The real untruth of
the worldview of which drugs and terrorism are symptoms consists in the
reduction of the world to facts and in the narrowing-down of reason to the perception
of what is quantitative.
A
Turning Point for Europe ?, 35
Reflection – This short passage may seem a bit obscure. It may even seem like
practically nonsense, a bunch of familiar-type words jumbled together into a
single sentence. Whassit mean?
Now of course this is one sentence lifted
from a lengthy analysis of the subjects mentioned, namely drugs and terrorism.
It’s nice to know that Ratzinger has really engaged with all the manifestations
of modernity in his writings. A while ago I mentioned that he has theologized
about rock music; here he philosophizes about the drug culture and terrorism.
These two may seem unconnected from one
another, especially since the form of terrorism we are most familiar with right
now is the Islamist variety. What does the quest for the global caliphate and
universal sharia law have to do with toking up? But both drug use and political
violence spring from a common source, which Ratzinger deftly identifies here.
Namely, the world of ‘facts’ is a bad
world. All we have are facts, ‘the way things are,’ and the way things are is
bad, bad, bad. And so, let’s get high. Let’s escape from the way things are
into a cloud of artificial bliss. Sure it’s not real, but reality is highly
over-rated, right?
Or, let’s blow stuff up. Let’s force the
world of facts to change by violent direct action. The lives destroyed by this may
or may not be regretted, but the bottom line is that the way things are is
intolerable and we must pull it all down around us, tear it to pieces, and make
things be some other way.
Flight from reality or fight with
reality—drugs and terrorism, two different responses to the same apprehension
of things. And Ratzinger rightly links this to the logical positivist approach
to reality that I have often discussed on this blog: that all we have are the
bare quantifiable facts, that there is no reality outside those facts, and that
there can be no reality outside them, and we are all trapped in a world of
brute matter and meaningless clashings of particles and energy fields.
Fight or flight—that is all that’s left to
us in that positivistic world. Oblivion or destruction—what a choice! And even
for those few of my blog readers who are neither raging coke fiends or members
of terrorist cells, the ‘fight or flight’ approach to reality may beckon. We
can fly into other things besides drugs, into banal entertainments or ceaseless
busyness or (Internet users beware!) constant low-level intellectual
stimulation. All of this can take us out of reality in ways subtle or not, out
of our own hearts and the here and now demands of our lives.
And we can ‘fight’ reality in ways that
don’t involve plastic explosives or high jacked airplanes. All the paths of
manipulation, dominance, spin, influence peddling, politicking, and the
manifold rejections of the moral law and rationalization therein, can be ways
of rebelling against reality, bending and shaping it to my specifications and
ideas with little regard for the human costs of that rebellion.
Fight or flight—when all we have are bare
facts, and those facts are painful and ugly, that’s all we can do. But what,
then, is the Christian alternative? It is to go forward towards reality,
towards ‘the facts’, and embrace them in love. To meet the world as it is with
the love of Christ, a love not our own, but given to us in baptism and fostered
in us by the life of prayer and virtue.
This calls us, then, not into oblivion or
destruction, but into the passion of faith. Because the world of facts will do
to us what it did to Christ; it will crucify us. But because we are not bound
by the mere brute facts, because there is a deeper, higher, truer reality
around and within us—the nascent kingdom of God
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