Lost in the sound and fury over the Pope's use of the seven century old words of a Byzantine emperor to critique Islam has been Benedict's critique of the decline of the notion of objective truth in the West.

The pope's third point — which has been almost entirely ignored — was directed to the West. If the West's high culture keeps playing in the sandbox of postmodern irrationalism — in which there is "your truth" and "my truth" but nothing such as "the truth" — the West will be unable to defend itself. Why? Because the West won't be able to give reasons why its commitments to civility, tolerance, human rights and the rule of law are worth defending.

A Western world stripped of convictions about the truths that make Western civilization possible cannot make a useful contribution to a genuine dialogue of civilizations, for any such dialogue must be based on a shared understanding that human beings can, however imperfectly, come to know the truth of things.

The abandonment of the notion of objective truths that can be know through rational inquiry will be the death of Western Civilization -- either through internal decay or external attack. The Pope's challenge to the West is to recover a precious nugget that underlies the Western tradition -- indeed, that is fundamental to the notion that there are unalienable rights that each of us has based upon our humanity. Will we in the West accept that challenge, even as we challenge the Islamic world to balance faith with rationality in an effort to bring respect for every human person into a religion that has been tinged with barbarism for far too long?

Posted by: Greg at 01:42 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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