EUROPE AND CULTURE
Krystyna Czuba
Relation
According to liberalism, religion are emotional-irrational attitudes. There are attempts to weaken relations of the man with God in order to manipulate him. People related to leadership in: politics, economy or culture, often perceive religion and Church as competitive reality. There are attempts of eliminating or assimilating Church not only in Western or Eastern Europe but also in catholic Poland. It is often said that Church is ‘open’, ‘democratic’, ‘intellectual’ and ‘backward’, ‘belonging to Toruń’. The purpose is to weaken Church and its authority. Assimilation is being done by making people of Church believe that they should be tolerant towards every appearing ideology or relativism of rules. In the contemporary culture the gender ideology is being promoted, which is aimed at depriving the human being of sexes explicitness and the reason.
Crisis
The reason for the European culture crisis is also making the man an absolute value which replaces God. In the recent years of our century neo-marxism is developing – there is dehumanization of the man at the cost of rights and protection of animals, a kind of assassination on the superiority of the human being over an animal. This is a road to annihilation of not only God’s plan but also the world. The human being is ‘an individual’ that is, ‘a copy’, ‘species’. It is reification of the human being. The contemporary liberalism is economics which is interested not only in the man but also production, consumption, profit. Liberal philosophy which is the basic support for culture says about the man as a producer and consumer of economic values. If possessing is a primate, the man is not looking for superior values. He is looking for satisfaction in emotional sphere, and forgets about ethical rules, doing harm to himself and other people. In the contemporary culture the technology development is becoming a superior value. This is a development which imposes a necessity of technology superiority over everything.
Progress
‘Progress’ is the omnipresent and the most important notion. It is a mythical word, a norm of politics and cultural life of people. It is difficult to deny that technology and medicine have progressed a lot in using nature forces. Technology progress, not the man – is a fact that tools take the first and the most important place. Medicine progress – is a longer life but also a real danger for human life which are: cloning the human being, human embryos used for experiments, in vitro, genetic manipulations, trade of human embryos for transplantations. In these cases good purposes are always presented in order to justify evil. But the purpose does not justify the means!
Progress is polysemy! It begins to be a danger for the earth, causes a lot of inequality among people, causes new dangers for the world and humankind. Progress in science may also be used to breach humanity in us. An example are a weapon of mass disaster and terrible wars pursued by various countries in Europe and outside it.
Freedom
A good understanding freedom is a sign of Europe. Today Europe is changing into anarchy through absolutization of freedom, separating it from the truth, good and human rights and it is also reconstruction of culture. It is becoming a lie and is leading into enslavement. Freedom of killing the human being in every phase of his life is terrible. Freedom of slandering what is holiness for Christians. Marriage and family are stopping to be the basic values for the modern society. The notion of law does not refer to the natural law, belonging to everybody and equal to everybody. It is voting of the majority. Peace and justice are indefinite in their content. In legal culture insulting Israeli faith, Koran, religious beliefs of Islam undergoes punishment in legal culture of contemporary Europe, whereas as for Christ and what is holy for Christians – freedom of opinion without any limits is promoted.
Hatred
‘Here there is a kind of hatred of the West to itself which is a strange phenomenon and which can be considered as a sign of pathology. The West us trying to open up with full understanding to outer values but it does not like itself. In its history it perceives only what one feels sorry for and is harmful but is not able to see what is great and chaste. Europe needs new critical and humble self-acceptance if it is to survive (…)For the world cultures, absolute secularism, which has spread all over the West, is something unknown. These cultures are based on a belief that the world without God does not have the future (…) Europe seems to be internally empty at the moment of its greatest successes, being somehow paralyzed by the disappearing system of circulation. This a crisis of putting its life at risk; it must save itself from transplantations which will finally negate its authentic identity. Beside using up all the spiritual energy there is also a fact that also from ethical point of view, Europe is taking the path of getting rotten. (Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Europe. Its foundation today and tomorrow’).
Europe is deprived of subjectivity, its identity, is becoming the subject, not something which passes over its own history and culture to others. Rejecting Christ, Europe rejects itself.
Translated by Aneta Amrozik
Niedziela 21/2019 (26 V 2019)