-by Karlo Broussard

“When you hear the sentiment “thou shalt not be a white supremacist”—it’ll be dressed up a bit, but that’s the meaning—you can rest assured that the moral absolute being expressed here isn’t really about white supremacy. Sometimes it amounts to a form of relativism called global or total, which claims there is no truth. (You’ll find some prominent examples of “thou shalt not be a white supremacist at that link.) Other times, it stops just short of claiming that affirming objective truth is itself a marker of white supremacy—not quite, but it’s pretty close.

“Truth cannot contradict truth.” -Aristotle’s First Principle of Non-contradiction, Metaphysics IV (Gamma) 3–6, especially 4

“Quid est veritas?“ – Pontius Pilate to Jesus, Jn 18:38

“What is truth? Pilate was not alone in dismissing this question as unanswerable and irrelevant for his purposes. Today, too, in political argument and in discussion of the foundations of law, it is generally experienced as disturbing. Yet if man lives without truth, life passes him by; ultimately he surrenders the field to whoever is the strongest.”
—Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) from Faith and Politics

The anagram of “Quid est veritas?” is “Est vir qui adest” (“’It is the man’ before you.”).

-by Karlo Broussard

“For many years, relativism was the craze in apologetic circles. It was a primary target for apologists because it was part of the modern cultural landscape. “You have your truth, I have mine” was the catchphrase.

Some have suggested that relativism is long gone. David Brooks, a political commentator, argued a few years back for The New York Times that although American college campuses used to be “awash in moral relativism” as late as the 1980s, it is not so anymore. Rather, Brooks argues, “college campuses are today awash in moral judgment” and are a hotbed for what some have termed the “shame culture”—a culture in which unmerciful moral crusades are initiated against those who violate the absolute moral values of inclusion and tolerance (oxymoron). You can’t shame people and be a moral relativist at the same time, so it’s said.

This idea that relativism is dead seems to have gained traction even among some Christians, non-Catholic and Catholic alike.

But I’m not sure this is entirely true.

It’s obvious that most people today affirm certain moral absolutes—“thou shalt not be a white supremacist,” “thou shalt not be intolerant,” “thou shalt not be a judgmental, hateful bigot,” etc. On the surface, people who say these things don’t seem to be relativists of any sort, whether intellectual or moral. But when examined more closely, such moral absolutes turn out to be code for some form of relativism.

Consider, for example, “thou shalt not be a white supremacist.” In 2017, the president of Pamona College (Claremont, California), David Oxtoby, wrote an email to the entire campus in response to protesters who had shut down a speech intended to be given by Black Lives Matter critic Heather Mac Donald. In the e-mail, Oxtoby expressed his disapproval of the shutdown, arguing that it conflicted with the mission of Pamona College, which is “the discovery of truth” and “the collaborative development of knowledge.”

A group of students responded to the e-mail with an open letter, claiming that “the idea that there is a single truth. . . is a myth and white supremacy.” The letter, written by three self-identified black students and signed by at least thirty others, further stated that “historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity . . . as a means of silencing oppressed peoples.” The implication of these statements seems to be that there is no such thing as objective truth, which is what philosophers call global or total relativism, the most universal relativism of all.

Other institutions express this idea, too. For example, in 2021, California’s Instructional Quality Commission proposed for a mathematics curriculum framework the use of a document entitled “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.” This manual gives a list of indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” one of which is a focus on “getting the right answer” and teaching math in a “linear fashion.” The manual goes on to state, “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false,” concluding that “upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity.’” Apparently, for this California Commission, the truth that two plus two doesn’t equal five is false, and to claim otherwise is white supremacy. This is global relativism at its height.

Another example is the Minnesota Department of Inclusion and Community Engagement. On its website, the department provides a “list of characteristics of white supremacy culture.” Like the California Commission, it lists “objectivity” as an indicator of white culture and defines it as “the belief that there is such a thing as being objective.” If there’s no such thing as being objective, then there doesn’t seem to be any room for objective truth.

Now, someone might say “objectivity” here doesn’t mean objective truth, but only freedom from biased or cultural influences. Perhaps. But the language of “objectivity” seems to be coming from the same echo chambers as the California Commission, which clearly identified “objectivity” as pertaining to right and wrong answers.

Moreover, the document says other things that suggest it’s denying objective truth. Just a few lines below, under the same heading “Objectivity,” it identifies “white culture” as “requiring people to think in a linear fashion and ignoring or invalidating those who think in other ways.”

Well, to think in a linear fashion is to argue for true conclusions based on true premises. If such thinking is white supremacy, and thus morally repugnant, then seeking to know objective truth is morally repugnant. It’s hard to see how seeking objective truth would be morally repugnant unless you’re denying the existence of objective truth.

But let’s grant for argument’s sake that by “objectivity,” all the document means is freedom from biased or cultural influences. What would be the implication? If the implication is that what we think is true is mere cultural conditioning, then it amounts to a form of cultural relativism. If the implication is that we can’t ever be objective enough to know what objective truth is, then it at least amounts to a form of skepticism, which makes objective truth irrelevant, since we can never know it. That’s not relativism, but it’s definitely a sister!

So much for “thou shalt not be a white supremacist.” What about “thou shalt not be intolerant”?

Suffice it to say here that what many people mean by tolerance is the acceptance of everyone’s beliefs as equal and valid. Let that one sink in for a moment! If all beliefs are equal and valid, can there be such a thing as absolute truth? Of course not! There can be no objective truth if all beliefs are just as good as another. Therefore, when decoded, “thou shalt not be intolerant” is nothing more than masked relativism, and its global form at that.

Now, if by “tolerance” someone simply means that we ought not to coerce people into believing what we believe, then we have no qualms. But most of those who tout this moral absolute don’t have this kind of tolerance in mind. It’s more of the egalitarian tolerance mentioned above.

This sort of decoding also applies to the modern absolute of “thou shalt not be a judgmental, hateful bigot.” But for our purposes here, such a moral absolute is code for we must accept everyone’s lifestyle choices, as if they’re all equal and valid—a similar line of reasoning to the tolerance absolute above, just restricted to moral choices.

Now, lifestyle choices can be equally permissible only if there is no objective truth about such choices. But if there’s no objective truth about lifestyle choices, then there’s no such thing as objective morality. That’s moral relativism. And if the charge is meant just to demand approval of certain sinful sexual behaviors, then that’s not moral relativism—it’s just special pleading, wrapped in a cloak of moral relativism.

So relativism might be dead for some who jump on the bandwagon of modern moral absolutism. But for many, relativism is still alive, coded within the language of modern moral absolutes. We just need to decode such absolutes and expose them for the relativism they are.'”

Love & truth,
Matthew

–Noelle Mering

“The woke movement seems to sense that it can grow parasitically off the residue of religion until it has replaced it.

One of the reasons woke ideology has been successful at making inroads among Christian communities is that it feeds off the Christian precept to offer compassion and aid to the marginalized and suffering. This leads to a lot of confusion about whether or not Christians can get woke, with many seeing it as the natural outgrowth of that Christian precept. But as I write in my book, Awake, Not Woke (TAN Books), on both a human and a spiritual level, wokeness is an ideology that harms far more than helps.

It is imperative that we identify how it operates, as it often mimics Christianity, compounding the confusion. Even as society grows more secular, the woke movement seems to sense that it can grow parasitically off the residue of religion until it has replaced it.

One example of how this happens is in connection with the Christian concept of repentance. Under threat of cancelation, people caught on the wrong side of wokeness will often repeat some version of the phrase doing the work in their apology: “Yes, I see where I was wrong, and I am committed now to doing the work.”

On its face, this phrase might strike us as a harmless and even helpful indication that the offender is reflecting on his errors or harmful biases and seeking to undo and repent of them. In this light, it can be compatible with Christian habits of examination, confession, and repentance. This is likely what your nice progressive Aunt Susan thinks is all the phrase means.

Doing the work of woke re-education, however, means coming to see all facets of society through a lens of power and oppression and becoming activists in their undoing. That Aunt Susan does not see the bait-and-switch involved is crucial to the success of the movement.

Here is an incomplete list of what is ultimately involved in doing the work:

1. Reframing our perspectives to see every person, event, and interaction (no matter how insignificant) through the lens of identitarian group conflict. As celebrity author and woke race guru Robin DiAngelo famously said, the question in any given human interaction is not did racism take place, but rather how did racism take place.
2. Seeing all Western thought, literature, institutions, ideas, philosophies as fraught systems of oppression and colonization that must be de-centered, destabilized, and disrupted.
3. Dismantling our understanding of objective moral law and intelligible bodily meaning. Our bodies can mean anything (which assumes that they mean nothing). Sexual repression is an internalized form of political oppression. According to Critical Theory, the academic underpinning of wokeness, moral principles are obstacles to personal liberation.
4. Committing to silencing (in ourselves and in others) any thoughts or concerns that question the ideology. Such resistance is either false consciousness, if we are in the oppressed group, or further evidence of our complicity and privilege, if we are in the oppressor group.
5. Committing not to be silent (“silence is violence”), but to use our voices only in support of woke-approved views. (The logic of 4 and 5 combined show how we devolve into compelled speech.)
6. Seeing that everything is political. Friendships, family, religion, knitting, cooking, even gardening.

While the phrase doing the work is far more loaded than what a good-willed person might suppose, in a deeper way, it is astonishingly reductive. Borrowing from Marxist conflict theory, the woke break apart the world into simplistic binaries of the oppressed and the oppressors. Within any given individual, various identity combinations might mitigate or intensify his victim status and corresponding right to be heard or need to repent. How have I participated, unwittingly or not, in the sins of my ancestors or systemic webs of injustice? Or how have I been harmed by them?

Moral stature is given not according to character, but according to victimization, which creates endless motivation to uncover culprits outside oneself.

This reduction of the moral life into collectivized culpability detached from moral law is irreconcilable with the Christian faith. Though the actions at first glance might bear similarities, Catholicism is directed at reconciling the penitent to God, whereas doing the work is directed at conforming the penitent to the ideology.

The Catholic call to self-examination is both more penetrating and more personal. It is also respectful of the reality of human nature. Four guidelines helpful for confession are that the penitent should be concise, clear, complete, and concrete. These simple guidelines serve to help us see ourselves with clarity and humility.

The human desire to see ourselves and have others see us in a good light can easily corrupt our vision. We are prone to hiding our faults—to deflect, to excuse, to generalize, to conceal. We want to avoid acknowledging our sins plainly and simply. When life goes poorly, we look for anything outside ourselves to blame.

Woke ideology exploits this. Stoking anger and resentment serves well the cause of revolution. But it also obscures our understanding of God’s mercy and love. We reduce Him in our imaginations to a harsh taskmaster rather than a loving father.

While we can hide for some amount of time from ourselves, we cannot hide from God. He already knows what we are—which is good and bad news. The bad news is that He knows our sins. The good news? That means that His love for us is far more sincere and intimate than we might have supposed. In knowing our need, He comes to reveal to us the depth of His love.

Woke ideology is both reductive and totalizing. It is parody of the C.S. Lewis quote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” By doing the work, we begin to see everything as signs and shadows of the power and hatred of man. Through God’s grace and the sacraments, by contrast, we begin to see everything as signs and shadows of the mercy and love of a Father.”

“Be sober and vigilant. Your opponent the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for [someone] to devour.” -1 Peter 5:8

“Therefore, stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” -Mt 25:13

“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.” -Eph 5:14

“But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect Him.” -Mt 24:43-44

Awake, not woke.

Love,
Matthew