Countering False Obedience: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Counter The Appeal To Authority Fallacy
Hey everyone,
I'm making a post out of a recent interaction I had in this sub, in the hopes that it will help some people who are dealing with the old "appeal to authority" fallacy that, on top of pouring out of r/catholicism to a frankly embarrassing (and worrisome) degree, is also the first line of attack from many friends, family members, and even complete strangers, who have sadly already decided that they hate you, but are still looking for the reason why.
It's probably the most popular one that other Catholics use to criticize us, because profoundly uninformed people assume that because obedience is so foundational to Catholicism, we must therefore not expected to critically think in the process of "obeying." This involves a clever bait-and-switch regarding the meaning of "obedience," and also denies certain obvious external realities, the most important of which is the existence of external and objective truth at all.
Of course it makes sense that the ones not in favor of critical thought are the most reliant on a logical fallacy! Anyways, without further ado, I hope this helps you to stand strong in the Truth.
The claim: By appealing to the "eternal Magisterium" over the living one in an attempt to demonstrate contradictions in teachings, the SSPX is necessarily preferring their own "private judgment and self-reliance" to the truth, as expressed by the one with the authority to declare it.
My response:
Yeah, so that's where the trouble lies. If we take your logic to it's natural conclusion, a person is completely incapable of recognizing reason for themselves, a premise which is refuted by nature itself, along with Scripture and Tradition.
A person with your line of reasoning has no way of knowing right from wrong at all, without someone ever telling you at any given moment in time. For example, is homosexuality bad? "I don't know, what did the Pope last say about the matter - not the older Popes, the ones that aren't important now - what did the current one say, and if he hasn't said anything, what did the one say right before him? I certainly don't want to be accused of disobedience now, so it doesn't matter what happened to Sodom and Gomorrha, it doesn't matter what the Church did in the late 1800's, and it doesn't matter what Thomas Aquinas said in the Summa. It also doesn't matter how clearly these teachings were stated, because I can't get that information without reading it, and I'm never not biased! Necessarily, I need to know what disobedience is currently considered by the Magisterium, because that is the only thing I can really know, because it is the only thing being told to me by a living authority. Oh is that right? The current Pope is permitting Pride Masses? Well, if the Holy Father allows it, then who am I to judge? I am a good Catholic."
This is a total denial of Thomistic Realism, and effectively an embrace of Naskh, or the Islamic principle of "abrogation," wherein beliefs are not held as articles of Faith because they are eternal, transcendental, and externally true, but rather because the living jurisprudential organ in the religion has decided that the old ruling has been replaced. It is a historically unprecedented and necessarily arbitrary way of ruling in Catholicism, and it's also very effeminate. God did not make us to only understand truth through compliance to a direct superior. He made us to have an innate ability to recognize truth that is so powerful, even the pagans would have no excuse on judgment day (St. Paul's letter to the Romans).
So your denial of the use of reason to identify truth in accordance with the Natural Law does two things.
Firstly, it actually prevents you from ever meriting anything. Because blind and unquestioning obedience is not actually an act of the will, it's just going through motions. Why would you ever make an act of the will to adhere your own will to the Pope's, when your will - or as you say, "your opinion" - is never possibly relevant? You empty yourself, which is a Catholic idea, but instead of filling yourself with Christ deliberately, you fill yourself with whatever the Pope decides to fill you with. That's why people with your line of reasoning must treat the Pope as essentially infallible in all things - an assertion which is not true now, and never was true. Because if the Holy Father is wrong about things, then you'd have to admit that you may be swallowing errors willingly in the name of "obedience," and then contend with the possibility that your conception of obedience, on top of not being Traditional at all, has formed you into a mindless pawn of bad actors. Real obedience, from the root obediere, involves "listening comprehension," or the active participation in the process of submitting to an order.
Secondly, it disincentivizes critical thought, historical literacy, and personal initiative when it comes to the Faith. Why would you possibly require any of those things, when coming to conclusions of any kind is "private judgment and self reliance?" Just like a factory worker has no need for a liberal arts degree, because we don't need a university filling a lineman's head with nonsense when he just has to stay in his lane and rivet like a good boy, neither does the "assembly line" Catholic that you conceive of here have any need for the tools involved in the decision making process. You tell yourself that the gates of Hell will never prevail, so what's the point in being a check or balance to the wider institution, which doesn't need "you input?" But by denying the nature God gave you through practiced and purposeful ignorance, you reject God's invitation to make you an instrumental cause of grace and truth - things you cannot possess or ever truly know, respectively - and instead give up the chance to do that, in the same way you no longer truly merit anything.
This is the ethos of the Arian during the Arian crisis who "just followed their lawful Bishop" (and the Arian Bishops WERE materially valid and also in possession of their Sees!), the ethos of the magistrate on the panel that executed St Joan of Arc, the ethos of the superior of St John of the Cross who beat him and locked him in the bathroom, and it's also the ethos of anyone else who ever did anything morally reprehensible in the name of "just following orders." History necessarily becomes the story not of people who were virtuous or reprehensible, but is rather reduced to people who did and did not obey. With this false notion of obedience meaning compliance, the highest moral good is doing what you are told, no matter what it is.
Additionally, while the conclusion of the logic of your argument is just dreadful, and itself serves as a kind of refutation, the evidence for the falsity of your assertion also lies in its lack of workability at scale. Because of how language and communication work, and given the fact that the meaning of an intended message is never "mind melded" perfectly into your brain, you can never be really certain you have received the message that is being sent to you by anyone else at any given time, unless you perform a process of interpretation and internalization that looks an awful lot like the thing you appear to be trying to make fun of the SSPX for.
OK, so for example, the Pope says "all religions are pathways to God." You say you can't compare and contrast that with other statements in Tradition, because that would be private judgement or self-reliance, and that's "schismatic rubbish." And yet, to accept the statement "all religions are pathways to God" as being "true" because you were authoritatively told it, even to unthinkingly obey, you are necessarily relying on your own personal understandings of "all," "religions," "are," "pathways," "to," and "God." In a supposed act of humility, you claim you are removing yourself from the equation; but it's "communication 101" that the transmission of an idea from one person to another requires buy-in from both parties. That's just how reality works! Welcome to the Natural Law. Otherwise, how do you know you have those definitions right? What if the Pope's understanding of "pathway" is different from yours? What if that makes you disobedient? What is obedience really anyways? Again, the end point of your flawed premise, which is that there can be no private judgment or self-reliance, is that you deconstruct the process of receiving a teaching to an impossible and frankly absurd degree.
So that reduces your argument from it's splendorous height of "I'm a good Catholic who doesn't question things, like the bad schismatics who use their own judgment" to the completely uninspired and mediocre logic of the World, which is "I make sure my private judgment and self-reliance are perfectly aligned with the person who tells me I am good if I do exactly what they say, and I am constantly vibe checking to make sure they approve with whatever it is I am doing, so that I know it is right."
And that's a sad thing to see people pass off as "Catholicism" today. It looks a lot more like how a dog tries to please their owner.