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Prof. Spaemann comments on the "Doctrinal
Note" of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, nn.
2-3
The Note of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
criticizes a prejudice that has become a constitutive element of
"political correctness" in the Western world. The prejudice
can be summed up in four theses: 1. The highest values of a liberal
democratic order are tolerance and pluralism. 2. Tolerance is
irreconcilable with the conviction that one possesses an absolute and
definitive truth. 3. The juridical order of a liberal state is based
exclusively on the will of its citizens. It cannot, therefore,
presuppose any ethical principle whose universality is recognized by
only a part of them. 4. There is no reality such as "natural
law". Law can only prohibit actions that are contrary to the will
of those affected by the consequences of these actions.
The prejudice, underlying these theses of ideological liberalism, is
not only wrong but dangerous, and more specifically dangerous for the
liberal legal state. The haphazard application of these principles
initially conceals their grave consequences. I shall now critically
examine the four theses.
Pluralism, absolute relativism, unity of truth, goodness
1. Pluralism is a word with many meanings. Creation is
"pluralistic". There is an enormous plurality of species, of
human beings, of races, nations and cultures and these, in turn, contain
a plurality of groups and individuals. This plurality constitutes the
world's riches. A reduced plurality would mean an impoverishment. An
impoverishment of what? Of the one world. If the world were not one, if
being were not one, then it would make no sense to speak of pluralism as
a richness. Our concept of "being" embraces all that exists.
To say that something exists outside being is self-contradictory.
The same goes for the concept of truth. Those who say that something
is like this or like that thereby exclude that it might not be so. And
if they assert that no one can truly know that something behaves in such
a way and not otherwise, then, precisely, they are again affirming
something, and this assertion is either true or false. If something such
as a plurality of truths were to exist, then the contrary would also be
true and therefore, in actual fact, precisely nothing would have been
affirmed. Newton's law of universal gravity is either sound or unsound.
Without a universalist concept of truth all scientific research would
immediately come to a halt. Another issue is that of the adequacy of our
concepts, if we are speaking of non-empirical realities. This is not our
topic. Since we can think and speak of God only with images, God himself
has given us a satisfactory image of himself in Jesus Christ.
"Those who have seen me, have seen the Father" (Jn 14,9).
However, it is not only the concepts of being and of truth that are
universalist by definition, but also the concept of good. "Good, if
it is manifested, is common to all things" Plato says. If we say
that pluralism is good, this phrase only means something if the very
word "good" has an unambiguous meaning. If good and evil are
relative, then these words are in fact meaningless. First of all, we
would not be able to condemn crimes against humanity. In one of his
addresses, Heinrich Himmler, the SS commander of the "Third
Reich", praised the altruistic morals of the torturers of
Auschwitz, who with no prospects of recognition or personal advantage
were liberating humanity from the cancer of Judaism. Notoriously, there
also exists an altruism of evil. But here, to speak of "evil"
can be interpreted by the relativist only in the sense that our
sensibility differs from that of Himmler. The relativist must avoid
passing a judgement on whose sensibility is higher than another's since
in his logic there is no criterion for good which is not relative. If,
in the fifth century B.C., the Greeks believed that they had found such
a criterion in the concept of physis or "nature", this
happened, in the relativist's opinion, because they were not yet aware
of the cultural conditioning of human customs.
Actually the opposite is true. The moment the Greeks became aware of
this conditioning, through travel accounts, among other things, they
began to seek a non-relative criterion by which to distinguish between
better and worse customs. That such a criterion ought to exist is
already shown by the fact that human beings discuss it. Questions of
taste cannot be disputed. Good and evil can be, because judgements on
good and evil always imply a universalist approach. Moreover, in the
vast majority of cases, the human family generally agrees on what is to
be praised or condemned. When there has been no ideological
brainwashing, gratitude, children's love of their parents, fidelity,
honesty, courage and compassion are recognized everywhere as being
beautiful; while ingratitude, betrayal, falsehood, cowardice, and
cruelty are known to be something that is wrong.
Christianity did not invent these virtues but only contributed to
their unlimited free development. It freed them from the constraint of
having to yield constantly to the need for self-assertion. Christianity
teaches that those who do God's will can leave to God the care of their
self-preservation. This alone allows for absolute moral values.
Tolerance based on relativism or based on convictions
2. Relativism, in short, has only one virtue, tolerance. But here
too, it is contradictory. Relativism itself cannot give a foundation to
such a reality as tolerance. Why should tolerance be a value? Why does
it foster the internal peace of a community? Can the peace of the
community be fostered by the repression and elimination of all
dissidents? And should we not also show tolerance to the religions and
world views that favour intolerance? Is not one conviction as good as
another? Many relativists favour the tolerance even of intolerance, many
favour intolerance in the face of intolerance and for them any authentic
verifying conviction, that is, a conviction that considers a contrary
conviction to be false, implies intolerance. Wherever tolerance is not
secondary, that is, when it does not derive from something else but is
the supreme value, it is transformed into intolerance of what alone, in
reality, gives tolerance its value: the sacredness of conscience.
In itself, the human eye would have no value if light and visible
reality did not exist. A person's convictions would have no value if
there were no truth and good to which the conscience and conviction are
oriented, even when, in a single case, they may be mistaken. The dignity
of the human person is based on this reference to the truth. Instead,
tolerance is withdrawal from this dignity. Relativism denies the value
of what is in fact the only foundation of tolerance: convictions.
Interreligious dialogue, world views and verifiable convictions become
impossible whenever the dialogue itself replaces the convictions, and
anyone with convictions who is not prepared to question them or
transform them into mere hypotheses is declared unfit for dialogue. This
dialectic is anything but purely theoretical. Today liberal intolerance
is clearly gaining ground in the Western world. Those who resist it are
marginalized as "fundamentalists".
Limits of tolerance: authority is God-given v. will of the majority
3. Unlimited tolerance is impossible. We expect foreigners to adapt
to a country's customs. Each one must be expected not to oppose the
basic rules for human coexistence. If someone's erroneous conscience
prompts him to become a terrorist, then he must be prevented from doing
what his conscience orders. Since constraint prevents him from this
course of action, his conscience is respected. In fact, no one is bound
in conscience to do what he is prevented from doing. Indeed, for the
relativist, there is no difference between a sound conscience and a
warped one. He admits of no super-subjective criterion which would allow
him to make this distinction.
The state order, therefore, in the relativist vision, does not
correspond to a "nature of things" desired by God, but only to
free will. In a democracy, the will of the majority prevails in
decision-making. But does this mean that there is a natural law of the
majority to claim every and anything from the minority? Where does one
reasonably draw the line? The relativist recognizes only two
alternatives: the effective acceptance by those concerned or the
practical prevalence of the majority. Both these alternatives are
unacceptable. Effective acceptance by those concerned makes it
impossible to claim something from someone if he denies his adherence.
This means anarchy. Domination in
practice, hence the law of the strongest, is not a law but the quite
the opposite. Every ordering of human life that deserves the name is
born from the desire to set limits on purely physical domination. The
relativist does not recognize the foundation of these limits and
therefore only recognizes their alternative: anarchy or tyranny. This
alternative is inevitable, if there is no order founded on the
reasonable nature of the human being, which is simultaneously legitimate
and limits political power.
After the end of the Second World War, the great Cardinal Clemens
August von Galen, the "confessor" Bishop, said to the
Catholics gathered before the ruins of Münster Cathedral: "What we
have just experienced, tyranny, persecution, terror and devastation, is
God's punishment for what, in 1919, the Germans wrote at the beginning
of their Constitution: 'Every power of the State derives from the
people'. We have now experienced the power of the State that is derived
from the people and now is the time to reflect on the one legitimate
origin of all state power, including that of the democratic state,
God". Already, Plato wrote that no man but God alone is the Lord of
the human person. Just as the Pope does not owe his authority to the
Cardinals who elected him, so the democratically chosen political man
does not owe it to the people who elected him. For him too, what Jesus
said to Pilate still stands: "You would have no power over me
unless it had been given to you from above" (Jn 19,11). The limits
of his power have the same origin as the legitimacy of this power: the
natural moral law in which the divine will is manifested for us.
When a parliament approves legislation that contradicts this order,
the duty of loyalty comes to an end. When the majority of a people
decide, or approve, to eliminate or reduce a minority to slavery, it is
the right and duty of every citizen who understands the injustice of
this law to oppose it, and stand by the minority to help those who are
threatened and to work for an order that will force the majority to give
up this injustice. If it were to be objected that a religiously
motivated minority did not possess this right, the response could only
be: We do not impose a religion upon you. But in this particular
instance, we seek to prevent you from resorting to violence or killing
innocent people, even if you believe you have a right to do so. And in
doing this we defend the legitimacy of the order on which your power
itself is based.
Dignity of human nature v. dignity of human will
4. Ideological liberalism recognizes this argument conditionally. But
it accepts only one limit to human action: the will of the interested
party. It rejects all the laws, by which persons are limited, starting
with the premise that nothing should be inflicted on anyone against his
will. But the will is too ambivalent a reality to be able to replace the
concept of "human nature". The will can be manipulated. It is
possible to imagine breeding slaves, by genetic manipulation, who are
fully in agreement with their condition as slaves. Why don't we do it,
if something like the dignity of human nature does not exist, but only
the dignity of the will? Today perversions such as sadism and masochism
are openly disseminated, on condition that a sadist associates with a
masochist.
A tricky case now awaits the judgement of liberal relativists.
Shortly before Christmas it became known that via the internet a
cannibal had found an accomplice who was willing to have himself killed
and eaten. It all happened with their mutual agreement and no outside
intervention. From the relativistic point of view, therefore, this was
not a crime.
Is this not an opportunity to return to reflect on the concept of
natural moral law?
Doctrinal Note of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith on some Questions regarding the Participation of
Catholics in Political Life, nn. 2-3
2. b) A kind of cultural relativism exists today, evident in the
conceptualization and defence of an ethical pluralism, which sanctions
the decadence and disintegration of reason and the principles of the
natural moral law. Furthermore, it is not unusual to hear the opinion
expressed in the public sphere that such ethical pluralism is the very
condition for democracy. As a result, citizens claim complete autonomy
with regard to their moral choices, and lawmakers maintain that they are
respecting this freedom of choice by enacting laws which ignore the
principles of natural ethics and yield to ephemeral cultural and moral
trends, as if every possible outlook on life were of equal value. At the
same time, the value of tolerance is disingenuously invoked when a large
number of citizens, Catholics among them, are asked not to base their
contribution to society and political life —through the legitimate
means available to everyone in a democracy—on their particular
understanding of the human person and the common good. The history of
the 20th century demonstrates that those citizens were right who
recognized the falsehood of relativism, and with it, the notion that
there is no moral law rooted in the nature of the human person, which
must govern our understanding of man, the common good and the state.
3. Such relativism, of course, has nothing to do with the legitimate
freedom of Catholic citizens to choose among the various political
opinions that are compatible with faith and the natural moral law, and
to select, according to their own criteria, what best corresponds to the
needs of the common good. Political freedom is not—and
cannot be—based upon the relativistic idea
that all conceptions of the human person's good have the same value and
truth, but rather, on the fact that politics are concerned with very
concrete realizations of the true human and social good in given
historical, geographic, economic, technological and cultural contexts.
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