https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THCNYF3kx8Y

Transcript

Pope Benedict, when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, coined a phrase that I’ve returned to often in attempts to penetrate what exactly he meant by it. He described the moral landscape of modern society as a “dictatorship of relativism”.

What stood out to me, specifically, was the word dictatorship. Because I could always appreciate the logical problems with relativism, but I was always a bit struck why he associated it with such a specific term – dictatorship. What is the association?

So for a little helpful context, relativism, in this sense, means an individualistic and subjective approach to morality probably best summarized by George Bernard Shaw who said the “the only Golden rule is that there are no golden rules.”

The trend in popular thought in modernist Western society has been towards embracing a sense that morality is a social convention. There is no, at bottom, objective morality. What we think of as right or wrong is something that has emerged out of some societal consensus and then adapted.

The evidence for this claim is that because people don’t always agree about right and wrong, there must not be an actual, objective, right and wrong. But just because there can be multiple answers to a question, it doesn’t follow that there is no answer to the question.

I think of those order of operations math questions that you sometimes see posted on Facebook that bait people into blurting out the answer in the comments and if you read through them, you see an array of answers as diverse as Justin Trudeau’s cabinet.

But we don’t measure truth by the various answers that fallible human beings might offer to a problem. We ought to acknowledge that truth as well as morality is, generally, self evident and then we ought to do the hard work of trying to discover it.

But that requires an integrity and fortitude that modern people seem reluctant to confront. After all, it’s much easier to shy away from the high calling of moral virtue and then to console ourselves that there aren’t any true morals anyways, so we should just do whatever we want because it’s all just social convention.

**Intro**

As soon as society concedes this ground to the social convention theory of morality, it starts to hear, very loudly, from those who say, “since it’s just a societal convention, why don’t we improve upon it and make it better?” And it’s by this clever slight of hand that we’ve seen huge tectonic shifts in Western culture around ideas about sexual morality and marriage.

This seems to have been the sequence of the great moral reformers and thinkers of the modern era. They perceive some traditional moral concept and then they denounce it as a mere convention and not actually a depiction of what is true or real, but just the preference of a particular time or worse, something like a patriarchal imposition.

Then they say, since that’s all it is, that means we can choose our morality, so why don’t we choose something better.

And then they do, they propose a whole new set of moral values and campaign to have them adopted by the populace which usually comes in the form of mass media. Our movies and TV shows adopt these sensibilities and then portray our favorite protagonists as triumphing over their adversities because they behaved according to these courageous new precepts.

People who live lifestyles that would have been seen as immoral previously, are now held up as charming, harmless, courageous, but most of all, relatable.

And our journalists promote them at every opportunity as the frame the protagonists and antagonist of every news story, but especially, every political controversy. Some politician or public person will run afoul the new morality and will be denounced or cancelled for it before they even realized that what they were doing was now considered wrong.

But here’s the first big flaw in this sequence: when they said that since our morality can be chosen, we should choose something better – what did they mean by better? Better, here, must be some kind of moral evaluation or it means nothing at all. How can something be better if all judgments of good or bad are just conventions that we choose?

Right from the very beginning our relativist reformers have already conceded that there is such a thing as a better morality that we must choose, but they snuck it in under the deception that we are free to choose whatever we want.

But if they conceded that there actually is a morality better than what already currently exists, then how did they discover this better convention? How did they know about this better behaviour if they did not observe everyone doing it – and we know they didn’t observe this because they were trying to introduce it to society as an ingredient that wasn’t already there.

If what already exists could be said to be what we observe people doing, then how do we discover a standard that we can use to compare our current behaviour to where we want to be going?

It seems to be that they are fully conceding an objective standard of morality, that exists apart from our preferences and that we must conform ourselves to it in order to be able to say our certain moral values (the ones we want to implement) are better than other moral values (the traditional ones we want to discard).

But the traditional values were based on an acknowledgement that there is such a thing as objective right and wrong a standard that we can measure ourselves against to be able to say, this is better or this is worse.

The modernist moral values were based on a lie that there is no objective standard but then they imposed an objective standard of their own, and it’s one with an even more unrestrained and hysterical loyalty that abuses anyone that might not conform to it - which is where we get the kind of aggressive superciliousness in cancel culture and woke culture.

So, if both concede that there is a moral standard, which one do you think we should trust – the system that admits this from the outset or the one that pretends it doesn’t exist before it is imposed?

Obviously, I’d say the former.

Now, I said earlier, what about this word dictatorship. Why did Benedict use that word?

Well, if we all, universally, admit an objective moral standard and instead of imposing our own concept of it, we try to discover what it is and conform ourselves to it, as our classical Greco-Roman and Christian ancestors did, then we have something to hold everyone, including our rulers, accountable to. This is what’s known as a rule of law.

So even when Kings or peasants, Hollywood producers or middle-class tradesman break the rule of law which is based on the objective moral standard, they are equally measured, and condemned if necessary, by it.

But in a system like what we have in the modern world where we buy into the lie that it’s all just a convention, what happens when the powerful and the elite behave in ways that violate the existing moral norms? They use their power and wealth to change the morality as they did before.

And those of us with little power have to conform ourselves to a standard not based on something objective that we are all judged by, but by a standard that is dictated to us according to whatever behaviour the rich and powerful happen to live by.

Maybe this is what St. Paul meant when he described those who are, “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine.”

And God help us if we ever want to hold them accountable for greed, corruption, lust, or abuse. They will only reply, oh that’s just a social convention. You need to update your old patriarchal morality to the new morality that we’ve already been campaigning to have adopted and viciously canceling anyone who endorses it.

In the absence of a common, objective morality, we are left with a relativism that tells us that we’re all allowed to assert our own moral values. But what you end up with is a situation in which those with the most power can assert their moral values with a strength that the rest of us can’t oppose and we’re left with tyranny.

So while moral relativism may sound like liberty in the beginning, it will inevitably end in dictatorship.