The False Promises of Drugs: Joseph Ratzinger on True Human Excellence

In the 1960s, the use of narcotics, psychedelics, and other “hard” drugs spread throughout Western countries to an unprecedented extent. Their toll is well-known: lives ruined, families torn apart, and fortunes wasted by the obsession with experiencing altered states of mind.

But despite longstanding legal and social efforts to stop their use, some hard drugs, like psychedelics or hallucinogens, are increasing, including among people considered to be successful. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs—even some of celebrity status, according to the Wall Street Journal—use them to increase their creativity and business savvy. One tech startup CEO

said the high expectations of venture capital firms and investors in general can lead founders to turn to psychedelics to provide an edge. “They don’t want a normal person, a normal company,” he said. “They want something extraordinary. You’re not born extraordinary.”

Now signs of hard drug use have appeared among self-identified religious conservatives. Sohrab Ahmari defends them as a means for spiritual growth, claiming they can induce “full-on spiritual battle” in the mind. Thankfully, this view has received strong criticism from other conservatives. They rightly point out that Western religious traditions—like Christianity and Islam—forbid drug use (“except on strictly therapeutic grounds,” under medical supervision) and deny that it can be a part of authentic spirituality. Drug use, as true religion sees it, is an act of radical self-will: a “tool to help the user gain more control over reality,” in Rod Dreher’s words, instead of trusting in God’s care. 

But in our secular world—the materialism of which conditions even the minds of religious people—the value of obedience to God’s law might not be as persuasive as in the past; making the case against drug use will require going philosophically deeper into the issue. Joseph Ratzinger—the second anniversary of whose death is almost upon us—did just that nearly forty years ago in his speech “1968 and Years of Violence and Disillusionment.” The dramatic rise of drug use in our times, he says, originates in a flight from the difficult but liberating personal effort that human excellence requires.

The Path to Enslavement

Ratzinger suggests a number of reasons why people start using hard drugs. Many are responding to peer pressure; others are sucked in by clever dealers. Still others seek the adventure of a new, even mystical experience: they use drugs to serve their “human need for infinity” and transcendence. For many the striving for transcendence takes prosaic forms: Ahmari credits psychedelics with helping him transcend his smoking addiction; the tech startup CEO quoted earlier sought “extraordinary” creativity to gain prestige and wealth; others use hard drugs to overcome the physical or emotional pains that are just part of life. Each of them, in different ways, is looking for peace and happiness.

And yet, Ratzinger argues, drugs are a path not to happiness but violence. They do violence to human nature, as seen in the addictions or psychoses to which hard drugs give rise. They incite their users to violence, as seen in the strong connection between drug use and criminal behavior.

This violent trend is not accidental, Ratzinger suggests: it is part of drug use’s inner logic. Drug use of this kind is “a form of protest against facts,” “against a reality perceived as a prison.” Drug culture suggests that happiness requires escaping that prison by removing something outside of ourselves—in this case a physical defect. This view resonates powerfully with Rousseau’s saying that inspired the political revolutions of modernity: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” It could hardly be a coincidence, then, that the drug culture arose simultaneously with the violent cultural revolutions of the 1960s in which Rousseau’s spirit came to life again.

By contrast, in the view to which Ratzinger subscribes (along with Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and many others), happiness begins within the person, because man’s core, his heart, is a spiritual intellect and will that transcend physicality. Happiness means actualizing our potential by choosing well, and choice is not determined by material circumstances. If we choose poorly, we become worse; if we choose nothing (which may not be possible) we are also worse off, because we have squandered a chance to become better. Continually exercising good choices makes them habitual. That habit settles deep into the soul as love, which motivates our actions as though by a second nature. That love is, to use Augustine’s image, the “weight” that gives the soul its gravitational drift toward or away from the unchanging truths of eternity.

The exercise of the will is what Ratzinger and the Western tradition call “asceticism” (from the Greek word for “exercise”), which is central to the moral life, also called the life of virtue. The words “virtue” and “exercise” make many of us groan. Exercise is hard, whether of the body or the soul; we find it easier to settle for what is pleasing in the moment than to do what is best in the long run. Those who try to kick a bad habit, like Ahmari, or who put in long hours of work in research and development, like the tech entrepreneur, will soon find their psyches rebelling against the pain of their tasks. In that frustration, many turn to drugs as a “magical key,” as Ratzinger puts it, to overcome their personal limitations.

But these quick fixes only make problems worse. Drugs might diminish physical or emotional barriers to excellent action—the fear that holds us back, or the pain that distracts our focus—but they leave untouched the deepest source of our defects: the weaknesses or vices that reside more in the intellect and will than the body. One might do apparently excellent things under the influence of drugs—a salesman might speak with more confidence, or a scientist might be more driven or take more risks with experiments in the lab—but only because his mediocre creativity or fortitude temporarily has no inhibition in its way. Once the effect of the drug wears off, the underlying mediocrity remains to hold one back; one is then tempted to return to the drug, and may even need a higher dose if one’s body has become accustomed to it. This can, and often does, lead to the development of a long-term dependency—a sort of emotional and spiritual slavery.

The Path to Self-Dominion

In moral effort one exercises the will and intellect such that, even in the presence of physical or emotional barriers, one can act with excellence. Drugs decrease self-dominion; moral exercise increases it, and therefore increases our freedom. By strengthening our person (our spirit) we become less dependent on changing material circumstances and more in touch with the inner truth of ourselves that does not change.  

Drugs give short-term happiness, but leave the long-term cause of unhappiness—our defective love of the good, and our excessive love of comfort—untouched. True happiness requires “getting out of one’s comfort zone,” as we often hear, by changing oneself; the violence of drug use seeks happiness without self-discipline. Therefore the apparently adventuresome drug user may in fact be a coward, seeking easy solutions for fear of what Ratzinger calls “[t]he patient and humble adventure of asceticism.”

One ought not to pass judgment on any particular person who has fallen into addiction; many people are drawn into it more or less unwittingly, or for understandable reasons, as we already noted. But whatever those reasons may have been, one’s freedom is always somehow engaged. Hence one cannot escape drug addiction by another quick-fix medication: one must always want to get better; one must learn again—perhaps through a long and arduous process—to live for the universal human vocation to truth and goodness, not merely one’s own pleasure.

There is of course a place for the controlled, therapeutic use of drugs. Even then, drugs are not a solution in themselves but an aid to the healing process. Some drugs help the body heal itself. Others give the soul a “leg up” in the process of healing itself through moral effort: they mitigate extraordinary psychological challenges so that the person can have “breathing room” to learn, or relearn, the virtues.

Rescuing Man from the Oppression of “Facts”

Emphasizing the primacy of self-discipline may seem unfeeling and cold. After all, depression, sadness, and other pains of the heart or body, constantly pressing on us, can be very trying, especially if they seem to appear without our consent. If people are suffering, what could be wrong with stopping the pain? Why add the burden of moral demands that will bring suffering back?

These questions lead Ratzinger to emphasize that the ultimate defense of an authentic moral life must be the higher meaning of human existence (as the most successful rehabilitation programs suppose). One reason why drug use has spread today, he thinks, is that contemporary Western culture has made answering the question of life’s meaning extraordinarily difficult by developing the theory of evolution “into a universal view of the world.” From childhood we are taught that there is no reality higher than precisely the “facts” that drug users find so oppressive. Positing that purely material animal species develop from each other is one thing; but philosophical evolutionism asserts that human personhood, too—our immaterial powers of intellect and will—has a “purely mechanical origin” from “chance and necessity.” Such a view effectively “abolishes” man himself, as C. S. Lewis said, and reduces all virtues to a blind drive toward “the survival and optimization of [our] species.” If the universe is so meaningless, and we have no real freedom, there is little reason to tell people not to use drugs, cross-breed humans with other animals, or take other bizarre “transhumanist” measures (as many tech CEOs propose) to evolve ourselves, until we have eliminated physical suffering. Real freedom—including freedom to overcome ourselves—is possible only if man’s life transcends his body.

Recovering such a transcendent perspective of man is hard to imagine if we do not also recover authentic religion: the recognition that there must be a higher origin and purpose to this universe—with all its order and beauty, often beyond our comprehension—that chance and necessity alone cannot explain. Only such a higher reality could account for our own transcendent, but finite, existence. It must be an infinitely transcendent being, at least as intelligent and free as we are; a Person, constantly beside us, ready to help us overcome evil and be our best selves, if only we seek His help.

The Liberation of Self-Discipline

As Ratzinger concludes, the traditional Western moral perspective is not a “burden” but a “liberation.” It satisfies the hunger in souls that drug abuse can at best only mask temporarily. In drug use, “the ethical and religious path” that is natural to man “is replaced by technology” that artificially props man up without requiring him to change himself, perhaps for a whole lifetime. The drug user risks ending his days in despair, realizing that he has wasted his life because he has not grown into the person he was meant to be.

Drugs leave man’s person shrunken, but self-discipline expands the man’s horizons by expanding his inner possibilities. It pushes him to venture out and try things that seem impossible, saving him from the feeling of being a “prisoner of facts.” It gives him the strength to believe that on the other side of the pain of personal growth is a peace and joy to which no chemical high can compare.

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