Yes, the Pope Is Catholic - On How to Really Believe (Without Blowing Things Up)
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.
PSA: They're different.
Yesterday afternoon became a roundup of Muslim hysteria and media shamelessness. But this scandal didn't come from nowhere - many in the West just don't get the Pope, and they just don't get the jihadist enemy. There is a fundamental failure to appreciate either on the terms that they appreciate themselves (in even the most surface way - it's just not credible that what a Muslim rioter tells himself is that he's rioting because of poverty... and what he's telling himself matters, because if he's rioting because he thinks Allah told him to kill Jews then negotiations over development assistance are going to be awkward). We'll try to explore this on multiple registers throughout the week, but there's a fundamental block in the way that Western elites approach religions, and it's one that the Pope alludes to ever so briefly in his speech. For elites, religion is a subculture - one among many, and one that can be entirely encompassed by an individual voluntarily embracing it for a couple of days before slipping back to a different culture. We'll suggest to you that there's a fundamental under appreciation that both the Pope and jihadists really, actually believe that they are right about God - and that those things matter.
Preempt. We wrote in several places yesterday:
Don't insult our intelligence by pointing out that the jihadist problem is also that they lack tolerance, and so the Pope is like the jihadists. The Pope expresses his belief in the superiority of his faith by tracing how the neo-Platonist trace in Aristotelian empiricism meant that the historical development of science qua falsification was limited by a horizon that it pointed to but could not access. The jihadists express their belief in their faith's superiority by slitting the throats of Jews on camera - and then selling those tapes to millions of other Muslims.
And that was before the articles about the British Muslims' threat to 'declare war' was released. Resist the intellectual laziness that marks so much of sophisticated academic posing and hold on to differences that make a difference. The Pope and the jihadists are alike in that they're both fundamentally beyond the psychology of Westerners who see religion as just a subculture. They are different in that one can explain his belief in terms of Aristotle and Plato and the other would burn the works of Aristotle and Plato as godless heretics - and would burn you to for trying to read them. The Pope, for instance, would never be so lacking in a sense of irony that he would burning effigies to protest being accused of violence, while the jihadists are pretty much just savage and dumb.
And so now that we've clarified that insisting on the essential rightness of religious dogma can be done in a way that's erudite and not at all like terrorism (contrary to what intellectual laziness might suggess), we can approach this fundamental problem over the course of this week - viz, the shock that some Westerners have expressed in discovering that the Pope thinks that Catholicism is intellectually and metaphysically superior to Islam. We don't want to ruin the ending for you, but myopia induced from an ideological hangover that they've been nursing since the 1990s ends up being pretty much the generous option.
