Ruby Slippers

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

In "O for Order," as I continued my ongoing discussion of Pope Benedict XVI's book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, I postulated that our society's capacity for ethical awareness is gradually producing a new moral "order for free" in the wake of the demise of old-fashioned taboos.

Very recently there has been a decline in the number of abortions being performed, in the amount of drug abuse that occurs, and in the rate of teen pregnancy, I said. Given that the erstwhile strictures on society's moral behavior have loosened considerably over the last several decades, why?

I suggested the reason has to do with evolution. Not biological evolution per se, but the way in which various types of complex-adaptive, self-organizing systems evolve. Among these types of systems are species, ecosystems, cultures, technologies, economies, financial markets ... and, I would suggest, the ways in which societies come to grips with their moral, ethical understandings.

All such dynamical systems, argues biologist Stuart Kauffman in his book At Home in the Universe, have the capacity to evolve by virtue of hovering mathematically at or near the "edge of chaos" — a unique dynamical locale where both novelty and stability are to be expected. "Chaos" itself has the ability to produce novelty but not stability; the two distinct regimes of dynamical "order" yield stability but not novelty. Only the "edge of chaos" offers sanctuary to the processes of graceful change we call evolution.

Stuff happens ... and when it does, chaos often ensues. But complex-adaptive systems are self-righting, and as they make their way back out of the regime of chaotic instability to the vaunted domain that has been dubbed the edge of chaos, which is equally the edge of order, their ability to self-organize produces new order for free — "for free," because the new order is not imposed on the system by any force or contrivance that exists outside or above the system.


The new moral order that is evolving in our society is not, I would claim, a matter of necessarily seeking different moral ends, but rather of having different moral means.

Take abortion. Those who support a "woman's right to choose" nevertheless want abortion to become (albeit safe and legal) rare. Of late, abortion indeed seems to have grown (slightly) less frequent than it was just a few years ago, as it remains safe and legal. Why?

That trend is probably due to a confluence of causes, I would say:

• Various new laws have chipped away at the ease with which women — for example, teens living with their parents — obtain abortions.
• Sexual mores have shifted in favor of serial monogamy, albeit not full-fledged pre-marital chastity.
• There are now "morning after" birth control pills.
• Women can now take birth control pills that suppress their monthly periods, a desirable goal in itself from the point of view of many women. The pills also protect against pregnancy.
• Advice columnists in newspapers now give hard-headed, practical advice about sexual relationships that no parish priest was ever equipped to give.
• Schools teach condom use.
• TV shows portray getting pregnant when you aren't in a stable relationship as not necessarily a wonderful thing to have happen.
• Women are not as starry-eyed as they once were about "Mr. Right."
• Religious and secular institutions with a pro-life agenda have learned how to pursue it more effectively.
  
• And so on.

There are also countervailing tendencies, to be sure, such as boyfriends, parents, and job requirements that pressure women to terminate unwanted pregnancies. But now there is increasingly a reaction against such pressures on the part of not only pro-lifers but also feminists who resent all forms of coercion exacted upon women.

All in all, the situation is evolving. As it does, abortion becomes rarer ... even though there are (a) fewer formal legal forces exerted upon women contemplating abortion, as there were before Roe v. Wade; (b) fewer informal taboos that remain in widespread effect against premarital sex, pregnancy outside marriage, or the illegitimacy of children.


What does any of this have to do with the pope's book? Well, the pope argues that the rise in the West, over the last several centuries, of the notion that we as individuals are, or ought to be, radically free to express ourselves as we see fit, without having to kowtow to external authorities or taboos, has put us in a self-contradictory situation. As more and more of us gain more and more "power to choose," in the guise of newly minted human "rights," those newfound "rights" endlessly trump other people's and institutions' existing rights — to the point, ultimately, of constricting freedom itself. Lost in the struggle, he believes, is our basic respect for the lives and dignity of other human persons.

I see his point, of course, since in the short term there is an apparent deficit of respect for life and dignity abroad in the land. But I would argue that in the long term, moral "order for free" will in fact emerge and rectify that situation. Indeed, it is already happening.

And so, an analogy. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her fellow travelers on the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City expect the great wizard who rules the Land of Oz mostly by the force of bluster and intimidation to grant whatever it is that would turn each one's individual world into a seeming paradise. Dorothy wants to go home to Kansas. The Scarecrow wants a brain. The Tin Man, a heart. The Cowardly Lion, courage.

As the story unfolds, it becomes quickly apparent that the Great Wizard of Oz is actually a humbug who lacks the power to grant anything. The wizard, I take it, is a stand-in for all external, top-down sources of authority: governments, churches, and those less-visible bastions of behavioral governance which sociologists catalog.

Accordingly, the wizard, who is actually a soft-hearted charlatan whose hot-air balloon descended quite by accident into Oz, confers empowering symbols of braininess, compassion, and courage on Dorothy's friends, and they each come to believe in the qualities they had all along.

As for Dorothy, after the wizard's plan to carry her back to Kansas in his resurrected balloon misfires, the Good Witch Glinda reveals that the ruby slippers Dorothy has inherited from the killed Wicked Witch of the East have the unsuspected ability to transport her home. I take "home" to represent (among other things) the graceful stability we associate with life on earth. The ruby slippers betoken (again, among other things) the power of living organisms — ruby is the color of blood — to, by virtue of their self-organized complexity, produce order for free from within themselves.


The Wizard of Oz is a paean to self-determination in the absence of external coercion, hard (as with formal laws) or soft (as with informal taboos). It is a tribute to the ability of complex systems such as Dorothy represents to right themselves after a catastrophe such as the cyclone that blew Dorothy's house from Kansas to Oz. It is an affirmation that good things can "magically" happen even when everyday logic would suggest otherwise.

When Pope Benedict makes in his book what otherwise would seem to be a logically compelling case that our radical bias toward more and more individual liberty today violates life's sanctity and dignity, and ultimately undermines liberty itself, I think he reckons without the capacity of self-organizing systems to produce (moral) order for free, as they gracefully evolve. I think he overlooks, as Dorothy did, the power of our cultural ruby slippers to transport us out of moral chaos and back to paradise.