Transcript for Episode 59
Grant:
My guest today is Dr. Andrew Willard Jones. Andrew is an assistant professor and the director of Catholic Studies at Franciscan University in Steubenville. He is trained as a historian and has written six books on church history and theology. His most recent book, called The Two Cities, is a survey of the history of church politics, from the creation of the world through Vatican II. He's also the editor of New Polity, a journal of post liberal thought.
I'm really excited to talk with Andrew today on a range of topics, including the limitations of liberalism, King Louis IX, and post-liberalism . Andrew, welcome to the podcast.
Andrew:
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
Grant:
Just to start off: we all know that you're a vocal critic of liberalism, but the word liberalism does a lot of work these days and is used in different ways by different people. So I just want to orient us to what we mean when we talk about liberalism.
I'll start off with a quote that I'd like your reaction to. This is from Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama, and he defines liberalism in this way: “By liberalism, I refer to the doctrine that argued for the limitations of the power of governments through law and ultimately constitutions creating institutions, protecting the rights of individuals living under their jurisdiction.”
Is this a sufficient definition of liberalism in your mind? Is this the project that you're after?
Andrew:
Great question. Hard question. This is one of those things, isn't it—where I spend so much time arguing about liberalism, talking about liberalism, studying liberalism. And then we'll have an undergrad that goes, Hey, what is liberalism? And I'm like, uhhhh …
And the reason why that can cause a problem is because in a lot of ways, what we're talking about is a tradition, and especially a tradition that is historical. Liberalism is something that has a history: it starts, it moves, there are nations that are liberal. And so we get in a similar sort of problem if we talk about liberalism that we do if we talk about socialism, where there's always a socialist who says, well, that wasn't really socialism. The same sort of thing happens with liberalism.
As far as that quote is concerned, I think that that is a fine definition that a liberal would give. What do liberals say about themselves? Something like that.
The problems with it are philosophical. So what is implicit, or maybe even directly explicit, in that definition is a dichotomy between individual freedom and sort of state hegemony: that more state hegemony means less individual freedom, more individual freedom means less state hegemony. These are inversely related to each other. And so the historical narrative that is being snuck in [through] that definition is that before liberalism, we had more hegemony and less freedom; and then liberalism comes along, increases freedom, reduces hegemony. That seems to be the sort of narrative that's in there.
And that's just not true. That's just not what happened historically, and philosophically it's mistaken as well. Not only can we demonstrate it historically, but we can demonstrate philosophically, that an increase in individual liberty—in the way that liberals mean it, which is something like the ability to satisfy your own will without constraint—that the maximization of that entails, from the very beginning, the construction and extension of the hegemonic state.
So freedom and state are not actually at odds with each other—I mean, individual freedom, liberty as understood by liberals—but are always bound up together.
Grant:
And I think the other thing that the definition by Fukuyama betrays is this belief that liberalism is a strictly political project. Whereas I think one interesting thing that Pat Deneen did was to show that liberalism is a total project that involves both an anthropology and a social theory, not just a political theory of the state.
Andrew:
Right. And it has to be; and that's part of the critique. That's the reason why I said that's a good definition that a liberal would give, is because most liberalism, generally speaking, doesn't understand humanity as that integral whole. Liberals seem to not have a problem with an unexamined compartmentalization of human beings, and sorting them into categories that become these sort of essential categories that they then talk about as if they're assembling them into some sort of political construction.
So critique within liberalism becomes policy arguments; but the critique of liberalism itself is the critique of that philosophical beginning point. Including the anthropology, of course—the most important part.
Grant:
A major bug of modern liberalism is the reliance on a number of false dichotomies or false binaries, particularly in regards to the human person. How might these false dichotomies and binaries drive some of the storylines in our modern political life?
Andrew:
The most obvious one is the one I already mentioned, which is this dichotomy between the individual and the state. In order to get at this, we have to start from the very beginning with this anthropology. I think one of the characteristics of liberalism—I think without it, you can't really be a liberal—is anthropological individualism. Pick your liberal theorist—John Locke is the go-to guy, so let's go to him. But the idea that the state of nature—which is a sort of thought experiment of bare human life—and that state of nature is a state of autonomous, self-interested, rational actors, that are autonomous, self-interest interested, rational actors before they encounter each other. Then they encounter each other, and then we start getting the political project and the social project. But that beginning point is of this anthropological individualism.
Once you begin there, what the liberals will say is, okay: these individuals are seeking their ends, whatever they happen to be. And they encounter each other, and two things happen. One is that they are threatened by each other. That's one thing, sort of a negative side. And then on the positive side, they realize that through cooperation, they can achieve their ends more efficaciously. So there's sort of a negative and a positive side to that. And so then they enter into cooperation, and ultimately the state emerges, and things like that. Their cooperation that they enter into is the construction of what we might call public goods—think of armies, roads, healthcare systems, whatever. Public goods, or public structures or infrastructure, makes their desire fulfillment smoother and easier. They can move within the social infrastructure with less friction.
But what's happening there, you can see, is that the social is not an aspect of human nature. The social is a technology. The political is a technology, something that's useful to various degrees. Then they get into arguments about what's useful. Is universal healthcare useful? Is universal education? What's useful and what's not useful? And that becomes the content of liberal politics.
But the thing is, that dichotomy between the individual and the state: the state emerges in the theory as a compromise. The social emergence is a compromise. Once that [hegemonic] compromise is created—you've surrendered some of your primordial liberty to this entity that is now going to provide these public goods—it makes possible the interaction of human individuals on a contractual basis. So now any human interaction is a compromise. Not just that primordial one that establishes the state, but all human actions within this theory are compromises, because all human interaction are ultimately exchanges, contractual of some sort. And so you have within that, then, what they would think of as the private sphere of individual liberty, a liberty of contractual interactions that occur underneath this hegemonic structure that ensures that those contracts are followed through on.
Grant:
One part of your writing that I find most interesting is that the case for liberalism is often made by pointing to our pre-liberal past as one of scarcity and violence, so we need liberal democracy and capitalism to help us rise out of hunger and bloodshed.
However, this narrative is being actively complicated by you and by others. One prime example outside of Christianity is Graebar and Wengrow's new book, The Dawn of Everything. I don't know if you've read that yet, but they essentially are showing that many indigenous cultures are actually marked by abundance and peace, not by violence and scarcity. So in your understanding, why is this assumption of primordial violence and scarcity wrong?
Andrew:
The reason why we experience it that way is because it becomes more true the more liberal we become. Liberalism is premised on an idea of the scarcity of resources. So that whole initial scenario I just gave, the only reason why people enter into cooperation is a form of compromise. There is a scarcity of resources—whether those resources be security, or food, or whatever—and we enter into relations as a compromise in the pursuit of these limited goods.
But that's a false anthropology. So from my perspective—and I think from the deep tradition—human beings are not anthropologically individual, but are social in our nature. That changes everything. It's very hard for liberals and people raised in liberal societies to wrap our heads around what it means to be social in our nature. Because what we mean is if you're going to imagine humanity, you imagine them as embedded in social structures from the beginning.
Our satisfaction—those ends which satisfy us, that make us happy in the simplest sense—are goods that are only had socially. What that means is that our encounter with each other is not primordially one of competition or cooperation towards the satisfaction of individual goods; our original encounter with each other is subsisting within the social good, which is the society.
So that sort of notion of the individual somehow arrayed against the world, facing all of these social and material problems, is undermined in the social conception of who human beings are.
When you look at universal scarcity, that theory which really underwrites modern economics, it's premised upon the idea that every individual—all else being equal—wants more of everything all the time. And that's not true of some things—say, happiness, love, contentment. These things are actually things that are possible. Another word for those is the feeling of abundance, of completeness. If you begin there, then scarcity becomes a tear in the social fabric, someplace where something has gone wrong; a new problem has emerged. In the Christian tradition, we would say sin has occurred. There's been some sort of a disordering. Those disorders are always present, and so there's always scarcity; but it's the exception rather than the norm.
Grant:
To what extent then does liberalism rely on vice to perpetuate itself? I mean, maybe the vice of greed is just a simple example.
Andrew:
The easiest form of liberalism to talk about is the form that's developed by people like Hayek or von Mises, or like the Austrian economists, because they're so consistent. They're so ruthlessly logical and consistent. So if we look at that sort of a system, then the presupposition is that human beings are self-interested. In fact, von Mises goes so far as to say that every action of a human being is an exchange, an attempt of bettering his own position. So self-interested is the primordial, the fundamental condition.
Now, that is a vice. Okay. From a Christian perspective, the natural condition of man and the virtuous condition of man is actually to be oriented towards the other, for the good of the other. Justice is the beginnings of that; charity is the fulfillment of that. But to be ordered towards the other, so that your primary orientation towards the other is one of gift rather than one of maximizing returns.
Liberalism has this imperialism built into, it because as liberalism begins and then seeks to dominate a society, what that looks like is the replacement of social structures that I would call structures of solidarity—which are structures that are based upon this idea of the giving to the other—and replacing those structures with structures of competition and exchange. Now you can't just replace structures institutionally, because that's not the way human beings are. You go all the way back to Plato or Aristotle; we know that the habitual virtue and vice constitution of the citizen is tied directly to the form of the regime. These things are bound up together. So in order for liberalism to function, it must be to convert the people to that self-interested and rational actor.
And I think we can see this: that the more we occupy liberal social and economic structures, the more we behave as self-interested actors; and that habituates in us those habits, which are vices.
This is something Patrick Deneen talks about: it ultimately ends up in undermining liberalism. Liberalism can't survive itself, because in whose self-interest is it to maintain the disinterested rule of law, the disinterested enforcement of contracts, the disinterested justice system? In whose self-interest is it to maintain that? Liberalism, in order for its ideal form to function, [there] has to at least be some non-liberal values, like justice, fair play, decency, honesty in exchange, pursuit of peace. These things have to be there, otherwise it just descends into a sort of oligarchic tyranny.
Grant:
One really interesting piece of the Graebar and Wengrow book is when Jesuit priests interacted with indigenous cultures, they were very chastened by [the community they saw] in North America; and the Native Americans were very offended by the fact that in back in France, there were beggars, and the common good was not looked after. What do we do with the fact that much of the expansion of Christianity throughout the world was carried on the back of this expansionist liberal project?
Andrew:
That's a gigantic can of worms. That's a huge problem. It's actually a problem that I think the 20th century Church is sort of groping after solving. I think the reforms that haven't yet come to fruition, but will, coming out of Vatican II are maybe aimed at that problem.
I think what happens to Christianity in the modern period—and when I say Christianity, I mean as a cultural phenomenon or institutional phenomenon, and not asserting that there aren't actually individually faithful Christians; there's millions of them—is that it becomes integrated into the modern regimes and becomes aspects of large parts of their ideological structure. So it becomes perverted in the sense of becoming in the service of power that isn't fundamentally Christian.
You can see this very clearly in the early modern period with the confessional states and the building of what we think of as apparatuses of social discipline, where it becomes clear that Christianity is primarily useful as a form of social control rather than as the salvation of human beings from oppression. So that becomes exported.
Also true Christianity is being exported as well. You have to be careful with that. I think the Franciscan friars out there serving the Indians were doing the real thing.
Grant:
This is played out most obviously in The Mission, the movie with Robert de Niro.
Andrew:
That's a good example, where you have the true priests, the Jesuits there who are actually missionaries; and then you have Christianity as an aspect of regime butting up against that.
Grant:
I realized when I read your work, I get the same sort of feeling in my stomach I got when I read Stanley Hauerwas in college. How would you respond to that sort of comparison?
Andrew:
I think there's a similarity. One of the things that I have come to understand is that if Christianity is true, that there's this sort of—it's not a leap of faith. We have to be willing to suffer. You have to be willing to lose. You have to be willing to be the one who's martyred. Because the order that flows out of love, which is real, which is the most profound kind of order, is the order that flows out of human beings that are giving themselves to others, which means making themselves vulnerable to others. If you read Locke, you read Hobbes, you read these guys, it's all oriented toward the opposite. It's all about avoiding vulnerability. It's all about protecting yourself, maximizing your security, maximizing your concern, your prosperity.
And Christianity says the opposite. You make yourself vulnerable to the other. You love the other and give to the other. Well, that is martyrdom already. Even if it never comes to the point that you are being executed—God willing, that will never happen—there's already a sort of self-martyrdom in play. It already bears the form of martyrdom, because it's already self-sacrificing. And that order is patient and seeks not to dominate, but to give, care; live orders of peace that then convert the world.
This brings us back actually to, for example, the Roman empire. You can see this sort of thing there, where it's often remarked that martyrdom converts the empire. That's half true, because when the pagans see the martyrs, they're seeing simultaneously the communities of love and peace that those martyrs are coming out of, and those are two aspects of the same thing. They're saying, oh, there's an alternative to our world of domination and violence and fear, and that alternative is a society of peace. And you can see that society of peace. You can see that it's premised upon and only works because those people are willing to go all the way. That's the reason why it works. The fear of death has to be overcome, which is why the resurrection has the radical political implications it has; because once the fear of death is overcome, the whole game changes.
Grant:
Then you no longer have to be concerned about the sovereignty of the state any longer.
Andrew:
It's just one concern among others. It no longer becomes the overarching concern that dominates you. It becomes just one concern among others.
Where I don't want to go is some sort of pacifism, because that's the temptation: some sort of Anabaptist, sign of contradiction to the world, which is actually a respectable tradition. Of all the Christian traditions, it's one that I have a deep respect for. But I think it's mistaken, because what happens in a true Christian society is, that society of peace and of love and self sacrifice, includes within it the obligation to use the power that that society can bring to bear for the good of the other. And that includes things that make us cringe a little, like discipline, law enforcement, even war [and] fighting. But all of those things would have to be—in order for them to be authentic, in order for them to actually be furthering this kingdom of peace—to always be oriented towards the good of the weak, rather than the accumulation of power.
I think we can see this very clearly in healthy parents with their children: you have an orientation of total gift to your children; but it would be an abdication of that gift for you to pretend like you don't have more power than them, to pretend like you don't have to use it for their own good, including sometimes doing things they don't want.
So we don't want a version of pacifist resignation to whatever happens to us.
Grant:
This actually leads into your final critique that I want to talk about, which is this idea of sovereignty of the state. In contemporary liberal democracy, the state is the only sovereign. The state is the locus of all authority, and all legitimate uses of force, particularly all legitimate uses of violence, sit in the state. So the question is, is the liberal state inherently tyrannical? I think that's the question coming up at the New Polity Conference at Stuebenville—is the contemporary liberal democratic state tyrannical?
Andrew:
Yes.
Grant:
So I don't have to have the conference anymore. I just got the answer to the question.
Andrew:
I mean, it's not quite that easy. Liberalism is a complicated tyranny, because the classic definition of tyranny is rule for private gain rather than rule for the one over whom rule is being wielded. St. Thomas describes these two things very clearly where he talks about human mastery. Human mastery over other human beings is a given; there's no getting out of it. But there's two particular forms.
There's one that is exemplified in the father-son relationship, where the mastery of one man over another is for the good of the other. That's [a] self-giving form of mastery. And then there's another form which is exemplified in the master-slave relationship, which is where the master uses the other as an instrument of his own gain, and so doesn't care about his own good in and of itself.
When you look at liberalism, one of the things that's odd about [it] is that tyranny is not simply something that the state wields. What the regime is attempts to do is maximize tyranny—it wants to make everybody a tyrant. Everybody encounters everyone else seeking to maximize their gain, not thinking of what power they have to wield as something that is for the other; rather, it's for themselves. Think about the way we think about our money, the way we think about our investments—this is for us. Well, that's a tyrannical form. That's a tyrannical move from the very beginning.
I think it becomes more directly tyrannical in a more traditional sense over time, because in order over time, because in order to maximize individual desire-fulfillment—in order to maximize the ability of individuals to be tyrants—what has to happen over time is the construction of ever more complex and ever more extensive systems of public goods. And that terminology may be opaque; but what I just mean is structures that lay out smooth pathways of desire-fulfillment, if you desire the right thing.
So if you desire money, then it's really easy, right? The whole structure of society is built to facilitate the pursuit of that desire. If you desire sexual gratification, it's built to facilitate that desire. If you desire whatever healthy lifestyle—running or yoga or something—it's built to satisfy that desire.
What I'm getting at here is that the original Lockean compromise, where society was built as a compromise to help facilitate our desire fulfillment, liberalism keeps adding layers to that compromise. Layers and layers, until what ends up happening in the end is [that] the maximal ability to satisfy individual desire is achieved when the desired end is completely homogenous—meaning everybody desires the same thing. And so we've been able to build a vast structure that enables our fulfillment of that desire.
Now that becomes tyrannical in the sense of totalitarian, because then to deviate from that ... If you're in it, you feel free. There's nothing you can't do. You can roam from city to city as an atomized individual actor fulfilling your desires. But if you want an end other than those ends, then you encounter friction. You encounter resistance. Eventually you'll encounter the wrath of the regime against you, because you're a threat to it.
Grant:
So then in that way, the liberal project serves what we call the “laptop class”—the ability to be unfettered from everything and to maximize financial gain and those sorts of things.
Andrew:
I think that's what it was from the beginning. From the very beginning, the liberal move was a middle-class or a sort of burgeoning bourgeoisie move against the aristocracy and the monarchies. In their own mythology, it's a move towards freedom against oppression.
Well, yeah, sort of. It's a move towards taking control of the state and using it to build structures that facilitate the things you desire, rather than the things that other people desire. And so it becomes liberating to that class, while being increasingly tyrannical to the others.
Grant:
In a lot of your work, you've really highlighted the kingdom of Louis IX as an example of a policy that doesn't fall prey to some of these failures of liberalism. So what can we learn from King Louis IX?
Andrew:
When we think of monarchies, as liberals—like we are, whether we like it or not—we always have the image of King George III, or Louis XIV if we know a little bit more about history. But the point is, we always have this image of an absolutist, tyrannical monarch whose will is law, and his throne is the throne of God, and all this kind of stuff that you get in the early modern period. And we want to then project that back as what monarchy is. But in the Middle Ages, that's not the case at all.
If we define that early modern monarchy, what we see is that they're primarily legislators. The monarch is the source of order for society. Louis IX is primarily a judge. The way that the medieval monarchs operate is that they understand that peace is the natural condition of Christian society. The population over which he rules is a population that is mostly living in peace. Most of its interactions are the interactions of friends, comrades, villagers, families, tradesmen who are making peaceful trades with each other. Most of that is peace. And that doesn't need to be structured or governed by any sort of positive law. That is peaceful.
And it is governed by law; it's just not governed by centralized, positive law, because what it is governed by is the peace itself. The people live the way they live peacefully. This is like what you're talking about with the pre-modern societies. There's a way in which they're interacting with each other that is formal in a certain sense—there are ways that they do things; there's a customary order, and it's a peaceful order.
When something goes wrong—when there's violence, when there's a conflict, when scarcity appears—that's where the medieval monarch, someone like Louis IX, understands his role. His role then, and the role of royal justice or centralized justice, is to go into these places of conflict to explore and investigate what the peace had been. So what the law was, and then who broke it, and then how to rectify it. Because the fact that there's violence means that someone has broken the law, because the condition of society is peace. Violence is the exception or the tear.
So you enter into it as a judge, and part of that judgment is actually figuring out what the law is. So there's no centralized code; there's no understanding of this all being pulled in to some centralized juridical or planning structure. In modern Catholic social thought, we talk about the principle of subsidiarity, where you have the idea that higher authorities enter into the realm of lower authorities when something has gone wrong with the level of lower authorities. The lower authorities aren't bearing a commission from the highest.
This is the opposite of sovereignty. The notion of sovereignty is that power descends from some centralized node, and it's sort of commissioned and handed down. There is authority at lower levels because the centralized power has somehow awarded it to them; or at least tolerates it, but doesn't have to. And so when that lower authority does something wrong that isn't in keeping with the higher authority, the higher authority intervenes—that's a sort of sovereign notion.
In 13th century France, it's the opposite. The king, very often in his court rulings, he rules against himself more often than he does anyone else. He will enter into a disagreement and go, oh, look, my officers disrupted the peace by doing this or that, and that was unjust of them. So this idea that justice is somehow bubbling up from beneath. Or a better way of putting it would be that justice in the universal comes from above; it's transcendent. And it's manifested in the particular, in the particular lives of people. They live justice in certain ways. And that justice is always a sort of analog of that universal justice, and then the political powers are sort of suspended in the middle, where they have to judge the particular in light of the universal, when something has gone wrong with a particular.
Grant:
What about the limits of the connection between 13th century France and the contemporary age, wherein our lives are not born around kinship relationships and the local guild, and the vast majority of people we interact with on a day-to-day basis really are strangers? Can that sort of political arrangement be replicated at all within the impersonal age in which we live?
Andrew:
There's a quote I really like from Hayek, and I like it because it's so it's so wicked. He says something to the effect of, unless we want to destroy this amazingly complex and prosperous society, we have to either submit to the irrational and impersonal forces of the market, or submit to the irrational and impersonal and arbitrary rule of men. But he has an option in there—if we want to keep the society of phenomenal complexity.
My point is, the desire to have your cake and eat it too is probably mistaken. It's probably not possible to both have an immensely powerful centralization of political and economic resources, and have a non-tyrannical personal society. Probably the cost of having the first is the elimination of the second. That sounds much worse than it is; but one of the things we have to realize, one of the insights that post-liberalism can provide, is that liberalism is mistaken in its anthropology, which means that we don't actually live in a liberal regime. That's impossible.
We live in something we call liberal, because what we mean is the way liberalism plays out historically. But what the liberals think is going on, isn't really what's going on.
I’ll try to explain what I mean. Look at something like the typical free market argument for the way the economy works. Everybody goes out there and competes with each other, trying to maximize their gain, and negotiates with each other over resources, and tries to maximize their returns. Blah, blah, blah. But what's actually motivating people? Very few people are actually pursuing profit for profit’s sake. The vast majority—say the typical parent who leaves his house every day and goes to work nine to five at some job—he's not pursuing profit for profit. He's working for his children, he's working for his wife. The liberal economists are wrong. They're not motivated by profit; they're motivated by love. The structure has been built in such a way that the most efficacious way of pursuing the love of the other, the most fruitful way, is in pursuing profit out in this other realm. But that's not the reason you're doing it.
My point is that the non-liberal world is already here. We live in it. In fact, it's the thing we actually care about. Our families are the things we actually care about; friends are the things we actually care about. It's only really the person who's descended to a really, really sad level of viciousness that the profit actually becomes the thing he's after, or the pleasure, or whatever.
There are already places that we can build, and so the first move is just to reorient yourself to those spaces. No, my real life is with my friends and family. My real life is here with this community. My real life is at my parish. Once you do that, I think that's the most decisive move.
Grant:
Push a little further on this: what kind of things would have to change, and on what scale, to get to a post-liberal moment in a meaningful way? Are we' talking revolution, a climate apocalypse, nuclear war, a reorientation of the mind, a revival of the Church, second coming of Jesus? What would it take?
Andrew:
All the above? Any one of those viable?
Grant:
Actually the demographic apocalypse I think is the bigger one that's actually hanging over us.
Andrew:
I think that we've seen this before, sort of. So the Roman empire was converted, and the Roman empire was an immensely powerful regime. Immensely powerful. We often have this narrative in our minds that Christianity somehow invades, that [it’s] sort of this foreign entity that comes in and destroys this Roman civilization or something. But the real narrative that occurs is that Christianity is a Roman phenomenon, and the Romans choose Christianity and convert to Christianity. They convert away from their power, their wealth, the structure of it, into something that ultimately undoes them. Ultimately the empire decentralizes; ultimately the empire crumbles. They did that to themselves.
Conversion of a very strong, essentially pagan, regime to Christianity is not some ridiculous pipe dream. It's actually kind of what Christianity is for. It's what Christianity does. This is all speculation, of course; but I think it's already gaining ground. You can feel it. There's a lot is post-liberal movement stuff; you can feel it in the air. There's already some movement towards a return to it. Authentic Christianity is occurring, but I think society is going to have to get closer to rock bottom before that occurs. Things will get worse before they get better.
Grant:
I was actually talking with a friend of mine that I was doing this interview with you, and I think he met you once in Steubenville. And his question was, is to a certain extent is the way you're thinking out of step with folks like Maritain, John Paul II, the documents of Vatican II, that seem to make peace with liberalism? I know this is another huge question, but I'm interested in your response. Are you out of step with the peace that Vatican II seemed to make with the liberal project?
Andrew:
In some ways I think that's fair. But I think not in essentials. I think that the Church's teaching in time is always bound in its historical context. The Church is always preaching to the world that it encounters. So what I'm saying is somewhat out of step with the encyclicals of the 19th century, and somewhat out of step with Unum sanctam in the 14th century. There's a certain historical contingency to the Church's preaching, and as history moves on, even if the essentials are being brought forward, there can be a distinction.
So now, this particular problem. There's very little that I feel tension with John Paul II. If we go to documents—Gaudium et spes orsome documents of Vatican II—there's definitely more tension there. And the reason why really has to do with the historical moment. I think that the post-war West created an illusion that many people fell for, which was that a regime of justice, a regime that's basically oriented towards the natural law, can exist outside of Christianity. The reason why they thought that was actually because of Christianity.
What we saw in Europe leading up to the war is what a truly post-Christian society looks like. The truly post-Christian society is something like what we're seeing in Germany, Italy, Russia. So the United States intervenes, and does so—and England along with them, with a similar sort of posture—along with this sort of reassertion of Christianity, of the values of Christianity. We are decent, we are moral, we are hardworking, we are freedom loving, we are God fearing. We are these people against these evil post-Christians.
I'm not trying to say it's cynical; I really think that people who fought that war, they rose into that sort of mental world. And so you get phenomenon like the explosion of church attendance. People don't know this, because we have this idea that we were really religious in the Middle Ages, and then this has been the steady decline. But that's just not true.
I think in the United States, in the 1920s, only something like 30% of the population was going to church. By the 1960s, something like 70% of Catholics are going to Church every Sunday. But then immediately, the next generation, it just falls off the cliff.
So it really is this moment that surrounds the war and that generation, and that happens to be the moment when these documents of Vatican II and that sort of stuff is produced. And I think then that's where we get what feels like naive optimism right in there; there's some basis to it.
Grant:
I do want to turn our conversation to this question of post-liberalism. Again, the term liberalism does a lot of work; post-liberalism as a term does a lot of work. Depending on who's writing about post-liberalism, Trump, Brexit, the rise of populist nationalism—that's post-liberalism. Some folks are looking at Adrian Vermeule and saying integralism, that's post-liberalism. Some are saying it's Adrian Pabst and John Milbanks, sort of Christian social democracy— that's post-liberalism.
So I want to do a little bit of—maybe taxonomy is not the right word, but maybe that's what we're going to do—is talk a little about this phenomenon that we call post-liberalism. I'm going to give you a definition that I use in my class and I want your reaction to it. Here's what I say: post-liberalism is any contemporary political movement that ventures to look beyond the basic axioms of liberalism to promote a political order that prioritizes some conception of the good over rights.
Andrew:
Yeah, that feels good. That feels like that captures a lot of what's going on. That feels like something that everybody who claims to be post-liberal could sign off on, even though we would look at each other and go, but you don't really think that.
Grant:
When you say good, what do you mean by good?
Andrew:
Or your philosophy obviously doesn't work. But I think everyone would at least say, yeah, that's what I think.
Grant:
With that being said, I want to explore a couple of these post-liberal movements and get a sense of where they go wrong or where they're limited. One critique that I've had with post-liberalism is that it's not clear exactly what the positive project is. There's a lot of critique of liberalism, but then it kind of gets a little thin in terms of recommendations about the structure of civil and political life in this postmodern age we live in.
One person who's tried to put some meat on those bones is Adrian Pabst. He wrote a book called Postliberal Politics, and he tries to get really specific. Frankly, it sounds to me like Christian social democracy, which is fine for what it's worth. Is post-liberal politics in it's most practical terms basically right on culture, left on politics?
And I will note that Pabst specifically says the post-liberal project is right on culture, left on economics; but then when you read it, what he's actually describing as right on culture, left on economics.
Andrew:
Here's what I think is interesting about post-liberalism, at least my version of post-liberalism: one of the things that it emphasizes is that politics is a contingent realm of prudential judgements that are based upon the pursuit of the common good. And also that because human beings are social in their nature, that groupings of human beings bring on or develop a character, or we call it a culture, a personality; they are certain ways. And the way in which then their virtues can be instantiated or manifested are different.
So the Church has historically throughout its documents, much to the chagrin of partisans, everywhere said things like: there's no particular political forum that we're endorsing here. We have no particular political philosophy. That sounds like a cop-out, but no; what it's actually doing is pointing to their understanding of what politics is, which is a contingent set of prudential judgements.
So my point is that it may very well be the case that the English, a just post-liberal society would resemble some sort of socialist democracy over there, whereas that may not be the way in which we do it, because we're different. We're different people. Or it may not be the way in which a post-liberal society would manifest itself in Africa or China or whatever.
That makes it very different than most contemporary political philosophies, which really are ideologies that have a particular form in mind. Most partisans of any sort of particular philosophy, have a form of government—their arguments are for a constitution. And that would be, I think, a truly post-liberal position: it's not arguments over constitutions, it's arguments over the concept of justice and over peace and things like that. So I think we have a wide range.
Now within that though, that doesn't mean people aren't making mistakes. I'm sympathetic to Pabst and Milbank and those guys over there, because I think their theology is pretty much right on point on most things, even though I find their politics to be foreign to me and not something I'm interested in.
If we move domestically to the United States, I think that there's a lot that's going under the name of post-liberal right now which isn't really post-liberal, which is really authoritarian. So it's really illiberal. And it's really ultimately, I think, indistinguishable from liberalism in its final phase.
Grant:
Oh, interesting. Tell me a little more about that. You're distinguishing post-liberal and illiberal. I make the same distinction, but I'm interested to hear how you're distinguishing those two things,
Andrew:
Within liberalism from the very beginning, there is liberalism's opponent. Liberalism is structured from the beginning as a sort of continuous revolution, or a continuous conquest of tyranny and replacement with freedom. And so it has built into itself this sort of reactionary, tyrannical foot dragger. Liberalism can't understand itself without that entity, without that person. That's the illiberal force. Liberal/illiberal together—they're in there, and they're bound up together in this historical movement. And I think that a lot of what passes for post-liberal now is people who've just doubled down on that illiberal side of things.
This is one of the reasons why I think that there's certain brands of illiberalism that are very easy to market. They get a lot of attention; a lot of people are interested in it, attracted by it. Same reason why a lot of the liberal mainstream media will write about certain forms of illiberalism a lot: it's because they understand it. In a lot of ways, they've never stopped writing about it. They've been talking about these illiberals since the 17th century, and now we’re just talking about them again. They'll use the word fascist, but it's this sort of authoritarian, top down, “we’ll force you to be good and happy,” type of a thing.
I don't think that's breaking out of the liberal tradition. I think it is an aspect of it. Another example would be something like the alt-right. They seem to be arguing against identity politics, stuff like that. But when you look at them, what they're actually doing is accepting identity politics from top to bottom and just switching sides. They just want the white guys to win.
You have the same sort of thing on certain brands of post-liberalism. They seem to be opposing liberalism, but really they're not; really, they just want to win.
Grant:
They want to use liberalism for their own ends.
Andrew:
Right. And that is, maybe, liberalism coming into its own. What I mean is liberalism becoming aware of its own Hobbesian reality. The delusions are over; this is no longer ideological liberalism. Now it's about centralizing power and maximizing gains, and now the fight is on.
You brought up Vermeule and those guys, and I hesitate … you know how among academics internal fights can get kind of vicious and disproportionate, right? Like you're fighting with each other viciously, and then you encounter someone who's an outsider, and you're like, oh, actually that guy's my friend. So, criticisms of these guys always have to be understood, that we share opponents. But, if you read his new book, Common Good Constitutionalism, Vermeule’s end vision seems to be something like a vastly empowered White House that’s free to make judgements on its own will of what's good; that rules through a greatly expanded and deep state—he calls it administrative state, but the right wing and calls it a deep state, so let's use it; and that is itself empowered to enforce the law selectively based on its perception of the common good.
And so my question will be, well, how is that not what we have? You sound like what you're doing is describing our current regime, and then saying we should be in charge of it. That feels like what's going on there.
Grant:
I read an article by Vermeule in the Atlantic speaking this way, and then he started talking about subsidiarity. I said, I'm not sure I understand what you mean when you use that word subsidiarity, after you spent the first half of the article talking about using the power structure of the administrative state to impose this.
Andrew:
He has a section in the book on subsidiarity, and he reveals what he means by it. It's the section that was most troubling to me, because he basically turns it completely on its head. He talks about the smaller entities in society as being the subsidiaries of the state in the same sort of way that a company has subsidiaries.
Grant:
That's exactly backwards.
Andrew:
Exactly backwards. So the regime has a conception of the common good. All subsidiaries must be working towards the common good, meaning working as a commission from the state. When they deviate, the state now has the authority to intervene, because they were working for the state all along. He emphasizes that idea of the authority to intervene, as opposed to the independence of that which is lower. That just sort of vanishes. So what happens then is that the independence of what is lower becomes good policy. It's not a philosophical principle; it's something that a wise sovereign ruler would allow, because it works well.
Grant:
I want to sit with this question of Adrian Vermeule for one more second. I don't want to draw you too much into this back and forth, but I think this is really instructive to understand you better and to understand your interests. When I was prepping this interview, I was telling some friends that I was going to do this interview, and I mentioned New Polity, and they said, oh, that integralist journal. I was like, oh, that's really interesting. And then as I read your work—I don't know if you've consciously done this, or it's just the way that you speak—I don't think you've ever used the term integralist.
Andrew:
Never.
Grant:
You refer to integralism, but you've never used it for yourself. So very directly: are you an integralist? Why or why not? This is your opportunity to clarify New Polity’s position.
Andrew:
My canned response to that is that my problem with the integralists is that they're not integralist enough.
Grant:
Interesting.
Andrew:
What I think is that grace, the spiritual power that Christianity brings … Christianity is something that permeates and penetrates every aspect of humanity, and through humanity, every aspect of the cosmos. So I have a very expansive understanding of ecclesiology and what's going on here. So all politics, because politics are about human flourishing, politics are an aspect of the Church. And I don't mean that the Church, meaning the clerical hierarchy, somehow trumps politics or runs politics. And a lot of the integralists—again, often more sophisticated than this—but when it's simplified to be explained, what it boils down to is some sort of natural/supernatural divide, where you have this natural realm, which is politics, and then the supernatural, which is the Church. And the Church trumps politics, because the natural’s ordered to the supernatural.
My approach would be something more like, no, the relationship between the supernatural and the natural is like the body and the soul; the relationship to the temporal power and the spiritual power is as the body is to the soul, which means that the spiritual power is present in animates the temporal power at every move. There is no temporal realm that's not also the spiritual realm.
That means then, that what we normally think of as the regimes [the integralists] imagine don't don't work for me. I don't understand them. It doesn't satisfy what I'm after here.
I'm after that's the reason why I can talk about peace as coming up from the bottom, as well as from the top. Because I'm imagining grace, revelation, order, as operating up and down the whole social hierarchy, and not simply descending from above. And so, again, they're not integralist enough.
And you know why else I don't use the word, honestly, is because one of my great theological/philosophical influences are the Communion school. So people like de Lubac, Ratzinger, Von Balthasar; and their opponents were called the integralists.So they were arguing against the integralists in the early 20th century France, in particular; and integralism there had this sort of quasi fascist, culminating in the Vichy regime, type of flavor to it. And the current integralists resurrected that word, I think, on purpose. So I don't like it, because I think it was purposefully rehashing a fight from the 1930s.
Grant:
I want to return to this question of what it would look like for the soul of the Church to animate the body of the state. But I want to sort of sit here with this idea of these competing post-liberal visions.
One concern that I have is that the integalists are not the only game in town in terms of thinking about how to orient society towards some particular conception of the good that might emerge after liberalism. So it's possible that when liberalism fails, it becomes a dog fight between folks like Adrian Vermeule and different forms of post-liberal order. I think particularly of authors like Bruno Maçães, who argues that a fundamentally new political order is emerging that's different from Western liberal democracy, one that's based on networks, data-mining, smart social control, all oriented to economic and social efficiencies. And these movements are very not so interested in civil rights and the good as we'd conceive of it.
I think of China as the central player in geopolitics that is sort of oriented in this way, but it also happens that this is also the vision of techno utopians in Silicon Valley. So that's all background for this question. It seems to me that the impulses are the same: to harness the administrative state for this sense of the good, with no orientation to civil rights.
In some ways, would modern democratic liberalism not be a better alternative for Christianity than techno utopianism, in the terrible situation where Vermeule doesn't win, where Mark Zuckerberg wins? So that's my question.
Andrew:
I'll take the libertarians any day over the Chinese Communist Party. You brought up the Chinese system, and that's really great, because I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of people in this sort of integralist side of things, as well as the woke, hardcore progressive types—neither of them seem very interested in criticizing China. In fact, every once in a while, they kind of sneak out this admiration for the Chinese system. What I would point out there, is that what you're seeing is really an agreement on political form, and a disagreement over ends.
Which I think works just fine for the woke, because I think that what they desire can probably be built through that kind of thing, sort of, until it ultimately falls. But I think that the integralists are mistaken, because the regimes of centralized technocratic power, I believe, only work to the extent that the populations have been atomized, and isolated from each other, and bound into large structures and systems that they are dependent upon, and which they then serve. So the idea of capturing those things and then turning them towards building societies of virtue is a contradiction. They depend upon the sort of moral wasteland that has been built in order for their power. It doesn't work otherwise. That's what I would argue.
So, maybe it makes sense to try to seize control as a tactic to then dismantle. But the idea that you're going to … I mean think of the way in which the incentive structures of vast, bureaucratic and economic structures work, of people who climbed to the top and why they climb to the top. The idea that you're going to convert that to the pursuit of Catholic common good, and have it be efficacious, have it work how those vast administrative and bureaucratic apparatuses and corporations work. That just seems foolhardy to me.
Grant:
So here's the last question I'm going to ask you, to put some meat on the bones. We did a lot of critique, and I'd like to just take a few minutes to think about what would that political form look like functionally and practically, to have the body animated by the soul in our political life? What form would that take?
Andrew:
I think it would take the form that the Church calls subsidiarity. I think that what we would see would be very local structures of solidarity. So starting with the family, building out into the community, the parish, the town, the city, with those relationships being profoundly personal.
Human freedom is an end, here. And I think it's a very real one. And so anytime freedom gets sidelined, like it has been recently, it should be a big red flag for us. Okay. Human freedom is a priority, and human beings, because we're social in our nature, become free, not over and against all of the fellows [with whom] we live—that's that's the liberal mistake. We become free in the relationships, in the communities, in which we are bound. Intimate communities take shape from the people who create them, so we as persons are integral to what that community is.
Think about the way a family is—that's the most obvious one, where a new person changes the family, because the family is nothing other than these persons who love each other and know each other. And so [in] the healthy family, the individual person fits in the family—it's where he belongs. It's his nature, it's his world. And so his freedom operates in that world, not against it.
If you imagine that way of thinking and expand that out into bigger groupings of people, where you are free in your family, in your community, in your town…those larger groups are more abstract, less personal, and so therefore weaker. They govern less in your life. And [then] up all the way up to the largest structure, which ultimately would be, in my view, the Roman Catholic Church—it would be the church in the largest sense—there's just all of humanity; that would be the highest order.
The reason why this makes sense, from the idea of the soul animating the body, is that the image I'm trying to paint here is one of a social hierarchy, and it's sort of an inverted hierarchy in the sense that the most powerful thing is the thing at the bottom. But the thing about the conception of the soul and the body is that, if you think of that whole hierarchy as the body of society—so society becomes this really complex hierarchical entity—the soul animates it at each rung and each piece. And we can see this [in] Roman Catholicism very clearly when we talk about the most profound instance of divine action as the Eucharist. And that is the most intimate one. That is the one that happens at the smallest entity within the Church: the parish and the individual receiving the Eucharist. And that's the most powerful aspect of grace.
So my point is that grace and revelation animates the ability for human beings to fulfill the vocations and find peace at each rung within the social hierarchy, and so it need not have a descending-from-above order. There need not be some sovereign, whether it be a king or the Pope. So there you have the idea of man as social in his nature; man has a body, the soul animates the body; the soul animates the whole complexity of the body, not just the top of it—the whole thing.
Well, if the body is the polity and the soul is the Church, we know just our basic philosophy is that we are a composite. We're not a body that has a soul, we're an ensouled body. There's a distinction between the soul and the body, but they're always and everywhere bound up together. And that's the vision for the spiritual and temporal powers.
Grant:
One thing that strikes me is you talk very little about actual state and Church. One thing I'm trying to get you to say very explicitly is what would it look like for the Church to work with the state? And it doesn't seem to be the level at which interests you, right?
Andrew:
The reason why is actually really easy, and I should probably say it more often. It's just that when I think Church—this comes from my Medieval training—for me, the Church is three orders. It's the laity, it's the clergy, and it's the religious. The basic politics from the Middle Ages was that they would say, in the Church, there are two swords: the temporal and the spiritual. The lady wielded the temporal, and the clergy wielded the spiritual. [They would say] there are three laws: the civil law, which is wielded by the laity; the canon law, which is wielded by the clergy; and the law of theology, which is wielded by the religious.
For me, it's all the Church. The laity are the Church; in fact, St. Thomas says that the reason for the clergy is to give the laity the Eucharist, and to prepare them to receive it. That's the reason why the priests exist.
The laity's role is what? Is politics, is family. The things that we think of as the role of the state is exactly what the laity rule over. It's exactly the vocation of the laity. If we want to talk about the Church as the bishops, which is what lots of people do …
Grant:
And is this also why people have such a hard time understanding what Archbishop Cordileone only did recently? And it can only be interpreted as partisan politics, as opposed to the Archbishop’s concern for the soul of Nancy Pelosi.
Andrew:
Yeah, that's right. And that Nancy Pelosi, like all of us as laity, has a vocation within the Church, not outside the Church. That again is one of the liberal dichotomies, is this distinction between religion and politics, or religion and public life, or whatever—like there's realms that don't have anything to do with the other.
But the whole conception behind Catholicism is the universality of it. That this is all bound up together in one thing. And we make distinctions, which are good, but the distinctions are not absolute. So it's not only her own soul that's at stake, but she's committing an injustice within the Church. She has a vocation within the church. It's like a priest who violates his vows: he also is violating his vocation within the Church. Well the laity are just as capable of doing that.
Grant:
Andrew, I could talk all day. This is a really fun conversation. Unfortunately, we are way over time, but I'd like to continue the conversation, and we're just a few miles away from each other. I think it'd be fun to continue this conversation in person. But in the meantime, I want to thank you for coming on the show and having this really robust conversation. And hopefully we'll be able to see each other in person.
Andrew:
Definitely.
Grant:
All right. Thanks so much.