COUNTER-CIVILIZATION: THE DICTATORSHIP OF RELATIVISM
Realism: Western Civilization in Rubble
It is important for us to be clear about the fact that we have passed from one civilization to another: Western Civilization is now the stuff of dreams, it no longer exists, it lies in rubble.
Monuments of its culture are all around us: cathedrals and art works, music and literature witness to its grandeur; we walk through St. Peter’s and Westminster Abbey, we gaze on the art of Fra Angelico and Michelangelo, we listen to Gregorian and polyphony and the Masses of Beethoven and Haydn, and admire a world that once upon a time existed. Remnants of Christianity can be found on some lone islands and in scattered hold-outs that are all under siege in our day; anachronisms such as Anglicanism as the state religion of a post-Christian England; a Christian veneer of public vacations coinciding with festivals such as Christmas and Easter and lip-service by politicians to “Christian values” during election campaigns.
Yes, the facades of two thousand years of institutions are still around us but the interior of Western Civilization has been gutted. The appearances however can still lull us into serenity or rather anemia. The moral values at the core of the Dictatorship of Relativism – “tolerance” and the “dignity of the individual” – appear to be in continuity with the ancient order yet this is not so: these values have been torn from the bosom of Mother Church and perverted in their inner meaning.
Certainly a minority of individuals still live by the Christian and cultural virtues of the old “Middle-Earth” but that cannot be called a Christian civilization. For a Christian civilization is above all the embodiment of a Christian soul in a society due to the Christian minds and hearts and imaginations of the majority of its citizens. It shapes legislation, it guides formal education from kindergarden to university; it is evident in informal education through music and movies; it is on the lips of every morning and in the serenity of every evening; it rejoices hearts at the crèche, strengthens them before battle, and consoles them at the hour of death.
The patterns of life in the societies of Europe and the Americas no longer draw breath and hope from the Christian culture that once upon a time embodied itself in the legislation and structures of the West. The civilization that began to appear around the 6th century, reaching a climax between the 12th and the 15th, and then, under increasing pressure from various sources, went into an accelerating pace of decline from the 16th century onwards, to be finally swept away by the cultural tsunamis of the last hundred years. The death-bells tolled for its final moments in the trenches of World War I, in the concentration camps of World War II and in the events of 1968 and its aftermath.
The New Anti-Civilization
The more precisely we understand the nature and origins of the new world-order the more likely are we to be accurate – and urgent – about plans for reconstruction of a Christian civilization.
Our era dominated by the culture of post-Christian Western secularized man, alias the Dictatorship of Relativism, came into existence with the gradual acceleration of secularization since the French Revolution. The core-values of the old West and those of the new civilization are mutually exclusive: the former were grounded on Christian culture while the latter are founded on the rejection of Christianity.
Yet over and above this rejection, the new secularized civilization is as unsure of its own identity as any teenager. All it can do is shout aloud what it is not: it is not Catholic and it is not Christian. It has no principle of unity for its societies since its principles of “multiculturalism” and “tolerance” are centrifugal forces wildly pulling individuals and institutions outwards from the unifying center of the natural law towards the spontaneous outcome of anarchy. However history teaches that man’s instinct for survival abhors such social disorder but it also teaches that in seeking to avoid anarchy men often open the doors to a totalitarian-style regime – such as that of the Nazis or Communists – before regaining freedom.
The apostasy of the West and its rejection of its patrimony is not merely a rejection of idiosyncratic “Catholic” and “Western” culture: it is a rejection of what Aragorn at the Black Gate called “all that you hold dear on this good earth” as human beings. When the state rejects the dignity and sanctity of each and every human life from conception to natural death; when it denies the nature of marriage, legalizes experimentation on unborn babies; when it opens the gates to cloning, what else can you call this society except a Culture of Death and a “brave new world” that looks ominously like an embryo of an Orwellian 1984 society.
For in the vast flat wastelands of Mordor there are no tall mountains of absolute truths except one located in the very heartland of the Dictatorship: Mount Doom, the “Mountain of Tolerance”. However the tolerance and freedom of Mordor have been set adrift from the anchor of truth to become a ship travelling in the night without North Star or compass. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (Macbeth) when “reason is fled to brutish beasts” (Julius Caesar). We are already going down the road where “good” means “useful to oneself” without seeing in the distance where this road leads: a society in which man becomes a wolf to his fellows, where there is “a war of all against all” (Hobbes). Thus, the Dictatorship of Relativism is far more deserving of the epithet Churchill gave to Nazism (another dictatorship of relativism) in May 1940: “the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history”.
It is the era beginning to resemble Mordor: “a grey formless world without mark or measure”; an age of tyranny that has declared a “cold war” against the Catholic Church since “having a clear faith”, said Benedict XVI, “ based on the creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that 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”
The Christian truths are no longer the vision and energy either of society or of the minds and hearts of many of the West’s citizens who are now only nominally Christian “living and partly living” (T.S.Eliot) with a patchwork vision of reality that includes tattered fragments of Catholicism: occasional prayers, moments of nostalgia for Catholic rituals and “religion”, interest in the sacraments as social landmarks. Relativism has infiltrated the thinking of many Catholics to such a degree that they are numbed and feel quite comfortable living under the new regime. So subtly omnipresent is “Big Brother” that no one is exempt from the need to peer into his own patterns of thought to see if the thinking of Mordor has not perhaps begun to decay his Christian soul. “This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers”, wrote Alasdair Macintyre; “they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.”
In this new world-order there is the growing shadow of totalitarianism, as even a century ago far-seeing intellectuals like Christopher Dawson, G.K. Chesterton and George Orwell had asserted. The state assumes increasing power over the lives of individuals softly taking away the influence of parents over their children by favoring a hegemony of state schooling; obliging compulsory sex-education with elements contrary to the Natural Law; favoring judicial decisions that encourage promiscuity among teenagers; depriving children and youth of their innocence by tearing down almost all walls of censorship around television and internet.
We cannot flee from “Mordor” in order to preserve our Christian identity in the style of some Christians during the collapse of the Roman Empire: there are no deserts and few “Isles of the North” to which we can escape because both totalitarian–style governments and anti-Christian mass-media have their tentacles everywhere.We as Catholics are now living precariously on the edges of a secular city that denies any public role to the Catholic Faith. The toleration that the secularist-style government still grants us may not last much longer since by its very structure it seeks full control of the life of society and –as in the days of imperial Rome – the only “Gandalf on the bridge” blocking its way is the Church.