Warning: This is an obvious, long-day-of-traveling, everyone-else-has-already-said-it post. But I thought it an issue worth raising on our nearly defunct blog.
"In a world where some no longer believe that we can distinguish between simple right and wrong, we need your message to reject this dictatorship of relativism."
President Bush flattered Pope Benedict yesterday with these words during a joint public appearance. If you remember, the Pope's first message upon his election introduced us all to the "dictatorship of relativism", while he called the Roman Catholic Church to return to the doctrinal standards of the faith. The phrase was well-tuned towards Europe, Latin America, and Africa, where dictators have often used the Catholic Church for their own means or disposed of church leaders when they got in the way. Time and again, doctrinal standards become subservient to the Fatherland, los Descamisados, or whatever idealized national identity is at the time purported by an authoritarian regime; Marxism, Nazism and Jingoism sweep up churches, student groups, the disenfranchised, and great crowds of "people with guns" so that the core of doctrine is discarded for a more permissive interpretation.
However, yesterday President Bush stole the phrase to pad his ideological agenda, just as he did at the end of Pope John Paul's life. Then it was the "culture of life" by which the previous Pope meant an end to abortion, capital punishment, and war--death, he said, in all its forms. Bush borrowed the phrase to express his belief that only one of those three were wrong, meanwhile celebrating the other two as necessary tools to "combat evil" in the world.
With Pope Benedict's phrase, Bush has taken a doctrinal sentiment and translated it to apply now to a simplified form of morality. As he would have it, there are "some" (read: others) who think that the world is not dividable into just two categories, right and wrong. Theirs is the dictatorship now.
Let's remember that moral equivocation is the essence of this President's administration. By simplifying the world into right and wrong, or free and terrorist, the Bush appointees to the Justice Department have continued to define and redefine the lines of legality and morality. Is waterboarding torture? Are captured soldiers from a terror-supporting state prisoners of war? Do we need courts to monitor terrorist prevention tactics? All three of these questions have been answered: No, not when in the service of a Global War on Terror.
Further, both Bush for President campaigns treaded a thin line of morality. Embrace the anti-Catholic Bob Jones University, then merely shrug when terrible things are said by its representatives (which turned out for the best, McCain got over it). Support the troops and attack opponents as anti-military, then ignore entirely groups inside and outside the party that mock and deride military honors and awards (pseudo-veterans "swift-boating" the Purple Heart on TV, and convention delegates awarding themselves Purple Heart bandages).
Finally, a practice which gained speed in the Reagan White House and was perfected in the Clinton years has continued to grow and prosper in this administration. I'm speaking of the credit-and-blame system of governance. If it is popular (and therefore right), take credit. If it is unpopular or a failure (and therefore wrong), blame, blame, blame. Let's be honest, the Clintons do this better than anyone else. Bush does it more. Even things of insignificance, such as "simple up or down votes" on judicial nominees, become moral issues in which small movement in any direction follows the credit-and-blame pattern.
Bush can choose to pervert the meaning of such phrases as "culture of life" and "dictatorship of relativism" to his own agenda as much as he wants. I don't imagine it raises his support at home and I know that the Pope is wise enough to treat our President with the love of Christ without subscribing to his politically motivated flattery. It is a safe bet to say that there are world leaders who will perform the same song for the Pope, and he will nod, smile, and stick to the decidedly complex doctrine of the Church, where right and wrong are a matter of careful discernment and prayer, never unilateralism, never without many voices adding wisdom to all sides of arguments of morality. I don't buy it when told that both Bush and Benedict are ultra-conservative (which I often hear). The former is a political animal who turns equally to the demons among ultra-conservatives as well as their angels for advice; the latter is a creature of metaphor, who seems willing to explore a truth in depth before saying it is the voice of the Truth.
While I disagree often with parts and pieces of the Pope's documents from before his election, I do see in them that the path to a dictatorship of relativism almost always involves an appeal to "simple right and wrong". Such an appeal requires movable boundaries, which forces a distortion of right and wrong. That distortion is the cornerstone upon which the house of relativism is built.
What happened to this blog?
Posted by: BCDees | July 17, 2008 at 01:58 AM