If there was ever any doubt about one of the Obama
Administration’s key philosophical commitments, it was dispelled on
Jan. 20 when the Department of Health and Human Services informed
the Catholic Church that most of its agencies will be required to
provide employees with insurance-coverage for contraceptives,
sterilization, and abortifacient drugs: i.e., products, procedures,
and chemicals used to facilitate acts which the Church and plenty
of others consider intrinsically evil.
Alas, it’s not a question of the administration being tragically
“tone
deaf,” as one American Jesuit claimed, to specifically Catholic
concerns. Nor is the bedrock of President Obama’s position, in the
end, a commitment to “women’s health.” Outside the ghoulish world
of Planned Parenthood, pregnancy does not qualify as a disease. A
fertile womb is no threat to human life.
No, this is all about the absolutization of choice for the sake
of choice. It’s also about creating a society in which any
discussion of the actual ends we choose is considered unacceptable
in public debates about law and morality.
Modern liberalism has a long history of trying to exclude
consideration of the proper ends of human action from public
discourse in the name of tolerance. But neither liberalism nor
secularism are as neutral about such matters as they pretend.
Self-identified modern liberals (and secularists more generally)
typically insist that justice and tolerance demand that governments
shouldn’t privilege any conception of morality, religious or
secular, in framing its laws. Unfortunately for liberals, this
position — outlined in excruciating detail by the seer of modern
secular liberalism, the late John Rawls — is self-refuting. Why?
Because it, ahem, privileges a legal and political commitment to
relativity about moral questions. It’s the same absurdity
underlying the philosophical skeptic’s claim that there’s no truth
— except for the truth that there is no truth.
These little internal inconsistencies, however, don’t stop the
use of such conceptions of tolerance and justice as weapons for
terminating any contribution to public debate that’s informed by
the propositions that moral truth exists, that we can know it
through revelation and/or reason, and that it is unjust to cordon
off these truths from the public square.
And here we come face-to-face with the essence of what a certain
Joseph Ratzinger famously described in an April 2005 homily as
“the
dictatorship of relativism.” Most people think of tyrannies as
involving the imposition of a defined set of ideas upon free
citizens. Benedict XVI’s point was that the coercion at the heart
of the dictatorship of relativism derives precisely from the fact
that it “does not recognize anything as definitive.”
In this world, tolerance no longer creates the safety for us to
express our views about the nature of good and evil and its
implications for law and public morality. Instead, it serves to
banish the truth as the reference point against which all of us
must test our ideas and beliefs. The objective is to reduce
everyone to modern Pontius Pilates who, whatever their private
beliefs, wash their hands in the face of obvious injustices, such
as what the Obama administration has just inflicted upon not only
Catholics, but anyone whose convictions about the truth requires
them to abstain from cooperating in acts they regard as evil per
se.
Of course, modern liberals do have their preferred ends, which
(despite all their endless chatter about reason) reflect their
profoundly cramped vision of man’s intellect. Here they follow the
eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. He argued that
“reason ought to be the slave of the passions.” Reason’s role, in
other words, is not to identify what is rational for people to
choose. Instead, reason is reduced to merely devising the means for
realizing whatever goals that people, following the profound moral
reasoning of a five year-old, “just feel like” choosing.
On this basis, utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham concluded
that life was really about nothing more than the experience of
sensations. Hence, the goal was to maximize pleasure and minimize
pain. But having repeatedly failed to construct a coherent
hedonistic calculus of utility (even Rawls concluded it was a
doomed endeavor), the “ultimate goal” of modern liberalism and
secularism now “consists,” as Benedict noted in 2005, “solely of
one’s own ego and desires.”
That in turn reduces life and my choices to ensuring that I am
among those who are (1) powerful enough to get to indulge my ego
and my desires, (2) sophistical enough to produce rationalizations
(otherwise known as consequentialist ethics) for doing so, and (3)
strong enough to trample over anyone whose existence or beliefs
might limit my ability to do whatever I just happen to “feel like”
doing.
Here modern liberalism’s essentially illiberal nature reveals
its true face. Because if your theological or philosophical
convictions get in the way of your employee’s desire to neuter his
spouse at your expense in order to avoid the “disease” of
pregnancy, then tough luck. Desire plus autonomy — the
calling-cards of secularist fundamentalism — trump all (except,
apparently, when it comes to the distribution of wealth, climate
change, and smoking).
The Catholic Church — and its teachings about good and evil —
goes back 2,000 years. Since that time, it’s weathered the savage
persecutions of the Roman Empire, the terrorism of the French
Revolution, the systematic harassment of National Socialism, and
the all-out assault of Marxism-Leninism. And, perhaps most telling
of all, it’s managed to survive the many, often terrible sins and
faithlessness of its own members. The Church will be around long
after the not-so-New Atheists have gone to their eternal
reward.
The Church’s struggle with the dictatorship of relativism may,
however, prove one of its most difficult challenges. That’s partly
because it’s a subtle form of oppression that trades off words like
“choice” that strongly resonate in Western societies — the same
societies in which many secularists all-too-quickly equate any
religion’s claim to teach the truth with murderers who fly planes
into buildings.
In the span of human history, the Obama Administration is just a
blip, however much it considers itself, like all progressivists, to
be on history’s cutting edge. But be warned: the Catholic Church’s
fight — in fact, the fight of anyone, believer or non-believer,
who recognizes secularist fundamentalism as a danger to freedom —
against the despotism of
“there-is-no-moral-truth-and-Rawls-is-his-prophet” is only just
beginning.
