Abstract

This is an attempt to understand why Carson Holloway’s book, The Gospel of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of 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 as tyrannical, or even as ordinarily unjust. One result of my grappling with this problem was that I came to see that Holloway’s argument was more right than not. Another result was that I came to understand that the culture of death is a new form of tyranny, one that is specifically the product of modern liberal political philosophy. A third result was that I had to ask, andgained 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.