Yes, the Pope Is Catholic - Confused? We'll Translate: He Believes in God
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.
The thing is, he actually believes that Christ is present. Unprecedented, we know. But he really believes it nontheless.
The fundamental problem for Western elites in approaching either devout Churchmen or fanatical jihadists is that they just don't get that people can really, truly, genuinely believe in revealed dogma. It is fundamental in every sense: although it does not describe every manifestation of Western journalists' confusion and antipathy, it is the psychological block that accounts for how they could ever be caught off-guard by a Pope defending the superiority of Catholicism.
We're actually not saying this to be disparaging - the impulse to 'never take things too seriously' is perhaps the single unifying imperative of consumer capitalism. At the risk of betraying academic roots, if you settle on one identity you can't be sold the trappings of another one. Chic indifference is the essence of cool, and we have thus get the cultural produce of the two sides of the multicultural coin: not caring too much about the other person's identity and not caring too much about your own identity. Westerners don't just assume an identity and then abandon it a couple of months later - they do, but the only reason that they can is because they never took any one of those identities to heart in the first place. It's shocking that we even have to argue - in an age of week-long marriages, prenuptial agreements, ready-to-wear identities, 'ironic' hipsters, commercials that make fun of themselves, etc - that the psychological makeup of consumer capitalism has engendered a certain distance between you and whatever beliefs you happen to hold that week. Socially, it's shallowness in the service of indifference. Psychologically, it's distance in the service of a certain flexibility.
In this cultural environment, religion, as Pope Benedict pointed out in his speech, becomes just another a subculture. There are weeks when people are 'Jewish' or 'Catholic' and weeks when they go back to being 'businesspeople'. This being the theory part of today's presentation, we'll as for your forbearance as we throw just a little bit of psychoanalysis at this problem. Before you roll your eyes, remember that this concept of relegating religion to subculture is literally the culmination of the Pope's speech:
[T]oday, "culture" is emerging as the central life-world category. Religion is permitted - not as a substantial way of life, but as a particular "culture" or, rather, life-style phenomenon: what legitimizes it is not its immanent truth-claim but the way it allows us to express out innermost feelings and attitudes. We no longer "really believe," we just follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores as part of the respect for the "life-style" of the community to which we belong (recall the proverbial non-believing Jew who obeys kosher rules "out of respect for tradition"). "I do not really believe in it, it is just part of my culture" effectively seems to be the predominant mode of the disavowed/displaced belief characteristic of our times: what is a "cultural life-style" if not the fact that, although we do not believe in Santa Claus, there is a Christmas tree in every house and even in public places every December? Perhaps, then, "culture" is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without "taking them seriously." ... is this also not why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as "barbarians," as anti-cultural, as a threat to culture - they dare to take seriously their beliefs? Today, we ultimately perceive as a threat to culture those who immediately live their culture, those who lack a distance towards it. Recall the outrage when, three years ago, the Taliban forces in Afghanistan dynamited the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan: although none of us, enlightened Westerners, believed in the divinity of Buddha, we were so outraged because the Taliban Muslims did not show the appropriate respect for the "cultural heritage" of their own country and the entire humanity... they really believed in their own religion and thus had no great sensitivity for the cultural value of the monuments of other religions - for them, the Buddha statues were just fake idols, not "cultural treasures."
This, we submit to you, is the essential difference between the way that many Westerners approach religion and the way that both the religious enemies and devout friends of European Christianity approach it. In more tranquil times (the 1990s, for instance), we could get away with this evisceration of genuine religion. But the people who became ideologically invested in the Clinton years refuse to break out of the way of thinking that was appropriate only to those years (if it was ever appropriate). And so we have sophisticated, non-ideological Westerners who literally cannot wrap their minds around the nature of the enemy. One more article:
When... the Taliban forces in Afghanistan proceeded to destroy all "idols," especially the two gigantic Buddha statues carved into the stone at Bamiyan, we got the usual spectacle of all the "civilized" nations unanimously condemning the "barbarism" of this act. All the known actors were here: from the UNICEF expressing concern about the desecration of an important part of the heritage of humanity, and the New York Metropolitan Museum offering to buy the statues, up to the Islamic states representatives and clerics eager to denounce the destruction as contrary to the spirit of Islam. This kind of protest means strictly NOTHING - it just contributes to the aseptic liberal (multi)cultural consensus. Instead of hypocritically bemoaning this destruction, one should rather ask the question: where do WE stand with regard to faith? Perhaps, therein resides the truly traumatic dimension of the destruction in Afghanistan: we have here people who REALLY BELIEVE. After the Taliban government made public its intention to destroy all statues, most of the Western media first thought that this is a bluff, part of the strategy to blackmail the Western powers into recognizing the Taliban regime and pouring the money into Afghanistan, if they do not execute the announced measure - now we know they meant it
Of course, what we must not give up on is the idea that nonbelievers can live quite happily with true believers, provided that the true believers limit their proselytizing to tactics that don't resemble the tactics currently being used by Europe's radicalized Muslim populations.
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