February 3-9, 2008 Issue |
Posted 1/29/08 at 12:02 PM
If irony abounds, but no one notices, does that mean irony
is dead? Or does it mean we’re living in the most ironic of all possible
worlds?
That’s the question that comes to mind watching the
intellectual controversies Pope Benedict XVI has had to confront on the world
stage in the past year and a half.
First, there was the Regensburg speech flap, and the irony —
willfully ignored by most commentators — of Muslims around the world angrily
protesting and issuing death threats against the Pope because he allegedly said
Islam was … well, violent. (It’s like the old joke — “There is no Mafia, and
we’ll kill anyone who says there is.”)
And now, we have professors and students at Italy’s La Sapienza
(the term means wisdom) University angrily protesting against — and forcing the
cancellation of — the Holy Father’s visit to the school over Galileo.
The subject the Pope planned to address in the speech that
was suppressed: how to encourage dialogue between faith and science.
According to the dictionary, irony “relies on a sharp
discordance between the real and the ideal … the perceived notion of an
incongruity, or a gap between an understanding of reality, or expectation of a
reality, and what actually happens.”
Based on that definition, Benedict has been living in a
whirlwind of irony since he was elected in 2005. Look at the “gaps” or
“incongruities” between what this Pope is supposed to be like — “God’s
Rottweiler,” oppressor of free inquiry and critical thinking — and the reality,
which is the exact opposite.
No world figure has spoken out more forcefully than Pope
Benedict XVI on behalf of reasoned debate and dialogue on the great issues of
the day
The problem is that the people who are supposed to be good
at perceiving irony — the young, radical, postmodern intellectuals who dominate
most of the world’s universities — have lost their ability to see the irony
that’s before their eyes, which means they’ve lost the ability to think
straight at all.
That becomes clear when we examine the additional layers of
irony that abound in the La Sapienza affair. The whole incident is based on
mistakes.
The source of the protests was a 1990 statement about
Galileo made by then Cardinal Ratzinger that was extracted — out of context —
from a speech entitled “The Crisis of Faith in Science.” The statement read:
“The Church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to
reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and
social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was
rational and just.”
The irony is that this statement was not made by Cardinal
Ratzinger at all. The cardinal was quoting someone else. And when you read the
entire speech, it’s not only clear that the cardinal didn’t say it, he
disagreed with it.
Far from using these ideas to exonerate the Church for
persecuting Galileo, Cardinal Ratzinger rejected the temptation to do so, and
concluded by saying:
“It would be absurd, on the basis of these affirmations, to
construct a hurried apologetics. The faith does not grow from resentment and
the rejection of rationality.”
But there’s more. The greatest irony is that the words
mistakenly attributed to the Pope were uttered by one of the most subversive and
controversial postmodern thinkers of the late 20th century, the deceased
Austrian philosopher, Paul Feyerabend.
Before considering Feyerabend, we have to briefly define —
however inadequately — the term “postmodern,” the philosophy that holds sway
over most of the world’s intellectuals.
Put simply, postmodernism is a philosophy that arose from
the ruins of World War II and the apparent collapse of Western culture.
Postmodernists rejected the “modernist” ideas that originated in the
Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries — that man can, without God, know
absolute truth and universal values through his reason alone.
While some postmodernists came up with legitimate criticisms
of rationality, and especially those situations in which reason was misused to
support man-made totalitarian ideologies such as fascism and communism, many
others went too far. They became philosophical nihilists, believing in nothing.
These postmodernists — exemplified by the crazed student
radicals Joseph Ratzinger encountered during his university teaching days in
the 1960s — believe all truth claims are merely propaganda used by the powerful
to justify their positions and to oppress the weak.
They reject any form of hierarchy and authority and instead
embrace the most radical relativism.
Not surprisingly, for postmodernists, the Catholic Church —
and the pope — are the epitome of power and privilege. For postmodernists, the
Church must always be opposed, even when it’s on their side on issues of war,
social justice and human rights (for different reasons, of course).
It also means condemning the pope, even when he appears to
ally himself with a philosopher who was one of the leading figures of
postmodernism!
Paul Feyerabend’s motto was “anything goes,” although that’s
a bit misleading. He was, despite his reputation, a serious philosopher, which
is why the cardinal bothered to quote him at all.
That takes us to yet another irony. While Cardinal
Ratzinger, in his 1990 speech, rejected Feyerabend’s critique of rationality and
his defense of the Church in the Galileo case, the cardinal and the “pomo”
philosopher did share legitimate concerns about science run amok.
In his recent encyclical Spe Salvi (On Christian Hope),
Benedict wrote about science:
“Francis Bacon and those who followed in the intellectual
current of modernity that he inspired were wrong to believe that man would be
redeemed through science. Such an expectation asks too much of science; this
kind of hope is deceptive. Science can contribute greatly to making the world
and mankind more human. Yet it can also destroy mankind and the world unless it
is steered by forces that lie outside it.”
This is the sort of critique that serious postmodernists
came close to making, albeit in a reckless way, when they’ve said, for example,
that there is a direct path that leads from Galileo to the atom bomb.
There is no doubt that Pope Benedict would reject such a
statement; as the statement above makes clear, he believed Feyerabend’s
rejection of reason was excessive.
Instead, the Catholic position might agree more with the
Church’s most prophetic critic of the Enlightenment, the scientist-mystic
Blaise Pascal. He was 10 years old when Galileo was tried for heresy, and would
go on to nearly equal the Italian as a scientist, as well as write Pensees, one
of the most profound defenses of the Christian faith ever written.
Pascal wrote: “Two extremes: to exclude reason, to admit
reason only.”
Of course, such subtleties eluded the protesters at La
Sapienza University. Their confusion, and their utter disregard for logic and
consistency of thought, perfectly illustrated what the Holy Father has been
warning about for decades, regarding the dangers of the “dictatorship of
relativism.”
This “dictatorship” makes it impossible for most universities
in the West to intellectually engage Pope Benedict XVI’s ideas on how to
reconcile faith and reason.
And that may be what’s most ironic of all, especially for
serious postmodernists who have legitimate criticisms of systems of thought
that leave no room for the mysteries of life and love (for example, scientists
who refuse to admit that there are mysteries that can’t be explained by
Darwinism or physics).
The best postmodernist thinkers used irony to criticize
real-life hypocrisy in Western societies, the gap between the reality of
suffering and injustice and the ideals of truth and love. These incongruities,
based on distorted reason, led political leaders to incinerate entire cities
with nuclear weapons, and scientists to experiment on human beings in
laboratories.
But when the postmodernists turned on reason itself, they
destroyed the basis for their criticisms, and their humanity. Without a
grounding in truth, post-modernism lost the capacity to perceive irony.
And without that perception, they’re now fated to erect new
forms of intolerance and oppression that are worse than the power structures
they seek to bring down.
And that’s really the ultimate irony. An irony, despite it
all, you won’t find Pope Benedict laughing about.
Angelo Matera is editor
of Godspy.com.
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