Catholism and Liberal Democracy: Will the Marriage Last?

[Music] you well thank you all for joining us today at this talk mm-hmm just a brief were a brief word of introduction Catholicism and liberal democracy have always made for an uneasy couple to say the least and in the 19th century when liberalism meant the effort to deprive the church of its lands and buildings as well as the favor of state privilege writers such as father Felix art I saw vani summed up the church's attitude then in a simple phrase le Bartoli's mo s picado the title of his 1884 book liberalism is a sin but faced with totalitarian regimes in Germany Russia and elsewhere the church cast herself as a friend of Liberty and prominent Catholic intellectuals argued that only Christian anthropology could give Liberty its proper underpinnings but that fraying is and and has now been happening on both sides for a long time live with liberals increasingly hesitating to grant religious liberty a special status and of course threatening it directly and with some Catholics growing skeptical of the relationship themselves so here to address the top this topic Catholicism and liberal democracy will the marriage last is one of the most prominent young Catholic young ish Catholic writers Ross Douthat of the New York Times when I met Ross almost 18 years ago he was the author of two columns he's always written at least two sometimes three four columns per week as far as I can tell at Harvard Crimson column called decline and fall and a Harvard salient column called Luke's in tenebris so if anything those themes I think have continued to characterize his work from from privilege his memoir of the decline and fall of the Harvard man I guess you could say too - too bad a religion his notes on American heresies for the use of some future Inquisitor so here to address the here to address the decline and fall of Catholicism and liberal democracy and to look for light and darkness thank you for that kind I think introduction gladden and I do go way back and he has read most if not all of the pieces that I wrote for Harvard's conservative newspaper that happily have been buried by the sands of time and are not available to read online and please don't get any ideas about putting them there but thank you guys so much for coming I really appreciate it I think this is a interesting and timely topic to address and one of the you know fun things about being a journalist is that you're called upon to give talks on particular themes and you give a talk and then a few years go by and you find yourself revisiting it and realizing that you were wrong about certain things or that you need to update certain things or that you know time has passed and you can put a different ending on an original version so I'm gonna start I was asked to give a talk at Notre Dame a few years ago which gladden has actually heard since he was a game at the time about on the 50th anniversary of dignity contest Humana the Vatican Second Vatican Council document that effectively reconciled the Catholic Church to religious liberty and with it to some version I would say of the Liberal Democratic project and I think that is a good place to start this talk as well so I'm going to start in the same place as to talk to gladden for his sins has already heard and then I'm gonna diverge gradually and sort of come around to what I think has happened in Catholic thinking Catholic argument and Catholic discussion over the last few years around these questions which because I think it's become a very interesting and distinctive conversation and I should say I myself and a journalist I have no PhD or serious professional qualification to assess political philosophy and political theory and so I tend to see my role in these things as a kind of interested observer describing the things that other people are arguing about and trying to push and fraud more qualified people towards points of tension point and ultimately points of synthesis and that is of course a useful cop-out which also enables me to avoid taking two strong positions on very vexing and strange and difficult questions so let's begin with the marriage of Catholicism and liberal democracy which was in many ways a marriage made right here in the United States of America and it was made here in two ways first and foremost it was made intellectually the arguments and debates that led to the Second Vatican Council that led to Dignitas ooh man I had deep European roots obviously and their development was bound up in larger European theological projects that were primarily French and German not American but on the specific questions of church state relations and religious liberty that sort of lie at the heart of a lot of debates about the church and liberalism and how the church should approach the modern liberal democratic state the crucial transformative voices were often American some by births and some by choice so for instance John Courtney Murray the Jesuit intellectual who actually wrote two drafts of Dignitas Humanite is sort of the representative native-born American figure and someone like Jacques Maritain who was part of a larger body of Catholic thinkers who left fascist Europe for American shores would often be cited as of representative emigrate and there were many other significant figures as well but the Murray Maritain pairing is particularly useful in illustrating how intellectual change often happens in these kind of debates you need a crisis in an old paradigm and then you need an alternative paradigm to emerge and Meriton reacting like many in his generation against the idea that Catholic social thought required supporting potentially fascist regimes that because Jacobins and Marxists were enemies of Christianity vici and Franco deserved the faith support he saw that as embodying the crisis facing the church's vision of church and state in a kind of post thrown in alter world and meanwhile John Courtney Murray making the case that the American founders had essentially supplied an alternative to both anti-clerical liberalism and clerical fascism at one that was consonant with Catholic ideas about the human person he embodied a part a possible resolution to this conflict not a reconciliation between the church and all of liberal modernity but an acceptance that a particular view of liberalism rooted in natural law natural rights might deserve the imprimatur of the church but this case that was made wouldn't have been persuasive if it wasn't for the second way and the deeper way that Dignitas humanae and the church's marriage with liberal democracy was made on American shores the fact that Murray's theoretical argument seemed to be buttressed by the extraordinary success of Catholicism in the middle of the 20th century in the United States its demographic strength its internal cohesion its booming vocation numbers and lay engagement even its going my way bells of Saint Mary's song of Bernadette cultural clout charles murray instruction was Mary Charles Morris's Charles Murray's history of Catholicism would be interesting but Charles Morris's history of Catholicism has a line to the effect that Maritain visiting America circa 1955 excuse me a Martian visiting I retain Martian I really have good run here visiting America circa 1955 would have assumed just on the basis of going to the movies for six months that America was a historically Catholic country and you know this was also of course the period of Paul Blanchard's famous 1949 bestseller American freedom and Catholic power which revived 19th century Protestant warnings about Catholicism's inherent liberalism the potential dual loyalties of Catholic citizens the sinister matcha nations of the American hierarchy and all the rest but the great irony of Blanchard's argument was that it was precisely the sociological trends that inspired his last great spasm of sort of elite anti-catholicism at that time - the same thing that inspired his worry about a Catholic take over the United States creeping Franco is a ssin driven by high Catholic birth rates and lockstep papal loyalties all of this ultimately was what helped persuade the best minds of the Catholic Church to make their peace with a form of liberalism to concede that the Vatican's understandable resistance to Rob's Pierre and Garibaldi and Bismarck might not apply to Madison and Jefferson so prior to the 1960s anti Catholics feared that Catholic thought and American constitutional principles were fundamentally incompatible and given the content of certain papal pronouncements in the 19th century their fears were not simply bigoted or baseless but one such pronouncement illustrates how and why the papal attitude ultimately changed it comes from Leo the 13th in a document in which he gently rebuked American Catholics who were inclined to uncritically celebrate their Republic's First Amendment he wrote the fact that catholicity with you is in good condition nay is even enjoying a prosperous growth is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed his church in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere she spontaneously expands and propagates herself but he went on she would bring forth more abundant fruits if in addition to Liberty she and she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority now when Leo wrote those words in 1895 base still had evidence in their favor but by the 1950s just looking at trends in the United States and Europe reality seemed to tell a different story in precisely those countries where Catholicism had labored to maintain the favour of the laws and the patronage of the public authority the church had often become captive to the public authority as under certain fascist regimes or else had effectively collapsed and gone into a kind of exile with its patrons royal or right-wing whereas in the United States with no patronage and indeed a certain amount of residual Protestant hostility Catholicism in 1955 or so seemed only to be gathering strength and seemed far better positioned to grapple and engage with modernity than most of the divided often persecuted and universally war ravaged churches of Europe in this sense the arguments of figures like Murray and Maritain the arguments that gave rise to Dignitas Humanity Humana and made the marriage of Catholicism and liberal democracy possible triumphed at the theoretical level in church debates because they'd already seemed to win at the practical level anyone looking at the evidence 50 years ago that the church had nothing to fear from dropping its call for a preferential position for Catholicism could look to the United States and we immediately reassured that the church could flourish absent such state patronage and anyone looking for evidence that one form of liberalism at least could be trusted to protect the church's freedom rather than perpetually warring against it could likewise look to the United States and find a solid proof of concept a document like Dignitas seemed at a Dignitas Humana would still have been imaginable without the American example the arguments that undergirded it could still have resonated if catholics tried to grapple with 20th century realities but political theology can only be abstracted so far from a reference point in actual existing politics and having this American reference point this example in the United States the church thriving under liberal democracy made an immense difference in the debate its outcome and the document and teaching that was ultimately produced so it's completely understandable in turn that the idea of a Catholicism at home in the American and an American experiment essentially compatible with the Catholic faith has been crucial or let's say was crucial to the self understanding of most American Catholic intellectuals in the years after Vatican 2 and John Courtney Murray in particular much liked his Protestant contemporary Reinhold Niebuhr has been claimed by many different Catholic heirs over the last 30 or 40 years by both liberal Catholics and what you might call neoconservative Catholics by readers of commonweal and richard john newhouse's first things alike the sort of liberal Catholic view tended to be that the church needed to go a bit farther to adapt to the best of liberal modernity and the neoconservative Catholic view might be that that the marriage was working but liberal modernity itself had drifted a bit away from the happy congruence that memory and Maritain discerned and needed to be pulled back that if you could just correct Roe versus Wade could correct certain cultural drifts you could get back to the point of this happy synchronicity but both sides in these intra Catholic political debates both liberal Catholics and conservative Catholics in the u.s. tended to agree that a congruence this basic congruence was possible and desirable and to the extent that you could find a real common ground between the different sides of American Catholic political infighting in the years that I was growing up and reading these magazines it was usually an agreement on this point on the possibility at least of a church fully at home in the liberal democratic experiment now though I think this consensus is a little more difficult to discern and perhaps may even be cracking up for a variety of reasons and you know those reasons I think start with the reality that in certain ways the neoconservative Catholic project the kind of vision of Catholicism effectively is a kind of new religious Center for American life of Catholicism as sort of a force than in alliance with evangelical Protestantism and through the use of sort of natural law philosophy and arguments that it could sort of replace the declining Protestant mainline as sort of the central the central sort of religious foundation for the American Republic that vision seems to have come to grief over the last 10 or 15 years and it sort of reached a kind of peak in certain ways under the presidency of George W Bush who more than any other conservative politician tried to sort of use as part of his governing blueprint this this vision of sort of Catholic evangelical common ground of Catholic social thought a sort of a basis for a sort of right-of-center but ultimately centrist form of politics and then in Bush's Bush's failure the collapse of his administration's popularity it met with a kind of sweeping political defeat which in turn has give gave way to an era of increasing tension between Roman Catholic institutions and ideas and the consensus and direction of the liberal state and you know I don't I don't think I need to recapitulate all the specific points of tension you can sort of run through debates as diverse as you know the pressure placed on Catholic adoption agencies that don't want to place children with same-sex couples to the controversies around the Department of Health and Human Services mandates requiring Catholic colleges and hospitals and so on to purchase contraceptives and contraception and abortifacients for their employees to to take a step further the American Civil Liberties Union's ongoing campaign against Catholic hospitals attempting to require them to perform abortions sterilizations and other procedures contrary to Catholic teaching and then sort of you know these are all sort of part and parcel of I think a general tendency a general anti-clerical drift in American liberalism over the last 10 or 15 years where what was once assumed to be this American exception to trends in secularization and church-state conflict and so on looks less exceptional American politics looks a bit more like European politics and it has in the past where you have an increasingly a liberalism that is increasingly post-christian in certain ways and certainly increasingly anti-clerical and sort of opposed to the institutional the institutional manifestations of conservative Christianity in general and Roman Catholicism in particular and there's you know there's a lot of different ways to argue about what this means but I would say that over the course of this period this 10 or 15 year period from sort of the heights of the Bush administration through its collapse through the era of Obama and now into the strange era of Donald Trump and populist dislocations in Europe and so on there have been a few different ways that Catholic writers and thinkers have responded to these trends and you know one one group has essentially I would say sort of assumed that the settlement of the 1960s is still basically in effect this is the basic view of people who would have identified as liberal Catholics 20 years ago and still identify as liberal Catholics today is that you know that essentially these these debates over religious liberty you know sometimes the church is right sometimes the state is right but they're essentially minors certain minor skirmishes that they're sort of important in their way but they aren't some manifestation of a deeper conflict a deeper tension between Catholicism and the liberal state and so they're they're more sort of ongoing problems to be managed as we continue to work towards a successful and happy congruence of liberalism and the Catholic Church so that that I think remains the position of what you might call John Courtney Murray's liberal Catholic airs the position elsewhere though is more confused and uncertain and it's there's been sort of an increase in this uncertainty driven by certain trends under the pontificate of Francis a sort of two to two factors in particular have have driven them I to begin with the age of Francis has breathed new life into a real Catholic Left which tends to to regard the church's marriage with liberal democracy with a deep skepticism driven by a skepticism of the sort of economic substructure upon which liberal democracy rests and so the current Pope's scathing criticisms of global capitalism and in certain ways the american-led World Order has encouraged more radical Catholic left critiques of the American system I think then we've seen since the era of Vietnam the beragon brothers and all that or at least that's my impression and I'm an interested observer of the Catholic left but also obviously sort of an outsider to those debates but it seems like you have especially on the younger Catholic left us to sort of two styles of engagement one is a sort of you know a sort of revival of the old liberation theology spirit of the 1970s in which instead of a marriage of Catholicism and liberal democracy there's the idea that in fact you need a marriage of Roman Catholicism and socialism shading into Marxism basically that this is sort of actually the natural development for Catholic political thought that's pretty steps I think a pretty straightforward revival of ideas that were au courant circa 1970 or 1975 but then in a more complicated way there's another sort of cadre or group of thinkers who would go part way with that diagnosis but would also say but look the left-wing Catholics of the 1970s were too much too eager to make their peace with the sexual revolution and all its works they were much too eager to make their peace with the secular left and in fact a Catholic Left would have to be very different and more traditionalist certain ways particularly on issues related to sexual ethics personal morals and so on and they would then go further and say you know indeed one might add and argue that the sexual revolution is itself an ultimate expression of and working out of the ruthless logic of global capitalism that you know Hugh Hefner is the fundamental face of the sexual revolution no matter what you know sort of anti misogyny feminists want to claim and say and that something like the dynamics of the you know then me to revelations and Harvey Weinstein and everything else is just a case of sort of liberalism confronting its own ruthless brutal logic as manifested in sexual exploitation and so therefore it should be possible to marry a kind of again very traditional Catholic vision of sexual ethics the family the common good and so on you know Humana vitae and everything else to a different but similar Catholic adaptation of Marxism along liberation theologian lines and this this vision you know if sometimes gets labeled with the term trad and ISTA which is a phrase that describes a clutch of people who put together a manifesto online and then immediately fell to arguing with each other and so the manifesto sort of lapsed and you know reappears online and so on and you know it's it's very easy to you know it's it's in certain ways it's easy to overstate the importance of you know a manifesto signed again by a very small group of people who all argued with each other too long to sort of have it turned into a movement but my impression is that that that sort of temporary crystallization crystallized something real something that you know is a real intellectual trend and that there is a sort of going to be an ongoing fight among the young Catholic left about you know whether to be essentially people who seek the fulfillment of Catholic political thought in a kind of subordination to the general logic of the left or people who see the fulfillment Catholic thought in a correction of the left by Catholic traditionalism that nonetheless retains a kind of Marxist understanding of what's wrong with liberal democracy at liberalism capitalism and so on again that's you know this is a very professional assessment of a sort of very much still in flux phenomenon but that that I think is roughly what's going on in these different kinds of Catholic left's and then on the Catholic right you have basically a kind of a kind of uncertain reassessment of ideas that were more or less taken for granted I would say by a lot of Catholic writers and thinkers older than myself and basically the the heart of the reassessment is you know if if it's the you know Anton Chigurh in no country for old men and where he says to someone you know if the rule that brought you to this point but if you know if a rule I'm mangling the quote but it's something along the lines of you know someone is basically confronted with their own death and he says you know the rule that if a rule brought to this point of what use is the rule and I I think that there is a style of again increasingly younger Catholic thought that looks at the marriage of Catholicism and liberal democracy along those lines and says if the theory that brought if this is the theory that brought you to this point and this point is you know the potential growing soft persecution of the Catholic Church by liberal democracies then maybe this marriage was a big mistake all along and in which case the proponents of this view argue you basically need a kind of recovery of Catholic social thoughts from the 19th century and not only the 19th century but that sort of that sort of the focus of a lot of these efforts the idea being that there is a sustained extended Catholic critique of liberalism that was advanced by multiple Pope's and many other thinkers as well across the course of the nineteenth century that even if it wasn't fully applicable to American liberal democracy for a particular period of time but let's say 1870 in 1965 is going to be increasingly applicable again to the gener the future drift of liberalism and that you know the recovery of of these ideas is therefore essential to Catholic political thinking as we enter into what some people imagine could be a post liberal age and you know as this last line suggests that thinking then intersects with this general sense which is not at all unique to Catholic thinkers that the liberal West and the liberal project is in some sense in a kind of general crisis and that some combination of reactions to people left behind by globalization the atomization brought on by sexual liberation you know the decline of civic institutions and communal life the you know the effects of the Internet of a culture of individualism writ large plus mass migration plus the rise of radical Islam you know you go down the list of factors that all of this means that the liberal order isn't gonna sustain itself no matter what and that it's going to either you know be overtaken by right-wing populism is or it's going to lapse into a kind of soft or not even necessarily soft despotism and that you know we're gonna have a return of sort of 1930 styled battles between you know Marxists and fascists and so on oh that general sense I think overhangs a lot of debates we have in the age of Trump and European populism and the migration crisis and so forth and if that's true then from the point of view of these revisionist Catholic thinkers it becomes all the more urgent that we should return to the deeper traditions of the Catholic past and reclaim these Catholic critiques of liberalism and reclaim with them a different vision of the common good a different vision of church state relations that might be useful and necessary in a world in which the liberal democratic order is unlikely to actually survive the next 50 to 100 years so that yeah that's my attempt to sketch what I think is going on in Catholic argument and so you have you know different names get applied to these different schools I've already referenced the sort of trad and East Catholic left vision among these different variations of the Catholic right there's a lot of talk about the word integral ISM as a description of church state relations the proper relation of civil authority to sacred authority the proper vision of how the state and society should pursue the common good and so on as you know as the appropriate Catholic alternative to liberal democracy and something that you know might potentially be manifest at some point in the development of Catholic politics for instance in Eastern Europe something you know something where modern Catholicism could profitably learn from the Constitution that Dolphus propagated in Austria in 1934 gladden can correct my dates if I'm wrong but anyway so there there's a lot there's a lot of activity around an argument around that idea around the you know a phrase like integral ISM and what and what it might mean and my impression of this as an interested observer is that it's all you know it's it's first of all that the people engaged in these debates are right to identify a possible crisis a slow-burning one but quite possibly a real one as well and that you know I think it's impossible to live in the culture of early 20th century modernity and not have a certain skepticism about about the essential compatibility of the Catholic world view and the worldview that functionally inspires liberal democratic life in the United States right now that you know whatever may have been true in 1965 or 1950 I've though in the world we live in now you know the ambient culture of liberal society is clearly hostile in certain profound ways to Catholic faith and the trajectory of liberal society seems to be towards a level of atomization post familial and post communal life and sort of you know and a kind of narcotic narcotic culture of video games and pornography and so on that you know simply doesn't look like the kind of culture that Catholicism should reasonably be married to and it looks instead like the kind of culture that Catholicism should find a way to stand in critique of and if you're standing in critique of a culture it's not enough to critique the culture alone in a certain way you know culture and politics are inseparable you need to find a way to critique the political regime as well so in that sense I have a broad sympathy for these projects extending to parts of the Catholic left as well as the Catholic right I should say and there is a I think also a clear overlap in certain ways between the sort of trad and ista left-wing impulse and the integralists impulse on the right even if online the people involved in each tend to hate on each other as much as they like you know like each other's tweets so that's that that's sort of my expression of sympathy but then I would offer two notes of skepticism the first note is that there's a tendency in these debates to in these arguments to sort of over overemphasize sort of the the inevitable ISM of certain trajectories so a lot of people engaged in these debates will say well look if you know again the the Anton Chigurh view you know if this is where we've ended up then the problem must have been that the theory was rotten from the start and so if America ended up as a kind of functionally anti-catholic Society that would mean that we have to condemn the founders and you know we haven't we have to say it's all John Locke's fault and that you know there are these sort of deep faults and locky and liberalism that have gradually worked themselves out over many many years and have brought us to this place and that this is sort of the theme for instance of Patrick de Nimes new book which is itself a version of this kind of critique of liberalism and it's a very powerful book which I commend to all of you but as someone who you know only dabbles in political philosophy I sometimes wonder if you know the way history works might be driven only partially by ideas not completely by ideas and if you know certain ideas and certain theories and certain projects work for a while and then stop working and the reasons that they stopped working aren't because they were rotten from the start or flawed from the start but because you know times change circumstances change and systems that work with human nature under certain context don't work well with them under others so it might be for instance that you know if the marriage of Catholicism and liberal democracy comes to an end it doesn't mean that liberal democracy was always bad and rotten from the start it just means that marriage worked under certain technological and economic conditions and doesn't work after you invent the birth control pill in the Internet and you know that this sort of the account of human nature the problems in the account of human nature that liberalism has manifest themselves more under certain situations than others but all political theories probably have problems in their account of human nature and you sort of move from one to the other in sort of more in practical terms you see you know something works for a while and then ceases to work and it doesn't mean that it was always fated or foredoomed it just means that you know circumstances change and a new system is needed so that's that would be one caution that you know sort of seeing a crisis in the current moment doesn't require saying that you know the American Founding was a disaster and we should have had a Catholic monarchy in the u.s. from 1780 onward as pleasant as that might have been for the House of Stuart who actually needed a monarchy to you know settle in the second caution is you know that we have we have lived through not in my lifetime but within living memory a crisis of liberalism and democracy before and has gladden sort of gestured at in his introduction one of the reasons that Catholicism ended up reconciling itself to liberal democracy was that the alternatives that ended up manifesting themselves as real life alternatives in the 1920s 30s and 40s one of them Marxist Leninist some communism and so on ended up being you know insanely hostile to Catholic faith and to Christian faith and to you know many many other other things as well and the other one the various forms of fascism and so on that often claimed to be manifestations of Catholic integral ISM tended to ultimately succumb to race based nationalisms and ultimately you know vicious anti-semitism massive persecution the Holocaust and so on through the litany of fascist crimes and if if that is the case anyone trying to construct or reconstruct Catholic alternatives to liberal democracy needs to keep and maintain that history very much in mind and so the young Catholic the young Catholics trying to draw on Marxist critique of capitalism can't just blithely wave away a hundred years of Marxist Leninist crimes as just you know we had the theory was right in the practice was wrong Marx was right and Lenin was wrong and so on I mean it you know you can make that argument but you can't just make it with a wave of your hand and in a similar way you know Catholics who are championing integral ISM might profitably want to reckon with you know the reality that for instance the term integral ISM itself was an invention of Charles Moreau the the sort of French Catholic nationalist figure whose relationship to Catholicism was itself at best complicated and is not remembered as you know a sort of perfect model of Catholic political engagement to put it mildly and in fact is remembered I think reasonably as someone for whom Catholicism was a means to fascist ends rather than the other way around although I perhaps I'm I'm being unfair to to his to his worldview but regardless in general the alliance between Catholicism and political parties that promised integral ISM at best bore a sort of temporary fruit and at worst led to a right-wing form of totalitarianism and that too is not a legacy that can be simply waved away which means in turn that in terms of intellectual and work and sort of practical applications and everything else any kind of project to sort of revive and apply the Catholic critique of liberalism from the 19th century needs to work very hard indeed to internalize sustained and serious lessons from the failure of attempts the bloody and egregious failure of attempts to build sort of Catholic friendly alternatives to liberal democracy in the early part of the 20th century and needs to think seriously about what what would make this period different because you know in certain ways we are play-acting the 1930s in different ways and I emphasize play-acting but you know in Western politics in the last five or ten years has seen sort of the revival of a somewhat further left group and a somewhat further right group and Catholics engaged in politics are tempted naturally into alliance with both groups I know sort of I know live Catholic critics of liberalism who love Jeremy Corbyn and Catholic critics of liberalism who love marine lepen and the question for both groups is how can you be sure that you aren't just going to end up as sort of clients of a Venezuelan style socialism or a kind of brutal right-wing dictatorship neither of which i think is actually likely from Corbin or lepen but if either of either of their movements developed further in anti-liberal directions the question of how catholics in their current political weakness would end up controlling those movements rather than being controlled by them is a very hard and heavy question which means that from my perspective I think the the Catholic critique of liberal democracy and the Catholic questioning of the marriage of Catholic political thought and Liberal Democratic thought that intellectual project is necessary and important and a completely reasonable response to the signs of the times but in terms of sort of practical political applications we have a very long way to go before I would be comfortable embracing embracing a kind of radical or reactionary Catholic political alternative to the current regime and I would be much I'm for the time being more comfortable encouraging these intellectual currents while preferring in practical politics to muddle along and hope that in fact this sort of inevitable list parting of the ways isn't inevitable after all and there could be a kind of happy reconvergence between liberal democracy and Catholic faith so I'll leave things there and now I will be rigorously questioned [Applause] thank you very much Ross for those who don't know me I'm dr. Daniel burns from the politics department a couple Corrections to the materials that were sent out about this one I'm sorry about this this is apparently not Haggar auditorium but Hagerty auditorium laterally found their way here and two outstanding aha how to tell the truth while in effect telling a lie and I my mistake thank you the second correction is for some reason the word brief was appended describing my response that should be deleted briefer than Ross's talk is all I can promise but any case see we can do Ross as a great strand immediately people start to leave Ross Ross is a great storyteller and I have nothing to object to in the story he just told about the relationship between Catholicism and liberal politics Ross is a journalist as he said he's also an opinion journalist and I feel like today we haven't yet gotten quite as many of his own opinions as I had been hoping to yesterday was wonderful by the way this is day two though and so this response will be an effort to get Ross to either come out and say he's ready to join the anti Cathy sorry the Catholic anti liberal movement that he's just been describing or to state a little bit more directly why he thinks that they're wrong we got some at the end but I'd like to get him to elaborate I understand and probably share all of Ross's critiques of the people who are now throwing around terms like post liberalism and one of Ross's critiques that they might take to be this okay liberalism is not working out as well as John Courtney Morey led us to believe it would fine where does that leave us liberalism is dead long live what exactly we don't expect the Spanish Inquisition nobody does nothing so what then I mean you know you are you really claiming that we can somehow overcome the problems of liberalism without bringing back all the things that we understandably are uncomfortable about about pre liberal politics that may be a fair question that Ross poses to the people he's arguing with these days I ultimately disagree about the way both he and they are posing that question so let me explain what I would mean if I were to say the Catholics should not be liberals and of course obviously this is all liberal in the political philosophy sense of the term not in the left-right you know Republicans and Democrats sense of the term I wanted a Singlish sharply between liberal theory and the bull practice liberal theory is a set of rules for politics worked out in its classic form by john locke later adapted in different ways by all kinds of thinkers all of whom ultimately rely on locke to the best of my knowledge these rules of liberal theory are rules that no government has ever followed or even come close to following or ever will follow every supposedly liberal government has been like a cocktail party with the legs of the dead body sticking out from underneath the table and every time people have had to acknowledge the dead body and say well you know we haven't quite reached the ideal yet but we keep striving somehow every time they get one step closer to it in one way they take a step back in another way I'll give two examples from American history the most obvious of which is obviously slavery black Americans did not even begin to achieve liberal equality until the 1964 Civil Rights Act which is an illiberal law liberal theory would say if you're a restaurant owner and you're racist you're the one losing out on non-white customers it's your property you can serve or not serve wherever you want I support the Civil Rights Act by the way I'm just saying that history of American race relations shows liberal Theory has not been tried and found wanting it has been found impossible and left untried one other example for most of our country's history we had an unofficial established church it was an ecumenical II Protestant Christianity it encompassed many denominations it later expanded to more or less include Catholicism too it dominated our civic institutions and our public schools according to Tocqueville it had a greater stranglehold on American thought than the Catholic Church ever enjoyed in medieval Spain liberal theory of course opposes any established church and so federal have been reading liberal theory have been dismantling that establishment over the past 50 years not completely but to a considerable extent what have we gotten its place the weaker that establishment gets the more we find that instead we have a very illiberal insistence that Christian Baker's should be forced to claim that a man can marry a man at what point exactly were we following liberal theory as a country the answer I believe is never now with communist theory anytime you try to follow it you always get something other than what the theory would predict maybe the same is true of liberal theory maybe it's a bad theory in fact let's drop the maybe it's a bad theory this is fun for me I've been teaching this stuff for six years refusing to tell my students whether I agree with it or not you ready I don't I think it's wrong starting with an imaginary state of nature that ignores essential aspects of our humanity and then from it rigorously deducing a bunch of rigid political rules that no one has ever seen in practice is not in my view a good way to run a country that's not yet a criticism of the political practice of the countries that we call liberal democracies our actual regime like all regimes is a mixture of good and bad and the two are often impossible to separate in practice all I've said so far is that when we evaluate what's good and what's bad about our regime we should not be evaluating it by the imaginary standard of liberal theory what standard then my answer to that would be the standard layout laid out by Aristotle and I'll give three examples of what I mean by that Aristotle thinks that an every regime we see one or more classes of people who dominate other classes through a combination of custom and force which they justify for reasons that are at best only partially valid the regime is better if that class of people are better human beings and it's worse if they're worse human beings liberal theory tries to claim this doesn't have to be true but in liberal practice it's pretty clearly always been true and Ross is one of the two living authors along with Charles Murray who have helped many of us see more clearly the character of the current ruling class in the United States we can evaluate our regime by asking to what extent these people deserve to rule us and always here with the huge proviso that we're comparing our regime not to the rule of loss of her kings but to the realistic alternatives available to us second Aristotle thinks that in every regime we see citizens held together by common moral opinions which are inculcated through family life through educational institutions through religion and through the common culture more generally the regime is better if those moral opinions do a better job of promoting true human flourishing it's worse if they don't liberal theory tries to claim that we don't have to impose moral opinions on anyone but we obviously do and we always have the civil rights movement and the gay marriage movement each in their own way saw very clearly that they wanted the law to support one set of moral opinions over another we can evaluate our regime by evaluating the opinions that it inculcates and its citizens especially the young we can ask for example whether it's true that were a nation of heretics third Aristotle thinks that within every regime there are intrinsic tendencies towards its own collapse towards civil war or revolution the regime is better when those tendencies are mitigated it's worse when they're exacerbated liberal Theory basically ignores the whole question of regime stability on the assumption that a legitimate regime will automatically be stable at least as long as it's competently managed it's increasingly obvious that's not true if our regime necessarily contains the seeds of its own destruction we can evaluate it by asking how good a job we're doing of keeping those seeds dormant for as long as possible or as some might put it how sustainable is our decadence those are three examples of how Aristotle would evaluate any regime what Aristotle never gives you is some sort of blueprint for the next awesome awesome regime you should be trying to transform yours into in fact he thinks the best you can do in real life is often just to persuade your local tyrant to be slightly less bloodthirsty and in that situation he thinks that's exactly what you should do and so if Ross wants art would be post liberal Catholic authors to present a blueprint for non liberal politics I would respectfully submit that he's still taking for granted one premise of liberal theory that I would deny because really why should we be imagining some plan for a post liberal politics to me the problem with liberal political theory is precisely that it is imaginary as Burke would say good practice does not come from following a theory theory comes from falling good practice or as I would prefer to put it if Ross is right that all political theories have problems in their own accounts of human nature maybe what's so great about Aristotle is he doesn't give us a political theory in that sense and so I would think the alternative to liberal politics is not some or too liberal theory at least is not some new untested imaginary scheme for the politics of the future lenin tried that most Cellini tried that both communism and fascism made the mistake of trying to fight liberalism with another ISM but if a rejection of liberalism means a return to classical political philosophy and that's what I think it has to mean and the real alternative to liberalism is not a new ISM but rather return to statesmanship old-fashioned Ciceronian statesmanship we can look to models of Christian statesmanship st. Thomas More the medieval st. Kings many other Saints involved in public life including a custom we might also look at statesman for whom faith wasn't necessarily the guiding light of their own lives but who professed and I think you know in different ways each sincerely felt a kind of piety that was at least shaped by their Christian cultural environment Washington Tocqueville Lincoln Churchill I would add Burke although it's possible he was more deeply Christian than I realized either way this kind of statesmanship is not intrinsically Christian or pagan I doubt that Churchill or Cicero would have found much to object to in the political career of Thomas More although they both might have had some trouble understanding just why it had to end when it did Ciceronian or Aristotelian statesmanship means finding the strengths and weaknesses of your particular regime being clear-sighted about them in private in public talking honestly about the strengths and discreetly about the weaknesses and trying in whatever little ways you can to shore up the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses that's really it there are some pretty good manuals of statesmanship even better if there are good history books as even Locke agreed the study of history is the great mistress of prudence and civil knowledge good books about politics in conjunction of course with real world experience can cultivate sound political judgment and sound political judgment is all we have to guide us once we realize the bankruptcy of liberal political theory now then you may well say well of course nobody's gonna come out opposed to the idea of sound political judgment but really what does this mean in practice I mean what are these practical applications you asked it towards the end of your talk I'm not competent to answer that very well I'm 31 I've never worked in government or even near government and frankly I think Ross's political judgment is much better than mine but still in the hope of revoking him to say more I'll throw out a few ideas about what what directions a genuinely post liberal Christian citizenship might take us in maybe the most important it would be conservative in the deepest sense of the term as Burke says a true statesman changes something only in order to preserve it right now that means that precisely if you throw out liberal theory you have to preserve what we mean by what we call liberal practice with all of its strengths and weaknesses so even if one thinks as I do that globalized technocratic capitalism is doing untold damage to the souls of billions of people throughout the world one also has to accept that it's the system we're stuck with we can try to reform it in little ways perhaps but there should be no doubt that there should be no doubt that any attempt to overthrow the system would fall prey to roughly all the same weaknesses of ever as every Marxist revolution has for our foreign policy to pick one we could stop assuming that promoting liberal democracy in any old country will be good for the citizens of that country I mean it may be in some cases it may not in others we can promote good governance political stability healthy civic institutions those overlap with ippol democracy sometimes but they're not the same thing and surely we all now know that the attempt to impose liberalism can even undermine those good things one example from domestic policy religious freedom is one of those aspects of a liberal practice that we obviously need to conserve and defend but there are different ways to understand religious freedom and different ways to defend it if you look at Joseph Ratzinger's interpretation of religious freedom and really what problem cannot be solved by saying read more Ratzinger then you'll see I think that his defense of religious freedom brings out the best in liberal practice while owing essentially nothing to liberal theory in education much more than politics proper I think education is the area where a post liberal Catholicism could have a serious practical in fact surely we could rewrite our Catholic school curricula to teach our kids that government exists not merely to secure our rights but in fact to promote the full flourishing of all its citizens and that as Pope Benedict said an overemphasis on rights leads to a neglect of duties surely we can teach our kids to spend more time reading history especially ancient and medieval history and to do so without fitting it into any narrative of general human progress or what CS Lewis called chronological snobbery when America was founded we used to compare ourselves to Rome Sparta Athens Carthage for seventy years we've been comparing ourselves to Nazism and communism those are literally the two lowest standards I can imagine any political community holding itself to go team America were not as bad as the Communists really I mean that may have been unavoidable during the Cold War it is not I think going to be enough to raise up a generation of intelligent Catholic Patriots why can't we hold ourselves to a higher standard why can't we read history with the humility to learn something from it and this goes beyond just political history so I'll close with what's probably the biggest practical change I would suggest for the education of post liberal Catholics we need to teach our kids that they have no right to assume that we are wiser than our ancestors period full stop no qualifications the tendency to as Chesterton said prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday it's very very deeply ingrained in our American church including in so-called conservatives and there is no clearer sign of that than the enthusiasm with which Ross described an earlier generation jumping on the bandwagon of liberal theory in defiance of centuries of brilliant Catholic political thinkers who had argued against it and I'm not saying that the 19th century popes were brilliant Catholic political thinkers but we have much much bigger guns than the 19th century popes then my most provocative suggestion is this how about if from now on every time someone comes to us and says well for nineteen hundred years the church thought X sorry I got that wrong I'll try again well for nineteen hundred years no one in the church thought X and in fact many great Saints and teachers of the church explicitly said not X but in the 20th century we realized in fact X is true we could treat that person I'm inclined to think we should treat that person precisely the same way we treat someone who says well for nineteen hundred years nobody in the church thought X but in a vision yesterday Jesus revealed to me personally that X is true in other words the burden of proof should be extremely high this would go a long way toward alleviating what Ross has rightly elsewhere characterized as the ambiguity sophistry and special pleading that have so offered and characterized the attitude of American conservative Catholics toward the so-called developments of doctrine that they selectively and rather meretricious Lee celebrate I conclude that with two questions for Ross you've asked for an alternative non liberal approach to Catholic citizenship in the 21st century I've tried to sketch one one are you on board - if you're not could you please state more directly what your remaining reservations are [Applause] yes I'm not gonna roam but I'm gonna is that okay can i yeah yeah can i it's it's actually is can I do this is that can I shift like this all right this is how am i destroying everything no I like holding the microphone but is that bad how what is my range of movement with the camera okay so I've only listened to it once so I want to be careful about full agreement but I would say I have a strong sympathy for what you've just sketched and so here is here is my if you had asked me this five years ago you said you know what is your what is your formulation for how Catholics should proceed politically in the existing political moment I have said that you know we need to in effect create a practical politics that is you know suited to present conditions and yes not sort of over obsess about the idea of sort of designing an elaborate new theory of politics or a radical new vision of how you know how Western societies or global societies or any kind of society should function and that in fact the basic model for Catholic engagement with liberal democracy that was successful I think in many ways in both Western Europe and the United States in the period where I began I talked the year of Murray and Maritain is still you know remains remains a completely reasonable blueprint today and that style of Catholic engagement would in effect attempt to apply Catholics teaching to Western politics more fully and it would be a politics that offered a greater stress on economic solidarity than the political right especially in the United States currently offers and at the same time it would offer Catholic ideas about you know the family and sexuality and reproduction and so on as an alternative to social liberalism and in the process it would offer a kind of alternative Center for Western life to what you might call the neoliberal center-right which is effectively libertarian mildly libertarian in economics with a lot of technocratic management and strongly libertarian in social life with a certain kind of Puritanism that doesn't speak its name among the upper classes right that's the neoliberal Center the Catholic Center would be in effect the same Center that a certain kind of New Deal Catholic would have offered in the 1930s when you know New Deal liberalism could speak in the language of family wages and you know the idea the idea that economic policy should take the family strongly into account and should you know take the welfare of children strongly into account and should you know have a kind of morally conservative vision around family life and sexual life and its relationship to social life and so on and that you know that practical politics had been upended and in you know upended in many ways by the sexual revolution but it you know it sort of continued to exist in certain form you could see it at the edges of george w bush's compassionate conservatism you could see it in the remaining band of pro-life democrats perhaps you could see it here and there in different parts of europe and that you know so that that is sort of the practical the the revival of that center should be the practical project which Catholics are dedicated and you know and in sort of i talked about this last night but you know to the extent that i saw great promise in the pontificate of Pope Francis I think it was in the possibility that he could in his engagement with the Western world and his critique of global technocratic capitalism or something that he could sort of help point the way towards some version of this new Catholic Center and that remains you know if you if you ask me questions about practical politics the United States that remains my answer you know if I look at something like the Trump phenomenon my response my immediate response to the Trump phenomenon is you know there's stuff there that Catholics should be able to work with that Catholic statesmen in politics should be able to say you know to take the Trump phenomenon and say well you know there is xenophobia and racism here that we need to reject but there's an emphasis on sort of solidarity through the nation-state that we can accept and there's a implicit critique of certain styles of Republican politics not implicit explicit that you know the Trump made explicit in his campaign a critique of sort of the tendency of Republican defenses of capitalism to just end up as defenses of plutocracy and defenses are saying well you don't have health insurance you're on your own or something but you know that that's something that Catholic politicians in the Republican Party are not in the Republican Party should be able to embrace and so you know there that there could be a sort of politics of populist solidarity that in its way provides some version of this new Catholic Center so you know and and I think that that sort of practical expression of politics is entirely compatible with the kind of you know reclamation of Catholic identity that I think you're urging and that I effective that I support and it's also compatible with a kind of effective questioning of the strong you know this sort of more sweeping premises of liberalism the more sort of sweepingly individualistic understandings of the human person the more ridiculously contract Aryan theories of human government and human nature and so on so I think I can reasonably put together a version of what you're offering with a version of the kind of politics that you know I mean I wrote a book called grand new party how Republicans can win the working class and save the American Dream and the effective message of this book was that you know there's a form of Catholic social teaching that Republicans could effectively move towards and become a better version of center-right politics that would be compatible with social conservatism and could again be a more effective force in American politics that pursued the common good as you know among others certain Catholic critics of liberalism would have understood it so all I you know I so I agree and I think you know that remains in a day to day basis you know if I'm writing a column about the Republican tax bill or you know any kind of social policy that remains sort of my my sense of what what this the practical statesman should be about in this moment however it is also important to consider the possibility that there isn't a sort of normal spaz statesmanship before us in this particular moment and that you know whether it stems from a flawed theory of human nature or whether it simply stems from you know this certain ineluctable logic of technological and economic processes it might be that that Center that I'm imagining really is just slipping back into the past right and anyway you know in one of these arguments that we get into on the internet about these things Adrian ver mule at at Harvard Law who sort of emerged as some kind of exponent of some kind of Catholic critique of liberalism that I don't think he's quite pinned down but he's very certain about who's wrong you know he wrote a piece criticizing basically a range of Catholic writers myself included for our nostalgia basically that you know in different ways we were all looking back - I'll see De Gasperi and you know the the Konrad Adenauer and you know the right reverend new dealer and all you know all these figures of sort of Christian democracy basically in its new deal American and mid-century european forms in fact that world is just gone you can't bring it back Donald Trump can't bring it back Marco Rubio can't bring it back and you know and and there I I don't you know i i i don't think that i think i'm more clear-eyed and less nostalgic than that but i think it's a very reasonable point that people engaged in practical politics need to keep in mind it might be that there just isn't in the near term under the current you know under current trends in the current system a a way to make social conservatism as Catholic politicians have understood it a viable political force if it is being undermined by let's say the internet every single day it might be for let's let's go let's get extreme right how many of you read have read doom only oh wow alright so you should all read dune because it's like an awesome science fiction novel but one of the interesting things about the room it's set in this far future society this is why I have to hold the mic like this because you're talking about doom you have to move around and and act a little weird but in this far future science fiction society they have spaceships it's you know they have all kinds of high technology but they don't have computers as we understand them because at a certain point basically they to put it in the terms that people understand now they essentially created too much AI too much artificial intelligence and there was a revolt against this called the but Larry in Jihad again nerd alert I apologize but the but Larry in Jihad basically meant that societies banned certain forms of computing and instead trained the human elect to do certain computational work that was necessary for spaceflight and galactic colonization and and there is a possibility I would say it's a remote possibility but it's a live possibility that given trends in sort of information technology the internet virtual reality and all the rest that you know that sort of this that the path over the next hundred and fifty years or the next five hundred years or something to a world where Catholicism can fully flourish requires some sort of massive political revolt against technology let's say this is just would be one example of some wild and crazy thing that might have to happen to get you to a place where you could have a sort of effective Catholic statesmanship again it might be that more generally it just might be that circumstances could prevail technological economic and political circumstances in which it was impossible for a Catholic politics to really exist and it was impossible for Catholicism to sustain itself as something other than a you know than the Amish basically unless there was a kind of regime change and I don't I don't think that's right but I'm open to the possibility that it's right and I think it's important in the failure and it's really now like a 50-year failure of Catholic politics to sort of get back to where it was in 1955 it's important to to see in that failure the possibility that we are just going to keep failing that the would-be statesman of this Catholic Center I have in mind are just not gonna keep they're gonna keep not succeeding and secularization is going to advance in certain ways and technological change is gonna get weird in certain ways and you're gonna come to either you're gonna come to some real crisis point or you're going to enter into a kind of you know more plausible version of Aldous Huxley's brave new world or something where everyone is in virtual reality or on some form of Soma and Catholicism is this extremely bizarre hobby that's six people practiced or something that that is a possibility that is worth considering and if it is worth considering then it's worth thinking about actual regime alternatives in addition to thinking about statesmanship within the existing regime and thinking about those regime alternatives might not involve a sort of ideological turn it might be as you say that trying to counter you know liberalism with another ISM whether it's Catholic Marxism or integral ISM or something is just a bad idea this is where Patrick de Nimes book about liberalism basically ends up he says well you can't you know the problem with liberalism is that it's to ideological it's too much like Marxism and fascism you can't you know you want to get back to a more practical statesmanship and maybe it means you know thinking in terms of you know just different kinds of regimes and how you get from a tyranny to a nola Karki and the democracy and so on you know there are lots of different ways to think about it my claim here and my interest in sort of watching and encouraging these debates is just that we should keep open the possibility that you know that some kind of more dramatic change is needed right and and and even I'll make a milder version of this argument and finish up and then we can if you guys have the patience for it take it take some questions but the milder version of this argument without but Larry and Jihad's and banning the internet and sort of you know insane things like that the milder version might just be that you know American society merican society has in effect gone through a number of kind of refounding periods this is you know bring out my vague Straus Ian background and say you know I mean the American Republic after Abraham Lincoln was different from the American Republic before Abraham Lincoln the American Republic after FDR was different from the American Republic after before FDR and this was you know there were people who supported Donald Trump who made a version of this argument who sort of implied that he could be this sort of transformational figure who you know if they were West Coast drowsy ins they would say and he can undo you know the progressive revolution of the nineteen tens and return sovereignty of the people or something and I think the idea of Donald Trump is a refound er of the American Republic is absurd and implausible and not going to happen but it doesn't mean that the impulse animating that desire was necessarily wrong and so it might be that without you know needing to overthrow liberal democracy in some complete way and replace it with a new ideological system you do need you know something that actually shakes and changes the way we are governed and the way we you know the way the way Washington DC works more than just getting rid of the filibuster or something and if that's the case then these sort of more radical alternatives might have their uses as you know sort of by expanding the field of argument you expand the range of more reasonable possibilities as well and so you you know that FDR's refounding happened in the shadow of Marxism and fascism and it was good that we didn't go fascist and it was good that we didn't go Marxist and but it might be that you couldn't have had sort of a successful or semi successful response to the Great Depression in the United States if you hadn't had these more extreme visions out there for people for statesmen to sort of pivot off of and so on so even if politics is more normal than my science fiction speculations are suggesting it still might be useful to imagine worlds and regimes beyond our own to help our own pass through some period of transition to a different and more successful order on the other side

Channel: University of Dallas

Views: 1,886

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Id: b1372dbqEGw

Length: 74min 21sec (4461 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 10 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/zaradeptus]

This is a lecture by Ross Douthat. It is not a talk about Integralism, but one in which Integralism is touched upon. Nevertheless I post it because it is related to the topic of Catholic Integralism, and also because Ross Douthat is one of the big-profile public writers on Catholic and religious thought in America today, and this talk is one of the higher-profile mentions of Catholic Integralism in the public discourse.

The general outline of his talk is that although historically Catholicism had an uneasy relationship with Liberal Democratic forms of governance, in the 20th century, and in large part due to the success of Catholicism in the United States during the 20th century, the Church largely made its peace and has even embraced Liberal Democracy. However, as Liberal Democracy has begun in recent decades to appear to pose more and more of a threat to Catholic moral values, the "marriage" of Catholicism with Liberal Democracy is more and more being questioned by various thinkers and groups of thinkers in the Catholic Church.

Douthat then reviews some of the ideas and "camps" of Catholics thinking through various ways forward. He briefly mentions Catholic Integralism as one of several proposed ways forward, but does not get too deep into it, and only really mentions it as one option being considered out of many.

Regarding Integralism, he makes the argument that Catholic Integralists correctly identify that the positive relationship between Catholicism and Liberal Democracy may be in a "slow burning crisis", but that Integralists have to confront the fact that Integralism in practice ran into some pretty serious implementation problems in the 1920s and 1930s. Douthat thinks that at least thinking through Integralism is a worthwhile exercise and has some sympathy for it, but on the whole leans against giving up so easily on Liberal Democracy. He also seems to think that interwar Austria is a good case study for Integralist thinkers to work through.

[u/TexanLoneStar]

12:20 - I don't think we're looking so much as to flourish in the sense of our ministry, but to enact civil law that upholds moral righteousness. We do not need Integralism to spread the Gospel, administer the Sacraments, or anything else - but I think the goals of Integralism are totally different when it comes to what he thinks by "flourish" and he's missing the point.

The United States will NEVER, I repeat, NEVER change their primary duty to upholding a form of governance where the foremost objective is ordering and helping their citizens to their eternal end. We can have all the conversions we want, and flourish under America, but ultimately the Founding Fathers didn't design it this way.

But then again I only watched like 3 minutes after skipping to a random spot.

Can you give a TLDW?