Blessed Relativism

Reading the reviews of Pope Benedict XVI it is interesting that his attack on the "dictatorship of relativism" is seen by many as a an attack on Europe.  In fact "relativism" is often a code word for Europe – something to be deplored. ( I should add that there is little evidence that most of these reviewers have actually read Joseph Ratzinger’s writings on relativism. ) The neoconservative Weekly Standard equates relativism with the moral and economic collapse of Europe. 

Does anyone doubt that Western Europe is tumbling downward? It cannot summon the will to reproduce itself. It has aborted and contracepted its birthrate down toward demographic disaster: perhaps 1.4 children per couple across the western end of the continent, when simple replacement requires a rate around 2.1. It can discover neither how to absorb nor how to halt the waves of Islamic immigrants swamping its cities, and it has proved supine in the face of those immigrants’ anti-Semitism, anti-Christianism, and even anti-Europeanism.

Meanwhile, Western Europe’s economies are soft, its unemployment rates are shocking, and its emerging continent-wide government is elitist and antidemocratic. Its people are hedonists and materialists, its soccer clubs are nativist militias in waiting, its churches are empty, and–well, that’s the problem Joseph Ratzinger faces, isn’t it? The newly elected Pope Benedict XVI has just inherited the world’s greatest pulpit, but, on his home continent at least, there’s hardly anyone in the pews to listen.

The neo-fascist weekly Junge Freiheit has an essay this week (by Dr. Karlheinz Weissmann)  that attacks the moral depravity of Protestantism in Germany.  The culprit? Relativism.

Das wird im besten Fall seine Anziehungskraft auf die ernsthaften Geister nicht verfehlen, die die „Diktatur des Relativismus“ als unerträglich empfinden und deren Bereitschaft wächst, sich mit den eigentlichen Gefahren für die Fortexistenz Europas auseinanderzusetzen.

The only solution is to submit to the doctrinal orthodoxy in Rome.  Even more bizarre, relativism is seen by some as the creation of German "nihilists":

Ironically, it was Joseph Ratzinger’s fellow Germans who gave us the diabolical idea that moral absolutes are nonsense – nihilists such as Nietzsche and Nazis such as Heidegger. French philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida then corrupted the faculty of reason with their postmodernist assault on truth.

Postmodernist thought is alive in many ideological isms: subjectivism, historicism, multiculturalism, deconstructionism, moral relativism and nihilism. It is the work of leftist academics at war with the Catholic concept of natural law. But others have promulgated this invidious idea.

This week an angry reader (J.H.Cohen) wrote to the New York Times complaining about judges "who ground their beliefs in an fashionable moral relativism and post-modern European nihilism."  Okay, which is it?  Are Europeans moral relativists or are they post-modern nihilists? Because the two are mutually exclusive: one group accepts the multiplicity of truths and the other denies truth altogether.

The answer, of course, is neither.  I was a student at German universities in the 1970’s – not long after Joseph Ratzinger had his "Saul on the Road to Damascus" conversion from liberalism to orthodoxy in Tübingen. The universities were hardly hotbeds of relativism or nihilism.  On the contrary, there were a multitude of orthodoxies – mostly of a Marxian variety.  The students agreed in a universal moral standard – they were not relativists – but their universal moral standard happened to have a content different from Catholic doctrine. 

The view that totalitarian ideologies like National Socialism and Leninism are somehow based on relativism is false.  Equally false is the view that Catholic orthodoxy always stood against totalitarianism  We need to avoid putinizing history.  Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners  weighs in on the subject in an interesting essay in Die Presse:

Benedikts Verschmelzung von Nazi-Horror – ein Bekenntnis extremer Intoleranz – mit der Moderne und heutigem Pluralismus unter dem Titel des "Relativismus" ist offensichtlich bizarr. Sie ignoriert auch einige Fakten: Im Gegensatz zu dem, was Benedikt in seinen Memoiren ausdrücklich behauptet, leistete die Kirche kaum Widerstand gegen die Nazis. Während die Kirche einerseits dem Nationalsozialismus in vielen Bereichen Widerstand leistete, kollaborierte sie in anderen Bereichen freiwillig mit dem Nationalsozialismus und Faschismus. Christliche Intoleranz und Antisemitismus waren die Grundlagen für die Entstehung des radikalen Antisemitismus der Nazis sowie dafür, dass die Nazis so viele Christen in ihren Krieg gegen die Juden einbinden konnten. Und während die Kirche nicht für den Holocaust verantwortlich war, ist es aber auch eine Tatsache, dass wesentliche Teile der Kirche den Nazis bei der Judenverfolgung begierig behilflich waren. So unterstützte die Kirche etwa die antisemitischen Rassengesetze der Nazis und Faschisten, und das slowakische Episkopat erklärte der slowakischen Nation, warum ihre Regierung, angeführt von einem Priester, die Juden des Landes deportieren müsste. In Bezug auf Juden war die Kirche kein fundamentaler Gegenpol, sondern Teil des Problems.