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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31013 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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A poster here recommended a book to us all called “Introduction to Christianity”, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who would go on to become Pope Benedict XVI) a few weeks ago. I recently got a copy of it.

I wanted to share with you all the first few paragraphs from the book, because I found them very interesting:

Anyone who tries today to talk about the question of Christian faith in the presence of people who are not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought (whether by vocation or by convention) soon comes to sense the alien -and alienating- nature of such an enterprise. He will probably soon have the feeling that his position is only too well summed up in Kierkegaard's famous story of the clown and the burning village, an allegory taken up again recently by Harvey Cox in his book The Secular City. According to this story, a traveling circus in Denmark caught fire. The manager thereupon sent the clown, who was already dressed and made up for the performance, into the neighboring village to fetch help, especially as there was a danger that the fire would spread across the fields of dry stubble and engulf the village itself. The clown hurried into the village and requested the inhabitants to come as quickly as possible to the blazing circus and help to put the fire out. But the villagers took the clown's shouts simply for an excellent piece of advertising, meant to attract as many people as possible to the performance; they applauded the clown and laughed till they cried.

The clown felt more like weeping than laughing; he tried in vain to get people to be serious, to make it clear to them that this was no stunt, that he was not pretending but was in bitter earnest, that there really was a fire. His supplications only increased the laughter; people thought he was playing his part splendidly--until finally the fire did engulf the village; it was too late for help, and both circus and village were burned to the ground.

I’m sure we’ve all felt like that clown at some point or another. Especially with regards to ideas like “just kids on college campuses”.

Here’s a quote, this one from Saint Anthony The Great, one of The Desert Fathers (Early Christian precursors to Christian monks who lived in Egypt in about 300AD).

“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”

Anyway I think the relevance to the culture war is obvious here, and could be taken any of many directions. I just read this today and wanted to share. To pull on one culture war thread (perhaps one of the oldest culture war) it is profoundly depressing to me that these parts of our history, especially the history of The Catholic Church, seem to be suppressed or at the very least ignore in modern western society.

Those quotes say nothing more than “I’m right but people won’t listen to me.” Just because something is dressed up as “The Parable of the X and the Y” or is quoting someone from 2000 years ago doesn’t really make it fundamentally different from just leaving it at “I’m right you’re wrong”

I think it points to a fundamental difference in how I see social issues and how people on the left see them. When discussing moral issues with left leaning people, they often focus on the individual and the utilitarian perspective of the individual in the situation. For example, a horny person meets someone at a bar and can choose between sex or sexual frustration. Forcing people to choose monogamy is therefore evil since it is the less beneficial outcome.

I don't really care too much about the individual enjoyment of the night, but look at the effects of family structure in society. Getting a well functioning family structure is an incomprehensibly complex problem and a balancing act which goes beyond human comprehension. Going from one man, one women to casual sex is fun can lead to all sorts of unintended consequences. People today have less sex than ever, fewer children than they desire, and we have incels and feminists who both have legitimate grievances in a dysfunctional dating market. Tampering with an entire ecosystem can have disastrous effects. If there is something we should have learned in the past centuries it is that experts who want to redesign a city, reorganize agriculture, introduce a new species that eats pests etc is that these projects tend to end in catastrophes. Disrupting a delicate balance is dangerous, and science doesn't really provide answers for it. Science experiments run for short period of time with a limited sample size and measure few variables. Traditions last millennia and have sample sizes in the billion. Following tradition is less likely to end up in a situation in which a brilliant scientist concludes DDT is safe, or in which an urban planner wrecks a city because the best science in traffic planning said urban freeways are beneficial.

Chesterton was correct in realizing that traditions were solutions to problems solved for so long that people have forgotten what the problem was.

When trying to stop people who want to engage in a behaviour that creates a small but immediate utility, it is hard to use arguments based on unintended long term societal consequences. It was easy to look like a clown when claiming that giving antibiotics to farm animals is dangerous when it clearly reduces sickness and increases yields, now we have an antibiotic resistance crisis.

Traditional religion are methods of handling large complex systems condensed in mythological format. Historically, this format has worked well. Today appealing to bible texts or the man in the sky doesn't work, yet the evidence for the unintended consequences of short term utilitarianism often appears long after the debate has ended.

Sure, we could look at the Great Leap Forward, cite Chesterton, and conclude that abandoning tradition is dangerous. But the Green Revolution also involved abandoning many traditional agricultural methods, and:

Studies show that the Green Revolution contributed to widespread reduction of poverty, averted hunger for millions, raised incomes, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, reduced land use for agriculture, and contributed to declines in infant mortality.

This is just one of many cases where radical change produced outcomes that are almost universally regarded as beneficial. We have also, for instance, reduced deaths from infectious disease by more than 90%. One doesn't have to look at too many graphs like this or this to understand why "change," as an idea, has so much political clout at the present moment.

There's always a tendency among activists to suggest things are terrible and improvement is only possible through whatever radical program they're pushing right now. In that context, it doesn't do to admit how much better things have gotten without that program.

But more broadly, had change reliably lead to ruin over the last few centuries, surviving cultures would have strong norms against permitting it. Instead we have exactly the opposite — cultures that permitted change reliably outcompeted those that didn't, so successful cultures are primed to accept it.

How does making humans more likely to survive and granting them more resources, reduce GHG emissions?

More importantly, the beneficaries of Green Revolution, "Global South" now use their superior numbers, enabled, by GR to demand more power, as that Modi speech that was the subject of a recent top level post shows. So this shows that only The Thrird World gained, any possible benefits for the First aren't demonstrated by your comment.

The comment to which I was responding seemed to be about how open human societies in general should be to allowing change. This first world vs. third world angle wasn't present. The societies that adopted these new agricultural techniques benefited substantially from doing so. It would have been a serious mistake for them to reason that abandoning their traditional methods could have unanticipated negative consequences and so they shouldn't do this.

Anyway, the first world obviously adopted the same techniques earlier, also abandoning traditional agricultural methods. To a large extent these advances are the reason there is a first world, a set of large, rich nations where most of the population is not engaged in agricultural production.

I don't think appeals to the individual vs appeals to society are necessarily a left-wing right-wing split.

E.g, The American Right largely opposed covid restrictions on individual grounds; "I shouldn't have to wear a mask", "I shouldn't have to get the vaccine, I'm young", etc. Whilst the American left doubled down on appealing to collective/net good. You were supposed to wear a mask for others because they don't protect you anyways, children were to take the vaccine for their grandparents, etc.

A better albeit more cynical model is... Everyone engages in motivated reasoning. What you want is predetermined, you will argue for the individual/collective or the deontology/utility or the long-term/short-term depending on which framing supports what you ultimately want.

I think the strength of the Blue/Red tribe framing is that it's implicit that policy positions are by and large aesthetic choices. To a young urban person who hangs out with other young urban persons who find hookups at bars, it's deeply "uncool" to suggest anything about hookups otherwise. Suggesting otherwise is what old people who live in the countryside do. And those countryside people are seriously so uncool, they don't even watch French movies or eat at Ethiopian restaurants.

It’s thrive/survive, not individualism/collectivism. You’ll note that when the left goes into survive mode- like with Covid- they go hard. Conversely when the right goes into thrive mode- like with Covid- they behave totally different from how they normally do.

I don't think appeals to the individual vs appeals to society are necessarily a left-wing right-wing split.

Johnathan Chait argues that the left-right split contains such contradictions because both sides are interested in being moral about different things.

It's values all the way down. Values shape what we want, what we need. They shape what we're willing to accept, and what we're willing to do about the unacceptable. The normie thesis everything runs on is that our system should be able to handle values conflict of any possible scale, because it assumes the possible differences aren't actually all that large, that everyone really wants the same things at the end of the day.

A better albeit more cynical model is... Everyone engages in motivated reasoning.

I think 'holistic' is a better term than cynical. People tend to pick arguments that support their public beliefs but also tend to extrapolate their current perspective to all scenarios. A cynical claim would be hypocrisy between public beliefs and personal habits.

The main problem is that people exist in a superstate in which we are both members of a community and individuals. Sometimes we think as individuals and sometimes we think as members of a community depending on the scenario.

Ratzinger is not attempting to persuade atheists here. This is a passage about how a theologian might feel conveying truth in “religious language” to atheists unfamiliar with how religious language works. It’s saying a lot, and should not be seen as an attempt to persuade atheists.

Cox cites this story as an analogy of the theologian’s position today and sees the theologian as the clown who cannot make people really listen to his message. In his medieval, or at any rate old-fashioned, clown’s costume he is simply not taken seriously. Whatever he says, he is ticketed and classified, so to speak, by his role. Whatever he does in his attempts to demonstrate the seriousness of the position, people always know in advance that he is in fact just — a clown. They are already familiar with what he is talking about and know that he is just giving a performance which has little or nothing to do with reality. So they can listen to him quite happily without having to worry too seriously about what he is saying. This picture indubitably contains an element of truth in it; it reflects the oppressive reality in which theology and theological discussion are imprisoned today and their frustrating inability to break through accepted patterns of thought and speech and make people recognize the subject-matter of theology as a serious aspect of human life.

Importantly, he notes the “classifying away” of religion as a category distinct from everyday life, and how this leads to the public seeing religious rituals as something performative and distinct from everyday moral and psychological concerns.

You are right about the second quote but wrong about the first one. Back then (Introduction to Christianity was published in 68) Ratzinger was a reformer: he associated with the nouvelle theologie and was one of the reformist peritus of Vatican II.

What he's saying here is that the catholic church should abandon neo-scholastic theology and all the other weird medieval trappings it accumulated throughout the century and both go back to the basics as well as reconstruct on modern philosophical foundations, because if it didn't do that it would never be appealing to modern intellectuals. This stuff was borderline heretical (probably still is, who can say) and allegedly he was even investigated by the holy office in the 50s (although I've never been able to locate a reputable source for this claim, nor any details about the investigation).

Eventually he became far more conservative, his former associate Kung went off the reservation (arianist, denied papal infallibility, promoted euthanasia) and started hating him. Later on he also became cardinal prefect of doctrina fidei (formerly holy office, formerly inqusition) where, thanks to his conservative positions, he was (informally) known as the german shepherd. Fun fact, he held this post for longer than almost anyone else, you have to go back to the 1700s to find someone that was prefect for longer.

His general ideas about theology and intellectuals didn't fundamentally change, even after he became pope (although they became more moderate): he still thought that the catholic church should appeal to intellectuals and that this would help bring back the european masses to church (see Fides et ratio and his regensburg lecture). I think he was wrong on two levels: first he completely failed to attract intellectual, second the masses don't actually give a shit about what intellectuals think. If anything Bergoglio's approach, to appeal to... "common people" has worked better, even in europe.

Take this with a grain of salt, I'm an atheist and I think it's all nonsense.

he still thought that the catholic church should appeal to intellectuals and that this would help bring back the european masses to church (see Fides et ratio and his regensburg lecture). I think he was wrong on two levels: first he completely failed to attract intellectual, second the masses don't actually give a shit about what intellectuals think.

Well, I don't think it was a kind of...business strategic decision optimizing for growth. I'm sure he hoped he would influence people to come back to the pews, but I think he thought and wrote this way because he believed that man is meant to search for the truth and must attempt to articulate to himself real, satisfying answers to his deepest questions. This is probably part of why he struggled with the job, because he was always more inclined toward theology than administration.

I'd also say that the crafting of an intellectual edifice is a lifetime of work that can only be judged from a generational, rather than immediate, perspective. When Socrates died it probably looked like he was a failure (from an external perspective - of course he succeeded in living how he thought was right), but his way of thinking about man and the soul (via its modulation in Plato and Aristotle and combination with Christian ideas) ended up ruling the Western world for a long time.

As a Catholic I hope that the slow decline of the west we are witnessing will lead to curiosity and interest in the questions that Ratzinger considered central to man's life and destiny but that modern society tends to obscure or deny. I hope it will also lead to fruitful engagement with the lifetime of work that he produced in attempting to answer those questions for himself. But even if it doesn't have any outsized downstream impact, it was worth doing anyway.

Francis’s approach isn’t working better, though. He hasn’t brought the masses back to church.

I mean to be fair that’s a hard problem to solve. But it does appear that Benedict XVI did notably better at appealing to people who are already practicing catholics, based purely on seminary enrollments(which are a reasonable proxy for engagement among young practicing Catholics). That was Benedict’s entire goal; the main thrust was to revitalize practicing catholics that were seen as lukewarm.

It’s not 100% clear what the main thrust of pope Francis’s pontificate is. But measured by what Benedict XVI was attempting to do, it’s been a dismal failure. He also hasn’t brought lots of people into practicing Catholicism that weren’t previously, which was the other obvious goal.

Thanks, I am also an atheist, but I found this a really useful bit of information.

My inclination is to think that he is right that the Catholic Church could win over some intellectuals if it wasn't so neo-scholastic. For example, I know one prominent philosopher who converted to Catholicism, and neo-scholasticism was the biggest single stumbling block. And they're Aristotelian about many things! If it's a problem for an Aristotelian, it's going to be even more of a problem for philosophers who are receptive to some sort of religious belief but who generally have deflationary or otherwise non-scholastic views on many metaphysical issues.

A neo-scholastic might argue that being a neo-scholastic makes it easier to e.g. be convinced by Aquinas's arguments and that these are the quickest way to Christianity for a smart person, but that's making the Perfect into the enemy of the Good. As I recall, my friend was mostly convinced by (a) a best explanation argument for God as the Creator, (b) a best explanation argument for Jesus as divine, and (c) a benevolent God as the best explanation of why there are moral truths. Then he reasoned to Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular as the best unifying theory of (a) to (c), and converted, having been an atheist and before that a Protestant.

I think the problem with abandoning neo-scholasticism is that aquinas is a doctor of the church and moving away from it was condemned as heretical by aeterni patris. Also scholastic concepts are used to explain both the trinity as well as transubstantiation. They might be stuck with it.

My inclination is to think that he is right that the Catholic Church could win over some intellectuals if it wasn't so neo-scholastic. For example, I know one prominent philosopher who converted to Catholicism, and neo-scholasticism was the biggest single stumbling block.

Meanwhile, for comparison, 35,000 people convert to Pentecostal Christianity every day.

Yes, this branch of Christianity with zero intellectual appeal is "the fastest growing movement in the history of religion", it grew, in little more than one century, from one small decrepit warehouse to about 1/4 of all Christians worldwide.

Maybe less intellectualizing and more speaking in tongues is the way to success?

There are lots of better ways to succeed if by succeed you just mean grow. But if by succeed you mean really satisfy man’s need to understand the world, his place in it, and his purpose and destiny, putting a primacy on the search for the truth is the only way to do it. If that means getting fewer converts than you could by being a less substantive philosophy, so be it.

(I mean, that’s the enterprise we are trying to be in. You (the reader) may or may not think we do that particularly well, but that’s the point of all of this, not just converting people to…something or other.)

I didn't mean to suggest that that should be the Catholic Church's focus!

In answer to your question, unironically "yes". If the CC had gone down the Malachi Martin route when the Exorcist was still in theatres and played up exorcisms, who knows how many they would have won over?

As it happens, I know a very Social Gospel-style Protestant minister. The one time they ever were invited into the nastiest ghetto in their local area by a family was to perform an exorcism in a "haunted" apartment. The minister didn't explicitly admit "We don't do exorcisms in my denomination," but instead provided a blessing for the apartment, which made the family extremely happy and apparently was enough to banish the ghosts.

The minister also told me that this was the first (but not last) time that they entered an apartment with no furniture - the family was penniless due to drug abuse, and they'd sold (or never bought) all the furniture. They just had sleeping bags, old matresses, and dirty pillows. It genuinely had a "haunted" feel...

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