The Culture of Death and Political Tyranny

Abstract

This is an attempt to understand why Carson Holloway's book The Gospel of Life: John Paul II and Liberal Modernity so strongly emphasizes that the culture of death is tyranny. Since Aristotle, Tyranny has been a political idea. John Paul's thought focuses on culture not politics. But Holloway interprets him as saying that the culture of death is political tyranny. I had trouble grasping how that might be, especially since the ancients, and Aristotle in particular, did not regard abortion and infanticide (the central characteristics of what John Paul calls the culture of death) as tyrannical; or even ordinarily unjust. My puzzlement made this paper a dialogue with Holloway about that. One result was that I came to see that his argument was more right than not. Another result was that I came to understand that it is a new form of tyranny, one specifically the product of modern liberal political philosophy. A third result was that I had to ask, and gained insight into answering, how liberal modernity makes it so difficult to see the culture of death to which it gives rise as a political tyranny.