John Paul II decoded the new threats to the “mystery of the human person” in the post–Cold War world, and he spent much of the decade of the 1990s trying to explain that freedom detached from moral truth—the “freedom of indifference” that dominated the high culture of the triumphant West—was, inevitably, self–cannibalizing.
Freedom untethered from truth is freedom’s worst enemy. For if there is only your truth and my truth, and neither one of us recognizes a transcendent moral standard (call it “the truth”) by which to adjudicate our differences, then the only way to settle the argument is for you to impose your power on me, or for me to impose my power on you. Freedom untethered from truth leads to chaos; chaos leads to anarchy; and since human beings cannot tolerate anarchy, tyranny as the answer to the human imperative of order is just around the corner. The false humanism of the freedom of indifference leads first to freedom’s decay, and then to freedom’s demise.
George Weigel John Paul II and the Crisis of Humanism
Gresham College in London has a day conference on John Paul II as Philosopher in November
