"From Consensus to Culture War"

In the July 2005 issue of the Knights of Columbus periodical, Columbia, Russell Shaw has an article titled "From Consensus to Culture War," in which he puts Pope Benedict's famous words about the "dictatorship of relativism" to the political test. Cardinal Ratzinger had said to the College of Cardinals on April 18, 2005, just before the conclave that elected him pope that we are "moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." His words have provoked widespread commentary and are likely to continue evoking discussion.

Shaw noted that some observers have attacked his comments, arguing that a "dictatorship of relativism" seems a contradiction in terms, since a philosophy of life that says there is no final or devinitive "good" or "truth" would seem to be tolerant of competing claims. But Shaw writes:

Think again. Recent political and social trends show that relativism does not result in tolerance. Some examples: pharmacists forced to fill prescriptions for abortiofacients against their consciences; Catholic Charities required, against Church teaching, to provide contraceptive coverage for employees; clergymen in Europe and Canada threatened with legal action for citing Scripture against homosexual acts; hospitals under religious sponsorship pressured to allow abortions. Such episodes have multiplied lately, with more to come. They reflect relativism in its intolerant, coercive mode.

Furthermore, says Shaw, upon reflection one sees that this is inevitable:

The central creed of relativism can be stated like this: No statement is absolutely true except one -- the statement that no statement is absolutely true. That is what's technically called a self-referential proposition. And self-referential propositions refute themselves."

Thus, standing as it does on shaky intellectual ground, relativism has few ways of winning in the public squre other than resort to force. Here we find the source of relativism's real-life intolerance.

Cardinal Ratzinger spoke to the heart of the matter several years ago, writing on the subject of -- of all things -- environmentalism. Shaw quotes Ratzinger: "The pollution of the outward environment that we are witnessing is only the mirror and the consequence of the pollution of the inward environment, to which we pay too little heed.... Man's self-pollution of his soul is to be treated as one of the rights of his freedom." Again, wrote Ratzinger: "There is a discrepancy here. We want to eliminate the measurable pollution, but we don't cosider the pollution of man's soul.... Instead of making it possible to breathe humanly again, we defend with a totally false conception of freedom everything that man's arbitrary desire produces."

Those, as Shaw observes, are "fighting words" to the ears of relativists:

Predictably, therefore, some were troubled by his pointed remark about the dictatorship of relativism just before becoming pope, because he sounded like a man who thought he actually knew what was true. As any good relativist will tell you, to believe truth exists and can be known in the first step toward some form of totalitarianism.

In fact, though, that view gets the situation exactly backwards. It is relativism, not the idea of real and knowable truth, that leads to trouble.

Studies of public opinion show Americans to be highly tolerant folks. The only thing many won't tolerate is making moral judgments. People who do so are thought to be judgmental, and in the jargon of relativism, there's hardly anything worse than being judgmental.

As Shaw goes on to point out, the issues at steak go far beyond words at this point. "For a pluralistic democracy to work," he writes, "society must balance tolerance and willingness to compromise with an underlying consensus on what the Declaration of Independence calls 'self-evident' truths and 'unalienable' rights." When that consensus is eroded -- as happens whenever and wherever relativism undermines conviction that human beings are capable of grasping truth -- compromise and the balancing of interests become impossible. "Conflicts can only be settled by resort to the coercive force of law."

We have been seeing the steady erosion of bedrock convictions about truth in the United States for years. Shaw offers as an example the fact that in Congress, "the old willingness to dialogue and seek common ground has largely disappeared." The reason for this, says Shaw, goes beyond mere political partisanship. "It lies instead in relativism's corrosive message that there is no common ground to seek." Shaw concludes:

Instead of consensus we have culture war -- the clash of fundamentally opposed value systems, each ready to battle the other to the death. This is what the "dictatorship of relativism" means in the political order.