Moral Equivalence

My sometime interlocutor/antagonist Daniel P. Moloney, whom I know to be a very smart guy, should have thought harder before writing (via Andrew Sullivan):

In this regard, the consumerism and relativism of the West can be just as dangerous as the totalitarianism of the East: It’s just as easy to forget about God while dancing to an iPod as while marching in a Hitler Youth rally. There’s a difference, to be sure, but hardly anyone would contest the observation that in elite Western society, as in totalitarian Germany, the moral vocabulary has been purged of the idea of sin. And if there’s no sense of sin, then there’s no need for a Redeemer, or for the Church.

Forget about the manifest grotesquerie of Moloney's equation (it's really beneath comment). The logic is circular, and the premises are a caricaturish misreading of history. Building this loaded concept of "sin" into all the antecedent claims does remove roadblocks to conclusions about the need for a redeemer, but as a methodology it won't be terribly persuasive to anyone who doesn't already believe in Thomist ethics.

As for the particular examples, neither the Nazis nor our contemporaries lacked schemata of right and wrong. National Socialist advocacy of the extermination of Untermenschen was not the product of a valueless moral outlook; it was defended as a supremely teleological and transcendent good. It pains me to have to say this in the same paragraph, but advocacy of gay civil rights is not a function of nihilism; it's a function of intuition about what justice demands.

Moloney's Ratzingerianism is reducible to this: any conception of right and wrong distinct from the Ratzingerian position is not just incorrect on particular points, but incoherent. I.e., outside a Ratzingerian framework, reference to "right" and "wrong" is like reference to "square circle." This. Is. Bollocks.

And one more thing. Moloney should be ashamed of himself for invoking Pius XII's theology as a solution to Hannah Arendt's investigation of Nazi evil.