As Ross Douthat remarks in the NYT Review of July 22, 2012(
12), “(T)hose older enemies – Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Mao’s China –
represented a different form of evil: institutional rather than individual,
strategic rather than anarchic, grasping and self-interested rather than
unpredictable and nihilistic.”
I
believe “nihilistic” is the operative word. He remarks that “By vanquishing or
outlasting them (the older enemies), we won a great victory for civilization.
But we ushered in an era in which evil seems to take on a more elusive, almost
elemental form. Instead of goose-stepping Nazis, it’s technology hating
recluses or furious young men with machine guns. Instead of super villains
seeking money or world domination, it’s the Joker with his head leaning out of
a police car, howling as a city falls apart.”
I would
suggest that the evil that is now appearing has always been present in our nice
apple pie-vanilla ice cream-grandmother American individualist capitalism
camouflaged under the cover of Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers.
It is the pernicious evil of the collapse into the self, a pernicious black
hole that sucks in and devours the very reality of the Higgs Boson.
The
collapse into self removes from reason the only being reason needs to feed on:
the self as imaging a God Who is three Relationalities as Father, Son and
Spirit. Face it: we are dealing with a
first rate outbreak of nihilism in the young. As Ratzinger entitled an article
in 1993, “And Marxism Gave Birth to… Nihilism,” he wrote: “Today, Marxism is
crumbling and liberal ideology is so split into fragments that it no longer has
a common, solid, coherent view of man and his future. In the present situation
of emptiness, there looms the terrible danger of nihilism, that is to say, the
denial or absence of all fundamental moral reference for the conduct of social
life. This danger becomes visible in the new forms of terrorism.”
It
could be interesting to insert here that our man James Holmes at the theater
massacre, as well as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at the Columbine High School
murders, were all loners. David Cullen in the same New York Times section wrote
that Harris’s journals were simply psychopathic “hate-hate-hate” but that
Klebold’s were different. Ten pages are consumed with drawings of giant fluffy
hearts. Some fill entire pages, others dance about in happy clusters with ‘I
LOVE YOU’ stenciled across. He was ferociously angry. Had one primary target
for his anger. Not jocks, but himself. What a loathsome creature he found himself.
No friends, no love, not a soul who cared about him or what became of his
miserable life. None of that is objectively true. But that’s what he saw.”
You
see, the self has no identity or reality as “I” if there is not another to give
it to us. Again it is Joseph Ratzinger who has been able to theologically
perceive and popularize the anthropology that the Magisterium is trying to get
across to the Church, particularly now with the “Year of Faith.” He wrote that “The
root of man’s joy is the harmony he enjoys with himself. He lives in this
affirmation. And only one who can accept himself can also accept the thou, can
accept the world. The reason why an individual cannot accept the thou, cannot
come to terms with him, is that he does not like his own I and, for that reason,
cannot accept a thou.
“Something
strange happens here. We have seen that the inability to accept one’s I
leads to the inability to accept a thou.
But how does one go about affirming, assenting to, one’s I? The answer may perhaps be unexpected: We
cannot do so by our own efforts alone. Of ourselves, we cannot come to terms
with ourselves. Our I becomes
acceptable to us only if it has first become acceptable to another I. We can love ourselves only if we have first
been loved by someone else.[1]
If
we pursued this point into its philosophic underbelly, we find Karol Wojtyla
explaining the very consciousness of the “good” coming from the experience of the
self as imaging the God Who alone is good (Mk. 10, 19: “No one is good but only God”). Negatively, he writes
that “guilt is the lived experience of a moral evil of which I myself am the
author…The experience of guilt always involves the efficacy of my personal
self.”[2]
Hence, I experience the good in consciousness by experiencing myself as doing
good and therefore being good.
Therefore, the person who is alone and not experiencing the giving of the self as
the expansion of being, does experience the good, and with that lack does not
experience any sense of absolute.
The
result is the dumbing down of reason to the positivistic state in which we now
find it, groaning under the weight of an infinity of information, facts and
data bases. And no absolute. Ratzinger offered this state as the cause of
positivism, the dictatorship of relativism and now nihilism. As he wrote, “only
what can be tested and proved appears as rational. [Sensible] experience has
become the only criterion guaranteeing truth. Anything that cannot be subjected
to mathematical or experimental verification is regarded as irrational. This
restriction of reason has the result that we are left in almost total darkness
regarding some essential dimensions of life. The meaning of man, the bases of
ethics, the question of God cannot be subjected to rational experience,
verified by mathematical formulae. And so they are left to subjective
sensibility alone. This is serious because if, in a society, the bases of
ethical behavior are abandoned to subjectivity alone, released from common
motives for being and living, handed over to pragmatism, then it is man himself
who is threatened.” And then, he hastens to the point that we are at: “Even though perverted, the political, social
terrorism of the 1960’s had a certain kind of moral ideal. But today, the
terrorism of drug abuse, of the Mafia, of attacks on foreigners, in Germany and
elsewhere, no longer has any moral basis. In this era of sovereign
subjectivity, people act for the sole pleasure of acting, without any reference
other than the satisfaction of ‘myself.’ Just as terrorism that was born from
the Marxism of yesterday put is finder on the anomalies of our social order, in
the same way the nihilistic terrorism of today ought to show us the course to
be followed for a reflection on the bases of a new ethical and collective
reason.”
As
Benedict XVI, Ratzinger renewed and intensified his topic of “expanding reason”
from the Regensburg Address (2006) to his address at the La Sapienza University
(2008). In telegraphic terms, the direction of his mind concerning the crisis
of faith can be summed up in the phrase, “not Informative, but Performative.”
By that he means that reason becomes truly reason and in possession of the
absolute when the person goes beyond himself in gift to Jesus Christ in faith
and in the service of others. This, and this alone, will be the solution of the
now regnant nihilism that is at the core of the present terrorism.
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