The philosopher Jean Baudrillard seems to have been on to something when he said that people in today’s media-driven culture exist more and more in a state of hyperreality, unable to distinguish between what is real and what is not.
Charles Flores devoted an entire article (TMIS, 15 February) to an attack on Pope Benedict XVI for certain horrible but unspecified things he is supposed to have said about homosexuals in his Christmas address to the Roman Curia. Nothing that Mr Flores wrote had any relation to the Pope’s real address. His whole article was an exercise in hyperreality.
In his popular blog, the Baudrillard-influenced, same sex attracted (his preferred term) Australian Catholic lawyer and philosopher John Heard compared the claim that the Pope had condemned homosexuality in his address to the claim of Bush and Blair that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. There where no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and there was no condemnation of homosexuality in the Pope’s address.
Benedict XVI did not even mention homosexuality. His only allusion to it was in a reference to “marriage, understood as the life-long bond between a man and a woman”, which simply restated the Catholic view that marriage is a heterosexual institution. An earlier reference to “the nature of the human being as man and woman” is basically a citation of Genesis 1: 27 (“God made man in his own image, made him in the image of God. Man and woman both, he created them”), and occurs in the context of a complex meditation on the dangers of gender theory and meddling with our genetic code. (On this see my letter “What the Pope really said”, TMID, 11 February).
If there are any implications for homosexuality here, they would be by way of gender theory, which is not primarily about homosexuality, and indeed, in its more radical formulations, tends to dissolve both homo and heterosexuality away. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate (2002) demolishes gender theory in a long chapter in which there is no mention at all of homosexuality.
As journalist Peter Popham explained in The Independent (UK), gender theory claims, “… our ideas about the categories of sex, gender and sexuality are not the product of biology but are culturally constructed in accordance with what a given society permits”. A century after Darwin, this fundamentalist dismissal of biology is the height of absurdity, or of hyperreality, as Baudrillard would say.
For Mark Henderson, science editor of The Times (UK), “gender theory is built on sand”, and in attacking it “the Holy Father has said something that needed saying… the Pope (is) taking the right side in this argument”.
How then did the Pope end up accused of viciously attacking homosexuals? The intellectual plane of his critique of gender theory and meddling with the human genome was way over the heads of most people, and besides, as journalist Paul Vallely noted in The Independent (UK), since the Pope’s remarks “were in an in-house address to his staff, he spoke in impenetrable theological shorthand”.
In retrospect, as John Heard and others have pointed out, it is easy to reconstruct what happened. One or two unnamed journalists (their reports were anonymous) did not have the faintest idea what the Pope was talking about except that he was attacking something, so they decided, after mutual consultation presumably and on no other basis than their preconceptions, that it must be homosexuality.
Let John Heard continue the story: “Homoactivists, garden variety anti-Catholics, incensed ordinary readers, and otherwise good people of all sorts took it from there. The resulting free-for-all was remarkable” not only for “the venomous denunciations of Pope Benedict XVI and the Church”, but because so many “pundits and other commentators… did not check the wording of the Pope’s address”, or even, “having been apprised of what the Pope actually said, displayed a surreal response”. “Who cares?” distorted attitudes encouraged them to say: “We know what he really meant!”
In this “manufactured, bogus event,” Heard concluded, “it is the preference for anything other than the truth that is most troubling”.
Adrian Camilleri Flores
ST PAUL’S BAY