I promise I'm not going to go too far in depth with today's post, because this is exactly the sort of topic to which I'd typically devote a gazillion words. And besides, Dan Froomkin already sorta covered it in his column from this afternoon.
Pope Benedict XVI is in town this week (in fact, my wife attended the Papal Mass at the Washington Nationals' new stadium this morning). President Bush rolled out the red carpet for him (literally), and as part of a ceremony on the White House lawn yesterday to celebrate the Pope's 81st birthday, he addressed both the public and the Holy Father and took an opportunity during his remarks to utter the following words to the Pope:
"In a world where some no longer believe that we can distinguish between simple right and wrong, we need your message to reject this dictatorship of relativism."
I talked to my wife yesterday morning - prior to this particular speech - about whether or not, on some basic level, George W. Bush kinda just doesn't get it. And, by "it," I mean, "pretty much anything." I don't intend to simply bash the man, because what I'm trying to get at here is an understanding of him as a human being and not as a political figure, or a symbol of an ideology, or certainly as a masthead of the human capacity for shittiness.
In George's mind, I think, there are two kinds of people: good guys, and bad guys. Good guys possess all the good qualities: moral clarity, a desire for peace and a will to work for it, a love of freedom and democracy, a loving and faithful heart, courage, perspective, etc. Bad guys possess absolutely none of these qualities. In George's mind, he's one of the good guys. Therefore, he possesses all the good-guy qualities. You see the weird-ass logic there? It's not that he's a good guy because he possesses all the qualities of goodness - no, he possesses all the qualities of goodness because he's a good guy. And by what measure is he a good guy? Simple: he's George Bush.
That's what I mean when I say that he doesn't get it.
What does this have to do with moral relativism?
Well, here's the thing. It's hard to get any more morally subjective than taking the position that a single temporal event - the terrorist attacks of 9/11, say - completely realigned the moral universe and gave rise to goals that justified absolutely any subversion of established morality in their pursuit. After all, if morals are absolute and objective, then they're not contextual, right? And if morals are not contextual, then the fact that we're "living in a post-9/11 world," as George and the members of his administration are fond of reminding us, doesn't do anything to change those morals, does it?
George Bush has started an elective war during his presidency. He's asserted that laws, statutes, treaties, and legal precedents can be selectively applied by the President, whose prerogatives in wartime trump all of them. His administration has taken the legal position that Americans are endowed with special rights that do not extend to the rest of the world's citizenry. He's asserted that the security of the United States takes precedence over questions of civility, morality, legality, and responsibility to the larger world community. And yet, there he was, standing next to the Pope, decrying the "dictatorship of relativism."
Aside from the obvious and bitterly ironic humor of George W. Bush lamenting the dangers of dictatorship, don't you get a strange sense of vertigo from hearing him talk about the evil of relativism? This is what makes me wonder if maybe he just sorta doesn't get it, in that particular Calvinist way of his (by which I mean that he seems to believe that goodness is an indivisible aspect of his being, neither arising from nor depending on his actions in any way, but rather an anointment from God). He thinks that moral clarity is the same thing as moral absolutism (he's close), but more importantly he thinks that he possesses either of those things, simply because he never checks or questions his own judgment. After all, moral clarity is what good guys have, and he's a good guy, so he must have moral clarity, right?
This whole thing gets at the essential weirdness of the Bush presidency - I almost don't want to use the word "weirdness" to describe something that has resulted in so much death. But it is weird: Bush himself seems so oblivious to the reality of his place in the world, to the consequences of his actions, to the relationship between the words we use and the reality we use them to describe, that he might almost be charming if he weren't also the holder of the most powerful office in the world.
I've lost my train of thought. I guess what I'm getting at is that the years of the Bush presidency have given me a new appreciation for the fact that words - individual words, each and every one of them - really do have specific meanings that are vitally important, and that shit gets awfully bizarre and unstructured when we lose track of those meanings. George and his administration have done so much to sap the meaning out of words like "freedom," "liberty," "justice," "democracy," and so on that nowadays when we hear these words spoken, they're almost totally meaningless - or worse, we understand them merely as political weapons designed to undercut opposition. After all, who could oppose this or that government initiative if it is undertaken in the name of freedom? What are you, anti-freedom?
We do so little to examine the very specific words that our public figures use. Eventually, through politicians' own careful and diligent use (and this is where I start to sound like a conspiracy theorist - I promise I'm not one, and I'm not describing a conspiracy here) of certain words and phrases, and through our and our media's passive acceptance of these terms, a web of perception is created. Because George W. Bush continually asserts that he is acting on moral clarity and clearly defined moral absolutes, continually characterizes his actions as prioritizing moral duty over political convenience, we gradually come to except this facade: George W. Bush is a man driven by a clear sense of moral obligation and purpose, as opposed to being, say, a narcissist with a dangerous belief that his choices are anointed the right ones simply because he's the one making them.
And that's how you end up with George W. Bush, the world's single most prominent moral relativist, standing at a podium and saying, with apparent and believable sincerity, that the world needs saving from the "dictatorship of relativism." It's how we end up with a guy who has capriciously started two disastrous wars and petulantly refused to end them in the face of overwhelming destruction and undeniable majority opposition, a guy who smugly ordered U.S. troops to capture Osama Bin Laden "dead or alive," a guy who presided over the most irresponsible and cavalier use of the death penalty in the United States during his tenure as governor of Texas, a guy who signed off on the executions of mentally retarded people and children and innocent men who'd been railroaded into wrongful convictions, bemoaning the modern world's callous disregard for human life.
Because he believes he's a good guy. And he believes good guys value human life and are committed to objective right and wrong. So he believes he values human life and is committed to objective right and wrong. Even when doesn't, and isn't.
It's interesting to see him standing next to the Pope. The Pope - this one in particular - is a man whose positions have a kind of unassailable consistency to them, even when they're hard to agree with, and they're backed up by a commitment. That's the kind of man Bush likes to claim to be, but in reality (it's what's behind that web of perception) he's actually a guy whose positions have absolutely no consistency except that he agrees with all of them, and the only thing he's committed to is resisting the idea that he's accountable to anyone.
Pope Benedict XVI is a man who, when he talks about God, is talking about a divine obligation that has demanded of him a life of chastity, humility, prayer, and constant self-sacrifice; an absolute commitment that he will never, ever get to equivocate his way out of; responsibility for a community of over a billion people that he cannot shy away from, even when it means enduring a hundred million Emperor Palpatine comparisons. When George W. Bush talks about God, he's talking about his own ego.
Wow, this post really went nowhere. Oh well. At least I got some thoughts down. I do have a job, you know.
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