FROM THE PRINT MAGAZINE:

This essay was originally published in New Polity Issue 3.3 (Summer 2022).
Order the full issue here.

ABSTRACT

After languishing in the obscurity that is philosophical and theological discourse for a couple generations, critical analysis of liberalism has become, under the name “postliberalism,” a cause célèbre in politics—or, at any rate, in journalism. Are we seeing, or about to see, the establishment of a postliberal order? That is, will the truth that philosophers and theologians have been seeking become the guiding principle of our social and political life?

Michael Hanby argues that we are witnessing not the illumination of praxis by truth but (once again) a characteristically modern reduction of truth to praxis. To substantiate this, he examines journalism’s functionalist thought-form (which reduces things’ depths to superficial “fact”), taken up in social media, within whose un-contemplative environs the “debate” has raged; the modern “tradition” of extrinsicist philosophy; the limits of the common good as a solution to our predicament; the assumption that our governing institutions are neutral; and, in general, the “mystical disaster” of liberalism that, far exceeding both the domain of politics and politics’ power to fix, makes truth as perennially understood socially invisible and irrelevant.

Acknowledging the positive openings produced by integralist and “postliberal” questioning, while insisting on the insufficiency of their proposed answers, he concludes that the only way for “postliberalism” to move in practice beyond liberalism is for it to recover the idea, at the heart of the Church, of a truth irreducible to practice. ( –Editor)

A Metaphysical Disaster

The deepest problems with our political order are not themselves political but metaphysical and theological.[1] Political order and political philosophy always presuppose natural philosophy, metaphysics, even theology. I do not mean that metaphysics and theology are first in the order of understanding as some kind of a priori “system” from which political conclusions are self-consciously deduced, though Hobbes, Locke, and other early modern thinkers proceeded in this fashion. Nor do I mean that metaphysics and theology are first in the order of intention as an ideal end state to be achieved through political action, though there are many examples of this being tried. I mean rather that they are first in reality, as an entailment of every conception of the human being, political order, or the common good. Political life, to borrow a term from Maurice Blondel, is “metaphysics in action”: and every metaphysics, even one in action, implies some tacit conception of God—what God must be if the world is really like this—irrespective of whether he is thought to exist.[2] Liberal order, whether in its classical 18th-century form or its technocratic 21st-century form, is premised upon what Charles Péguy called “a mystical disaster”—also a metaphysical disaster— coincident with the invention of “the secular” as a kind of ontological tabula rasa, a blank field of mere power relations indifferent to divine presence, forming both the all-encompassing backdrop for the unfolding of history and the horizon beyond which we can no longer see or think. The advent of the secular thus coincides with a total transformation of the world’s relation to God—and indeed with the reinvention of God, nature, Christianity, and the Church as instruments of political and scientific purpose—a transformation, in other words, that affects every aspect of reality.[3] Theoretically, this meant unthinking the great tradition of Christian Platonism; historically, it meant overthrowing the ancien regime and founding “the political” as a self-enclosed sphere administered by the new science of power. The elevation of potency, power, or possibility over the actuality of given order is the metaphysical root from which springs both liberalism and Baconian science, the former valorizing possibility under the name of freedom, the latter under the name of a truth reduced to pragmatic “function” produced by instrumental reason, that co-penetration of thought and action that now determines what it means for us to think. The political and the scientific converge to give America, the quintessentially modern nation, its true form and raison d’être as a society “organized for ... inquiry” to “attack nature collectively.”[4] Seen in this light, it is the scientific and technological utopia of The New Atlantis, and not The Leviathan, The Second Treatise, or The Federalist Papers, that is the most prescient anticipation of what we have become. Accompanying this new social object is a new, functionalist form of social and political knowing that excludes God and questions of ontological truth from its field of vision and mode of operation. For the sake of brevity, I will follow Augusto Del Noce in calling it sociologism, which is less an expression of atheism—itself an inverted form of Christian belief—than of irreligion, where God and being have simply ceased to be intelligible as meaningful questions.[5]

This summarizes a great number of arguments that the patient reader can digest elsewhere.[6] I recall them now for two reasons. The first is to indicate the nature, size, and scope of liberal order, without which it is impossible to understand its totalitarian character as a total interpretation of reality, the horizon within which other social facts are permitted to appear, that recreates everything in the image of its own fundamental assumptions. The second is to establish something of a backdrop for the ensuing discussion of “postliberalism,” about which there seems to be a good deal of confusion. Serious Catholic and Christian critiques of liberalism, for a long time roughly grouped together as “postliberal,” are in at least their second or third generation.[7] Patrick Deneen referred to this strain of thought in an early article before his breakthrough book, Why Liberalism Failed.[8] Mentored by this earlier generation of anti-liberal philosophers and theologians, I myself have been a critic of liberalism my entire career, though I have never used the term “postliberal” to describe my own thought. Nevertheless, this earlier strain of “postliberal” thought never succeeded in capturing the public, or even the ecclesial, imagination. Three things have transpired in recent years, however, to transform the situation. First, events have finally vindicated these earlier generations of critics, falsifying both the “fusionism” that synthesized social conservatism with libertarian economics as well as the Americanism of Catholic neo-conservatives, a distinction with little difference. Second, and partly as a consequence of the first, “postliberalism” has acquired that special sort of reality that can be conferred only by the attention of the American pundit class. A tree falling in the forest doesn’t make a sound until the New York Times hears it, and it is only with the attention of a Ross Douthat, or a David Brooks, or even a Rod Dreher or Sohrab Ahmari that ideas achieve reality in the public consciousness.[9] Third and last, social media have made potential journalists and pundits of us all, thereby making this power to determine the boundaries of “the real” potentially available to anyone who can succeed in building a personal brand and establishing a following. In consequence of all this, “postliberalism” has burst into the public consciousness as a phenomenon in itself—a banner to march under for some, a dangerous but useful foil for others—exceeding the narrow genre of political philosophy or the theses of any given thinker. But what sort of phenomenon is this, and how should we understand it?

The Medium is the Message

The prefix in postliberalism is an indication that we have left the realm of traditional political philosophy, a theoretical inquiry into the ideal polity. Rather, postliberalism denotes a form of thought conditioned in some way by a liberal order that is thought to be passing and which it hopes to supersede. Whether liberal order is indeed passing, or whether it represents something of a Zeno’s paradox of fragmentation—always falling, never collapsing—, whether this interminable disintegration marks the transition to a new kind of politics or passage into a post-political age governed by technological exigencies that are ultimately ungovernable by us, whether, in other words, there is anything after liberal order, once it has negated every alternative and established its inherent meaninglessness as the ultimate horizon, is an important question that we have only begun to contemplate.[10] Here the question simply denotes the concern that the nature, size, and scope of liberal order—as a cataclysm of the human spirit—are obscured by the confident triumphalism of liberalism’s opponents. Their quest for political relevance risks domesticating a once-potent critique and obstructing our vision of what a real alternative to liberalism would require and how it might be lived in the midst of (what I am convinced is) liberalism’s interminable disintegration.

Recently I was contacted by a journalist from a national magazine who wanted to discuss Catholic integralism and the new American right, which have become conflated in the popular imagination.[11] That a journalist from a national political magazine would be interested in what were, until recently, arcane questions of Catholic theology, history, and ecclesiology is a sign that the phenomenon we are dealing with is no longer a theoretical effort to understand what is true, but a practical agenda for what might be done within the limits of 21st-century American politics, where the truth itself is measured by what is “possible” or “useful.” This is utterly predictable. Whether in its liberal, Marxist, or technocratic form, the absolutization of politics follows inevitably from our “metaphysical disaster,” which grants power ontological primacy over form and goodness, bringing about the conflation of theory and practice, knowledge and power, truth and utility. Praxis now takes precedence over theoria which, deprived of its ontological objects and unable to justify its truth in terms of “results,” is unintelligible and obsolete. As we shall see, this conflation of theory and praxis—the measurement of theory by praxis—is an abiding source of confusion about what postliberal political thought is—or ought to be. Yet this confusion is compounded by the fact that the sphere of practical politics is now exhaustively mediated by social media, where brands are built and careers as a “public intellectual” are made and broken and where the “success” of one’s arguments—what we now mean by profundity and truth—is measured by “impact”: by the size of one’s following and one’s dexterity in saturating and manipulating the market. What should be a patient philosophical and theological inquiry into the nature of things has become a political contest played out before the eyes of the virtual world, where the object is not understanding but winning.[12]

There are at least two interrelated problems with this transformation. Neither is principally a question of intention, though the massive, ubiquitous stimulus-response mechanism created by this virtual world does shape our subjectivity and distort our character more deeply than we perceive. The first has to do with the journalistic form of rationality intrinsic to these media. As a kind of light-minded empiricism, journalism can only exteriorly juxtapose “facts”—atomized units of allegedly self-evident meaning—to other “facts,” from a neutral methodological vantage devoid of ontological commitments (though of course this neutrality is an illusion). Viewing everything from without in this way, journalism transforms everything it touches into an assemblage of such facts, which is to say that it remakes the world a priori into a two-dimensional image of the superficial ontological assumptions inscribed into its own methodology. Blondel’s observation about the impossibility of historians passing from the factual to the true applies perforce to the journalistic form of empiricism, which converts questions of ontological truth—what is?—into questions of social and political function: how many? under what influence? by what means? to what effect? to whose benefit?[13] Strictly speaking, it is impossible to adjudicate questions of truth in a more than functional sense from within this form of rationality, yet it is also impossible to admit any other form of rationality without undermining journalism’s authority as arbiter of the real. It is not even possible to pose a profound question from within this form of reason, since the reduction of reality to an assemblage of self-evident facts empties the world of the depths to which such questions would correspond. This is one of the reasons why I often say that there is no such thing as a profound question in American public life: only problems to be solved by various technical, political, or bureaucratic means.[14] Thus when journalism attempts to surpass itself and become philosophy, as it inevitably must, its very nature as a thought form ensures in advance that the result is partial and superficial. And the same is true of philosophers and theologians who unconsciously adopt a thought form at odds with their professed ontological commitments.

Second, the superficiality of journalistic reason is compounded by the same structural features that give social media their great power.[15] Social media grant to their users something of the editorial power long enjoyed by traditional media in their mediation of what counts as reality: the power to construct a self-enclosed world, only now with the added capacity to curate a population of “followers.” The illusion that this stylized world is the real world depends both upon the never-ending feedback loop of affirmation from these followers and, even more fundamentally, upon the capacity to exclude from consideration ideas and questions that might undermine the edifice. The media’s mediation of reality, their power to determine what we think about, and the power of not thinking are one and the same. The structural features of a platform like Twitter—its brevity, the “presentism” of its mediated immediacy, and, of course, its omnipresence—enhance this power exponentially. Combine this with the stimulus-response character of these disincarnate exchanges and their performative character as instruments of self-expression and self-promotion, and a powerful inducement to thoughtlessness comes into being: an irresistible “structural temptation,” inherent to the very nature of the medium, to exchange knowing for knowingness and to absolve oneself and one’s followers of the burden of thinking. Social media discourse is therefore structurally sophistic even when it is telling the truth, employing words not for the sake of understanding but as instruments of other ends, ends for which understanding, half-truths, or falsehood may be equally useful as means. In the virtual world created by social media, even the truth itself becomes an ideology, an instrument in the service of power—which is the fate of truth whenever politics becomes the ultimate horizon.[16] Social media and totalitarianism are thus made for each other.[17] As Marshall McLuhan famously observed, the medium is the message.[18]

A New Version of an Old Problem

If half-thinking superficiality is a structural feature, one might say a “system requirement,” of contemporary political discourse in the virtual public square, then one would expect a certain superficiality of both diagnosis and prescription in the transformation of “Catholic postliberalism” from a philosophical orientation to a political enterprise. This is apparent in the “manualist” tendencies of certain New Right thinkers, speaking and writing as if Augustine, or Aquinas, or Charles De Koninck wrote manuals full of ready-made solutions to our present social and political crisis. One is reminded of Blondel’s withering assessment of the neo-scholastics of his day:

to study and care for men and peoples, it is not sufficient to treat them as walking syllogisms, to refute errors demonstratively, by dialectical and didactic means to establish truths which impose themselves as fixed structures, like an “unchangeable essence,” but that it is still necessary to consider the historical and economic evolution, to envisage the science of human perspectives, to rely on the slow maturation of problems, to aid the fumblings, to follow the work of implicit thought and carry it through to the end.[19]

The very existence of Blondel’s remarks, written over a century ago, suggests a deeper, theoretical source for these tendencies of thought than the pressures of the contemporary political and media environment, though perhaps one that would make the protagonists of these tendencies vulnerable to these pressures—and indeed to darker political temptations—when the occasion arose. The thought of St. Thomas is a perennial storehouse of wisdom for the Church, as evidenced by the many Thomist revivals from the 13th century to our own day. It is not for nothing that St. Thomas is called the doctor communis. What Thomism does not offer, however, and made no pretense of offering, is an immutable system of thought that pre-comprehends history prior to its unfolding, a kind of a priori scheme into which all philosophical questions and all historical particulars can be translated without loss. “[I]t should be obvious already,” Blondel writes,

that to lay down without more ado the basic doctrinal affirmation of the thirteenth century is not only to stop up all access to those who think in terms of our own time, but also to make a hopeless attempt to recover for one’s own mind an equilibrium which has been irretrievably lost, which could remain stable only because further distinctions had not yet been made and certain problems had not yet appeared. To think in our day in precisely the same terms as five centuries ago is inevitably to think in a different spirit.[20]

The result is a kind of extrinsicism of thought to history analogous to—and at some points overlapping with—the extrinsicism of grace to nature that de Lubac would later criticize at greater length. Though they are not identical, we might jointly call them an “extrinsicism from above” inasmuch as each depicts the “mechanics” of the fundamental relation in question—the relation of grace to nature, or of cognition to truth—in what are essentially atemporal terms. The extrinsicist then enters into his own time only in a “second moment”—“from without,” as it were—after he has the truth already firmly in hand.[21] As Blondel put it,

[T]he relation of the sign to the thing signified is extrinsic, the relation of the facts to the theology superimposed upon them is extrinsic, and extrinsic too is the link between our thought and our life and the truths proposed to us from the outside. Such, in its naked poverty, is extrinsicism—it lacks the strength to make life circulate between faith and dogma, or between dogma and faith, and allows them by turn to fall tyrannically one upon the other.[22]

The first problem with this “extrinsicism from above,” at least for our purposes, is that it transforms philosophical thinking itself from an open speculative engagement with a reality that necessarily exceeds thought, or even from the endeavor to “comprehend one’s own time in thought” (Hegel), into an exercise in intellectual archaeology whose results provide a kind of exoskeleton for pre-comprehending everything. Beneath this problem is a second, still more fundamental problem: the failure to adequately incorporate historicity or the historical mode of existence into its metaphysical and theological vision.[23] (Joseph Ratzinger was right to think that the reconciliation of ontology and history was one of the principal challenges facing Christian thought.)[24] The inevitable result is a failure to really penetrate and apprehend its own historical moment.

Although Blondel contrasts traditionalism (which he called “veterism”) and historicism, it is clear that he regards them as two, mutually reinforcing extrinsicisms—perhaps anticipating de Lubac’s later argument that the theorists of natura pura, by premising the real upon a counterfactual, had helped to usher in modern secularism. If traditionalism is a kind of “extrinsicism from above” that pretends to view history from without and thereby fails to comprehend it, historicism is a kind of “extrinsicism from below” that eliminates every form of transcendence—God, being, nature, an ontological conception of truth—from both its apprehension of the world and its order of intellectual operations. Both positions are illusory, the one blind to the historical conditions that determine it as reactionary, the other oblivious both to its inherent limits as a form of reason and to its own necessarily metaphysical character.[25] This extrinsicism from below is a mirror image of its counterpart “from above” in that from within this horizon God can appear only as a superfluous superaddition to an order of existence and a form of knowledge that are functionally atheistic, while the extrinsicism “from above” inadvertently reinforces this Godless sphere in its secularity.

Let us consider one contemporary example of how an “extrinsicism from above” fails to apprehend its own historical moment: the attempt by some New Right thinkers to rehabilitate a politics premised upon the common good. I will do them the credit of assuming that they mean by this something more than a return to a traditional form of jurisprudence or the adoption of less libertarian and more family-friendly social and economic policy. Now, there is much to be said for a metaphysically robust articulation of the common good, with its aprioricity, transcendent unity, and indivisibility. St. Augustine depicts these aspects of the good beautifully in The City of God, when he contrasts that good whose possession is not lessened by being shared, indeed which is not properly possessed unless it is shared, to those goods whose possession is attended by anxiety about their inevitable loss and which therefore tend to engender conflict and division.[26] This contrast is fundamental to his dramatic division of humankind into the heavenly and earthly cities according to the objects of their love. Such an emphasis on the transcendence and indivisibility of the common good as a whole is an important corrective to the Maritain-inspired view that has become all but canonical: which equates the common good with the sum of conditions necessary for human flourishing.[27] This impoverished notion of the common good has been one of the portals through which liberalism has entered the Church, as it all too easily slides into the notion that liberal order, as the condition of possibility for the pursuit of all other goods, is itself the summum bonum. From here it is but a short step to the conclusion that the Catholic’s principal religious duty in the public sphere is the preservation of liberal order, a nearly irresistible temptation, for some time now, to American Catholics on both the political left and the political right.

Nevertheless, to treat the common good as a kind of manualistic solution to the crisis of liberal order is to fail to grasp the depth and breadth of liberal nihilism. Genuine political order presupposes political community: the common good presupposes that we share a common nature and a common reality. Mutual deliberation about the means to attain the goods proper to this shared reality presupposes, too, that we all participate in a shared order of reason. Yet all these common things are profoundly threatened by a liberal and technological order premised on their theoretical and practical negation.[28] The exaltation of possibility over actuality in the name of freedom and pragmatic “truth,” or rather, the reconception of freedom and truth as forms of power, has inaugurated a state of permanent revolution against every form of antecedent order—natural, moral, political—with the technical and political dimensions of this revolution mutually reinforcing and capacitating each other.[29] Even the language by which we recognize this world in common, the connatural knowledge that we drink in with our mother’s milk and that precedes every ideology, is now under assault, aided and abetted by a science ideologically bent on bringing the brave new world into being. The “American experiment” is rapidly becoming an experiment to determine whether a society can be duct-taped together by physical infrastructure, bureaucratic and financial administration, and a shared antipathy toward reality. How is anything common to be found or recognized?

Thinkers of the New Right often respond to the crisis of liberalism by saying that the law is a teacher. I fully agree with this traditional point and contended for it long before postliberalism became a preoccupation of the political class. Good laws are obviously preferable to bad ones, and I would no doubt favor many of the laws the New Right would establish were they ever to ascend to power. Nevertheless, the inadequacy of this response in the face of our situation calls into question whether they really understand this crisis. Technology does not wait on politics, and law is largely impotent, and permanently reactive, in the face of interminable technological revolution and its exigencies. As a regime of necessity, technological revolution governs us more deeply than the rule of law ever could, determining the conditions of our thought and action and generating an endless current of downstream possibilities that can scarcely even be imagined before they are an accomplished fact.[30] Twenty years ago, no one could imagine that he needed a smartphone. Now the digital revolution has irreversibly transformed the very nature of human sociality, bringing the sexual revolution to a decisive triumph with astonishing speed—does anyone really think the SOGI juggernaut could have advanced so rapidly without the internet?—, propelling us breathlessly toward a posthuman future, and capacitating new forms of political action without political responsibility and new mechanisms of enforcement operating completely outside the traditional channels of political deliberation and decision. Riots can now be conjured up instantaneously around the globe in response to any provocation before our politicians can brush their teeth in the morning. The furies can be called down without notice upon anyone, anywhere, at the first indication of wrongthink—not by the state, or even by anyone in particular, but as the emergent effect of a vast stimulus-response mechanism and a system of mutual surveillance of all against all that has taken on a life of its own. The very possibility of being caught up in this mechanism suffices to “keep us in awe,” ruling by inducing what Shoshana Zuboff calls “anticipatory conformity.”[31] The Hobbesian ambition of modern politics, to erect an artificial God imbued with quasi-divine attributes, has been realized on the plane not of political but of technological order and will almost certainly become more total still as biometrics fuses biotechnology and information technology together with the “internet of things”—tracking, predicting, and controlling the details of even our bodily life.[32] Almighty Google, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid, is more interior to us than we are to ourselves.[33] Compared with such awesome new powers, having a few hundred people gather under a dome for part of a year to deliberate policy seems positively antiquated. The maturation of this technocratic power signals not another form of political order, transparent to the categories of classical political theory, but the end of politics, the beginning of a post-political age that indeed may already be upon us—and the need for a profound renewal of Catholic thinking. Bromides about how culture is downstream from law do not avail when there is no longer a culture. Triumphal tweeting of such slogans does not amount to a serious analysis of these new realities or a profound grasp of our present situation.

Against this postpolitical, and increasingly posthuman, backdrop, it is difficult to imagine how a Christian, not to say Catholic, political order could be instituted and sustained in the United States without recourse to extraordinary measures exceeding the ordinary coercive powers of law—measures that would likely only accelerate the cultural disintegration and violence already underway. I do not wish to be mistaken here for a “therapist of decline”; for there is nothing at all therapeutic in what I am saying.[34] I do not offer this objection on the usual liberal grounds that America is intractably pluralistic; nor do I propose doubling down on classical liberalism as a way to mitigate the crisis of liberal order. To the contrary, I maintain that American liberal order presupposes and perpetuates a “monism of meaninglessness” impervious to Christianization, which continually remakes Christianity itself in its own irreligious image as an extrinsic superaddition to an essentially atheistic conception of reality.[35] (See the aforementioned “metaphysical disaster.”) The processes of disintegration set in motion by this totalitarian monism seem irreversible, moreover, such that many of the efforts to arrest them will likely have an opposite—accelerating—effect.

Take one prominent, timely example. The damage from a half-century under Roe v. Wade is incalculable. It emanated forth from the decision like ripples on the surface of a pond after a stone has been dropped in: extending farther and farther from the point of impact, across American society and across the years, until eventually it came to touch everything. Beyond the 63 million aborted children, Roe has poisoned American politics, tainted the relationship between women and their children, as well as that between women and men, altered how we think of our relation to our own bodies, and even darkened reason itself, expanding the list of human questions we can no longer think about. The Dobbs decision has now revoked the barbarism’s status as a constitutional principle. That would have been the right thing to do even if it did not prevent a single abortion, which it surely will. The law is, after all, a teacher. Yet those liberal justices who long upheld Roe on the basis of stare decisis have a point about its fundamental place in contemporary American society. Our social ideal of white-collar proletarianism, of society as an atomized collection of sexless, genderless (and childless) pundits and programmers, depends as surely on abortion (and contraception) being reliable social facts as the cotton economy of the Old South depended upon slave labor. Some have likened Roe to Dred Scott, but we seem to forget that the price of nullifying Dred Scott was civil war. One does not simply dismantle such “peculiar institutions” without upending an entire social structure or without a fight.

The obstacles to a postliberal order, much less one that is in any way Catholic, are daunting. Whether such a thing can be realized at all is highly doubtful. That it could be realized without an extraordinary exertion of power seems impossible. The dilemma recalls another problem illuminated by Blondel: extrinsicism’s tendency to make “faith and dogma,” our lived existence and juridical Christianity, “to fall tyrannically one upon the other.”

These tyrannical tendencies appear differently depending on whether they are viewed ad intra or ad extra. Yet the same extrinsicism that produces authoritarian tendencies inside the Church results in political compromises without. This is as true of the “extrinsicism from below” that characterizes the Catholic Left as it is of the Catholic Right, as recent political machinations within the Church have shown. But our concern here is with the extrinsicism from above. Within the Church, this basic extrinsicism underwrites a pervasive clericalism, which is to say, a predominately juridical conception of the Church and of clerical power.[36] Writ large this becomes papal positivism, which is all the more pronounced the more the truths of faith are thought to exceed natural reason and the less the default Thomism of this understanding penetrates present historical reality. If the mechanics of cognition are essentially ahistorical, and natural reason possesses a clear intuitive grasp of the first principles of being and nature, then the failure somehow to possess this understanding cannot be due to a real intellectual puzzlement arising from new philosophical questions as they emerge in the course of history. It must rather be due merely to a moral fault, a failure of will in the face of an obvious truth, a conclusion that absolves the Church from undertaking its own examination of conscience; to ask, for example, how atheism and nihilism could have arisen on what was once Christian soil. And yet if the practical difficulty which St. Thomas saw in acquiring natural knowledge of God is converted into a metaphysical impossibility such that the Church is left in possession of a clear and distinct class of supernatural truths that reason cannot know, then the faithful have no choice but to submit to a magisterial authority forever beyond their comprehension whose positivism has now deprived it of any basis in being or in reason for distinguishing authority from mere power in the modern sense. The way is paved, to put it in Péguy’s terms, for reducing Christianity from a mystique rooted in the structure of intelligible being and the mystery of God to a politique within the field of power relations that defines the modern secular.[37]

Outside the Church, this extrinsicism reinforces the self-conception of secular politics, virtually identical to the “extrinsicism from below,” as an autonomous field of power relations, thereby making the relation between spiritual and temporal powers purely instrumental.[38] In which case, any old atheist regime will do, provided it protects the liberty of the Church and upholds certain moral truths (by, say, eliminating Critical Race Theory in schools and prohibiting Drag Queen Story Hour). And any old Machiavellian means—the enemies lists of the Sodalitium Pianum, for example—become legitimate provided they are placed in the service of Aristotelian ends. This proved to be an irresistible temptation to French integralists in the era of Charles Maurras and Action Française, and it is a worrisome tendency as well among latter-day American integralists. This is no less a problem on the Catholic left, however, where the conflation of authority and power and the absolutization of politics have caused the categories of “true” and “false” to be replaced by those of “friend” and “enemy.” There has even emerged a kind of Sodalitium Franciscanum to name and discipline the perceived enemies of the left’s newfound ultramontanism, and if there is a contemporary American analogue to Charles Maurras and the Catholic collusion in authoritarian politics, it is arguably not the Right’s dalliance with Donald Trump but the “neo-modernist” Catholic left and their embrace of Joe Biden’s fusion of sentimental postconciliar Catholicism and technocratic authoritarianism.[39] In either event, it is the absolutization of politics and the conflation of authority and power characteristic of modern politics as such—and not, in the first instance, the influence of Carl Schmitt—that undergirds the suspicion that integralism is just a Catholic variant of the Hobbesian science of power.

This concern that contemporary integralism is party to the modern conflation of authority and power, and thus to the metaphysical disaster presupposed and perpetuated by modern political order, is not allayed by the integralists’ inordinate preoccupation with the legitimacy of political coercion for spiritual ends.[40] It is true that law has both a pedagogical and coercive function and that it is necessary for any political order—including liberal order—to coerce its citizens for the sake of ends it regards as good and true. It is also true that the Church has never relieved the political order of its obligation to serve the truth and even to promote true religion, though Dignitatis Humanae draws out the implicit truth that freedom itself is an integral dimension of a truth that is finally convertible with Trinitarian love.[41] One hardly needs to invoke the authority of St. Thomas to explain this teaching or to remind us that coercion can inculcate virtue. Every father already knows it. But it would be strange and indeed perverse if I were to define the essence of fatherhood by my power to coerce my children, and it would be abusive if that power were not informed from top to bottom by my love for them and by a true understanding of their flourishing. However necessary it may often be to compel them to do what is right, there remains an infinite difference—an infinitely rich difference, philosophically speaking—between their being made to do what is right by my exterior imposition and their interior assent to truth and goodness as such. The point is not that coercion is always and everywhere illegitimate or that authority and true power are outside of each other; the point is that that they are not identical, that recognition and willing assent involve an ontological affirmation of a truth that can finally compel only by its own self-evidence, that authority, in distinction from mere power, operates as such by eliciting this willing affirmation, such that whenever truth is in any way recognized, including in the potestas that acts on its behalf, the willing self-surrender to its intrinsic evidence will be found already to have taken place. To fail to give the distinction between authority and power its proper metaphysical due, to recognize its relation to the intrinsic intelligibility of being and the communicability of the good, in other words to treat it principally as a question of function or office, is already to have succumbed to the modern reduction of power to sheer force.

In view of these considerations, we can say that it would have been better for the integralists to begin not with the Gelasian Dyarchy or the societas perfecta of Immortale Dei, but with Lumen Gentium’s definition of the Church as “in Christ ... in the nature of sacrament—a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of unity among men.”[42] It is not that Lumen Gentium supersedes or denies the traditional teaching, but that it comprehends the Gelasian distinction and establishes the traditional affirmations on a more adequate theological and ontological basis. Beginning with the sacramental definition of the Church, rooting the very being of the Church in the self-communication of the divine Logos would have, at the theoretical level, reversed the modern overthrow of Christian Platonism. It would have thereby provided a basis for overcoming the modern reduction of auctoritas to potestas by establishing authority on its proper metaphysical and cosmological foundations. It would have better protected the Church in its sacramental, organismic, and Marian nature from devolving into the juridical Church of the right or the administrative Church of the left, thus laying the groundwork for rescuing the Christian mystique—the mystery of its contemplative, supernatural, and eschatological communion which is its source and end—from its reduction to a politique.

Is Postliberalism Really Postliberal?

Whether a kind of Hobbesian power politics is the ineluctable telos of integralist thinking depends not only on the extrinsicism inherent in integralist thought, which ends up treating the political sphere as a graceless sphere of power relations, but also on whether integralism is regarded principally as a theoretical or a practical exercise, a point about which there seems to be a great deal of ambiguity and confusion. As a theoretical matter, the revival of integralist thought is, despite its aforementioned defects, a welcome development. It challenges the simplistic narrative, common to both the left and the right, about the Church’s alleged rapprochement with liberal democracy as the highest and final form of human government, and it gives impetus to a clearer inner reconciliation of pre- and post-conciliar teaching. It should provoke renewed thought on the nature and ontological basis of authority and its distinction from power. It should occasion reflection on the true relationship—true in a “Platonic,” ontological sense—between political and sacramental order and ought to stimulate thinking on new forms of authentic Christian existence in historical situations where this relationship is impossible to realize, where the divine presence is felt most keenly in its apparent absence, as eschatological hope and longing. As a theoretical matter, it raises important questions that have been largely ignored, and if the answers are thought through well, the present implicit Hobbesianism need not leave a mark. The revival of integralist thought is a welcome development, in other words, for theological and ecclesiological reasons that have little to do with the fate of American liberal democracy and that are presumably of little interest to reporters from national political magazines.

As a practical political program in twenty-first century America, however, integralism is a fantasy, a virtual politics for a virtual world—or perhaps an exercise in personal branding for would-be political influencers.[43] This unreality perhaps explains why integralism in practice always delivers substantially less than integralist theory, to the point that it is unclear what relationship, if any, there is between integralist theory and the “postliberal order” now being advanced by professed integralists. After two years of trolling the twitterverse in the name of integralism, Sohrab Ahmari announced on Twitter that he and his postliberal friends were men of action and unilaterally declared an end to the debate over integralism on grounds that it all had become tedious and seemed so very 2017.[44] Now this could simply reflect the strategic calculation that integralism, while a great way to attract the attention of the market, is not really a winning political brand in 2024. It is impossible to say. Nevertheless, Ahmari’s unspoken assumption that integralism raises no philosophical and theological questions of lasting importance or difficulty indicates that his integralism was always a political stance and that he never took more than a journalistic interest in the substantive theological and ecclesiological questions at issue. This would suggest either that postliberal practice has little to do with integralist theory or that contemporary American integralism is really only the new Catholic “brand” of conservative power politics. In either event, the Church has essentially disappeared as a factor in the thought of American Catholic postliberals. Stanley Hauerwas used to say that the subject of Christian ethics in America is America—in other words, not the Church, not Christian truth claims or eschatological hope, not the peculiar form or demands of the Christian life, not even the meaning of history or the order of nature that is creation, but the nation. The same could be said of American Catholic postliberalism; indeed the name of Ahmari’s forthcoming conference—“Restoring a Nation”—says precisely this.[45]

All of this calls into question the extent to which American “postliberalism” is really postliberal after all and what finally differentiates it from the earlier versions of conservative Catholic Americanism that it seeks so eagerly to replace.

The conservative champions of “postliberal order” obviously seek to wrest American conservatism away from the neo-liberalism and libertarianism that has defined it for the last half-century or so. Yet, there seems to be little in postliberal order that cannot also be found in earlier historical iterations of liberal order or counted among liberalism’s imaginative possibilities; indeed the new postliberals sometimes justify their proposals—vigorous anti-trust laws, blue laws, and obscenity laws, for example—by appeal to an earlier period of American history in a manner not wholly inconsistent with the method of a Robert Reilly or a Nathan Schlueter. These may be the most humane and decent proposals presently on offer, but that is beside the point: surely there is more to postliberalism than defeating “wokeness” or even tweaking capitalism to be more responsive to the needs of families and the working class, as desirable as these ends may be. Yet, amongst the champions of postliberal order, there is no serious analysis of the nature of our New Atlantis, nor of the pragmatic, technical reason that now defines what it means for us to think. Neither is there any program to overthrow our reigning scientism and restore theology to the queen of the sciences.

Have they made any substantive philosophical advances in our understanding of these intractable phenomena? This lack of real interest in the nature of such things means that even the practical proposals don’t resemble a serious attempt, were such a thing possible, to “overthrow” liberal order by political means. There is no proposal to inscribe the authority of the Catholic Church as guardian of the truth about God and man into the American Constitution, nor for suspending democratic elections as a prerequisite to reestablishing a permanent Catholic vision of things amidst the recalcitrant nihilism of our age. There is no throne that a restorationist could even restore so as to be able to re-integrate political and sacramental order, much less to re-establish their joint basis in a symbolic cosmology.[46]

The fact that so many defining features of our secular present would be left untouched by postliberalism raises questions not only about the meaning of the “post-” but about the “liberalism” we are supposedly moving beyond. Is “liberal order” the political expression of a comprehensive metaphysical revolution, or merely a free-standing political arrangement, indifferent to its metaphysical substructure? Is becoming postliberal merely a matter of changing governing philosophies—preferring Charles De Koninck to Jacques Maritain, John Courtney Murray, and John Rawls, for example? Or is it a question of constitutional theory and judicial philosophy—of retrieving older, traditional elements from Anglo-American tradition of jurisprudence? Perhaps, then, nothing of theological and ontological consequence occurred in the scientific and technological revolutions or in the political revolutions that transformed Christendom into a collection of republics. Maybe bureaucracy—as Chad Pecknold suggested at a recent New Polity conference—is simply the rational way of ordering society, instead of the institutionalized form of a mechanized and de-humanized rationality.[47] Maybe Murray was right after all, and the Founders “built better than they knew”: maybe American governing institutions are ontologically neutral and devoid of content and only need the right kind of Catholics to fill them. The old “Judeo-Christian” tradition has even re-appeared in this connection, newly rebranded as “cultural Christianity,” to perform its traditional role in the alchemy whereby “the combination of American Lockeanism and American Puritanism/Calvinism produced something like an accidental American Thomism.”[48] In that case, however, it becomes difficult to differentiate formally between “postliberal order” and George Weigel’s perennial formula of electoral politics plus the moral renewal of civil society. Maybe becoming postliberal is just plain harder than it seems.

The Consolation of Philosophy

In its earlier iterations, “postliberal thought” denoted a philosophical and theological outlook: a fundamental ontological critique, undertaken from the vantage point of the Trinitarian mystery and the metaphysics of creation, of secular modernity’s “metaphysical disaster” manifest in the indivisible unity of liberal political order, capitalist economic order, and the technological order that encompasses and overtakes them. Now that postliberalism has become a brand in the virtual public square, it no longer stands for a wholesale critique of the founding assumptions of modernity, and thus for a difference in fundamental philosophy, but merely for a difference in policy that unwittingly takes at least some of those assumptions for granted. Many of the policy prescriptions that emerge from this movement will certainly be preferable to both woke progressivism and the older, neo-conservative liberalism. It would nevertheless prove tragic if the reduction of postliberalism to a political platform and a social media brand were to absolve us of the burden of real thinking and understanding or to inadvertently aid the Catholic left in reducing the mystical, sacramental Church to the Church of pure administration.

If the deepest problems with our politics are not political but philosophical and religious, then it follows that the solution to these problems is also not political but philosophical. “Solution” in these terms, however, does not mean “restoring a nation” premised upon the negation of Catholic Christianity, and it is arguably those who imagine otherwise that are the real “therapists of decline.” This is because the “negation of Catholic Christianity” is not just the domestication and protestantization of the institutional Church, or the overthrow of Catholic morality, but the negation of the metaphysics of creation and of an intelligible order of nature, the very rejection of the notion of truth rooted in the intelligibility of the eternal Logos, and the rejection of the possibility of a mystical communion with the transcendent. It is the denial, to put it in Péguy’s terms, of the eternal in the temporal. This is presumably what he meant when he bemoaned the de-Christianization of the modern world,

the world that tries to be clever. The world of the intelligent, of the advanced, of those who know, who don’t have to be told a thing twice, who have nothing more to learn.... That is to say: the world of those who believe in nothing, not even in atheism, who devote themselves, who sacrifice themselves to nothing. More precisely: the world without a mystique.[49]

Such a world is not merely less moral, more sinful—which would make it simply a bad Christian world.

What we mean is that the modern world obviously renounces the whole system, both parts together and their interplay. This is what we mean when we say that the world is being de-Christianized, and we affirm the disaster.[50]

Inherent in the very structure of being is an eliminable “surprise” quality, an irreducible novelty built into the structure of creation ex nihilo.[51] Human action, moreover, exhibits something of this novelty in that remarkable quality that Hannah Arendt calls “natality,” the capacity to initiate something genuinely new. And miracles continue to occur, despite our systematic efforts to insulate ourselves from them.[52] To speak of our postpolitical or posthuman “fate” as I often do is, therefore, not to speak of some precise state of affairs ontologically determined to occur with mechanical necessity, but to speak of a kind of formal and final causality—or sowing and reaping, if you will: the logical outworking, within a range of possible variations, of deeds we have already done and cause-effect trains we have already set in motion. The possibility for error in trying to anticipate such things is, thankfully, built into the very structure of reality. However if, as seems likely, it should turn out that our de-Christianized civilization has already destroyed itself and is simply waiting for the deed to become apparent, that it cannot be “restored” but must be rebuilt from the ruins by our children’s children, then “solving” this disaster will mean undergoing the inevitable consequences of this fateful renunciation in freedom and in faith, and with a patient hope that only a deep trust in the living God can justify. It will mean keeping alive the memory of what it has meant to be human and coming to terms with the real depths of what we no longer believe, that its ubiquitous presence might be rediscovered in the longing engendered by its apparent absence. There is no hope for such a solution in a “clever” world that has renounced understanding or in a Church pervaded with pious atheisms that do not know themselves and are intent on misreading the signs of the times. There is no hope for it, that is, unless we are able to “comprehend on our own time on thought” in the light of a truth, a Logos, that transcends all times. There will be no “restoration,” “rebuilding”—indeed, no salvation—without a renewal of the Catholic mind. “The truth will set you free” is not a platitude but an ontological and theological principle. The Catholic and human future—and it will be both, or it will be neither—depends finally not on political action but on rediscovering the truth of this principle.

Endnotes

I would like to thank Reuben Slife for his extraordinary labor and exacting standards in editing this piece. Any remaining errors, lapses in logic, or ambiguities are wholly my responsibility.
For example, the so-called “New Atheism” routinely projects for itself the watchmaker God of 18th-century Anglican broad church latitudinarianism as the counterpart to its Darwinian conception of nature, thus illustrating the principle that atheism is parasitically dependent upon the God it doesn’t believe in and showing why atheists cannot stop themselves from doing theology, usually badly.
Two additional things should be said here. First, it is obvious that human thought and action cannot alter the God/world relation ex parte dei, which is the measure of the truth of that relation. On the other hand, in saying that the advent of modernity altered the God/world relation as we consider it ex parte mundi, I am not referring principally to what those within the modern world know themselves to think—though many of modernity’s theoretical architects were quite self-conscious about the nature of this reinvention—but to what modern people in effect think, guided by the objective “plausibility structures” of the surrounding world, which shape thought and action in advance.
The phrases are from John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (London: Forgotten Books, 2012), 37.
On sociologism, see Augusto Del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, trans. Carlo Lancellotti (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s, 2014), 68–85, 217–66.
See Michael Hanby, “A More Perfect Absolutism,” First Things (October 2016), www.firstthings.com/article/2016/10/a-
more-perfect-absolutism; “Before and After Politics,” The Political Science Reviewer 43.2 (2019): 511–30; “For and Against Integralism, First Things (March 2020), www.firstthings.com/article/2020/03/for-and-against-integralism; “The Birth of Liberal Order and the Death of God: A Reply to Robert Reilly’s America on Trial,” New Polity 1.4 (February 2021): 54–85, available at https://newpolity.com/s/Hanby-The-Birth-of-the-Liberal-Order-and-the-Death-of-God.pdf; “American Revolution as Total Revolution: Del Noce and the American Experiment,” Communio 48.3 (Fall 2021): 450-86, available at www.communio-icr.com/files/48.3_Hanby_-_final_HQ.pdf.
Alasdair MacIntyre, George Grant, David L. Schindler, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Milbank all come to mind. I recall first encountering the term in the subtitle of the important little book by the great Yale theologian George Lindbeck. See Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1984).
See Patrick Deneen, “A Catholic Showdown Worth Watching,” The American Conservative, February 6, 2014, www.theamericanconservative.com/a-catholic-showdown-worth-watching/.
Two events in recent years have impressed upon me firsthand the power of the American pundit class to determine what the nation sees and thinks about, even though the ideas of the professional pundit are almost always derivative and can rarely be considered original or profound. (As I will discuss below, it is indeed the great genius of journalism to make profound ideas banal.) The first was the launch of Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option at the National Press Club in Washington, days after it was reviewed in the pages of the Times by both Brooks and Douthat. The centerpiece of the event was a discussion among three journalists, none of whom were really equipped to discuss the ideas at issue with any depth or rigor. The evening quickly devolved into each taking turns opining, in effect, “Well, this is what I think Christianity is.” The second was the French-Ahmari debate, a curious spectacle in which the Catholic University of America invited two pundits to address a lecture hall full of scholars—many of them, presumably, political philosophers who had spent their lives studying political theory—on the virtues and shortcomings of liberalism. This debate eventually focused on whether “Drag Queen Story Hour” is to be counted among the blessings of liberty, an important question, no doubt, and a potent symbol, but one that hardly gets to the foundation of the problem. The oft-repeated spectacle of universities cozying up to famous ‘opinion makers’ in the media is one that deserves scrutiny unto itself. I invoke it here only to illustrate the seductive power of punditry. Suffice it to say that in a better world, pundits would attend university lectures, not give them.
See Hanby, “Before and After Politics”; “American Revolution as Total Revolution,” op. cit. In her prologue to The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt makes the following observation:
“The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society. The fulfillment of the wish [to liberate ourselves from the necessity of labor], therefore, like the fulfillment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating. It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.... What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.” (Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 4–5)
We may be about to discover whether she is right, or whether something could, in fact, be worse. What happens when a society that has believed only in politics, that is, in the power of human agency to control reality through political and technical means, is failed by politics? What happens, and what becomes of the basic consensus that underlies any political community, when that faith in politics is lost?
This conflation is due to the resurgence of integralist thought among Catholic thinkers such as Pater Edmund Waldstein and others associated with The Josias—including the publication in 2020 of Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy by Thomas Crean, O.P., and Alan Fimister—and to the fact that two of the most prominent postliberals online, Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule, were at least for a time identifying themselves as integralists.
Here is an example. In my 2020 article “For and Against Integralism” (op. cit.), I made the following statement attempting to distinguish auctoritas and potestas at the level of essence rather than of office or function—which is to say, to distinguish them metaphysically rather than politically. (The point will be developed a bit further below.) “Authority possesses no extrinsic force; it can compel only intrinsically, by evoking recognition and love, by eliciting the willing surrender to its evidence.” (The statement distilled part of the analysis contained in a little-read article that I had written years earlier, which attempted to develop an Augustinian understanding of the nature of assent in the context of a Trinitarian metaphysics. See Hanby, “These Three Abide: Augustine and the Eschatological Non-Obsolescence of Faith,” Pro Ecclesia 14.3 [Summer 2005]: 340–360.) The point was perhaps not well stated or fully developed, but it was (I thought) an attempt to make an important philosophical distinction that implicates a host of other important questions, among them the nature of truth and assent, and the manner in which the former obliges the latter. Ahmari, showing not the least interest in understanding, extracted this remark from the context of the surrounding argument and responded, in the virtual presence of his thousands of followers, with the following tweet (since deleted): “Jailed Donatists couldn’t be reached for comment. Pelagians suppressed at Augustine’s behest.” (As if, after writing a book on Augustine, I was not aware of the Donatist controversy.) The essential point here is not the personal affront, about which I care very little. It is that with a few strokes of the keyboard, one can score a rousing rhetorical victory before an audience of thousands, all while absolving oneself and one’s followers of the burden of thinking or understanding. The example, which could be multiplied thousands of times each day, illustrates how—as I will argue below—social media discourse is essentially sophistry that transforms even true words from vessels of understanding into instruments of power.
It would require a separate study to catalog and analyze the various ways journalistic media deform thought. For a start, see D. C. Schindler, “Social Media is Hate Speech: A Platonic Reflection,” Humanum 2 (2020), https://humanumreview.com/articles/social-media-is-hate-speech.
I am suggesting, in other words, that to live and think as an American is to be a pragmatist. But this requires understanding pragmatism, as Dewey himself understood it, not simply as one among many philosophical options, or America’s peculiar contribution to the history of philosophy, but as the American spirit come to philosophical self-consciousness and expression. For more on this point see Hanby, “The Birth of Liberal Order and the Death of God,” “American Revolution as Total Revolution,” op. cit. See also George Grant’s essay, “In Defence of North America,” in George Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969), 15–40, and the essay by Hans Jonas, “The Practical Uses of Theory” in Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 188–210. Both essays have had a tremendous effect on my own thinking.
I have long wanted to bring together extended metaphysical critiques of journalism as a form of rationality and of digital communications technologies, social media in particular, as forms of communication that presuppose and advance a technological ontology. The remarks in this essay can provide no more than a promissory note for this project. For a brief and somewhat dated first stab at the the journalistic side of this project, see Hanby, “The Totalitarian Myth of the Free Press,” The Federalist, March 10, 2014, https://thefederalist.com/2014/03/10/the-totalitarian-myth-of-the-free-press/. For a more philosophical reflection on the digital reconfiguration of time and space, see Hanby, “Technology and Time,” Communio 43.3 (Fall 2016), 342–64, available at www.communio-icr.com/files/43.3_Hanby.pdf.
Too little serious attention is paid to the factors by which truth itself is made into an ideology. In his essay, “The Traditionalist Error,” Robert Spaemann examines the traditionalist origins of sociology, which converts ontological truths into social functions, thus paving the way both for the reduction of truth to ideology and for truth to function as ideology—“ideologies” being defined, in Del Noce’s words, as “expressions of the historical-social situation of some groups, as spiritual superstructures of forces that are not spiritual at all, such as class interests, unconscious collective motivations, and concrete circumstances of social life.” Spaemann’s remarks are pertinent, in ways that I hope will become clear as the argument unfolds, to the rise of the new Catholic postliberalism and its relation to the modern conflation of the speculative and the practical: “It is easy to be overhasty in one’s criticism of the founder of traditionalism....
Bonald was not an irrationalist, to the contrary, he was an extreme rationalist. He was moreover a pious Catholic. He believed in God. And he was convinced that the order of human society has its foundation, and has to have its foundation, in the order of being. “The holiest of all legitimacies is that of reason and truth,” he wrote.... He moreover does not define sovereignty by the jus utendi et abutendi as does his “decisionistic” brother-in-arms, de Maistre. The only thing for him in the final instance is the volonté générale, which is no other than nature or the will of God. But in spite of all these things, this philosopher, who was the last person in charge of censoring the press in Restoration France, represents the moment of transition to modern, atheistic, positivistic, counter-revolutionary totalitarianism....
As a convinced Catholic, Bonald is still persuaded that only the truth can be useful for society in the end. “The truth will make you free,” as he still read in the Gospel. The novelty is that, for him, the proper and final argument in favor of a thing’s truth was the value it has for society. Thus, concerning the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the reality of a final judgment, he writes, “These dogmas are true, because they are useful for the preservation of society.” “Everything that is useful for the preservation of civil society is necessary; everything that is necessary is a truth; and thus all truths are useful for man and for society, and therefore anything that is dangerous for man and for society is an error.” Needless to say, this is a false inference. Nietzsche spoke of useful and necessary errors. The necessary association of truth and benefit presupposes a harmony that has already been established theologically. It therefore presupposes precisely what it is supposed to prove, namely the existence of God. In order to be reasonable, the existence of God must be justified on a basis different from the social necessity of this conviction. When theology turns into a mere sociological tautology, there is no reason to keep it. But this is what happens in Bonald. What disappears is the insight into the meaning of truth that transcends all things sociological, insight into its sociological uselessness and therefore into its liberating character. Granted, the truth is necessary for society, but precisely for this reason: because it is not defined by this necessity.”
See Del Noce, The Age of Secularization, trans. Carlo Lancellotti (Montreal: McGill-Queens, 2017), 219; Spaemann, A Robert Spaemann Reader: Philosophical Essays on Nature, God, and the Human Person, ed. and trans. D. C. Schindler and Jeanne Heffernan Schindler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 41–2.
In the event it is not obvious, by “totalitarianism” I mean not one among many possible political systems that could be contrasted with “democracy,” but the subordination of the whole of reality to politics consequent upon the negation of a transcendent horizon and the priority of contemplation/theoria that accompanies it. Totalitarianism in this sense is obviously perfectly compatible with “democracy.”
It is therefore astonishing to me that Chad Pecknold can say, “Far from a non-religious tendency, what our secular liberal orders more reliably, and more increasingly produce is very, very bad religion which disorders human passions, intellects and wills,” while remaining oblivious that Twitter is an order that “disorders human passions, intellects, and wills.” See Pecknold, “Augustine’s Confessions,” https://open.spotify.com/episode/5YeFQxSCZXx78M7udmYsP8.
Blondel, “The Third ‘Testis’ Article,” Communio 26.4 (Winter 1999): 846–874, at 850.
Blondel, “Letter on Apologetics,” in The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 125–208, at 149.
It should be said that self-professed integralists such as Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, and Sohrab Ahmari, do not really do theology, but treat integralism principally as political theory. They seem to let Pater Edmund Waldstein, who deserves much of the credit for reinvigorating integralist thought, do their theologizing for them. Waldstein’s theology thus seems to stand as a kind of placeholder for their own, though beyond that the precise relation between their thought is unclear. To the extent that their thought can be characterized as extrinsicist, it is a practical extrinsicism, an extrinsicism presumed in the place that theology and metaphysics holds with respect to their political theorizing, rather than theoretically articulated. As I will suggest below, however, an “extrinsicism from below” that theorized about politics in a manner that is functionally atheistic would itself find theological warrant from an “extrinsicism from above” that bifurcated grace and nature, ontology and history. Theoretical traces of a grace/nature extrinsicism can be seen in Waldstein’s effort to split the difference between what he regards as the Augustinian pessimism of thinkers such as Milbank and William Cavanaugh, who in his view so conflate nature and grace that they deny the legitimacy of political order, and the dualism of the Whig Thomists, who so separate them as to leave the autonomous, liberal political order intact and untouched. It seems also to underlie his criticisms of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s stance on integralism, but while Waldstein (somewhat ham-fistedly) accuses Balthasar and the nouvelle théologie of compromising the gratuity of grace, he does not really elaborate his own position on this question. See Waldstein, “Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy,” The Josias, March 3, 2016, https://thejosias.com/2016/03/03/integralism-and-gelasian-dyarchy/; “Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Critique of Integralism,” The Josias, February 27, 2018, https://thejosias.com/2018/02/27/hans-urs-von-balthasars-critique-of-integralism/. D. C. Schindler has rebutted Waldstein’s criticism of Balthasar in the context of laying out his own alternative vision: see Schindler, “ ‘Societas Perfecta’: Neither Integralism nor Disintegralism,” New Polity 1.3 (November 2020): 24–45.
Blondel, “History and Dogma,” in The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 219–287, at 228.
Entailed in the failure to incorporate historicity into its metaphysics, we might suggest, is a failure to incorporate the ex nihilo novelty inherent in the world that is creation.
Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, trans. Sr. Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 15–17.
Blondel’s criticism of historicism and the impossibility of the historian, qua historian, passing from the factual to the the true, is instructive here. “It is impossible,” Blondel wrote, “that history by itself can know a fact which would be more than a fact: each link in the chain, and the chain as a whole, involve the psychological and moral problems implied by the least action or testimony. It is easy enough to see why. Real history is composed of human lives; and human life is metaphysics in act.” The only solution for this science, as for every other, is “to recognize itself as an abstraction bound up with a thought and a life from which it borrows its material,” to acknowledge somehow, from within its very methodology, “that it remains dependent upon ulterior problems, upon sciences superior to it, which it can neither supplant nor replace” and that it “keep its researches perpetually dependent upon the ultimate questions which it has not the competence to decide by itself or, indeed at all; for while the historian has, as it were, a word to say in everything concerning man, there is nothing on which he has the last word.” History cannot supplant metaphysics “except by a usurpation and by falsely proclaiming itself a sort of total metaphysics, a universal vision, a Weltanschauung.” Blondel, “History and Dogma,” in The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, op. cit., 238, 236, 234.
Augustine, De Civ., XV.5.
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church seems to offer a subtle corrective to this interpretation, both in its insistence upon the unity and interrelatedness of each facet of the Church’s social doctrine and in its commentary upon the Maritain-inspired definition, which it calls “the primary and broadly accepted sense”:
“The common good does not consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of each subject of a social entity. Belonging to everyone and to each person, it is and remains ‘common,’ because it is indivisible and because only together is it possible to attain it, increase it, and safeguard its effectiveness, with regard also to the future.... Just as the moral actions of an individual are accomplished in doing what is good, so too the actions of a society attain their full stature when they bring about the common good.” (Compendium 164)
What seems to be missing, unfortunately, from this clarification is that the common good is not simply a good which society “brings about” in common, but a source that makes society possible in the first place.
All of this Augusto Del Noce sums up as a totalitarianism of disintegration, aimed not at a positive political program, but at the order of being: see Del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, op. cit.
For example, I have argued that the sexual revolution, conventionally regarded (by conservatives) as a revolution in sexual morality and (by progressives) as a moment in the ever-forward march of freedom, is more adequately understood as a revolution in our archetypal conception of human nature to become that which is fundamentally technological in nature: theoretically, in its essentially dualistic, plastic, and mechanistic conception of the human body; practically, in that its most dramatic ideological expressions (same-sex marriage, transgenderism) presuppose the technological conquest of human biology as their condition of possibility and require the biotechnocratic fusion of politics, medicine, and technology in order to be instantiated. The sexual revolution, in other words, is the moral and political outworking of the technological revolution brought fully to bear on ourselves. See Hanby, “The Brave New World After Obergefell,” available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3501246.
This is a consistent theme for Hans Jonas. See, e.g., his essay “The Altered Nature of Human Action” in Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1–24.
Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology 30.1 (June 2015): 75–89, at 82.
The interminable dynamism propelling us from a political society toward a post-political, technocratic totalitarianism, what Hans Jonas calls the “unwanted, built-in, automatic utopianism” of technology, is a feature of technological development and technological civilization as such, prior to and apart from the emergence of “Big Tech” (Jonas, Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974], 18). Law and political processes are just as reactive, and therefore just as impotent, in the face of developments in biotechnology as they are, for example, with those in information technologies. Both are aspects of technological civilization regarded as a non-linear, complex adaptive system whose ensemble behavior is irreducible to—and uncontrollable by—the behavior of its individual components, which continually resets the conditions of human thought and action. The movement from a political to a technocratic society is inscribed into the DNA of American liberalism insofar as it instantiates a “Baconian” conception of being, nature, knowledge, and truth. This technocratic destiny is therefore not simply a function of Big Data and those aspects of technological civilization that Shoshana Zuboff identifies with “surveillance capitalism,” though this is certainly a signal moment in that transformation. Zuboff writes powerfully of this development:
“In the world implied by Varian’s assumptions, habitats inside and outside the human body are saturated with data and produce radically distributed opportunities for observation, interpretation, communication, influence, prediction, and ultimately modification of the totality of action. Unlike the centralized power of mass society, there is no escape from Big Other. There is no place where the Other is not.”
She concludes,
“Surveillance capitalism thus qualifies as a new logic of accumulation with a new politics and social relations that replaces contracts, the rule of law, and social trust with the sovereignty of Big Other. It imposes a privately administered compliance of rewards and punishments that is sustained by a unilateral redistribution of rights. Big Other exists in the absence of legitimate authority and is largely free from detection or sanction. In this sense Big Other may be described as an automated coup from above: not a coup d’état but rather a coup des gens.” (Zuboff, “Big Other,” 82–3)
For more on the “utopian drift” of technology and the altered nature of human action in technological society, see Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, op. cit., 1–24.
Some of these possibilities are anticipated in Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017), 309–402.
See Chad Pecknold, “Therapists of Decline,” The Postliberal Order (blog), December 14, 2021, https://postliberalorder.substack.com/p/therapists-of-decline.
The phrase “monism of meaninglessness” is from George Grant’s essay, “Religion and the State.” Grant writes,
“How can we escape the fact that the necessary end product of the religion of progress is not hope, but a society of existentialists who know themselves in their own self-consciousness, but know the world entirely as despair? In other words, when the religion of progress becomes the public religion we cannot look forward to a vital religious pluralism, but to a monism of meaninglessness. And what becomes of the constitutional state in a society where more and more persons face their own existing as meaningless? Surely the basic problem of our society is the problem of individuals finding meaning to their existence. The most important cause of the psycho-pathological phenomena, which are becoming terrifyingly widespread at all échelons in North America, is just that human beings can find no meaning to their existence.”
My use of the phrase does not exclude Grant’s, and indeed should be understood to include the many social pathologies toward which he gestures—such as the rapidly spreading epidemic of seemingly random mass violence that gives evidence of this underlying monism—but which were not as prevalent when Grant wrote. However, as I use it (and, I expect, also as he does), the phrase should also be understood to include the ontology that liberal and technological order enact, an ontology that robs all things of their given, and therefore intrinsic, form, finality, and meaning, and recreates these as objects of possible choice subject to human freedom and technical control. See Grant, Technology and Empire (Toronto: Anansi, 1969), 41–60, at 58.
This clericalism is not the exclusive property of the Right. It is also presupposed by the Catholic Left, who ironically promote, in the name of anti-clericalism, the most clericalist conception of the Church imaginable—the Church of pure administration, although now distributed more “democratically” among various parties and agencies. See Hanby, “Synodality, Sociologism, and the Judgment of History,” op. cit. Apparently this is not a new problem; Péguy laments that “we sail between two curés: the lay curés and the ecclesiastical curés; the clerical and the anticlerical curés; the lay curés who deny the eternal aspect of the temporal, who would like to extract the eternal from the temporal, remove the eternal from the temporal; and the ecclesiastical curés who deny the temporal in the eternal, who would like to remove the temporal from the eternal.” Péguy, “Clio I,” in Temporal and Eternal, trans. Alexander Dru (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 85–165, at 114.
Péguy, “Clio I,” in Temporal and Eternal, op. cit.
This stands in contrast to a view that saw political and ecclesiastical order as each participating, in its own proper mode, in an essentially symbolic/sacramental order of reality—but such a view could not really be invoked without a revolution in metaphysical cosmology.
How else to describe the recent event in Chicago where “People named names,” according to Michael Sean Winters, organizer of the event. See Jack Jenkins, “In Chicago, the pope’s allies gathered to discuss his vision—and his detractors,” Religion News Service, March 31, 2022, https://religionnews.com/2022/03/31/in-chicago-the-popes-allies-gathered-to-discuss-his-vision-and-his-detractors/. For exhibit A in the claim that Joe Biden most occupies the position of Charles Maurras, see the ridiculous book from Massimo Faggioli, Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States (New London: Bayard, 2021). Augusto Del Noce differentiates the new modernism from the old whose metaphysics it completes by virtue of its political origin: historically, in that it began in opposition to fascism and forever imagines itself as defending the world from fascism, which blinds it to its collusion in a still more total form of totalitarianism, and ontologically in that it presupposes and perpetuates the metaphysics of historicism and its “sociologizing” reduction of truth to social, historical, and psychological conditions. See Del Noce, The Age of Secularization, 86–95.
Recognizing that the integralists are simply employing a traditional way of speaking, I leave aside the problematic dualism implied by the distinction.
See David L. Schindler and Nicholas J. Healy, Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom: A New Translation, Redaction History, and Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015).
Lumen Gentium, I.1.
Pater Edmund Waldstein, to his credit, concedes that the likelihood of an integralist order conforming to his theoretical specifications are exceedingly unlikely, though this seems to lessen the practical difference, in our present moment, between integralists and garden-variety Catholic conservatives. See Waldstein, “Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy,” op. cit.
See the thread from Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari), beginning with the tweet that starts, “I have to say, like @gjpappin, having engaged them intensively since 2017-18, I now find the liberalism/integralism debates downright tedious,” October 28, 2021, 9:52 AM, https://twitter.com/SohrabAhmari/status/1453721430621782024.
See https://institutes.franciscan.edu/restoring-a-nation/.
The very absurdity of these suggestions raises questions about what the integration of “spiritual” and “temporal” power could even mean now, after the death of God and metaphysical catastrophe, but I will leave it to the integralists to answer them.
See the exchange in the second panel discussion at the New Polity conference “Is America a Tyranny?,” June 4, 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gzxGnx3owI, beginning about 12:40.
Peter Lawler, “Better than They Knew: A Response to Patrick Deneen,” First Things, January 25, 2013, www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/01/better-than-they-knew-a-response-to-patrick-deneen. See Sohrab Ahmari, Gladden Pappin, and Chad Pecknold, “In Defense of Cultural Christianity,” The American Conservative, www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/in-defense-of-cultural-christianity/. Let me say here that there is nothing per se wrong in the notion of “cultural Christianity.” But there is a vast difference in a cultural Christianity that is the residuum of a millennium of Catholic history, that reflects cultural habits deeply shaped by a Christianity inscribed into the land itself, and what any form of “cultural Christianity” must be in America, where the price of religious survival is becoming some form of Protestant congregationalism and tacitly assenting to the theology and metaphysics of liberalism despite what one voluntaristically “believes.” Failure to attend to this difference in “cultural Christianities” is evidence of a deeper failure on the part of American postliberals to adequately analyze, in philosophical and theological terms, the meaning of America as an essentially Protestant and modern project or the inherently totalitarian nature of that project. “Judeo-Christianity” and now “cultural Christianity” serve to paper over this problem.
Peguy, “Memories of Youth,” in Temporal and Eternal, op. cit., 7.
Peguy, “Clio I,” in Temporal and Eternal, op. cit., 125.
“Hence the non-being which things have by nature is prior in them to the being which they have from another, even if it is not prior in duration” (Aquinas, In Sent., II.1.1, a. 5, ad 3). To say that non-being is prior to being in things is to say that being itself, created ex nihilo, has this novel quality. See Hanby, No God, No Science: Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 334–74.
Arendt, The Human Condition, op. cit., 175–247.

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