IN THIS 2002 piece about Pope John Paul II, Lawrence Auster describes the Pope’s use of conservative rhetoric to expound liberal ideas that deny the essential connection between culture and human dignity. He writes of the Pope’s speech to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, delivered in Paris in 1980:

Throughout the speech, John Paul II keeps evoking the larger wholes of culture and nation, but only in light of their subordinate function in fulfilling the spiritual strivings and psychological needs of the individual person. The larger whole has no existence or transcendent value in itself. Not only that, but to the extent that the Pope does value culture in itself, as when he speaks of “the spiritual sovereignty of a culture,” he seems to value it only insofar as it is threatened by Communist or colonialist domination. This explains why he has passionately defended the Polish national culture in the face of Communist tyranny, but has shown no concern about the self-undoing of America’s national culture through its attack on its own particularity. In this regard, and especially in light of his advocacy of open immigration, he’s behaving just like a multiculturalist. That is, when a culture (and thus its individual members) is being oppressed, he insists that it be defended and strengthened, in order to liberate its individual members from spiritual slavery. But when a culture is not being oppressed, but rather is voluntarily destroying itself through the same cult of individual rights and open borders that the Pope himself supports, he treats that culture as irrelevant. This shows how making the “human person” the criterion of all cultural values leads to the radical devaluing of actual cultures.

Auster goes on to elucidate the holistic approach of traditionalism. He writes:

In his portrayal of the human person as the sole focus and meaning of culture, the Pope seems less a “philosopher of culture” than a kind of ideologue, that is, one who treats a single aspect of the totality of things as though it were the totality, and seeks to advance that one aspect at the expense of all others.

Traditionalists are not ideologues. For example, when I criticize the Pope’s one-sided stress on the individual person at the expense of the larger whole, I am not running to the opposite extreme of saying that the larger whole is all there is or that it should overpower the individual and his rights. A nation is not a god or even a person, yet it performs an indispensable function in the scheme of things. That function is derived from man’s own nature. Man is a social animal, which means that he becomes what he most truly is when he is part of a concrete society—a society that is not simply a set of contracts or an arena for competition or a system for the protection of human rights, but something real. And that’s what we traditionalists are seeking—that the nation (along with the other larger wholes that have been denigrated by modern ideology) resume its natural place in the scheme of things, that the nation once again be something, instead of, as now, being drained away into nothing and replaced by other peoples and cultures.

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