It is my attraction to order and truth that bring me generally to re-evaluate Catholicism as well as some love for our southern cousins in the Americas. But it was a very specific argument I read somewhere, perhaps in the coming of Benedict, that posited a nexus between Conservatism and Rationalism and suggested that the coming century will be more conservative because of that. The postmodernists have nothing on their side. Even by their own relativistic definitions Truth = Volume. We're already tired of their yelping, and they'll grow winded and hoarse over time.
Be all that as it may, I wish I could find that particular document, and I'll continue to search for it as I begin investigating this angle of theology in earnest. In the meantime, a thoughtful reader has pointed me to John Paul II, and in quick fashion I found an interesting parallel. It's difficult for me to say what the precise differences might be between our current and prior Pope, but I can't imagine them too far apart on such matters as the Rationalism of the Catholic Church. And to my notes I add the following observation from Michael Peters, a gent from New Zealand:
7. Pope John Paul II suggests that postmodernism appears on the horizon at this point in history as a form of nihilism, resulting from the crisis of rationalism, for which Catholic theology provides the precisely correct philosophical antidote: self-certainty and absolute values based upon faith in the truth of personal existence sought in relation to God. He writes:
As a result of the crisis of rationalism, what has appeared finally is nihilism. As a philosophy of nothingness, it has a certain attraction for people of our time. Its adherents claim that the search is an end in itself, without any hope or possibility of ever attaining the goal of truth. In the nihilistic interpretation, life is no more than an occasion for sensations and experiences in which the ephemeral has pride of place. Nihilism is at the root of the widespread mentality which claims that a definite commitment should no longer be made, because everything is fleeting and provisional (71).
Modern philosophy, he says, has abandoned the investigation of being to concentrate on knowing. This move accentuates the limited capacity to know rather than the use of knowledge to reach the truth, leading to forms of agnosticism, relativism and pluralism. The Pope argues, "A legitimate pluralism of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid, which is one of the most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in the truth" (10). Against the ‘postmodern’ nihilistic view, Pope John Paul II pits a set of absolute values based upon the radical question of truth about personal existence, about being, and about God. He reaffirms the truth of faith and the faith in truth as a foundation for personal and communal life, suggesting that a core of philosophical insight in the history of thought has revealed certain principles as a "spiritual heritage of humanity" – an implicit philosophy – which all schools should use as a reference-point. He includes the principles of non-contradiction, finality and causality, certain fundamental moral norms (unspecified) "which are shared by all," as well as the concept of the person as a free and intelligent subject, with the capacity to know God, truth, and goodness. This is what he calls "right reason":
Once reason successfully intuits and formulates the first universal principles of being and correctly draws from them conclusions which are coherent both logically and ethically, then it may be called right reason or, as the ancients called it, orthos logos, recta ratio (8).
8. My difficulty with the Pope’s argument is that he does not sufficiently distinguish among the different kinds of modern philosophy or, indeed, between postmodernism and poststructuralism.2 In particular, he falsely attributes nihilism to ‘postmodern’ philosophy when, at least in the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, it is nihilism that must be overcome. For Nietzsche, nihilism is a consequence of the fact that, as his madman announces, "God is dead." In other words, God and all transcendental truths are no longer believable. God has died because humans have become too weak to sustain their belief in him. God has died out of pity for human weakness. It is the imperative of Nietzsche’s figure of the philosopher-artist, in face of nihilism – of suicide, pessimism, cultural dissolution and fragmentation – to create new values. It is also the case that those who follow in Nietzsche’s footsteps – including Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault – are fundamentally concerned with the history and meaning of being (as the history of Western metaphysics) and with the question of value. These contemporary philosophers, as Pope John Paul II suggests, investigate "the philosophy of being," but they pursue their lines of inquiry in such ways that cast doubt upon the very concept of the (humanist) "free person" to which Pope John Paul II appeals. I shall elaborate these kinds of difficulties with the Pope’s interpretation in the final section of the paper.
There is certainly a great deal more to be said on such matters as Peters does. But I think it is most interesting and critical that whther or not Islam or Buddhism will provide a fundamental challenge to Western thought in the world, we ought to be quite interested in what America the Secular has left in the lurch after the 20th century. This is the kind of stuff I can sink my teeth into, and that is my intention going forward.
I have enjoyed the advantages my curiosity have given me but have tired of the subversion implicit in organic struggle. Not that I need to be transcendant, but it's reassuring to know that established entities as large as the Catholic Church are serious about a way of thinking that addresses more of the human but fully encompasses what we have become with regard our fundamental ways of thinking. To constantly assert a black humanity (which requires its foil) is tiresome, not to mention self-limiting if not self-defeating. I am far from convinced that blackness is capable of piercing certain philosophical cielings, not the same kind of blackness incapable of recognizing the basic decency of ordinary whitefolks. So it is obvious to me that the bona fides of The Struggle, existentially exhilirating as they may be for the purposes of funkified call and response, are lacking in self-contained positivity. They always assume an oppressor, a superior evil force. Religion, especially Catholicism never assumes that evil is superior, and I appreciate deeply that which calls out to all to appreciate its light. Hiphop was that when Turbo poplocked with a broom. Today it is all darkness, mourning Tupac and Biggie, paranoid underdogs to the death.
I have given up organicism when the crimes of Stalin were made plain to me in 2003, and have since embraced my conservatism overtly as a Republican convert. But I have taken seriously my stand as a moderate Conservative by active moderation of the Right Wing, and especially the Christian Right, who would subvert the law through their false populism bouyed as they are by their ability to be a reliable base of votes for the GOP. And as much as politics satisfies my admitted need to be partisan and beat up on stupid people who fumble with our civilization, I have always been more fundamentally driven by philosophy. Indeed much of my politics arises from the need I have for a philosophical discipline in daily discourse, so I am naturally drawn to the consistency of the Right over the unbridled open-ended 'eclexia' of the Left.
Still I am attracted to the premises of Liberalism and Modernism and that is why I am a geopolitical neocon. The attraction of global liberty is very exciting. Every soul should have that. And thus we are back at souls. Even Burroughs noted that every soul is worth saving, at least to a priest. Every soul is worth saving and I tire of those whose philosophy cares only for the few. Graciously, I'll take their concerns as provinciality and an inability to conceptualize the catholic. Into that bucket I place all the multiculturalists and their oppositional diatribes against the very term 'mankind'. They've got nothing to show us be the color of their tatoos, natural or otherwise. So too the postmodern relativists and their whining devotion to moral & cultural heat death.
And so it seems that only God and Empire are large enough and bright enough to even approach a consistent universiality of mankind. Islam appears not be gracious enough, Buddhism motivated enough, Judaism large enough and Christianity discipline enough to the task. But aren't we fortunate to have the Internet and our own minds? It's enough to remake the world of thought, and luckily enough we're in it, and of it. Now's the time to get on it.
I may nave never mentioned it, but in my life I have always wanted to be a Philosophy Professor at Harvard. Next to the Kung Fu Santa Claus, it's probably the greatest thing I could aspire to. It's surely a consequence of being instructed by Jesuits, a gift I can hope to give to my son. Too, I admire Theology and as Lucifer Jones, I might rip up a few floorboards and find some treasures under hour house, close to our foundations. So here we go.
