"Power, And Those Too Weak to Seek It"

There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.--Professor Quirell, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Paperback, (Scholastic, 1997), pg. 291

John Zmirak is usually well worth reading, and this piece on "consent as the criterion of the good" is quite good.  Yes, Virginia, separation of Church and state is actually part of authentic Catholic tradition.  Excerpts.

...Although the Church became entangled with government early on – namely, with the conversion of Constantine – it has never seen its primary duty as giving directives to kings, or telling citizens how to vote. That is, at best, a tertiary role the Church is sometimes forced to serve when the conscience of a polity has become so degraded that natural reason cannot do its job, so faith has to step in and plug the gaps. Classic examples include St. Ambrose’s rebuke of Theodosius for the massacre of unruly citizens; the Church in 16th-century Spain insisting that Indians in the New World were fully human and should not be enslaved; German bishops condemning Nazi euthanasia; and Pope John Paul II denouncing both Communist tyranny and the Western “culture of death.”

But these acts of political prophecy on the part of bishops and popes stand out because they are not the norm. It is the duty of laymen – statesmen and citizens – to inform their consciences with sound moral principles in order to form public policy. Religious believers and leaders must make sure that those principles are sound, and call out the culture when they are either perverted or ignored. That is what abolitionist Christians did in the 19th century, and civil rights leaders in the 20th. Such a movement in Poland brought down the Soviet bloc, ended the Cold War, and may have saved our species from a global nuclear war. So maybe – just maybe – people of faith deserve a hearing...

And then an essential rebuke of those who would seek a simply libertarian state with strict free market capitalism without paying heed to what sort of culture is needed to render that humane:

...Indeed, the very name of the workers’ movement (Solidarity) that knocked down the first domino in Communist Europe was borrowed from Catholic social teaching’s term for the force that knits society together, that goads us to treat each other justly even when the government isn’t looking, that lubricates the highly efficient engine of the market economy with the oil of human kindness. Too often, especially in Europe (as Samuel Gregg documents), the word “solidarity” is cheapened into a synonym for socialism. It’s trotted out as a slogan every time the goldbricking workers of one country crave a subsidy from the thrifty taxpayers of another. But words like “justice,” “love,” and “freedom” are often perverted, too – that doesn’t mean we drown the baby in the bathwater.

The central principle of solidarity in practice is simple and timeless – the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This ethical maxim, which Jesus quoted from the Old Testament, exists in some form in every culture on earth – as C. S. Lewis documented in The Abolition of Man, where he called it the Tao. It is so ubiquitous that it’s easy for us to assume that it’s universally accepted – at least in theory – while far too rarely practiced...

In a strongly ethical culture, a humane culture of life in the context of a civilization of love, perhaps we could have far fewer laws--more conscience, fewer cops. Perhaps a free market system could work with minimal regulation in a highly principled population.  Absent the culture, though, libertarianism at its common extreme is one more example of the very modern/Enlightenment-era mistake of thinking that humans are innately good, merely corrupted by the structures binding them.  If only we would loosen the fetters of society, then humans would do the right thing and get along without coercion.  All would be well.  Marx's revolution; Rousseau's noble savage; Rand's superman--on and on it rolls, across all ideological divides in the modern era.

Oh, look!  Zmirak proceeds to make all those points in the rest of his article!

...We have another maxim, which crept into Western souls via “worldly philosophers” such as Machiavelli and Hobbes – the principle of the “consenting adult.” Any time someone uses this phrase, he is saying (under his breath) that none of us is the least bit responsible for each other. If folks make stupid choices, that’s not our problem. Even if we are the ones who tempted them to make such a choice – if we have exploited them personally, economically, or sexually – we are still scot-free: “She was a consenting adult;” “That schmuck should have known better,” we tell ourselves, and smirk.

Instead of an ethic that rests on reciprocity, on admitting the unique value of every person because he’s a fellow human, we treasure a heartless, pragmatic ethos that shrugs at suffering and confusion, a Darwinian willingness to pounce on our neighbor’s mistakes. So “consenting adults” work in sweatshops overseas making our iPads, or sweat before cameras enacting our porn, or wake up alone in the bed where we’ve left them when we were finished with our desires. No individual rights were violated, no crime was committed or contract broken – so the modern secular conscience has nothing meaningful to say.

What we don’t dare to realize is that human trust, promise-keeping, and a basic sense of concern for our fellow man are the glue that holds a free society together. (So Adam Smith taught in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.) The anarchy which arises in its absence is just too awful for people to tolerate, so in self-defense, they will even embrace a tyranny.

So tyranny creeps in...any ideology that focuses on power relationships (rather than love and justice) is programmed to liquidate every human value in the end...

Heal the culture first.  Open the doors to God's grace to heal, illumine, and deify nature.  Then talk to me about libertarianism.

Ayn Rand Sounds Like Marx

Or so the following would seem to indicate:

...Cardinal Ratzinger, in his homilies on creation, talked about a "change of paradigm in our understanding of the commission to exercise dominion" delivered to man:

How did the mentality of power and activity, which threatens us all today, ever come to be? One of the first indications of a new way of looking at things appeared about the time of the Renaissance with Galileo, when he said that if nature did not voluntarily answer our questions but hid her secrets from us, then we would submit her to torture and in a wracking inquisition extract the answers from her that she would otherwise not give. The construction of the instruments of the natural sciences was for him as it were a readying of this torture, whereby the human person, despot-like, gets the answer that he wants to have from the accused.--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,, "In The Beginning...", p. 49.

At that time, a new kind of knowledge was being sought--not what things are, what constitutes their "nature", or, to put it another way, what their "logos" is, the divine idea that is being expressed in them--but rather what we can make out of them for ourselves. This approach to reality is called "power knowledge."...

In order to establish this kind of "power knowledge", the idea of a Creator had to be set aside. It had to be made possible as a "hypothesis", to dispense with him.  It was a matter of eliminating any "language of creation", and thereby any message from the Creator, so that sheer utility, with no limitations or handicaps, becomes the model that determines everything.  The question regarding a Creator had to be declared meaningless, as did the question of his commission to us in creation.  In its place a different basic commission for man had to be formulated: "This is the source of the change in humanity's fundamental direction vis-a-vis the world; it was at this point that progress became the real truth and matter became the material out of which human beings would create a world that was worth being lived in."(Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,, "In The Beginning...", pg. 50)

The two ideologies that this "power knowledge", dissociated from the Creator and the creation, brought into a largely dominant position during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were Marxism and Darwinism (to be distinguished, once again as an ideological trend, from Darwin's scientific theory). The young Karl Marx drew up the following basic outline:

A being cannot call itself independent until it can stand on its own feet; and it stands on its own feet when it owes its existence to itself.  A man who lives by the grace of someone else regards himself as a dependent being.  And yet I live entirely by someone else's grace if I owe to him not only the sustenance of my life, but if besides that he has created my life; if he is the source of my life--and my life necessarily has such a basis outside itself, if it is not my own creation.  Creation is thus a concept that is difficult to drive out of the consciousness of ordinary people.--Karl Marx, translated from Nationalokonomie und Philosophie.  Fruhschriften [National economy and philosophy: early writings]  (Stuttgart, 1955), p. 246, cited in Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, Chance or Purpose?: Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith (Ignatius Press, 2007), 156

Not to owe one's existence to anyone else is certainly the presupposition for empowering oneself to be one's own Creator. It is certainly no accident that Friedrich Engels, after reading Darwin's Origin of Species, wrote enthusiastically to Marx that here they had found the scientific basis for their theory...

The era of ideologies is at an end. However, the paradigm of "power knowledge", the ideology of the domination of nature as mere matter for our scientific/technical/economic will to power to work on--a domination dissociated from belief in creation, and the responsibility for creation that is founded on it--has not yet perished. Now, as in the past, our culture is dominated by a way of thinking that sees the world as a product of chance and necessity rather than as the utterance and the challenge of the Creator. Now, as in the past, the idea of utility is largely dominant within the ethical debates about whether what we can do is permissible...--Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, Chance or Purpose?: Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith (Ignatius Press, 2007), 156

Gah! Atlas Shrugged Rises Again!

Behold!  Atlas Shrugged...2!  Excerpts:

The second installment of what will—Rand willing—become an epic trilogy based on the objectivist ur-text Atlas Shrugged is even more implausible than the first. By the conventional economics of the film industry “Atlas Shrugged Part II,” which opens to around 500 theaters this October, should never have been made.

Unless the movie in question involves simply tacking another numeral on to a field-tested franchise like “Scary Movie” or “Final Destination,” universal derision from critics and a box office loss are usually enough to count a sequel out. And yet here’s the next installment of “Atlas Shrugged” anyway, not limping straight to DVD but doubling the size of its theatrical release, having added $20 million to its budget, 20 minutes to its run-time, and a new cast...

Paul Ryan: Hope or Hindrance?

From the mixed up articles of Ms. Kirsten Powers.  She can't seem to make up her mind.

From the hindrance side of things.  Excerpt:

If you are Mitt Romney, how do you spell disaster? Paul Ryan.

A Great Critique of Rand

Really, the essential problem with her philosophy, identified in this piece at First Things.  Excerpt:

...“The creator stands on his own judgment. The parasite follows the opinions of others. The creator thinks. The parasite copies. The creator produces. The parasite loots. The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.” And so on.

There, of course, one has the essential oafishness of Rand’s view of reality. For her, the world really was starkly divided between creators and parasites, and the vast majority of humanity belonged to the ranks of the latter. “I came here to say I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life,” Roark continues, “nor to any part of my energy, nor to any achievement of mine.” Rand really imagined that there could ever be a man whose best achievements were simply and solely the products of his own unfettered and unaided will. She had no concept of grace, even of the ordinary kind: the grace of an existence we do not give ourselves, of natural powers with which we could never have endowed ourselves, and of all those other persons on whom even the strongest among us are dependent. She lacked any ennobling sense that what lies most deeply within us also comes from impossibly far beyond us, as an unmerited gift. She liked to talk about “virtue” a great deal—meaning primarily strength of will and the value that one creates out of one’s own native resources—but for her the only important question regarding the relation between the individual and society was who has a right to what. That is, admittedly, a question that must be asked at various times, but it is never the question that true virtue—true strength—asks of itself...

I Enjoy Ayn Rand's Novels

but her philosophy, while getting right the absolute importance of the truth, doesn't actually know what is truth.  Or human nature.  Or charity.  Or, it would seem, the consequences of a world where her philosophy wins.  But anyway--Mark Shea does some lovely commentary on her, Rush Limbaugh, and the ways of much of the modern right.  Excerpts:

... Rush Limbaugh is a big fan of Ayn Rand. That would be the Ayn Rand who says:

There is a great, basic contradiction in the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was one of the first great teachers to proclaim the basic principle of individualism -- the inviolate sanctity of man's soul, and the salvation of one's soul as one's first concern and highest goal; this means -- one's ego and the integrity of one's ego. But when it came to the next question, a code of ethics to observe for the salvation of one's soul -- (this means: what must one do in actual practice in order to save one's soul?) -- Jesus (or perhaps His interpreters) gave men a code of altruism, that is, a code which told them that in order to save one's soul, one must love or help or live for others. This means, the subordination of one's soul (or ego) to the wishes, desires or needs of others, which means the subordination of one's soul to the souls of others.

This is a contradiction that cannot be resolved. This is why men have never succeeded in applying Christianity in practice, while they have preached it in theory for two thousand years. The reason of their failure was not men's natural depravity or hypocrisy, which is the superficial (and vicious) explanation usually given. The reason is that a contradiction cannot be made to work. That is why the history of Christianity has been a continuous civil war -- both literally (between sects and nations), and spiritually (within each man's soul).

It's that Ayn Rand who saw abortion as an absolute right more fanatically than Obama does.

It's that Ayn Rand who said, "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”...

Atlas Shrugged The Movie--Actually Good?

Huh.  Interesting early indicator on the movie adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.  Excerpts:

They got it right.

Sure I would have loved to see the $40 million dollar version of the same movie, but the bottom line is that it works and works well. With the executive summary out of the way, let’s go into a bit more detail about the film itself. (If you want to read about my night out at the premiere, that’s here.)...

The story is really the star here. It’s a film on gleaming blue rails that carefully follow the curves of the landscape Ayn Rand created over 50 years ago. There won’t be any unpleasant surprises for devotees of the novel. No Jar-Jar moments to make you cringe. In fact, the producers have put together a top notch cast of character actors, many of whom will be familiar to audiences even if their names aren’t quite household words...

The overall impression is of a very well crafted indie film. The budget (around $10 million according to this site) is sufficient but obviously precluded some of the grand sets and throwaway beauty shots that a $30-40 million bankroll would have made possible. Still, the story is the star here and once that gets going it seems to pick up speed right until the end. In fact, I was actually surprised when it was over that the time had gone by so quickly.

Of course at just an hour an forty minutes fans of the book will notice there was a lot that had to be streamlined and/or simplified. No doubt some purists will have a problem with any changes, but I understand why the producers went the way they did. They wanted this to be accessible to a wide audience, not just the die hards. Still, I would happily watch a director’s cut with an additional 20 minutes of footage should one ever become available.

If I were to compare this to anything it would be to the Swedish films based on Stieg Larsson’s popular novels (i.e. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Those were produced with similar (slightly larger) budgets and I felt they were some of the best films released last year. Like those films, Atlas Shrugged part 1 is well written, well acted and well directed. Indeed, it’s better than most big studio films. Having seen it, I’m very hopeful it will find an appreciative audience and, in true Randian form, a very profitable release. I’m already planning to see it a second time when it opens in theaters April 15th and, needless to say, I’m looking forward to part 2.

The Atlas Shrugged Trailer

Not, mind you, because I necessarily agree with her on all points (as has been mentioned in the past), but because--confession--I just enjoyed the book.

For All You Capitalists Out There

On the one hand: Atlas Shrugged the movie is on its way.

On the other hand: Fr. McCloskey is excited about the work of this economist.

Ayn Rand's Nietzchean Pathology

Warning: extremely disturbing imagery in the link below. Reader be warned.

Ayn Rand had some brilliant insights--the necessity of the relentless pursuit of truth, the refusal to compromise with a lie in one's philosophical system, the value of profit as a reward for the productive individual, and so forth. But she also fell flat on her face in some respects. She never understood the family, or the community--indeed, anything which violated her absolute individualism was supposedly evil and in the service of the oppression of genius.

One can easily see the gaps between her theories and reality in her fiction when she has to write something approaching believable human interactions between sympathetic characters. Family is glossed over to a large extent. Issues of real interdependence become reduced to social contract style interactions insofar as she can make it make sense--but she never can quite figure out the family. Anyway--there's some reasons for that. Among them, her infatuation with the Nietzchean ubermensch, over and above all other mere mortals, liberated from all rules, killer of God and so killer of man, wild and free. As can be seen for her fondness for a serial killer:

In her journal circa 1928 Rand quoted the statement, "What is good for me is right," a credo attributed to a prominent figure of the day, William Edward Hickman. Her response was enthusiastic. "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard," she exulted. (Quoted in Ryan, citing Journals of Ayn Rand, pp. 21-22.)

At the time, she was planning a novel that was to be titled The Little Street, the projected hero of which was named Danny Renahan. According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan - intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man - after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should." (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)

"A wonderful, free, light consciousness" born of the utter absence of any understanding of "the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people." Obviously, Ayn Rand was most favorably impressed with Mr. Hickman. He was, at least at that stage of Rand's life, her kind of man. So the question is, who exactly was he? William Edward Hickman was one of the most famous men in America in 1928. But he came by his fame in a way that perhaps should have given pause to Ayn Rand before she decided that he was a "real man" worthy of enshrinement in her pantheon of fictional heroes. You see, Hickman was a forger, an armed robber, a child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer.

Other than that, he was probably a swell guy...

No doubt defenders of Ayn Rand, and there are still a few left, would reply that the journal entry in question was written when she was only in her early twenties and still under the spell of Nietzsche, that as her thinking developed she discarded such Nietzschean elements and evolved a more rational outlook...

But before we assume that her admiration of Mr. Hickman was merely a quirk of her salad days, let's consider a few other quotes from Ayn Rand cited in Scott Ryan's book. In her early notes for The Fountainhead: "One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one's way to get the best for oneself. Fine!" (Journals, p. 78.) Of The Fountainhead's hero, Howard Roark: He "has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world."(Journals, p. 93.)

In the original version of her first novel We the Living: "What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?" (This declaration is made by the heroine Kira, Rand's stand-in; it is quoted in The Ideas of Ayn Rand by Ronald Merrill, pp. 38 - 39; the passage was altered when the book was reissued years after its original publication.)

On the value of human life: Man "is man only so long as he functions in accordance with the nature of a rational being. When he chooses to function otherwise, he is no longer man. There is no proper name for the thing which he then becomes ... When a man chooses to act in a sub-human manner, it is no longer proper for him to survive nor to be happy." (Journals, pp. 253-254, 288.)

As proof that her Nietzschean thinking persisted long after her admirers think she abandoned it, this journal entry from 1945, two years subsequent to the publication of The Fountainhead: "Perhaps we really are in the process of evolving from apes to Supermen -- and the rational faculty is the dominant characteristic of the better species, the Superman." (Journals, p. 285.) So perhaps her thinking did not change quite so much, after all...

Read the whole thing--if you have the stomach for it: Hickman did some vile things--and consider the peculiarities of mind which lead someone to think this way. Consider also the significant similarities between the worldview expressed her and that of the Communism from which she'd escaped.

She seeks to use the methods of the Communists against them. She merely believes in the proleteriat of the brilliant oppressed by the bourgeois of the mediocre and incompetent. Apart from that inversion, the whole scheme is the same: the awakening of the consciousness of the oppressed, including class traitors such as Eddie Willers and other sub beings who serve the wonderful higher beings even to the point of self destruction after the glorious revolution comes into being, sweeping away the structures of oppression by the oppressive powers of incompetence and mooching. Ayn Rand is Karl Marx.

The Oddities of Ayn Rand

I mean, aside from her atrocious understanding of human relationships, of course...

No, the odd thing about Ayn Rand is that she truly failed to understand or articulate what she was arguing for. It's there, in Atlas Shrugged, just not in the clearest, most philosophical passages. She's perhaps the best--at least, the most ferocious--enemy of charity broken away from truth.

The promise of Communism lies in man's natural rage against injustice and the suffering of his fellow man. When the workers were treated like animals, and worst than animals, the resulting back lash was inevitable from any conscience with a bit of life and spark left in it. You must feed a horse enough to keep it alive and plowing your fields. You must tend to your machinery and equipment at a bare minimum in order to keep it at work. When the horrors of the dawn of the industrial age, of Dickensian poverty and working conditions are defended and embraced by the titans of industry and those supposed to preserve the virtue of society, then one risks revolution.

But at the same time, such rage against ill treatment based in man's benevolence towards his fellow man overshot. In the name of the revolution, in the name of compassion, in the name of charity and concern for the oppressed laborers of the world, the revolutionaries believed they had to throw out all concern and charity for the oppressors of the world. Into that category they lumped the preservers of virtue in a society--the religions, the governments, the organizations and framework of the world from before the time of the Revolution, before the Year Zero of the Revolutionary Calendar--and decided it all had to go. Not only were they committed to throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but they wanted to chuck the tub with it. As well as the soap. And indeed anything and everything that reminded them they were ever involved in a bath to begin with.

Rand comes forth into the field with a clarion call for the nobility and necessity of truth, the importance of justice, the vital place of the producers--of the virtuous--who become the people of wealth and power in a society, and indeed, a call for the repudiation of anything, anything at all, that smacks of communism! And so, she pulls the baby and the tub back into the house, through the house, and right back out the other side of the house. She throws out charity.

Funnily enough, she tries to keep good will between people. She wants to retain a willingness to sacrifice everything for the welfare of people you love. She'd like to retain compassion. Even while she scorns it. It's an odd dynamic to watch at work. Her statement of her philosophy is so forceful, so compelling, so inviting in its heroic cadence and the strength of conviction behind it--and let's not forget the fact that an appeal to the existence of reason contra much of modernity is always refreshing--that many people get swept up in it and overlook the problems. She did, herself, I suspect, though it is unfair to judge her system merely from the novels and not from the explicitly philosophical work.

But her whole system depends upon the Communist vision of the world having some real attachment to what ordinary people mean when they speak of care for the little guy, and compassion for the oppressed, and the need to resolve problems of systemic injustice, and love, and altruism. Rather, she didn't understand Christianity. She who loved Aristotle, who ripped off some of his best lines for her chapter titles and section names, didn't seem to get the full force and effect of his description of the Prime Mover. Her adaptation to fit the main players of a capitalist worldview celebrating producers and men and women of achievement is an ingenious one, but it does not show that she got what he was saying. There must be a God. There must be some being at the back of all things, whether as the First Pusher who Itself is not Pushed or as the Ground of All Being or what have you, but there must be a God. There must be some first cause, or else we live in a universe of infinite cause, which is a universe of irrationality and unpredictability, without purpose or meaning. And this she abhorred.

Once that is understood, a great many other things are thrown into a different light. In an atheist's world, then history could truly have been a sequence of moochers and looters oppressing the men of production eternally, because in an atheist world, all religion would have been a sham and a lie, useful only for crowd control and the deception of the masses. But if religion is true, or the reflection of a higher reality expressed in better or worse ways by different systems, then there exists a being who may truly have a claim upon all men by right of creation, of production--a right over the creature that she would have understood and appreciated if she could only have seen. The creator's rights over the created are not like those sham rights of the master over the slave, or (in her novels) the sham rights of the looters and moochers over the producers and men of genius and achievement.

And then, of course, there's the complicating factor of the relationship God desires with his creations, which would elevate us far beyond anything Rand dreamed of in her neo-pagan fantasies. So Rand: both prophet of the diseases of modernity (specifically, of charity without the bindings of truth and justice, i.e., Communism) and a purveyor of false teaching herself (of justice without mercy, of Darwinian capitalism), while at the heart of it pulling out a key insight into money as the means of man's peaceful interaction, of trading value for value, of labor rewarded with pleasure rather than the slave's mere relief from pain, of the best of capitalism rewarding people of virtue with wealth according to their production and achievement aiding all of humanity.

I think frequently she is mistaken as a proponent of deregulated business, when she was rather arguing for the proper rewards for achievement and virtue. It is true, she wanted government cut to a minimum, enforcing contracts, handing down justice, and keeping the peace so that the producers could do what they did best. But she was not simply friendly to business--she was friendly to the achievers. She was not friendly to deregulation--she demanded just laws and good government, government based on truth and justice. She desired to see virtue rewarded and vice punished, according to her own scheme. And that was the problem, in the end. According to her own scheme--except her scheme was wrong.

Two Big Lies and A Smokescreen

One of the names on any round-up of the people contributing to turning the tide must be Peter Kreeft. He's especially well known for his analyses of the culture, culture wars, and where we go from here. Exhibit A:

Night is falling. What Chuck Colson has labeled "a new Dark Ages" is looming. And its Brave New World proved to be only a Cowardly Old Dream. We can see this now, at the end of "the century of genocide" that was christened "the Christian century" at its birth.

We've had prophets who warned us: Kierkegaard, 150 years ago, in The Present Age; and Spengler, 100 years ago, in The Decline of the West; and Aldous Huxley, seventy years ago, in Brave New World; and C. S. Lewis, forty years ago, in The Abolition of Man; and above all our popes: Leo XIII and Pius IX and Pius X and above all John Paul the Great, the greatest man in the world, the greatest man of the worst century. He had even more chutzpah than Ronald Reagan, who dared to call Them "the evil empire:" He called Us "the culture of death." That's our culture, and his, including Italy, with the lowest birth rate in the world, and Poland, which now wants to share in the rest of the West's abortion holocaust.


If the God of life does not respond to this culture of death with judgment, God is not God. If God does not honor the blood of the hundreds of millions of innocent victims then the God of the Bible, the God of Israel, the God of orphans and widows, the Defender of the defenseless, is a man-made myth, a fairy tale.

He goes on to offer hope and make the best diagnosis of the problems and solutions of the modern age available. But the question the above quote raises is: why have we ignored so many different voices speaking with authority and telling truth for so long? Several reasons present themselves. First, the long and fruitful efforts of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire, among others, have taken deep root in the Western subconscious. Even those frequently considered conservative have swallowed whole the fundamental lies of the Communist ideology.

1. Possessing power which others do not have/being in a position of authority/having more money/talent/having more makes you an oppressor. Those with less than you are the oppressed.

2. Anything the oppressed do to achieve parity with the "oppressors" is legitimate because they would not need to take action to achieve parity if they had not been oppressed in the first place.

Since any redistribution of the wealth/power/authority/etc. undertaken within this model will almost always occur in the context of unjust acts (the French Revolution followed by the Terror, the Communist take over of Russia followed by show trials and seizure of wealth, the Chinese Communists followed by the long reign of Mao, etc.), a new oppressed class emerges and the cycle begins anew.

Communism is a road into a traffic circle with no outlet. The cycle of violence, begun in the name of ending oppression, does not permit the possibility of ever ending oppression, injustice, and violence, but rather sets in motion a process which may only end with the sort of forgiveness practiced and taught by Christ. Along the way, though, the adherents to these two lies will put in motion the sorts of obfuscation and distortion predicted so accurately by George Orwell. And hence our current state of confusion and fear.

The easiest way to hide the lack of morality consequent on accepting the two lies is to deny the existence of morality at all--or at least, the existence of objective morality. The dictatorship of relativism decried by Pope Benedict is in part a reaction to the deep self assurance of the high modernity, evident even unto our present day in statements of relativism as dogmatic truth, i.e. "There is no such thing as absolute truth". This intellectual self assurance held (and holds) confidently the idea that man's mind may attain a knowledge of truth by the application of reason to the workings of the natural world and man himself. Frequently, such a mind dismisses all religion and belief in the spirit world as mere ridiculous superstition, a viewpoint especially evident in the Sherlock Holmes canon and other literature contemporary to that time.

Ayn Rand and her followers remain prominent adherents to such a view, as do those who take Robert Heinlein and other such logical positivists as intellectual leaders. Taken as a whole, these admirers of the high modern intellectual assurance usually presume that a complete scientific understanding of and explanation for all phenomena within the realm of man's experience is only a matter of time. Partially in a natural reaction to such an evisceratingly anti-spiritual worldview, partly in reaction to the associations of such a view with eugenics, imperialism, colonialism, and slavery arising from the common origin of that method of viewing the world and these evils in the 1800s, and partly because it is so much easier to "win" an argument when one has blunted the force of reason, many people avoid such a belief, preferring instead the false hopes of boundless tolerance, endless comity, and an end to conflict, by denying mankind the ability to know what is right and true. Indeed, they deny that anything is right and true, or that righteousness and truth exist at all.

In the absence, then, of boundaries, we see the coming death of human rights, and law, and science, and anything that depends upon the intelligibility of the universe and the existence of truth--a point laid out by John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor. Absent truth, there can be no morality. Absent morality, there can be no justice--for without a standard of law, any court or authority can only be an arbitrary one. Absent justice, the world devolves into an all against all struggle for survival.

So we have the two key lies of the Communist ideology, which are actually the lies humans (and possibly the devils as well) tell themselves when they seek to excuse monstrosity. In order to avoid the accusations or the realization of monstrosity, they deny the existence of any objective, universal standard by which to measure their actions--but in so doing, they unleash hell upon the world. In this, we have another of the key reasons for Rand's continuing popularity--she saw this trend and excoriated it--as well as an explanation for why modern movements are so hard to fight. Whether they be liberal or conservative, jihadi or communist, they embrace obfuscation, justified by the two lies listed above. The only answer? Truth, repeated so that the great lie may not drown it out.

Benedict: Charity Depends on Justice

Mark Shea excerpts from the new papal encyclical Caritas in Veritate:

Charity goes beyond justice, because to love is to give, to offer what is “mine” to the other; but it never lacks justice, which prompts us to give the other what is “his”, what is due to him by reason of his being or his acting. I cannot “give” what is mine to the other, without first giving him what pertains to him in justice. If we love others with charity, then first of all we are just towards them. Not only is justice not extraneous to charity, not only is it not an alternative or parallel path to charity: justice is inseparable from charity[1], and intrinsic to it. Justice is the primary way of charity or, in Paul VI's words, “the minimum measure” of it[2], an integral part of the love “in deed and in truth” (1 Jn 3:18), to which Saint John exhorts us. On the one hand, charity demands justice: recognition and respect for the legitimate rights of individuals and peoples. It strives to build the earthly city according to law and justice. On the other hand, charity transcends justice and completes it in the logic of giving and forgiving[3]. The earthly city is promoted not merely by relationships of rights and duties, but to an even greater and more fundamental extent by relationships of gratuitousness, mercy and communion. Charity always manifests God's love in human relationships as well, it gives theological and salvific value to all commitment for justice in the world.

The fascinating thing about this passage is that he captures perfectly the promise and the problem of Ayn Rand's philosophy. The reason why her work is so attractive to so many is her clear eyed perception of the tendency towards injustice in the modern world to the great and the good. We live in an age characterized by the instinct described by Screwtape of the dictator flicking the tops off of grass which stands above the rest, discouraging genius and greatness in the name of central planning. She was in full rebellion against the Communist move to falsely level the playing field, to prevent any man from becoming rich in the name of justice, when wealth can be the just reward for skill and labor.

But she sought merely justice, strict justice, justice absent charity or mercy. She failed to make the leap to the second half of the equation, or to understand, as John Zmirak pointed out in his piece commenting on the encyclical, that all human beings inherit vast quantities of gratuitous, unearned social capital such as language, technical knowledge, and so forth. She remains a powerfully attractive force by means of those truths she saw so clearly and articulated so forcefully in a time which mirrors much of the decay she described in Atlas Shrugged, but she failed to understand man. She didn't know mercy, or care for the weaker and less fortunate--though her characters are usually better than her philosophy, and her philosophy better than its practitioners. She had half the insight of the Pope. She knew the necessity of justice, but failed to see that it acts as the foundation of charity.

Once the great and the good of society are granted the basic, elemental charity of just pay for excellent, superlative work, then due to the life, skill, and the cultural riches transmitted from ages past which come as gift, the excellent of society have an obligation to "give back" a little in return for what they have received. Scripture even suggests that such a gift ought to be proportional when it states that "Those to whom much is given, much will be expected."

The next step is not looting in the name of altruism, but rather a recognition of the fundamental dignity of all human beings deriving from their common humanity. That dignity lays obligations upon others to respect human rights and freedoms, to love their neighbor as themself. Further, we are all part of a common human family, and so stand in a relationship of love and care to the rest of humankind. When we fail to recognize this relationship, we sin.