Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Das selbstherrlich Selbst; Zusammenhang: Freiheit als Wahltfreiheit - selbstgenügsame Autonomie - Egalitarismus; Akzeptanz von wesentlichen Unterschieden würden Annahme einer realen Ordnung bedeuten

Kurzinhalt: Egalitarianism is a necessity for people intent on believing they are sufficient unto themselves, capable of actualizing, fulfilling and beatifying themselves. They cannot accept moral differentiations ... since that would force them to acknowledge the ..

Textausschnitt: THE IMPERIAL SELF

88b The theological answer to that question is very simple. Today in America the imperial or autonomous self reigns. What more and more Americans seek, above all else, is the feeling that they themselves are in total control of their lives, that in some ultimate sense they are sufficient unto themselves, requiring nothing and no one else. Thirty years ago there was talk of the "me generation". We have now seen two "me generations", with a third already well on the way. These are the people who value above all things self-empowerment and seek as their highest goals self-actualization, self-realization and self-fulfillment. These are the people who, if they are psychologically oriented, find a home among the many therapies which teach them how to manipulate other people and things to enhance their own personal sense of well-being. They have adopted the "character ideal of an autonomous man, using but unused".1 These are the people who, if they are spiritually oriented, find a home in the New Age movement, which assures them they are gods unto themselves. "The self that God created needs nothing. It is forever complete, safe, loved and loving", we are told in the preface to A Course in Miracles, the basic text of New Age. "Spirit is in a state of grace forever. Your reality is only spirit. Therefore you are in a state of grace forever."2 (Fs)

89a Egalitarianism is a necessity for people intent on believing they are sufficient unto themselves, capable of actualizing, fulfilling and beatifying themselves. They cannot accept moral differentiations between a superior good and an inferior evil or ontological differentiations between order and disorder, since that would force them to acknowledge the existence of an objective reality larger than themselves which they cannot control. (Fs) (notabene)

89b Ontological differentiations, as between male and female, in which both are recognized to be good and equal but different, are also unacceptable, since the obvious implication of such a differentiation is that while each is good in itself and equal to the other, each is also incomplete in itself, requiring the other for its own completion. This also the imperial self cannot acknowledge, since the autonomous self holds itself to be already complete or at least capable of becoming complete within itself and by itself. (Fs)

89c This is why, as Robert Nisbet points out, we have so many individuals not seriously connected to anything in society today. "Without doubt there are a great many loose individuals in American society at the present time: loose from marriage and the family, from the school, the church, the nation, job, and moral responsibility."3 They are loose from the church, because they do not really think they need God. They are loose from marriage and family, because they do not really think they need other people. They are loose from moral responsibility, because they do not really want to think other people need them. Nowhere is this looseness more apparent than in the massive numbers of abortions obtained every year. This nationwide refusal to admit the existence of the unborn child is symptomatic of the desire, even in the presence of pregnancy, to retain the illusion of personal independence from any serious bond with another person. This is why feminists such as Mary Daly assert: "It is the autonomy of women that is the target of anti-abortionists."4 (Fs)

90a People intent on exercising total autonomy cannot afford to acknowledge serious ontological and moral differentiations among human beings, because they understand freedom not, as the Church always has, as the power to be and to do the good, but as the ability to do whatever they want to do. And they can act this out only if all choices are equal and interchangeable. As Christopher Lasch points out, in his examination of American society,
"Freedom of choice" means "keeping your options open." The idea that "you can be anything you want," though it preserves something of the older idea of the career open to talents, has come to mean that identities can be adopted and discarded like a change of costume. Ideally, choices of friends, lovers, and careers should all be subject to immediate cancellation: such is the open-ended, experimental conception of the good life upheld by the propaganda of commodities, which surrounds the consumer with images of unlimited possibility.5 (Fs)

90b This trivialization of all choices rests upon a trivialization of all differences found among people. This has resulted in the invidious habit of calling the way a person lives his "lifestyle". Those who speak the language of lifestyles betray by that language the meaninglessness they attach to all choices. As Lasch correctly notes, "They reduce choice to a matter of style and taste, as their preoccupation with 'lifestyles' indicates. Their bland, innocuous conception of pluralism assumes that all preferences, all 'lifestyles,' all 'taste cultures,'... are equally valid." 6

91a In the final analysis, the imperial self, intent on exercising absolute freedom of choice, cannot accept any realm of objective truth or morality which would inhibit that freedom by requiring the self to conform itself to that objective truth. The imperial self, in order to be truly free as it understands freedom, must be able to create its own realm of truth. As the Pope points out in Veritatis Splendor, "Certain currents of modern thought have gone so far as to exalt freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values" (32). This notion that every person is the source of his own values is quite popular today. As the Pope observes: "Such an outlook is quite congenial to an individualist ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others" (VS 32). The result of this subjectivism is not lost on John Paul II. "This ultimately means making freedom self-defining and a phenomenon creative of itself and its values. Indeed, when all is said and done man would not even have a nature; he would be his own personal life-project" (46). (Fs)

91b In our society today, this kind of radical subjectivism is all but taken for granted across the spectrum from popular television programs to the Supreme Court itself. An episode of Designing Women, for example, had one of the women advising another (who was worried about her weight gain and the unkind remarks it had provoked from her acquaintances) to this effect: "It doesn't matter at all what other people think of you. Ten minutes after you're dead, everyone will have forgotten you. What's important is that you be the person you want to be, that you be true to that and feel it. That's all that's important." (All anyone can add is that if a person really did live this way, it would be easy to understand why he would be forgotten ten minutes after he was dead.) At the other end of the spectrum, we have the Supreme Court telling us, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that abortion is a right on the basis of that liberty which is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, since "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life." All of this is music to the ears of the imperial, autonomous self. (Fs)