Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Hierarchie; Gegenteil von H.: nicht Ungleichheit, sondern Anarchie; autonomes (imperial) Selbst - Wahlfreiheit - Ablehnung jeder Ordnung

Kurzinhalt: This refusal to accept that God has ordered the universe and that there is, as a result, a serious differentiation between that order and the disorder caused by human sin, requires that the distinction between order and disorder be eradicated.

Textausschnitt: HIERARCHY VERSUS ANARCHY

102a It is unfortunate that so many people, theologians and others, have rejected hierarchy under the mistaken impression that it necessarily produces inequalities, when in fact hierarchy per se means neither equality nor inequality but simply sacred order. (Fs) (notabene)

102b More unfortunate, even potentially disastrous for us, is the fact that to reject hierarchy is not to reject inequality but to reject order. For the opposite of hierarchy is not equality, as so many people today seem to think. The opposite of hierarchy is anarchy, that is, no order at all. Anarchy is chaos, and if we doubt that this is what egalitarianism really leads to, all we need do is look at the violence in our streets, the disorder in our families, the lawlessness in our schools, the corruption in our politics, the immorality in our media and the dissent within our churches. Karl Stern observed: "When equality becomes sameness, an immanent principle of order is lost."1 One could go a step further and say that the most important principle of order is lost. (Fs)

102c Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of human sexuality. Once we have lost the sense that male and female are hierarchically ordered, i.e., differentiated and by that differentiation ordered to one another in marital love, it becomes impossible to see why homosexual relationships are wrong. If the differentiation between male and female is insignificant, then the sexual relationship between a man and a woman cannot be significandy different from the sexual relationship between two men or two women. And if that is true, it then becomes impossible to see how sexual activity is linked to marriage or indeed how procreation is linked to sexual activity. As Cardinal Ratzinger has pointed out, "The issue is the rupture between sexuality and marriage. Separated from motherhood, sex has remained without a locus and has lost its point of reference: it is a kind of drifting mine, a problem and at the same time an omnipresent power."2

103a Sexual activity today is ordered to nothing whatsoever. It has become quite literally chaotic, anarchic. And the implications for society as a whole are incalculable. As sociologist Philip Rieff has noted, the center around which society today revolves is no longer the family but the self, the imperial, autonomous self. As a result, "a new and dynamic acceptance of disorder, in love with life and destructive of it, has been loosed upon the world."3 This new self, loose from all institutions, all commitments, all differentiations, all relationships, in short, from all order whatsoever, is no longer able to see itself as the subject of responsibilities by which it would be bound to others, but only as the subject of rights which it can claim from others. As Gottfried Dietze points out, "In our egalitarian age, the present riot of rights, in a large measure brought about through rioting, threatens to turn into an anarchy of 'rights' that are not right."4

103b Although this turn down the egalitarian path is supported by a large number of misled people genuinely operating under the illusion that hierarchy means nothing more than inequality, we ought not for that reason to suppose that those leading the charge do not know what they are really doing. They know that the path they are on leads to the destruction of order. Chaos is precisely what they seek. And the reasons are not hard to discover. (Fs)

103c The imperial self intent on creating its own values and truths, indeed its own self, through the exercise of an absolute freedom of choice, requires, as the very condition of possibility for being able to "create" such values and truths, the absence of any pre-existing objective order to which it might be required to conform itself. The imperial self literally cannot tolerate the idea that such an order already exists with God as its source or author. The autonomous self wishes to be God, not to obey him; it wishes to become its own life-project, as the Pope puts it, not to make God's will its life-project. (Fs) (notabene)

103d This refusal to accept that God has ordered the universe and that there is, as a result, a serious differentiation between that order and the disorder caused by human sin, requires that the distinction between order and disorder be eradicated. The cover article in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly, on the dissolution of the two-parent family and its consequences, noted this phenomenon as it applies to the many attacks made on the two-parent family in recent years. (Fs)

... [T]he attempt to discredit the two-parent family can be understood as part of what Daniel Patrick Moynihan has described as a larger effort to accommodate higher levels of social deviance. "The amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can 'afford to recognize,' " Moynihan argues. One response has been to normalize what was once considered deviant behavior, such as out-of-wedlock birth. An accompanying response has been to detect deviance in what once stood as a social norm, such as the married-couple family. Together these responses reduce the acknowledged levels of deviance by eroding earlier distinctions between the normal and the deviant.5 (Fs)

104a Nowhere is this project of eroding the distinction between the normal and the deviant more vigorously pursued than in America's colleges and universities, where hardly anything today can be spoken of as deviant or abnormal without getting the speaker into trouble with the politically correct. A former student of mine now in graduate study in psychology in a secular university recently told me that the professor in her course on abnormal psychology started the semester by saying that, objectively speaking, there really is nothing one could call abnormal behavior. What is called abnormal behavior is a culturally-conditioned phenomenon and therefore varies from one society to another. Secular schools are not the only place this sort of thing occurs. In my theology course in graduate school entitled "Moral Norms", the professor finally admitted about halfway through the semester, upon being asked why he had not as yet introduced us to a single moral norm, that he did not believe there are such things as moral norms. If nothing is normative, then of course nothing can be abnormal either.6 (Fs)

105a Although intellectuals generally take more extreme positions on such matters than does the public as a whole, the fact is that such thinking sooner or later trickles down into the larger population. As is pointed out in The Atlantic Monthly article, attacks on marriage and the family as normative do not these days simply come from the culturally elite, but also reflect to some degree a shift in attitude that has occurred among the larger population. (Fs)

Survey after survey shows that Americans are less inclined than they were a generation ago to value sexual fidelity, lifelong marriage, and parenthood as worthwhile personal goals. Motherhood no longer defines adult womanhood, as everyone knows; equally important is the fact that fatherhood has declined as a norm for men. In 1976 less than half as many fathers as in 1957 said that providing for children was a life goal. The proportion of working men who found marriage and children burdensome and restrictive more than doubled in the same period. Fewer than half of all adult Americans today regard the idea of sacrifice for others as a positive moral virtue.7

105b The fact that self-sacrifice is regarded by less than half of all adults in this country as a positive moral virtue tells us far more about the current state of American religious belief than do all the polls indicating that more than 90 percent of the American public still believes in God. It tells us that the Trinitarian Godhead which is within itself a communion of self-giving love is no longer the God in whom the American public believes. It tells us that Christ, the source of the sacred or sacramental ordering of our lives, who becomes Head of the Church and source of that order by virtue of his sacrifice for the sake of the Church, no longer informs American religious sensibilities. It also tells us why Americans place less value today on being husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. Those who do not value the Godhead as Trinity or hierarchy are not likely to value their own ability to image that hierarchy in the union of marital love. (Fs)