The Pope and The Enlightenment

Sylvia Poggioli had a piece on NPR's Morning Edition today describing the Pope's new book: Memory and Identity. Since I have not read the book, I can't vouch for the accuracy of Poggioli's reporting on its contents. However, that's really beside the point. Even if the Pope did not say what Poggoli attribues to him, the characterization itself captures something deeply troubling about the world today.

According to Poggioli, the book's major thesis (or at least one of its major theses) is that Europe is the epicenter of the war between good and evil (with Nazism and Communism being the most obvious examples of the latter) and that the primary source of this evil is . . . . The Enlightenment (!). Again according to Poggioli, the Pope argues that the source of Nazism and Communism, as well as more generalized evils like abortion, homosexuality, divorce, etc., is the widespread acceptance of the Enlightment's emphasis on reason and individuality as opposed to spirituality and unity with/dependence on God.

My first reaction was to laugh out loud. I suspect it would be pretty easy to show that far more evil has been (and is being) perpetrated in the name of God (or more broadly "true belief") than ever was or will be perpetrated in the name of man or reason. But my second thought was a more sobering one: There are a lot of people out there that agree with this thesis.

I am certain this is not a new observation, but much, if not most, of the conflict in the world today springs from a conflict between reason and individuality on the one hand and faith and forced conformity on the other. To some extent, of course that battle has been going on for centuries if not millenia. But right now, the latter values are in the ascendency. Indeed, even those who espouse the the political fruits of the Enlightment -- liberty and democracy -- do so on explicitly religious or quasi-religious (i.e. jingoistic) bases. Witness W's inaugural address.

I find this profoundly scary. A rejection of reason and individuality in favor of faith and conformity as the bases for human decision-making would be a catastrophe of the first order. Yet, that is exactly what is going on in today's world. I want to believe that this is only temporary: one of those pendulum swings that is eventuially self-correcting. But we are, it seems to me, getting close to a tipping point in this struggle, and if we go very much farther along the continuum, a correction could well take a very long time. Faith is ultimately totalitarian, with the true believers brooking neither dissent nor departure. Once such people actually achieve political power, the time and suffering required to reverse the process can be enormous.