A Sensible Reality Check

When we look around at the things happening around and the trend it's heading for, it would seem that we lost "reason". We live in a world of clouded minds. In spite of the adulation given to John Paul II, it is more an adulation of his image and charisma, in the same way we idolize media personalities. If John Paul II and Benedict XVI were listened to, our world would have gained much. We can be more in touch with reality as we focus and move toward Truth. With truth, we can really learn to love.

Another beautiful mind is Fr. James Schall S.J. who talks about our world today in an interview.

The modern world is a “rights” world. This comes largely from Hobbes. The logic of a “rights” world is curious. It basically means that what we “ought” to be by “right” is owed to us. If we do not have what we ought to have, we are victims. Someone has the “duty” to give us our “rights.” This “rights” world is a world in which the notion of gift can no longer exist. Christianity is rooted in gift, not rights. If I do not have what is my “right,” then, when it is supplied to me, it is because of someone else’s “duty.” In a way, such a world bears out the problem that I have always associated with justice, namely, that it is the most terrible of the virtues. When we treat someone “justly,” we return what is “due.” It does not depend on that person’s charm or character. He can be the worst of men and, if we “owe” him something, we must return it. A thoroughly “just” world is a world of cold impersonality. The great things of life—friendship, honor, sacrifice, love, praise—are beyond justice. Aquinas thus said that the world was created in mercy, not justice.In a paradoxical sense, in a completely “just” world, Christianity itself would have no place to exist. It could not really talk about “giving” or “sacrificing” because what is given is “due.” This is the classical problem with socialism and such forms of “rights”-oriented systems. In the name of justice, they get rid of all the real institutions of love and sacrifice that really deal with individual people in their particularity. The greatest things are beyond justice. When we politicize all the human activities, we really end up with a world in which no one can possibly love another because everything is already “owed".

But here the word “liberty” means precisely that no standards or norms exist. Freedom does not mean follow reason, but follow whatever we want. Each person chooses his own definition of happiness or the good, as one of our Supreme Court justices is fond of telling us. No one agrees on anything except that no good requires human beings to live according to reason, a reason that is found in human nature itself as expressive of its good.

The purpose of the ruling principle is to guarantee that this form of “liberty” be protected and expanded. Equality means that no criterion of excellence or good exists. The regime then comes to be a systematic dismantling of any residue of a claim in nature that a proper way of man to live can be found. The institutions and virtues that were needed to protect family and personal integrity are now overturned. In Aristotle’s sense, out of this moral chaos we would see a leader arise who could manipulate this moral chaos of the citizens into his own arbitrary power. He would no longer see any reason not to put his own ideas about what was good into effect.

More at: http://claremont.org/index.php?act=basicPageArticle&id=162&bpId=122#sthash.pbyEsYqU.dpuf