Reading Incomprehension

One thing you notice whenever Pope Benedict speaks. A lot of people seem determined not to pay attention to the wording of what he says, even though it’s clear that his scholarly exactitude is one of his major characteristics as a speaker. People are used to reacting to a few keywords, like they’re Pavlov’s bell. So they react, not noticing that what was actually said about their cause was polite.

For example…

When Pope Benedict officially greeted Queen Elizabeth, he noted various nice things about Christianity in England that all Christians could agree about (thus, without saying so, addressing her role as head Anglican and as leader of a country that had had some bad and good history with Catholicism). Then he talked about fighting Nazis, which is not only something everybody is against and which hurt his family, but was a nice acknowledgement of the Queen’s war work as a girl and Prince Philip’s service in the military during WWII.

(At one point this week, it occurred to me that given their close age, it’s even possible that Joseph as a kid had a crush on Elizabeth as a kid. This made me chuckle, though it’s much more likely he had a crush on her mom or one of the older royals of Europe. Boys tend to get infatuated with Older Women.)

Anyway, after all this, you get this rather platitudinous statement, which caused tons of atheists to fume in the comment boxes of the world:

“As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a reductive vision of the person and his destiny.”

Well, obviously any atheist of goodwill is going to be sure he’s not an extremist atheist, so none of this is going to apply to him. But if that’s not enough, the exclusion listed is that of three things, not one and not two. Taking them as one thing is a sign that an atheist grew up in a Christian society. A olden days Chinese person would probably regard the gods, their religion, and their practice of Confucian virtues as all different things, though closely related.

So let’s take a totally utilitarian, secular view. Obviously, if you’ve got public life that is devoid of God or gods as an overriding principle and motivator, and devoid of religious duties and disciplines as a principle and motivator, you’re going to have to lean very hard on making public life full of virtue. You have to be sure there’s something keeping your politicians at least pretending to be honest. You may or may not care about the religion of the guy next door; but you definitely want him to be virtuous enough not to come over to your place and rob, rape, and murder you while burning your house down.

Virtue used to be something English atheists were big on supporting. One of the old standard claims of old school atheists is that it’s actually more virtuous to be virtuous simply for the sake of virtue (like a Greek philosopher), rather than out of cowering cringing fear of some God or religion (and so forth). You don’t hear much of this anymore, alas, despite the obvious fact that an atheist does have to be virtuous from his philosophy, or not be much use to anyone (including other atheists). I think this has made the new school atheists go back to regarding virtue as an exclusively religious thing, and not as a philosophical excellence. It’s turned back into one of their kneejerk keywords.

So when various atheist groups and the combox sillies responded to the bell without really paying attention, and thus protested this remark, the careless way they responded often made it sound like they’re not going to have any truck with virtue in public life or anywhere else. I’m sure this isn’t what they would have said, if they had actually thought it out logically.

The remarkable thing is that we see this sort of thing happen again and again, but people keep digging themselves these traps and falling into them. I’m not sure whether this is actually a desired side-result of the Pope’s rhetorical technique, or whether it’s just inevitable that clear words on controversial topics will produce a muddled response.