A Hope-filled Christmas
posted by Frank Pasquale
It’s always difficult to know exactly how to observe a holiday like Christmas on a blog like this. On the one hand, norms of “public reason” tend toward the neutrality of a “happy holidays” approach. On the other hand, I do celebrate Christmas and have a sense that at least some dimensions of Christianity’s aesthetic and ethical appeal are universal. So I’ll make a brief note of three of that come to mind.
1) The Vatican’s increasing environmental awareness was manifest in the Pope’s midnight mass today, when Benedict XVI lamented “the abuse of energy and its selfish and reckless exploitation.” An eschatological awareness can help us better value a future too easily diminished by standard economic discounting methods.
2) On the aesthetic side, I would trade all the department store carols in the world for a few minutes of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. This podcast organized by the extraordinary Christopher Lydon is a great introduction to Bach’s music.
3) Finally, the recently published papal encyclical Spes Salvi has a number of illuminating insights, particularly on the relationship between technology and values:
Science can contribute greatly to making the world and mankind more human. Yet it can also destroy mankind and the world unless it is steered by forces that lie outside it.
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In the twentieth century, Theodor W. Adorno formulated the problem of faith in progress quite drastically: he said that progress, seen accurately, is progress from the sling to the atom bomb. Now this is certainly an aspect of progress that must not be concealed. To put it another way: the ambiguity of progress becomes evident. Without doubt, it offers new possibilities for good, but it also opens up appalling possibilities for evil—possibilities that formerly did not exist. We have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man’s ethical formation, in man’s inner growth . . . then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.
In words that call to mind Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the Pope notes that any overarching “technical” solution to human conflict should always be suspect:
Anyone who promises the better world that is guaranteed to last for ever is making a false promise; he is overlooking human freedom. Freedom must constantly be won over for the cause of good. Free assent to the good never exists simply by itself. If there were structures which could irrevocably guarantee a determined—good—state of the world, man’s freedom would be denied, and hence they would not be good structures at all.
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It is when we attempt to avoid suffering by withdrawing from anything that might involve hurt, when we try to spare ourselves the effort and pain of pursuing truth, love, and goodness, that we drift into a life of emptiness, in which there may be almost no pain, but the dark sensation of meaninglessness and abandonment is all the greater.
These may seem rather dark ideas for an encyclical on hope. But an idea of redemption is a common thread throughout the document; “It is not science that redeems man: man is redeemed by love.” Here is to hoping that “progress in man’s ethical formation” can begin approaching our technical prowess in 2008.
December 25, 2007 at 12:01 am
Posted in: Religion
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Responses (1)
Rick Garnett - December 25, 2007 at 2:32 pm
Nice post, Frank. Thanks!
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