Why a ‘dictatorship’ of relativism?

It was a remarkable thing to say, and a remarkable moment at which to say it.  It was at the opening Mass of the 2005 Papal Conclave, addressing those gathered to elect the next Pope, that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as he then still was, warned of a growing ‘dictatorship of relativism’ in our present era.  He was reflecting in his homily on words of St Paul to the Ephesians —

We are all to come to unity in our faith and in our knowledge of the Son of God, until we become the perfect Man, fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself.  Then we shall not be children any longer, or tossed one way and another and carried along by every wind of doctrine, at the mercy of all the tricks men play and their cleverness in practising deceit.  If we live by the truth and in love, we shall grow in all ways into Christ … [Ephesians 4:13-15]

— and his thoughts, which, when of course the next Pope turned out to be Joseph Ratzinger himself, came to serve in a way as the first homily of Benedict XVI, were these:

How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves — flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error comes true.

Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labelled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires. 

(http://www.vatican.va/gpII/documents/homily-pro-eligendo-pontifice_20050418_en.html, accessed 13 May 2018)

That phrase, the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, has become one of Benedict’s best-known and oftest-quoted.  Even without it, this would be a startling homily; indeed, it attracted a good deal of attention at the time from the secular media, whose spotlight, he knew, that Monday the eighteenth of April, was trained on the Vatican as a new shepherd was being chosen for the Church.  Yet it ought perhaps to have been no surprise to hear a Cardinal opposing moral relativism.  For the Church has always asserted the unchanging nature and the objectivity of the fundamental moral principles that it has been her business, over the centuries, to discern.   Just as the foundations of our human nature have not been designed by us, lie outside our control and are determined by laws above us, the Church tells us that the moral life by which that nature should flourish comes ultimately from standards not our own.  The Church looks with a clear eye and the Holy Spirit’s help at the way we are made, and at the perfect example of Jesus Christ, the man who was God, and concludes not merely that we should not but that we cannot adjust, relativise or negotiate these standards — even if it feels or seems to us like a good idea — without doing ourselves harm.  There are no circumstances, then, in which we may put aside the commandments, disregard the dignity of any human being, or accept the use of evil means in any cause, even a good one.   Moreover, what is fundamentally good and just is the same in every time and place, even if its precise manifestation can sometimes vary from age to age, so neither social change nor technological advances can change these rules.  Now, the Church at its best has also always understood nuance, and knows that different kinds of actions vary in moral gravity, that there is a distinction to be made between the wrongness of a deed and the guilt of the person who commits it, and above all, that God is as merciful as He is just.   But that very paradox of justice and mercy, one of the most tremendous of Christianity’s strengths, would only be weakened if the Church allowed the moral principles themselves to be slackened, offering mere excuses for sins, rather than the limpid water of forgiveness.  If God’s justice were not absolute, the gift of God’s mercy would be diminished.  Relativism weakens justice and falsifies mercy: this is why the Church cannot accept it.

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Obedience to moral principles does not spare us moral dilemmas, though.  Indeed, moral principles sometimes appear to impose suffering on us, seeming to ride roughshod over mankind’s weakness and woe.  Of course the Church is opposed to an unrelenting fundamentalism.  But even as we move mountains to hold out mercy to people, we have to insist, again not without nuance, that the slightest concession to a moral principle itself, even a chink or fracture in the underlying foundation, opens up a temptation to widen it a little further, and then a little further again, and then further still, until, slowly or swiftly, we are tempted into believing that the moral law is below us, rather than above us.  Only when it is too late does it become clear how surprisingly malleable a moral principle may become under surprisingly little pressure, just as easily, we know, as we yield to temptation ourselves.  Hence principle after hitherto-unassailable principle — the dignity of the poor, the sanctity of life, the indissolubility of marriage, the common good — come to be undermined through any number of apparently just, and undoubtedly sincere motivations.  In our own age we have seen this happen.  The Church is not just being jittery when it keeps its look-out for the thin ends of wedges, and Cardinal Ratzinger knew what he was talking about when he warned against it.

Just as this position might be expected of the Church, it is nothing new that it should meet with the disagreement of main-stream secular thought.  Many Western commentators and campaigners would argue that to insist more than a little on more than a minimum of moral standards is to take upon ourselves an authority that is not ours, and in fact to display a certain short-sightedness — a failure to allow for the difference of others’ situations from our own.  From this point of view, relativism is not only harmless, but becomes a virtue, a positive proof of a lack of prejudice, a sign of  a citizen’s readiness to make adaptations in an age of rapid change — and, as we shall see, more important even than that.  The main-stream would probably accept the definition given in an article published in BBC News’ online magazine just after Benedict’s election.  According to this, relativism is the idea that moral principles lack any objective foundation, and vary across cultures and between individuals: not only beauty but ‘goodness, virtue and duty also lie in the eye of the beholder’.  Therefore, in direct contradiction to the Church’s view, it is logically necessary to say not merely that particular discrete acts or deeds or incidents are morally relative to each other (as a judge might hand down different sentences to those found guilty of the same crime) but that the underlying principles that make them right or wrong are also relative, and therefore fallible or negotiable (as if circumstances could put into question the very criminal quality of a given crime; as if the proven act of burglary were not necessarily always forbidden by law).  This idea leaves it up to us to form our own moral standards; we are left to navigate the world by our own light, according to our own perception of our freedom. The secular point of view is far less troubled by the thin ends of wedges than the Church, because it sees no important difference between the wedge and the moral fabric into which it is driven.  Each is as valid, or as fallible, as the other.

The fundamental disagreement is this: the Church says that morality, having an objective source, namely God, is unchanging, written within us and must be discerned; whereas modern Western secularism acknowledges no overall moral authority, understanding morality simply as an agreement reached within a community for the sake of peaceful living.

So, the mind of the Church and the prevailing culture of secularism disagree with each other: business as usual, then!  But what about this word dictatorship’?  This might initially strike even faithful Catholics as quite strong.  We might have expected Cardinal Ratzinger to foretell of a collapse or a disintegration of moral standards, an ‘anarchy of relativism’,  but here he is describing an overt, concerted effort of construction; he seems to be warning of an organised threat.  “Really, a ‘dictatorship’?” even faithful Mass-goers might respond.  “But secular society allows us to practise our religion, doesn’t it?  We are not yet persecuted for our faith, are we, by any authoritarian regime?” Yet a harder phenomenon, with order and purpose, is indeed what he perceived, and to describe it he deliberately chose a word that conjure up in the mind’s eye a whole picture-library of the outbreaks of totalitarianism that litter the twentieth century.  And for the secular mainstream the term touched another nerve.  It is one thing to criticise relativism,” they might retort, “but quite another to suggest that it could lend clout to any organised form of oppression.  Surely this is a contradiction in terms.  Our permissive society seeks precisely to weaken such tyrannies and to liberate the will of the individual; the more dictatorial the authority, the more fervently we oppose it.”  And some of their number would probably add, “And that includes your Church!”

This choice of the word ‘dictatorship’ is all the more startling because Joseph Ratzinger’s writing is characterised precisely by a careful, restrained use of language (it is more the sort of thing his successor Francis would say!).  And, furthermore, to know even a little about his biography and the events that shaped his youth is to realise that he would not employ the term ‘dictatorship’ lightly.  The young Joseph Ratzinger, like the young Karol Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II), was embroiled in the very cauldron’s depth of the Second World War.  Even during the 1930s he had gone to great lengths to obtain exemption from the Hitler Youth, and in 1945 actually deserted his post in the German army, risking his life in doing so, and made his way hundreds of miles home to Bavaria.  Cardinal Ratzinger, having witnessed from within the rise, realisation and collapse of the Third Reich, knows better than most of us what a dictatorship looks like.  He would not make such an allusion glibly.

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Where and how, then, did the man who was about to become Pope see a dictatorship emerging in the modern West?  Not, perhaps, in its outward appearance — there are no mass rallies, no night raids, no goose-stepping infantrymen — but perhaps he sees it, firstly, in our willing blindness.  The apostles of Western progressivism, in allowing the old morality to be compromised, have missed something: the relativism of moral principles has itself been exalted as an absolute moral principle.  And it is rapidly becoming the only absolute moral principle, stiffening among us silently and ironically behind the velvet veneer of fashion, social convention and even, to an increasing extent, the law.  The reasonable freedom to allow each other to order our own lives as we see fit and the reasonable custom of showing tolerance towards those with whose actions or opinions we may disagree have been fashioned into a new moral obligation, a duty to avoid the assertion, in the public sphere, of any absolute moral principle whatsoever, lest others suspect a curtailment of their individual freedom.  It is the bureaucracy of the dictatorship of relativism that, all across western Europe, has in recent years expelled religious signs from public buildings, attempted to interfere and mediate between parents and children, even taken to test in court the unfashionable views of public servants, and gradually elevated quite broad, shallow and unelucidated notions of ‘tolerance’, ‘liberty’, ‘dignity’ and ‘best interests’ to the status of the tenets of a creed.  Quietly, and, it seems, perceptible only to those on its receiving end, a new force crystallises and hardens.

Still, some secularists might say, “Well, even if the law has to be heavy-handed in preventing interference with our liberty to do whatever we want, does this not still mean freedom for us as individuals?  We are still some way short of dictatorship.  Can we not all just lead our lives as we like, so long as we get along with each other, even if the law sometimes has to make to mind our own business?”  But the Church understands that this idea is really an illusion.  This is actually the very threshold of the dictatorship of relativism, which is capable of holding sway over whole cultures and individual minds alike.

To see why, perhaps the first thing we must do is to perceive, behind the promise of freedom that sounds so good, the quality of indifference that pervades and underpins it.  Even that phrase, ‘just do as we like’, apparently resonant with liberty, is radically and inhumanly self-centred.  If I, the ego, am at the centre of my own existentialist quest, I am less concerned not just about what my neighbour is doing, but also how my neighbour relates to me, and who my neighbour is.  Individualism may prevent me from meddling, but it also liberates me from caring. The loosening of the bonds between human beings may sound just fine to strong, independent people, but not to the vulnerable and downtrodden, whom bonds support as much as they bind.  Is it really others’ freedom for their own sake that is so appealing to the individualist, or our own freedom to care less about them?

Once such indifference to our neighbours is permitted we see — and have seen in our culture in the past fifty years — the rise of a general moral indifference: an ‘OK’ culture, in which the maximum we can reasonably expect of others is the bare minimum.  Although there are certainly many exceptions to this rule — I encounter them daily — it is in many places the lowest common denominator: I’m OK, you’re OK, I’m OK with you if you’re OK with me and we’re all OK with whatever each other is OK with. (Unless you’re not OK with what I’m OK with.  That’s not OK).   The smaller aspects of morality — good manners, common decency and solidarity — are threatened and eroded.  The world becomes a rougher-edged, sharper-elbowed place.  We might now be more reliably deterred from prying into others’ business, but we now lack conviction and the support of others, or even the language to offer people guidance and help if necessary.  

Thus is set — very low, it must be said — an upper limit, a kind of ceiling of cultural morality.  But where is the lower limit; where is the minimum?  For how long does the ‘OK culture’ remain merely vaguely, lukewarmly ‘OK’, before it curdles into callousness?  Perhaps the question is now to ask how individuals might respond to life in such a culture, and the answer is surely that many would soon come to permit themselves lower standards.  If my ego believes I am entitled to all the freedom I can get that does not impinge on others, I will naturally be tempted to exercise my own freedom to the full, to the very limit of my neighbour’s freedom.  If that limit is contestable, how long will it be before I am indeed tempted to contest it?  And then how could I be sure, without some external and absolute moral rule, that I was not riding rough-shod over my neighbour?  Would I have the self-discipline to stop short of that limit, if I did not acknowledge any moral authority over me?  Many of us might, much of the time, but we all know enough about the nature of human beings to see how precarious this arrangement is.  This is how yawning temptation and the keen encouragement to fend for oneself consolidate the inward power of the Dictatorship of Relativism, and its command over individual hearts and souls. 

Soon a vicious circle emerges: such changes repeated in many souls all add up to a culture of competition and self-seeking, which, in turn, again strengthens its influences on the individual.  The Church is often accused of ‘scaremongering’ — and no doubt is very adept at scaring people — but the trouble is that the cliché is true: relativism really does lead down a slippery slope towards ever-lower standards of personal behaviour.  The evidence is before us: we can see for ourselves what happens when principles are compromised in the name of some economic or political benefit.  There are modern Britain’s dismal marriage statistics, the slave trade’s legacy in America, the volume and aggression of road traffic, the gradual ruination of river estuaries, and so on.  The effects of the general relaxation of certain laws or moral rules tend to match, even to outdo, the worst fears of those who wish to retain them.

A culture filled with individuals who revere personal choice and freedom above all will not only tend towards self-seeking and indifference, but may also use coercion or the application of heavy pressure to protect its interests, at precisely those troublesome boundaries where the freedoms of individuals collide.  The distance is surprisingly small from an insistence on personal autonomy to the compulsion of others to provide for that freedom, in ways both great and small.  Thus, in liberating the radio broadcaster from the watershed, children’s freedom to tune in is severely reduced; thus, for the sake of motorists’ freedom, rural settlements are subjected to the severing swathes and sempiternal howl of motorways; thus our easy equivocation about the humanity of the unborn compels midwives to supervise and co-ordinate staff involved in abortion procedures.  Now it all begins to look more like a dictatorship.  Or, if I leave my words unminced, the tyranny of the spoilt brat.

This dictatorship has other victims, too, for those whom it does not coerce it may abandon.  For example, to those who use their freedom unwisely it can give only the cold shoulder.  Sartre, the founder of existentialism, acknowledged this with honesty.  The existential doctrine that offers us freedom to form our selves by ourselves never claims to offer any positive guidance other than that we must keep within our boundaries; it ‘accepts no liability’ if people come to regret how they have used their own freedom.  But who, then, will teach us how to use our freedom properly?  The Church understands that the free will that God has given us leaves us with the capacity to do ourselves great wrong and great damage — but is not indifferent to this risk.  As we have seen, the Church proposes moral rules and guidance to help us to use our freedom for greatness, and offers the channel of God’s mercy to help us when we misuse it.  A culture of relativism is not so good at doing this.

Yet even if moral relativism did not produce the coercive lowering of standards, its inhibition of a heightening of standards is equally tyrannical.  Relativism has nothing to say about sainthood.  It is perturbed by holiness.  It prefers to bury itself in a stifling mediocrity of morality.  If somebody actually asks, like our brethren in the Gospels, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ — in other words, ‘How do I live excellently?’ — what happens?  They are brushed off with a curt, dismissive ‘Whatever you wish’: no answer at all.  That too is dictatorship.  People are deprived of the gold standard of living for which they were made, for which they thirst, and to which they are entitled.  The ‘OK culture’, in the guise of liberty, forbids the true freedom obtained by meaningful living. 

For the Church has a revolutionary understanding of freedom that is radically different from the world’s.   The freedom that the modern world offers is, as we have seen, the freedom to do whatever we please at the present moment as far as possible.  But there is another kind of freedom.  For we also call an athlete’s highly-trained movements free; we speak of the freedom of a musician’s thousandfold-practised performance.  Hard-won fluency in a language is a freedom.  But these achievements do not come about by accident.  The athlete, musician and linguist have not spent their lives casually doing what they want.  No; they have made a definite, hard effort to train themselves in a particular direction and to conform to certain rules, of physics, of music, of grammar, that are not of their own making.  Beyond the press-ups, the scales and the verb-tables lies a greater freedom that can be achieved only by conforming to those apparently restrictive and arbitrary rules.  Surely it makes sense, then, that the same principle applies to the moral life.  Bishop Robert Barron, one of the greatest living evangelists of the English-speaking world, has set this out in an article here, which is worth quoting at length:

The view of liberty which has shaped our culture is what we might call the freedom of indifference. On this reading, freedom is the capacity to say “yes” or “no” simply on the basis of one’s own inclinations and according to one’s own decision. Here, personal choice is paramount. We can clearly see this privileging of choice in the contemporary economic, political, and cultural arenas. But there is a more classical understanding of liberty, which might be characterized as the freedom for excellence. On this reading, freedom is the disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good, first possible, then effortless. Thus, I become increasingly free in my use of the English language the more my mind and will are trained in the rules and tradition of English. If I am utterly shaped by the world of English, I become an utterly free user of the language, able to say whatever I want, whatever needs to be said. 

  In a similar way, I become freer in playing basketball the more the moves of the game are placed, through exercise and discipline, into my body. If I were completely formed by the world of basketball, I could outplay Michael Jordan, for I would be able to do, effortlessly, whatever the game demanded of me. For the freedom of indifference, objective rules, orders, and disciplines are problematic, for they are felt, necessarily, as limitations. But for the second type of freedom, such laws are liberating, for they make the achievement of some great good possible. 

  St. Paul said, “I am the slave of Christ Jesus” and “it is for freedom that Christ has set you free.” For the advocate of the freedom of indifference, the juxtaposition of those two claims makes not a bit of sense. To be a slave of anyone is, necessarily, not to be free to choose. But for the devotee of the freedom for excellence, Paul’s statements are completely coherent. The more I surrender to Christ Jesus, who is himself the greatest possible good, the very Incarnation of God, the freer I am to be who I am supposed to be. The more Christ becomes the master of my life, the more I internalize his moral demands, the freer I am to be a child of God, to respond promptly to the call of the Father. 

  Finally, human beings are not hungry to choose; they are hungry to choose the good.

This final flourish explains a great part of the Church’s mission.  People of good will want to know how to do good, and they want trustworthy instruction.   The Church is not there just to make life difficult for us, while the world handily tries to work out what the minimum is that we can get away with.  The Church is there (among many other things) to discern the way of life that leads us to our highest dignity.  It offers, in Christ’s example, the gold standard of morality, which is the gold standard of both justice and mercy.  Quite often the path diverges from our own wishes, and very often it is extremely difficult to follow.  We might say ‘this is a hard saying’ (John 6:60) and disregard it.  But it is the way home.  The Church is simply setting out as much of the truth as has been given to us to understand.  We are not obliged to follow the Church if we choose not to, but the Church is itself obliged to put the truth forward intact, and thereby to offer the possibility of sainthood to us all.  In the cosmic scheme of things, grace notwithstanding, it is only a slight simplification to say that practice does make perfect, including when it comes to practising a religion.  The more we practise opening ourselves to the Holy Spirit, the less attached we become to our bad habits, the more used we become to good habits and the freer we become to do what is right.  Perhaps St. John Paul II put it most pithily: freedom consists ‘not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought’.  The fleeting satisfaction brought by the freedom of indifference is a dull thing compared to the greatness that the freedom for excellence would lend us.

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But St. Paul had another insight.  If we choose not to pursue that freedom for excellence, it is not the case that settling for freedom of indifference simply provides us with a tolerable second-best.  The freedom of indifference offers no guarantee against falling into slavery, the slavery of the ‘devices and desires of our own hearts’, or ‘all the tricks men play and their cleverness in practising deceit’, and indeed the way there lies clear.  For relativism’s ultimate aim, to achieve freedom by abolishing moral authority, is impossible.  We are all religious creatures; we all have our objects of worship, even if we do not realise it.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and there is always something, good or bad, set on the altar of our hearts.  How easy and how tempting it is to place on that altar ‘our own ego and desires’, and become slaves to them.  This would be the ultimate triumph of the dictatorship of relativism, which is ultimately the dictatorship of the self.  By this it claims as its third set of victims those who think they are doing rather well out of it.  The tyranny of the spoilt brat, even as it is inflicted on others, always ends up by turning on the spoilt brat himself, ruining and enslaving, by his own greed and selfishness, a person who could have been a saint.

All this goes some way to show, I hope, why Cardinal Ratzinger chose such an arresting phrase for his homily.  It was not because he was just another grumpy old man in the Vatican wanting to spoil everyone’s fun, as the world’s media somehow persisted in believing, against all the evidence, for eight long years.  Rather it was because, as a keen observer of Europe and the world, he could see forces at work, turning us in on ourselves, towards self-slavery and away from the dignity and glory for which we were made.  He knows as well as we do how hard it is to be good, how much help we need to avoid making mistakes, and what the Church’s vision of freedom means.  This is why, in that homily, and all through his pontificate in one way or another, he urged us so boldly to reject the lure of the Dictatorship of Relativism, and to seek instead the Kingdom of God.

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Pope Benedict is ‘photo-bombed’ by H. M. the Queen