The Benedict XVI Generation

I was going to write a post on this, but the much younger Jacob Phillips has made the point by doing it better:

Shortly after the election of Pope Francis in 2013, I was talking with someone still deeply upset by Pope Benedict’s resignation. Her reason for being so upset, she said, was that his papacy had been so short — a mere eight years compared to John Paul II’s remarkable twenty-six. She worried Benedict would not have a “generation” in the way his predecessor did, presumably meaning an entire wave of people born into the faith and schooled in the sacramental life under the aegis of one and the same Pope. A friend of mine immediately interjected at this moment and sharply corrected her: “Benedict XVI does have a generation,” he said.

Usually to speak of a generation one would be thinking in segments of roughly twenty-one years. Someone born and baptised around the time of Benedict’s enthronement in 2005 is unlikely even to have been confirmed by 2013, and at eight years old can hardly be expected to have a personality too deeply formed by a particular pontificate. My friend didn’t mean this — he wasn’t talking about people eight years old and younger in 2013 — he was talking about people like himself (and like me) who did then (and do now) feel they are deeply informed by the life and writings of Benedict XVI. We both converted to the faith in the middle of that eight year pontificate.

One of Benedict XVI’s prime concerns was the re-evangelisation of formerly Catholic countries. Two Englishmen converts could thus feel particularly at home with the then Holy Father. Benedict XVI was also a prophet for the secular age, and his work is premised perhaps more than any other theologian on the reality that the Church is being thrust into a position like that of its earliest years in the pagan Roman Empire. Lest we forget, the Church of the Apostles was once composed exclusively of converts. There is a particular relationship between Benedict’s pontificate and the phenomenon of post-secular conversion. The Benedict XVI generation are those who converted in the midst of modernity’s travails.

Benedict’s intellectual legacy is one of “dynamic fidelity”. Fidelity points to his deep and intransigent loyalty to Catholic tradition — no surprise there. The word dynamic, however, points to how Benedict XVI’s work is never without a responsive contemporaneity, an attentiveness to the questions and needs of the contemporary world. This makes his theology quite unique, in that he draws deeply on the yearnings and desires of the world, yet responds faithfully with aspects of tradition. These aspects of tradition are often seemingly “made new” after decades of being wrongfully neglected or misappropriated. Moreover, his return to the fountainhead of tradition is never what we might term a retrograde reaction, which means he doesn’t just want us to return to some bygone era. This can be seen in comments he made when accused of “restorationism”; he responded by saying that he was fighting “not for a turning back” to the past, but “a newly found balance of orientation and values”.

Memory is a theme which crops up repeatedly in his writing, but memory is not merely about the past. When one remembers, something from the past is made present in the here-and-now. If our memories belonged only to the past, they wouldn’t be memories; they’d be things we’d forgotten. When something is committed to memory, then, something from the past is made presently available for the contemporary moment. Benedict XVI’s “dynamic fidelity” is similar to memory: a making present, dynamically, in the here-and-now, of aspects of historical experience and wisdom hitherto lying dormant in the mind of the Church.

By contrast, the era in which we live now is an age of amnesia, a hi-octane epoch in which individual and collective forgetting and reinvention are encouraged and normalised. The Benedict XVI Generation thus tends to question and challenge the many forms of rupture and discontinuity assailing Western civilisation on various fronts.

It is oft-repeated that Cardinal Ratzinger’s concern for Europe led him to adopt the name Benedict — for he had long been concerned with the amnesia affecting the self-understanding of European nations. Immediately after the 1960s, it was commonly held that any culture can function for Christianity in the way the cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome had once done, becoming part and parcel of the faith itself. To try to somehow politely edit the history of Christian teaching, to reapply it haphazardly in different contexts, requires significant forgetting, however; it exhibits amnesia about the faith’s origins and roots. Christianity didn’t flower in European contexts purely by accident, says Benedict. Classical civilisation was not just an accidental, external clothing for the Church, but was prepared by God’s providence to ensure its flowering and perpetuation.

For this reason, Benedict XVI follows St John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio, which states “the Church cannot abandon what she has gained from her inculturation in the world of Greco-Latin thought”. There is fidelity here, of course, but it is also dynamic. He doesn’t just remind us of the distinctive patrimony of Christianity; he also highlights aspects of it which are markedly pertinent for today’s world.

Let us take an element of the ancient thought Benedict XVI held to be central to the development of Christianity and to be rooted in Ancient Greek philosophy: the notion of a shared human nature or essence. The ethical consequences of undermining the concept of human nature are dire. When a universal human nature is not ascribed to all people without exception, some persons need not be treated with the same ethical gravity as others. If human nature is not the common property of all, certain persons can be classified as somehow differently human, even sub-human, which the young Ratzinger saw first-hand in Nazi Germany. Coming from a very different setting, race theorists like Kimberlè Crenshaw have more recently argued for a racialised ontology — an approach to human nature as something always indelibly marked by ethnic identity. Then there are all the ways today’s society finds to soften the boundaries of human dignity so certain persons don’t have full ethical significance — being unborn, for example, or chronically infirm. 

A concern for the distinctive cultural patrimony of Catholic teaching, the intellectual legacy of Europe, is not triumphalism or eurocentricity. Nor should it be seen as in any way undermining the wonderfully rich variety of global Catholicism — but it does mean holding firm to memory, to history, in which context is always vitally important.

Another example of Benedict XVI’s concern for memory comes from his writings on liturgy. After the motu proprio Traditiones Custodes restricted celebration of the traditional Latin Mass in 2021, Benedict XVI’s earlier move in the opposite direction was commonly presented as just a hearkening back to some bygone era, an attempted escape from the present. Nothing could be further from the truth. Benedict XVI was always attentive and responsive to the needs of the present day. His own motu proprio on this issue states that “young persons … have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Eucharist, particularly suited to them”.

His contemporary moment presented a need for a more widespread celebration of this ancient liturgy. This was no attempt to get people running back to the past, but a response to the needs of the present. The modus operandi was to undo the rupture and discontinuity at work in the fact that, for many, the Church seemed to be alienated from its own past by restricting the ancient form of the Mass. He writes, “in the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.”

One chapter of the book Spirit of the Liturgy explains some of the deeper features of Benedict’s dynamic fidelity. He reminds us that we are not currently living in heaven, nor in a new heavens and a new earth after the end times, but in a period he calls the “in-between”. Something of eternity has “entered” the world in Jesus Christ. During the liturgy, he argues that we are similarly “in-between” — the actions, words and prayers all take place in the earthly present, recalling and re-enacting foundational events from the past. In eternity, those foundational events are ongoing and ever-present — the self-offering of the Son to the Father is a perpetual heavenly event, but through memory relived in the present, events within time can be joined with it.

It is that bringing “again and again”, through perpetual recollection, particularly in the liturgy, that lies at the heart of Benedict XVI’s thinking. He maintained a dynamic responsiveness to the contemporary moment, grounded on and drawing vitality from fidelity to history and tradition, thereby reminding us that this world is graced by the touch of eternity. The easier option is to withdraw from this difficult tension; to surrender to the age of amnesia and be pulled this way and that by the shifting sands of the dominant culture, or to escape the difficulties of the present world by retreating to an idealised and unsustainable past.

Benedict XVI shows us that neither of these discontinuities are inevitable. The fact that this seemingly most retrograde of Popes is so enduringly popular among the young surely proves my point. The Benedict XVI generation includes those charged with bearing witness to the memory of history and tradition. In an age of amnesia, such things are not only sorely needed, but serve as vehicles of the abiding mystery of that eternal present for which Benedict XVI himself had always yearned.

Cooperatores Veritatis

We are mourning the only twentieth-century theologian who will be read in the twenty-third, by which time he will have been proclaimed a Doctor of the Church, as only two Popes so far have ever been.

Neither of those is Saint Sylvester, but Benedict XVI did die on the Feast of that, the Pope of the First Council of Nicaea, the Creed of which is used at Mass because it is the full Profession of Faith and because it was written for the purpose of Eucharistic recitation, rather than being a purely Baptismal formula that was not otherwise used liturgically at all until the Middle Ages.

As is illustrated by the use of the Apostles' Creed in the Office and in the Rosary, the Creeds are prayers. On Sunday, say the Nicene Creed for the repose of the soul of the man who taught its truths with greater depth and clarity than anyone else with whom any of us has shared this earth, and to invoke his intercession.

Then begin to read the three volumes of Jesus of Nazareth, by Joseph Ratzinger. Whether for the first time or for the umpteenth, it will change your life. The translators of the King James Bible had the dying thief say to the Dying Saviour, "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom," because at that point in The Greatest Story Ever Told Ἰησοῦ, Jesus, was just too much for them or for the readership that they envisaged. Likewise, an Authorised Version is already taking shape, according to which Benedict's last words were, "Lord, I love you." Believe instead the original reports. Jesus, ich liebe dich.

Not Extinction, But Rebellion

We all knew that Extinction Rebellion would not last a winter. The contrast with the miners could not be starker. Anne Scargill never deployed "You've got a small willy" as a killer line, not even against people who were no less tiresome than Andrew Tate. Nor would anyone have hailed her witty repartee if she had. Even allowing for the fact that English is her second language, as in any case it scarcely is to young Scandinavians, Greta Thunberg is one of the most inarticulate 19-year-old NEETs that I have ever come across.

The XR tweenies of all ages are used to being agreed with, but even they can see how unpopular both their tactics and their cause have become. We have all seen through the ease with which they have been able to stage ostentatious stunts "against" heavily guarded corporate buildings and arms of the State. Net zero is government policy, and transnational capital is the beneficiary of that, for which it therefore lobbies as hard as possible. Real protesters are not escorted and fed by the Police. In fact, real protest is now illegal in and of itself.

It is January now, so the winter is about to begin in earnest. As we shiver, let us ponder who was authorising the bombing of Russia and Belarus with weapons that could not be used without American permission and participation. Whose interest does that serve? Meanwhile, the dominoes from the war in Ukraine continue to fall in all directions, as the Venezuelan Opposition votes to stop indulging the comical fantasises of Juan Guaidó, as Jair Bolsonaro flees to the United States, as Zimbabwe adopts the policy that led to the American-backed coup in Peru by banning lithium exports in order to concentrate on domestic development, as France and the Wagner Group go to war with each other for control of Mali and of the Central African Republic, as the 20-year-old feminist arguments are revived to try and take us back into war in Afghanistan, as strategic countries queue up to apply for membership of BRICS, as Taiwan extends conscription, as the ghastly regime in Myanmar sentences the ghastly Aung San Suu Kyi to a further seven years in prison, as the dangerously lunatic People's Mojahedin Organisation of Iran attempts a Colour Revolution against an Iranian regime that for all its monstrosity is still better than the one that has just taken power in Israel, as the United Nations General Assembly votes by 87 to 26 with 53 abstentions to refer the Occupation of the Palestinian Territories to the International Court of Justice, and so on, and on, and on, and on, and on.

For all their talk of globalisation, few people in the Government, and no one on or around the Opposition frontbench, understand how these things are connected. Thankfully, we are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Consonant Vowel Consonant Consonant

"Pelton, Chester-le-Street," announces Google as my location, "based on your IP address." I have never lived there. I am not sure that I have ever even been to Pelton. Yet, for far from the first time, that is where Google thinks that I am. Read the rest of this post in the light of that and this, and read those in the light of each other.

My grandmother has the BEM, my mother's late brother had the MBE (his name and face are even on Saint Helenian stamps), my mother's cousin still has it, their grandfather did, one of my great mentors since he was my Senior Tutor as an undergraduate also has it, my godmother has the OBE, and so does another mentor who was one of my Campaign Patrons when I stood for Parliament, an election at which my Proposer, of blessed memory, had the BEM. And so on.

But what precise thing has Rachel Riley ever done to "combat anti-Semitism"? She has been given the MBE because she sued small media outlets that failed to curtsy low enough to her, and because she at least condoned physical violence against Jeremy Corbyn. She must have known what the reaction would be, but that reaction was still libellous because she was on the telly and thus a Very Important Person.

Well, it is already illegal after all to call Corbyn a terrorist sympathiser, so now he should sue Riley for calling him an anti-Semite and for at least condoning physical violence against him. Who is the More Important Person? A Member of Parliament of 40 years' standing, and a member of the Privy Council to boot? Or the glamorous assistant on a game show, even with the MBE?

By the way, successive padmates and I were very fond of that game show. I was good at the wordy bits, while they, although by their own admission men of limited formal education, were good at the sums. Yes, of course I know why. Not least, they well and truly told me.

And what is the "anti-Semitism" that we are expected to believe that Riley has "combated"? The IHRA Definition, which it must be said that the Labour Party adopted under Corbyn in one of his many disappointments to huge numbers of us, would forbid any criticism of the new Israeli Government. Such criticism is probably already a criminal offence. Keir Starmer's Crown Prosecution Service would press charges for harassment, to which there is in practice no defence, and even arrange for trial by a state employee sitting alone, if anyone sufficiently grand claimed to have been alarmed or distressed by it. What does a telly dolly have to do to be bumped up to OBE?

Beyond The Clamour

Kenan Malik writes:

Half the room is jumping up and down, screaming “Gotcha!”. The other half shrugs its shoulders, muttering “So what’s new?”. Welcome to the war over the so-called Twitter Files.

Over the past month, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has made available to a handpicked group of journalists internal documents and conversations that took place before his takeover. They are mainly discussions about who and what should be moderated or banned, ranging from the Hunter Biden laptop story to the question of whether to remove Donald Trump from the platform. The journalists have made public selected slices of the data through a drip feed of Twitter threads.

For some, the Twitter Files provide evidence of collusion between tech companies, liberal politicians and the “deep state” to silence conservatives. For others, they constitute little more than a publicity exercise that told us nothing that we did not know. As someone who has long made a case for the importance of free speech, I think we should take the Twitter Files seriously, but also look at the discussion with a sceptical eye, given that much of it is framed by the culture wars.

Consider the controversy over “shadow banning”. It’s a phrase much bandied about in debates about social media, but its meaning is contested. For the curators of the Twitter Files, “shadow banning” means using algorithms to “deamplify” tweets – that is, stop them reaching a wider audience.

For the old pre-Musk Twitter, however, it meant something different – “deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it”, as a 2018 blog post put it. The conflicting definitions have allowed the critics to accuse former Twitter executives of lying, although they seem as interested in putting the old Twitter regime in the dock as in uncovering the truth.

The journalists curating the Twitter Files have presented deamplification as a secret process. Certainly, the internal mechanisms of moderation have been veiled in secrecy. As a practice, however, Twitter has long been open about deamplification – or “visibility filtering” as it also calls it – noting even in its terms of service that “we may… limit distribution or visibility of any Content”.

It’s a practice championed not just by old Twitter but new Twitter, too. Shortly after buying the platform, Musk tweeted that his policy would be one of “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach”, adding that “negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted” – in other words, deamplified.

But is it a good policy? Who decides who or what should be “deamplified”? By what criteria? And how different is this from straightforward censorship? Unfortunately, the polarisation of the debate seems to have overridden a nuanced debate around such questions.

The Twitter Files also reveal some of the processes by which users are banned. Twitter insists that it does not suspend accounts for “political reasons”. That’s hard to square with the evidence.

Take the controversy over Trump. Twitter executives held anguished discussions about how to deal with the president, recognising the dangers of banning a democratically elected leader. Nevertheless, as one executive put it, “the narrative that trump [sic] and his friends have pursued over the course of this election and frankly last 4+ years must be taken into account”. In other words, Trump’s politics mattered. After the 6 January riot at the Capitol, the pressure that Twitter faced led to the second argument taking precedence over the first.

All this has strengthened the view on the right of tech companies as fomenting a liberal conspiracy against conservatives. Within Twitter, Musk tweeted, “rules were enforced against the right, but not against the left”.

Yet a 2021 study suggested the opposite. Looking at millions of tweets in seven countries – Britain, America, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and Japan – researchers found that, with the exception of Germany, Twitter algorithms amplified rightwing politicians more than the left. They also found that in America, conservative news sources were boosted more than liberal ones.

These results cut against the grain of conventional wisdom. It may be that there’s a sharp divide between algorithmic decisions and those made by human moderators. It may also be that the high-profile censoring of rightwing voices is not representative of the mass of decisions. In the last six months of 2021 alone, Twitter censored an extraordinary 4m tweets – a figure that itself should give us pause. The political bias in those 4m decisions is unknown. There is little discussion, for instance, about the suppression of Palestinian voices, a practice that has continued under Musk.

At the very least, we need more transparency about moderation. Yet, when Alex Stamos, of Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, asked Musk to allow not just handpicked journalists but academic researchers to inspect the data, Musk dismissed him on the bizarre grounds that “you operate a propaganda platform”. Musk seems more interested in being seen to “own the libs” than in opening up Twitter’s inner workings.

The most worrying issue the Twitter Files have exposed is the level of contact between the social media company and state security organisations. The FBI regularly holds meetings with Twitter executives, pressuring them to take action against “misinformation”, even when this amounted to little more than a satirical tweet, and demanding the personal data of users. Twitter, to its credit, often pushed back. Nevertheless, the Twitter Files do show an unhealthy relationship between social media and state security.

Equally unhealthy is the response of many liberals who have become sanguine about the work of the security apparatus. There has been a remarkable partisan shift in American attitudes towards the FBI, with a huge swing in Democratic support for the organisation. Many now view the FBI as an essential weapon against populism. Many seem to have forgotten the sordid history of the FBI in undermining radical movements from unions to civil rights organisations. The insouciance of liberals and many on the left to such state interference in public life is disquieting.

Twitter, we are constantly told, is not real life. That’s true. But, like all social media, it plays an inordinately large role in real life, a private company that has become an intimate part of the global public square. We need to keep that public square as open as possible. That is why the revelations of the Twitter Files matter. And that is why we need to understand their significance beyond the clamour of the culture wars.

The More Consideration

Channelling her inner Morning Star, Counterfire or Spiked (those links are purely representative; those publications have held the line firmly ever since the debate began many years ago), and in stark contrast to the editorial positions of The Times and The Sun, Sonia Sodha is coming round to agreement with George Galloway:

We inhabit a world in which the answers to thorny moral questions are too often cast in black and white. Nuance is for losers: stray too far from your tribe and you’re accused of aligning yourself with rightwing religious fundamentalists or lefty woke warriors. Very little truly fits these social media-driven straitjackets. So it is in the case of assisted dying.

As a liberal, assisted dying – enabling people with terminal illnesses to end their life at a time of their choosing – is something I feel instinctively in favour of. This sense is only piqued by testimony from people with conditions such as motor neurone disease who feel their life is no longer worth living, and who don’t want to pay thousands of pounds to go to Dignitas in Switzerland, or risk criminally implicating loved ones in assisted suicide. But stories now emerging from Canada, where medically assisted dying has been since 2016, have prompted me to think again.

Canada legalised assisted dying for people suffering terminal illness six years ago, after a ruling by its supreme court. In 2021, this was expanded to voluntary euthanasia – medically assisted death for people not terminally ill, but with a “grievous and irremediable” medical condition. This was due to be extended to chronic mental illness from this March, although ministers have just announced they will delay this after concerns from doctors.

Worrying stories have emerged that hint at a lack of safeguards: relatives shocked at doctors’ lack of probing of family members who have pursued voluntary euthanasia; the process being proactively suggested to veterans by government caseworkers, including Christine Gauthier, a former Paralympian who had been trying for five years to get the government to install a wheelchair ramp in her home and said it was “exhausting us to the point of no return”; a man with significant disabilities who testified to a parliamentary committee that nurses tried to coerce him into medically assisted dying by threatening forcibly to discharge him without the care he needed and denying him water and food for days.

In the UK, assisting a suicide is a criminal offence. But the Crown Prosecution Service will only prosecute if it is in the public interest and prosecutions are rare – just 26 were proceeded with out of 174 referred cases between 2009 and 2022. Most proposals for reform that have been debated in parliament are for assisted dying – making it legal for doctors to help someone with a terminal illness who is likely to die within six months to end their lives – but some campaigners support the principle of voluntary euthanasia now enshrined in Canadian law.

On the face of it, assisted dying might sound like a limited shift in the law that carries no risks of Britain ending up like Canada. But when you start probing its limits, it quickly becomes evident how difficult it is to draw a distinction between what is and isn’t permitted.

There are no higher stakes than ending a life. How do you know someone is giving meaningful consent? The first plausible scenario that springs to mind is a coercively controlling abusive relationship in which a man puts pressure on his female partner diagnosed with end-stage cancer to end her life. Yet doctors are not particularly well placed to assess whether someone is being coerced. The latest parliamentary bill, introduced by Molly Meacher in 2021, contains the safeguard that a judge would need to sign off on assisted dying, but we also know from the family courts that judges can get coercive control very wrong. What evidentiary standard could there be to say there is no chance of someone’s life being wrongfully ended? The balance of probability, as in family law? Beyond reasonable doubt?

There are other types of coercion, such as pressures from extended family. Disability rights campaigners point to the fact that even quite a mild suggestion from a relative or professional that it is something someone should consider could make someone vulnerable feel that it is the only right thing to do. In places where assisting dying is legal, studies suggest that not wanting to be a burden is a frequently cited reason. 

And how do we know how timeless consent may be? The perceptions of people with life-limiting – even terminal – conditions can shift quite significantly over time. What about the role depression might play in someone’s decision? Mental health diagnoses are not clear cut and there is some evidence that in Oregon, another jurisdiction where assisted dying is legal, a few who chose it may have had undiagnosed depression.

The slippery slope – the idea that once you make any form of assisted dying possible it crosses a threshold that will inevitably become more permissive over time – has become a bit of a cliche, one that has been more true of some jurisdictions than others. But definitions are always malleable: in Canada, grievous and irremediable medical conditions include cases of people with severe chemical sensitivities opting for a medically assisted death because they have been unable to secure appropriate housing with the support of the state.

“Terminal” can be less precise than it sounds: doctors say it is very difficult to accurately predict how long someone has left to live once you go beyond a few days. There lies another danger: we invest far too little in the palliative care needed to ensure that everyone has the most dignified and low-pain death possible. Huge improvements are possible and there remains significant discrimination against disabled people in the provision of health and personal care. Assisted dying could make improvements in this less, rather than more, likely.

I have no doubt that there are some individuals who would benefit greatly from assisted dying and who ought to be granted the autonomy to choose this path. It is tempting to legislate with those individuals in mind, particularly given that end-of-life care in this country is not what it should be.

But the more consideration I’ve given it, the more doubts I harbour that the risk of vulnerable individuals suffering a wrongful death as a product of abusive relationships or family pressure can be effectively eliminated. For now, that makes it difficult for me to support.

Happy New Year

I don't know who is bombing Lanchester, but I would welcome the Russians, the Iranians, the Chinese, anyone, as long as they brought back the late buses on Sundays and Bank Holidays.

Don't worry, assuming that no such conquest had taken place, or even if it had, my post on Benedict XVI will be here within 48 hours.