today, is the value we call liberty. Personal liberty as a value and a right was originally derived from the Christian idea of the intrinsic dignity of the human person created in God's image. But the scientific version of rationalism which flourished in the wake of the Enlightenment cut the umbilical cord between such values and an erstwhile belief in God. Liberty became its own supreme good.

The pope shows how that seemingly progressive idea has carried the seed of its own self-cannibalization. Protecting the right of man to liberty inevitably leads to the prohibition of discrimination — see pp. 34-35 — which equally inevitably leads to a reverse discrimination wherein we lose, say, the liberty loudly to proclaim ideas resented by legally protected groups.

There are many manifestations of this that can be listed, among them:

• Women, as possessors of abortion rights, are protected from hearing the speech of anti-abortion protesters on the way into an abortion clinic, by keeping the protesters at a certain distance away from the woman's path.
• Meanwhile, as the pope himself mentions (p. 35), the rights to life and liberty of the human fetus about to be aborted get lost in the shuffle.
• A church that calls homosexuality "objectively disordered" and claims that it, as a church obedient to divine revelation, "does not have the right to confer priestly ordination on women" is, according to the pope's book, relegated to the status of an institution whose tenets are deemed entirely private matters of merely subjective belief — which, I think the pope would agree, is equivalent to designating them "not even wrong" at the level of our publicly shared culture.
• On many progressive college campuses, "politically incorrect" speech is simply not tolerated, and can be grounds for dismissal.
• We in the U.S. now feel we need special laws against "hate crimes" in which, for example, assaults aggravated by hateful, discriminatory motivations on the part of the perpetrator draw longer jail sentences. How does a jury know the perp's inner motivations? Well, if the perp has spoken out against homosexuality and slugs a gay guy in a bar fight, presumably it was a hate crime. The onus is on the assailant to show that it wasn't.

I'm not trying to say that hate is OK, or that laws should change, or that controversial positions taken by the Catholic Church are unassailable. The overarching point that the pope is making, and that I agree with, is that liberty, unmoored from the Christian religious values which engendered it, ties itself in knots. It then needs ever more knots in order to balance out the first knots. The compensating knots need to be tied — by an increasingly powerful state! — at the cost, ultimately, of handcuffing liberty itself.

This is the logical flaw in the hard diamond of Enlightenment thought, to the extent that its science-only version of rationality disenfranchises the Christian religion and associated moral understandings which originally gave rise to secularism's most cherished values.


To the Enlightenment axiom that personal liberty can serve as the indisputable source of all else we need to believe in, morally and ethically, the pope juxtaposes Christianity's foundational assumption: human life itself is sacred; it belongs to God. Liberty, though itself a worthy value, derives from the dignity of the human person who is made in God's image, and whose life comes as a gift from God.

That idea is the only true basis for morality, for justice, for a rationality that is not crippled and incomplete ... and, yes, for liberty.