The neoconservative commentators at The Weekly Standard continue to praise Joseph Ratzinger’s homily where he blasts "relativism" as the source of all evil in the modern world.
We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not
recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal
one’s own ego and one’s own desires. (Ratzinger)
In the neocon interpretation, "relativism" is equivalent to "liberalism" – i.e. everything that is wrong with American society. In an effort to understand what exactly Ratzinger means by "relativism", I went back to his 1996 essay (pdf) Relativism: The Central Problem for Faith Today. The essay is helpful in illuminating key aspects ot Ratzinger’s theology. Much of the essay is an attack on Liberation Theology, which in his mind is equated to Marxism. But he sees "relativism" as the philosophical foundation of democracy. Ratzinger sees the value in relativism as a political principle, the problem occurs when this carries over to church doctrine. I think Ratzinger mistakenly confuses relativism with pluralism. He then seems to conflate theological relativism with Kantian epistemology – the inability of the mind to know the objective Ding-an-sich. So the only possible way out for man is through Faith – orthodox faith as mediated by the traditional church.
Why, in brief, does faith still have a chance? I would say the following: because it is in harmony with what man is. Man is more than what Kant and the post-Kantian philosophers wanted to see and concede. Kant himself must have recongnized this some way with his postulates.
For those who believe in papal infallibility and literal biblical truth, Ratzinger – Pope Benedict XVI – is your man. You could not ask for a more forceful advocate. For the rest of us who are infected by the prevailing relativism and harbor uncertainty I can recommend Doubt, a History by the poet and scholar Jennifer Michael Hecht. In this ambitious book Hecht surveys almost three millenia of human history seeking evidence of the common thread of doubt across many different cultures. Kant makes a brief appearance on page 367.
Kant so fully demolished the last remaining philosophical proofs of God that Mendelssohn called him "the all destroyer." and the name stuck. Kant would be a major figure of doubt, but the man himself was a believer. He thought that moral feelings were a hint from the unknowable world, and because of our total lack of knowledge of that real, noumenal world, one might as well choose to believe that there is a God out there. He revolutionized philosophy without having to shift in his pew.
One comes away from Hecht’s book with a great appreciation of the skeptical intellect that stops at nothing in pursuit of truth. The mind that is frozen in certainty – Ratzinger’s dogma – is much less appealing – at least to me.
