One of the many striking things about the past week has been the persistent use of tendentious phraseology to insinuate a definitive verdict about John Paul II. The idea that the late Pope was "conservative", "traditionalist" or "unyielding" is asserted, time and again, not as an argument or a proposition to be pondered or debated, but as an absolute, unquestionable fact.
The fact that it is done without malice, in deference to his passing, makes it, if anything, more insidious.
And very often in the same breath it is suggested that the next pope must be more progressive, which all but invariably means more liberal, more yielding to the demands of modern society for a papal blessing to be administered to its indulgences.
We have developed an odd approach to overcoming incompatibilities between extreme individualism and ancient truth: we want to jettison the ancient truth.
The possibility that, rather than the pope falling into line, it might be worthwhile for modern society to look at its value system, consider that selfishness may not be the ideal solution to everything, admit the damage it may be causing to itself, and change where appropriate, is rarely admitted to the mainstream discourse, and certainly never in a neutral fashion that leaves the question open. The language of the discourse is tilted to normalise the idea that positive change necessarily involves the adaptation of "conservatism" to the "realities" of modern life.
"Reality" is the final arbiter of every modern conundrum. It is, you might say, both the democratic disease and the market malaise - the stretching beyond usefulness of values that in less absolute terms are precious beyond price, but which become reduced in virtue when taken to extremes. Behaviour, desire - what people actually do or want to do - have come to overrule questions of what is right or good, or even what is in those selfsame people's broader interest.
"Choice" is all.
This anti-ethic is protected by a self-validating language, which bundles along with it two fundamental misapprehensions: (1) that all progress is linear, and (2) that each new achievement of human knowledge or competence will ipso facto vindicate all our "choices" and expose as obscurantist any values inhospitable to them. The word conservative is rapidly acquiring an as yet unacknowledged irony. The way we use it now is little changed from the way we used it a generation ago, though Ireland has altered beyond recognition.
When Pope John Paul came here in 1979, his prescriptions might plausibly have been described as conservative, because, to a high degree, he reflected the dominant values of the Ireland of that time. His advocating of the rights of the family or the unborn were at that time pleas to conserve values of the majority. But nowadays someone seeking to conserve the dominant value-system would be a proponent of secular-individualism, consumerism and freedom of choice. We have experienced an almost complete inversion of the reality, without any revision of the language. In Ireland 2005 the ideas of John Paul II demand not the conservation of existing values, but the transformation of society and its thinking. His prescriptions, far from being conservative, are certainly radical and arguably progressive.
The evening before the late Pope was laid to rest in Rome, Channel 4 broadcast a remarkable programme about the life of the child in the womb. It wasn't in any sense a religious, still less a Catholic, programme. Using a new photographic technique known as the 4D scan, in which three-dimensional images are shown in real time, Life before Birth traced the development of a human being from the instant of ejaculation to the moment of birth. The images caught the brain's first nerve cells being formed after 15 days, the first beat of a heart the size of a poppy seed at 22 days, the first grimace of pain at 26 weeks, a dance at 33 weeks. For any sentient being who watched it, it put an end to the discussion about when life begins, vindicating absolutely the "conservative" view that life begins at the moment of conception.
This exposes the nonsensical nature of conventional political terminologies and their assumptions. The implication of the conventional use of terms such as conservative and progressive in respect of abortion is that we are moving towards a new truth, which we seem sure will unseat the traditional one. We believe also - and perhaps some of those who hold to what is called the conservative position fear it most - that social and technological progress will inevitably vindicate the anti-ethic of personal choice, leaving dissenters with nothing to cling to but their obscurantism.
Be not afraid. While the foetus remained an abstract blob in a jerky monochrome image, it was easier to decide that it was in a different ethical category to a viable human being.
But, with advancing technology, the ancient truth becomes once more irrefutable, and the "liberal" evasion of "choice" is exposed as the true obscurantism. Progress isn't what it used to be.