Transcript for Episode 68
Grant: My guest today is Dr. Michael Hanby. Michael is an associate professor of Religion and Philosophy of Science at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies of Family and Religion at Catholic University of America. Michael has many, many research interests, ranging from the metaphysics of modern science to the doctrine of creation.
Recently, Michael's been working on political theory, especially engaging the current debates related to postliberalism, writing in journals such as First Things and New Polity. Our conversation today will be wide ranging, but it will focus largely on the philosophy of science and postliberal theory.
Michael, welcome to the podcast.
Michael: Thank you, Grant. I'm really excited to be here.
Grant: If someone was to ask me to describe the essence of your work, this is what I would say: the central preoccupation in Michael's work is critiquing the modern understanding of technology as ontology. He writes about how this understanding impacts areas such as science, human anthropology, sexuality, and politics. Would you agree that that's the essential essence of your work?
Michael: Yeah, that's not bad. That's a pretty good distillation actually. I might have to borrow that when people ask me what it is that I'm doing.
Grant: What do you mean then by technology as ontology? We'll just get right into the essence of what you're trying to do.
Michael: Well, in order to see it, we have to unthink a couple of things that we're accustomed to thinking. As soon as one brings up technology, you think of your phone, and you think analogously of the collection of devices that we have amassed to make our lives allegedly better. And I don't dispute that. That's one sense of technology, obviously.
But underlying that and making that possible, is a deeper sense that is contained in the word itself, which conflates or fuses together: making, techne, and logos, knowing/reason. It is a bringing together of knowing and making, or knowing by making, that has as its correlate a preconception of what there is on hand to know. So it is a way of looking at reality; but entailed in that way of looking at reality is a tacit conception of knowing that involves experimentation, and verifying our knowledge by the success of our experiments. And so knowledge becomes equal to our capacity to predict, manipulate, transform nature by laying our hands on it. But it's also a tacit theory of nature, insofar as it assumes that nature is, fundamentally, something that is amenable to or transparent to that.
One of the ways that I've kind of summed that up pithily in some of the things I've written is to say that, it regards nature is a kind of machine and therefore knowledge of nature is a kind of engineering.
Grant: So the question in technology as ontology is never, what is this thing; it’s how can we use this thing.
Michael: It's curious that you phrase it that way, because one of the things that I've argued is that science as our most authoritative form of reason—and I'm by no means the first to have observed this actually—really isn't capable of posing questions in the “what is” form.
Corresponding to that, of course, is that we have evacuated from nature the things that used to correspond to that question. I mean, that question is ineliminable—we do ask it. we can't help but ask it. But what we tend to do under the sway of scientific reason is answer “what is” questions with functional answers like how many, how far, under what influence, to what effect, and so forth. And we ascertain our answers to those questions by taking phenomena apart, analyzing them experimentally, manipulating them, and so forth. So we tend to answer the question of what things are by how they behave under those imposed conditions.
Grant: And to the extent that we believe that reality is composed both of what we can see and what we can't see, science can't even describe reality. So in that case, is contemporary science even equipped to answer big questions?
Michael: I would say it depends upon what you mean by a big question. One of the curious things about our culture—which is a culture in which really only scientific reasoning is regarded as authoritative. I mean, you can philosophize if you want, but that's a kind of private and personal occupation that has no effect either in the world of science or in the world of policy and law; that only accepts scientific or social scientific conclusions as reasonable. Within that framework—and it's amazing, when this occurred to me, it hit me like a ton of bricks; and then once I saw it, it was everywhere. Within that framework, there is simply no such thing as a profound question. The very idea of profound questions as something publicly educatable in American life has just vanished. What we confront are not depths of reality that raise profound questions; qhat we encounter are problems in need of solutions.
Now there are big problems. There are huge problems having to do with the physical structure of the universe, or the way in which epigenetic manifestation works itself out—that is to say, very technically complex problems. And I suspect that what we tend to mean by big questions from within a scientific framework is big problems. But the question of, for example, what a human being is, what human life means, the questions of traditional philosophy, are simply excluded except insofar as they are transposed back into very complex functional problems.
So I guess the answer to your question would be, no. It's not equipped to answer the big questions, or it transforms the meaning of what we think a big question is. So questions in the “what is” form—what is the human being, what is a good human life—really become unintelligible as questions, and so we don't ask them.
Grant: We were talking before we hit the record button that I worked at the RAND Corporation for many years, and I realized that we were very, very good at solving problems, but we never asked the question: what is a problem, and why is this a problem? And I realized that's one of the reasons I entered the academy was to begin asking those questions, although I'm not totally convinced those are questions in the academy.
Michael: No. I would argue in fact that they're largely excluded from the academy, and that for the most part what we mean now by education at every level is rigorously not asking them. Hans Jonas, who's a philosopher who has influenced me a great deal, likened the whole situation to a ship navigating with its landmark tied to the bow. I think that's a pretty good description. Better in terms of what? Problems in terms of what? It's bottomless: each problem begets another, each solution begets another problem, and so forth.
Grant: When science is fully technologized, when we've sort of given over to technology as ontology, will this inevitably render the person into an object of technology rather than its subject?
Michael: Yes, but of course it is human beings who do or who undertake technological and scientific analysis. What's curious about that is that our analyses would effectively reduce us to sort of aggregations of very complex material processes. The effect of that would be to say that reason is really just electrochemical behavior in the brain. Of course, we don't think that when we're reasoning about the brain. So in the very moment that we undertake these reductive analyses, we leap to a kind of Archimedean point outside of nature and exempt ourselves from it. It is, as Jonas says, the Cretan declaring all Cretans to be liars.
But in answer to your question, in the more basic sense, I think the answer is yes: the human being becomes a very complex aggregation of biological systems, with no unifying principle. And if what the human being is is identical to how those systems behave or can be made to behave, then there's really no in-principle limit on how we can transform or enhance or manipulate those systems for ends desired on other grounds besides those generated by the system.
I realize that sounds pretty abstract. If I can give you a cultural example—I don't know if this takes us into forbidden territory for your podcast or not.
Grant: There's no forbidden territory.
Michael: Let's look at the most obvious recent iterations in the triumph of the sexual revolution: the redefinition of marriage, and now the transgender explosion. I've argued that both of those are ideological manifestations of the technological revolution. They’re the technological revolution brought fully to bear and ourselves in at least two senses: theoretically, in that they require us to regard the human being and the human body in the way we've just described, as a kind of meaningless physical substrate; practically, in that the revolution can't be implemented without public and social commitment on the one hand, in the case of marriage, to a widely publicly available regime of assisted reproductive technologies, commercial surrogacy, et cetera; [and] on the other hand, we cannot normalize a transgender anthropology without the regime that is now going under the euphemism of gender affirming medicine: puberty blocking hormones, sex reassignment surgeries, and all the rest of it. So it's technological in that sense too. We can't have this unless we politicize and technologize medicine in these ways, and commit to them publicly. In a way it's analogous to, and in some ways also an extension of, the eugenics programs of the 1930s in which you had the state wedding itself to an ideologized biological science.
We're playing here with the very foundations and principles of reality. All of us are born. All of us come into the world with a sexually dimorphic body of one gender or the other. The future of the human species depends in a very significant way on this; our recognition of a world in common, ascribed into our language, into our pronouns for example, presupposes this reality. It's a pretty profound thing to take hold of, and a pretty profound thing to manipulate. And yet we're doing it because we can. We're in fact imposing this on our culture, it seems to me, with hardly any serious thought about the meaning or the gravity of this, either for ourselves, for our children, or for our children's children. What do we have to do to ourselves, to our own reason, not to see that?
And it seems to me that your question then …
Grant: It's the question, does technology as ontology inevitably render the person an object of technology rather than a subject.
Michael: Well, this will [make it] obvious how the answer to that is yes. But it's also an obvious answer to your earlier question about big questions. There are huge questions embedded in what we are now doing to ourselves that we and our pervasive forms of reason do not permit us to ask or think seriously about. We're blind to them.
I think perhaps one of the most important little books of the 20th century, that everyone would do well to read and reread and reread—I teach it every spring—is CS Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. What's remarkable about that, and what people for the most part miss, is the connection between the first and third lecture: the connection between the realization of Huxley's Brave New World and the conquest of nature in the third lecture, and the very seemingly innocent transformations and mediocritization of education, thereby depriving us of the ability to see and think, in the first lecture. What it was his, and for that matter Huxley's, genius to see is that these two things go hand in hand.
But I do think that in terms of the latest practical turns that the sexual revolution has taken—same sex marriage and transgenderism—in both of those cases, the imaginability of those as possible social realities depends upon the advent of the technology. I'm not sure we could have had—in fact, I'm pretty sure we could not have had—so-called marriage equality without the technological means to give children to same sex couples. And the same would be true in the transgender sphere. For us to imagine that a man could really be a woman, it's because we can imagine ourselves transforming him into one with biomedical means. Then that becomes a reality.
Grant: Another question about this connection between queer theory and technology: are the critical theories, themselves, the technologizing of the humanities?
Michael: That's a really interesting question. I'm not quite sure what I think about it, simply because I lost my interest in critical theory around the end of the 1990s and have not kept up that well. But I do think I would offer a tentative yes to that.
Part of it depends upon the meaning of your question. Do you mean that theory becomes an instrument for the manipulation of social reality? That would be one way to understand it as a technology. In that sense, yeah.
Grant: Yeah, that's sort of exactly what I was thinking. The idea that the theories themselves are meant to be useful as opposed to true. They're meant to be politically useful as opposed to actually describing reality as it is.
Michael: Right. At that level, sure. Yeah, I think so. At a slightly deeper level, part of what it means to say that technology is our ontology is to say—and this is right there in Francis Bacon and in the 17th century—that it conflates truth and utility. We measure what is true by our power to realize it. So in that sense, truth in the old sense—truth as the WHAT of mind in being just disappears. Which helps to explain the disappearance of truth in our culture, or its reduction to technological or political feasibility.
Grant: So I sit in a discipline—in nursing school, and more generally health science—that, in my estimation, has been fully technologized, where in science as action has completely eclipsed science as contemplation. The only way that metaphysics seems to appear is in the required ethics courses. What is the role of ethics within a paradigm in which science has been fully technologized?
Michael: Inadequate. I mean, first of all, what do you mean by ethics? The underlying ontological fragmentation that is expressed in the dominance of science and technology in our culture is reflected in the ethical sphere by the fact that you have a hundred different ethical methodologies that are incompatible with one another. Alasdair Macintyre wrote about this 40 years ago in After Virtue. By ethics, it's not as if we're identifying any coherent and unified discipline. But even if we were, it would be, as you say, essentially outside of the practice of medicine and as science, right? So it's always trying to correct it from the outside.
But precisely for the reasons that we've described—the fragmentation of ethics on the one hand, and the intrinsic indifference to ethical methodologies on the part of science on the other hand—what bioethics almost inevitably tends to become is a kind of baptizing of the technologically inevitable. Or it confines itself to banal questions like equal access to technological improvements or patient consent and so on and so forth. In other words, our ethics tends to be constituted by exclusion of the very same ontological considerations and principles that our science is. And so it really doesn't seem to do much to restrain biomedical and biotechnical advances from their unlimited upward course.
Grant: So just as a point of illustration, here's a quote from Richard John Neuhaus: “Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they're called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on the way to become in justifiable until it's finally established as the unexceptional.”
Michael: There you go. It would be interesting to find concrete case studies filtered precisely through that framework. I don't know well the history of gender affirming medicine, but I suspect it follows something almost exactly like that course.
Grant: I'm going to move on now to some questions related to political philosophy, especially some of the writing that you've done related to postliberalism. As you've written, Maurice Blondel stated that politics is metaphysics in action. However, the foundation of liberal democracy is that liberalism is a form of government that expressly ignores metaphysics; but we know that is not true. So what are the implicit metaphysics that liberalism has smuggled in, whether liberal theorists like to admit it or not?
Michael: There are a number of different ways to approach this question. The simple answer that I suspect we may come to is that it's the political expression of the metaphysics that undergirds our scientific and technological civilization. That liberal nations—that America as the quintessentially modern and liberal country—has as its overarching form of life, as its collective raison d’etre, as its sort of animating principle, the collective pursuit of scientific and technological progress; that we are as much Bacon's New Atlantis as Hobbes’ Leviathan, or Locke’s second treatise, or the Federalist papers; it's not accidental. And in fact, it's one of the things that's been really fascinating to begin to discover. I'm no historian, but it's really interesting to trace out how this was operating in and amongst the founders themselves, Jefferson and Franklin in particular.
The way I would characterize that metaphysics, and maybe unify it with the scientific side of things, is to say that it's first of all consequent upon the overthrow of the older tradition of Christian Platonism, whether in it's Aristotelian or more neoplatonic form. That is to say, it's premised upon the elimination of form and finality and goodness and meaning as ontological principles, and this is reflected scientifically in the movement from an Aristotelian to a Newtonian physics. What that overthrow does is invert the ancient priority of actuality or being over possibility. And now not the possibilities of particular things operating according to particular forms—things being what they are, doing what they do in virtue of what they are—but sheer abstract possibility/power.
The modern liberal order valorizes or elevates possibility or power to its highest principle in two different ways. We've already talked about one: in the scientific and technical sphere, it absolutizes power or possibility in its way of conceiving of truth. Truth is technological feasibility. We know we have arrived at a true conception of nature or a true theory of nature, or provisionally true one, when our experiments work. This is what Bacon means in saying knowledge is power and truth is utility and all the rest of it.
On the political side, I would argue that we valorize power or possibility through our conception of freedom and rights. What is a right? A right is a kind of zone of possibility that surrounds me: my possibility of doing this or not doing this according to my choice. And the entire purpose of liberal order, ostensibly, is to protect those rights; to protect my possibility of choosing, my possibility of defining myself, my possibility of acting, from the encroachment of others: from the encroachment of God, from the encroachment of society or social norms. From, it turns out, the encroachment of my own nature, which more than anything else, threatens to define me prior to my choosing. To be born a man or a woman is to have my freedom constrained before I have the opportunity to act.
These two things really fit well together. And what they conspired jointly to do, it seems to me, is to inaugurate a kind of perpetual revolution or war against any antecedent order that would define me prior to my choosing. And again, I hate to dwell too much on this, but what's curious about the latest stage of the sexual revolution, for example, is that the freedom of self-definition and the technological conquest of nature converge. The technological conquest of nature becomes the means by which I express my freedom, and necessary for it.
So, I don't know, does that answer your question, Grant?
Grant: Yeah, it does. One follow up: is the sort of techno-surveillance utopianism that we see in China, and which is facilitated by Silicon Valley, the next stage of liberalism, or is it something entirely different? Because their interest in rights is not particularly strong.
Michael: Another philosopher whose work I've really come to appreciate, who I think casts a lot of light on the present moment even though he died in the 1980s, is an Italian philosopher named Augusto Del Noce. [His] work has been unknown to Americans, but has been translated into English in three volumes by my friend Carlo Lancellotti. One term that he uses to describe the curious historical course of Marxism is “the suicide of the revolution”: Marxism realizing its deepest presuppositions in its opposite, in a kind of bourgeois society.
I think that term—the suicide of the revolution—applies to liberalism as well. It's certainly a different stage of the evolution of liberal order than the kind of “live and let live” civic liberalism that might have dominated the landscape Half a century ago. In that respect, it is something else; but it seems to me at the same time—and insofar as it is totalitarian, and I think it is in ways that we don't even fully appreciate yet—it is the manifestation, or the outworking of, or the logical fulfillment of the deepest presuppositions of liberal order in what appears to be its opposite.
To make good on that a little bit, let me go back to something I said in response to your previous question. One of the curious things about the liberal conception of rights—the idea that I'm surrounded by this zone of possibility, and that the state is instituted to protect the violation of that zone from outside influences—it actually insinuates the state into the heart of every human relationship. Along with the proliferation of rights—and rights can't but proliferate—goes the enlargement of the state's power to police and enforce those rights. So what happens with the advent of the right to define my own gender, for example, and the codification of that? Well, you necessarily have to have the state, and instruments of the state like bureaucratized medicine, intervening in the relationship between parents and children, because parents are now a threat to children's capacity to define and express themselves. And so what curiously happens, is that the state becomes totalitarian.
The political order, it becomes the absolute, the horizonless horizon that is situated into everything. Everything becomes political in the name of protective freedom. So absolute freedom and absolute totalitarianism are not opposites; they coincide. The more rights we have, the more totalitarian of a political order we need. You see this for example in the war on pronouns, or the need to impose a new ideologically driven language to enforce this new order. If you think about what our old pronouns did—he, her, him, him, his—they gave unreflective access to a reality that we shared in common and that we mutually inhabit. And a common reality is the basis of anything like a common good. You can't have a common good if you don't inhabit a common reality.
The revolution destroys that. We're losing our grip on a common world, even as we speak. It seems to me where there's not a common good and a common reality, you have to have—as Hobbes recognized in the 17th century—a common power; a common power who rules by keeping us in awe.
It seems to me that this is exactly what rule by internet does, and what it in fact does far more effectively than the finite rule of the state. The state can't get inside your head in quite the same way. You don't carry the state around in your pocket like you do your iPhone. But we all live in fear.
We live in awe of the possibility (here's possibility again, right?) that in this mutual surveillance of all against all, that the Furies can descend upon us anytime, anywhere, for the slightest thought crime and destroy us.
Grant: Do you imagine a future in which politics collapses so much into technology that we no longer need the state, we just need people in their homes with iPhones in order to govern? Is there a future in which governance no longer requires government?
Michael: That is a really interesting question. Yes and no. In certain sense I think we're already here. The state in its narrow sense is still a form of an attempt at human governance—that's to say, the governance of humans by human institutions at something like a human scale. The state in that sense, it seems to me, is already wholly reactive to technological developments in the technological sphere, that insinuate themselves into our technological regime of necessity and have a role before politics even knows what's happening. If that sounds abstract, let me give a mundane example of this.
Twenty years ago, none of us knew or even imagined that we needed an iPhone. Steve Jobs might have imagined it, but the rest of us didn't. And of course, no one asked the permission of the government, or any of the rest of us, to introduce this thing into the stream of history. By the time that politics can get around to trying to regulate the new world that the iPhone has wrought, the decisive deed has already been done. And that strikes me as a pretty good image of the relationship of political to technological order in general. We can't even imagine the various eventualities that are going to present themselves to which we will then have to politically react.
There's still a role for the state in that I don't expect the political form of the state to disappear. One of the things that we've interestingly discovered, and I think that covid has helped reveal, is perhaps the unanticipated ways in which technocratic order and political order can use each other. So I'm not one of those end of the state kinds of theorists; but I am a sort of end of political order kind of theorist. I don't think that the order that emerges out of the convergence of politics, technology, medicine, and the surveillance capacities can be described as a political order, or that it can be really governed by political means.
Grant: If Aldous Huxley rewrote Brave New World, how would the character of Mustapha Mond change?
Michael: What a great question. I really appreciate it. Mustapha Mond, it seems to me, is still a political character—and this may be an example of the way in which Huxley, and to some extent Lewis, still had one foot in the political age, while having another foot in the post political age that may be emerging now—in that obviously there is an elite class that is able to wield enormous power, akin to the power of the controller in the brave new world, Mustapha Mond. So it turns out—who knew? I didn't know—that the election of 2020 showed the extent to which actually it's possible for big tech to kind of turn off the spigot of information, or to control what information appears and what does not. And that obviously represents an enormous power, and one of the nodal points where something like a controller can manipulate or inject very powerful inputs into the system.
But the curious thing about life in technological society is that you see emerging forms of political agency for which it is impossible to assign political responsibility. Take for example someone getting canceled; or for that matter, take the phenomenon of rapid onset gender dysphoria, which seems to be partially a consequence of, and unimaginable without, the proliferation of social media and our being connected to them like a prosthetic attachment attachment; or for that matter, take the vast science experiment that we're now performing on the nation's children in the name of gender affirming medicine. Who's the responsible agent of that? You can name people who input into the system the horrible deed that gets someone canceled; or you can locate particular ideological sources of gender affirmation. These are just two of the examples on the table.
But the thing is, these are inputs that ramify through a system that behaves systematically, and a system whose ensemble behavior, whose behavior as a system, isn't simply reducible to or explainable by any of those singular inputs. So what that seems to suggest, apropos of your question, is that it's a system of control without a controller.
It would be nice actually if there was one conspirator who was pulling the levers of power that we could tag as the responsible agent. If we could just stop them, we could stop these phenomena from happening. But I don't think that's what technocracy is or how it works; this represents a new form of power, and a new form of political power, that we don't really have a good name for, that we don't understand, and that I'm not sure we can ultimately govern or control.
Grant: Yeah. My son and I have been watching Karol, which is the six hour docudrama about Karol Wojtyla; and then at the same time, we were talking to our kids about abortion and women's care clinics. And I had this epiphany moment. I said, this is a weird time. In 1940, you could look and see who the evil people were. They were Germans marching through your town, and they were Russians marching into your town. But now the manifestation is downgrading search results, such that a woman types in, “I'm pregnant,” and you downgrade the women’s care clinic and you upgrade the abortion clinic. But I can't stand in the face of that and demand that they stop; it's just an algorithm. It's Arendt’s the banality of evil; it's almost boring, and there's no one to fight. I don't know how you're a moral agent in the face of that sort of thing.
Michael: There are people to fight. Of course there are people who devise these algorithms and apply them in certain areas. One of the nice things about the revelation of the censorship of information surrounding the last election—and this is not to speak about the election per se—is that it revealed that there are in a certain sense responsible agents who could be held accountable for this. We could break up Google, for example, or Twitter. And maybe that's even being done. Who knows?
But the point is, that algorithm itself becomes a catalyst for further downstream consequences that display a kind of systematic behavior, but aren't controlled by the algorithm, so that even if you were to annihilate the algorithm, you wouldn't kill the system. That just further describes the form of power that you're talking about and that we all find ourselves confronting and surrounded by and feeling helpless in the face of.
One of the great books in this regard—and I say great book advisedly, or I put that in in scare quotes, because in many respects it is a very banal and frustrating book; it has a great capacity for making profound questions banal—but that's Harari’s Homo Deus. There are a couple of books like that now that are laying bare, if you will, the sort of post-political, posthuman structure of this kind of social form. As an anticipation of the forms this takes and what it looks like, I think it's pretty good; as an answer to the philosophical questions that it tries to raise, it's very thin and weak.
Grant: I want to wrap up discussion with a brief back and forth about integralism. I know you've been writing about this recently. First question is, to what extent is integralism simply liberalism in Catholic drag?
Michael: Well, I've alleged that, of course; and I've alleged that specifically with respect to the revival of so-called Integralist thought principally among Americans. There's a separate question about the integralism that appeared in France in the early 20th century, or what came to be known as integralism in France in the early 20th century. And then there's yet another distinction between those two phenomena and traditional Catholic teaching on the relation of the political and ecclesial orders. Every form of integralism claims to be appropriating that teaching and claims to be simply representing it. I'm not convinced, and one of the reasons that I'm not convinced is because I think that there are unacknowledged modernist assumptions at work inside of Integralism which it has not itself taken adequate account of. I realize this is all a long and probably excisable prelude to the answer of your question.
The reason I think that integralism is a kind of liberalism in Catholic drag is because, however true in principle it may be that political order is inherently and intrinsically related to sacramental and ecclesial order—insomuch as that is rooted in the very ontology in which the Church in its fullness makes sense—that, like every other truth of the sort that we've been talking about, is systematically excluded by the official meaninglessness of our modern and liberal order, which therefore makes anything like the realization of a Catholic political order—barring a miracle—historically impossible in our historical present. Unless one has a highly, highly reduced understanding of that historical present on the one hand, and of what it would mean to have a Catholic politics on the other.
A truly Catholic political order would not simply be political. It would require the recovery of an entire form of reason, or the development of a cosmology upon whose denial our world is predicated. So in that sense, you can liken integralism to a politics of Rivendell. It's unreal, practically speaking, even though it may be ontologically true.
In consequence of that unreality, what integralism ends up tending to mean in practice is a religious embrace of the secular political order. That can take really ominous forms. Once you have that framework in play, it makes conservative Catholicism susceptible to any atheist political regime that promises to uphold certain moral positions or provide certain protections for the church. Patrick Deneen's positive formulation of this in one of his papers is the use of Machiavellian means for Aristotelian ends. I’m not sure you can appropriate Machiavellian means for Aristotelian ends without making the ends Machiavellian as well. And the reluctance of integralists to say, for example, what secular methods of wielding power would be excluded by their Catholic vision of things; what secular institutions, as they have currently come to be, would cease to any longer have a purpose in their vision of a Catholic order, is telling.
More benignly, what I think it tends to mean—and this gets to the answer of why integralism is maybe another form of liberalism in a Catholic tribe—when it doesn't mean susceptibility to a strong man, it tends to mean, rather than a fundamental philosophical difference, a difference in policy. Maybe it's a less libertarian economic policy, or more pro-family policies and incentives to the tax structure. Maybe it means the revival of decency laws or blue laws, for example, that were once a part of and had a place within our liberal order, but have since fallen out of favor and are now thought to be impossible.
All things, by the way, which are arguably quite worthy; things that I would on an empirical political level support, certainly in contrast to Biden's Brave New World regime. But this becomes, in the end, the realization of different possibilities afforded by liberal order. That doesn't call liberal order into question, and in some ways doesn't differ a great deal from what other forms of American conservatism have offered.
And again, it might be politically salutary, and it might be actually politically feasible within the confines of our historical situation and therefore even politically desirable. But let's not confuse that with a real integration of a Catholic vision of reality and American liberalism. Let's not imagine or deceive ourselves into thinking that it's something other than a further perpetuation of the order that we already have—that keeps in place, by the way, the entire cosmological/technological/scientific juggernaut that we've been discussing earlier in the conversation.
Grant: The last question I have for you is, how do you explain the growing public interest in integralism? Who knew that this sort of arcane Catholic theology would be in the New York Times in the Atlantic. How do you explain the growing interest in the general public in these postliberal questions?
Michael: That is a complicated and multifaceted question. First of all, there is a felt dissatisfaction among everybody—no matter what side of the political spectrum you're on, but certainly among Catholics—with the status quo of our political order. What’s remarkable, for example, leading up to the midterm elections is how diametrically opposed, as if they inhabited a different world, people on opposite sides of the spectrum are. So if you saw Michael Beschloss, the little video clip of him suggesting that the midterm elections would be the very end of democracy; our children would be rounded up and killed, future historians won't be able to write … The most radical and hyperbolic interpretation of democracy being on the ballot on the one hand. And you contrast that with, I think, someone who's far more insightful and closer to the mark, Rod Dreher, on the other hand.
No one is happy. Clearly we have a massive social and political problem. The last two or three elections have manifested this; that we were choosing in 2016 between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is itself absurd, when you stop to think about it, and shows the extent of civilizational decay that we are in the midst of. That's a long winded way of saying there's a lot of dissatisfaction, on the one hand.
On the second hand, there's a sense among Catholics that the Church and Catholicism is itself in a bad way, and that entering more deeply into the tradition is a way out. But then you have to compound that with the fact that among the integralists themselves, as I was suggesting in earlier part of our conversation, there is a certain categorical, modern confusion as to the nature of integralist theory, what it is and what it should be now, and the desire to translate it into a kind of practical political program that has some purchase in America.
And of course all of this then gets ramified through social media, where it's taken on a life of its own and where it has caught the attention of the American pundit class, who is not the least bit concerned about the theological and Ecclesiological questions at the foundation or the heart of, or really at stake in, properly Catholic political theory. They are only interested in how this could present itself as an ominous force within conventional American politics. You put all of that together and suddenly integralism is no longer a deep question of theology and the relationship between sacramental and political order to be worked out principally in theoretical terms amongst Catholic intellectuals. It enters into the sphere of the competitive arena of American politics, where it is denatured completely; where there's a certain cash value in opposing it, but also in identifying with it. And it distorts the nature of the thing fundamentally.
It's a tangled web that I've tried to disentangle a bit in a piece for New Polity called “Are We Postliberal Yet?” I try and look at this—at Postliberalism and integralism—not simply as bodies of theory, but as a social and cultural phenomenon, and disentangle some of this. I'm not sure it was entirely successful, but it seems to me a very complicated phenomenon, and I hope what I've just said helps provide something of an answer for why that might be the case: for why it has emerged in this form, and why everybody's talking about it, why the secular media in political journals are interested in the bogeyman.
American media need a good theocratic scare every decade or so, right? What was Kevin Phillips' book from 10 or 15 years ago—American Theocracy. American democracy thrives and legitimates itself over and against the threat of theocratic scares, particularly on the left. So this bogeyman has to be sort of resurrected every so often, and that's certainly a part of the equation as well. It's why it's of such interest on the left. But among the postliberals or the integralists, depending upon how they're identifying themselves at different moments, these fires have been stoked partly on the basis of these confusions, and partly as an expression of the desire to seize hold of the conservative movement and reshape it.
Grant: Well, Michael, this was a great conversation. We are way over time, but I really, really enjoyed chatting with you about this, and I really hope that we can chat again. Maybe we can bring you up to Pittsburgh and have a conversation in person, which I think would be a lot of fun.
Michael: I would love that. We haven't even scratched the surface of all of this; we could do this all day. I think maybe over a beer would be a better way to do it; but yeah, I would love that. It's great to meet you, even if only virtually, and to learn more about your really impressive Institute and the things you're doing up there in Pittsburgh.
Grant: Oh, thank you. It's exciting. We have lots of really fun and exciting stuff happening in Pittsburgh right now. Thanks again, Michael. And hopefully we'll meet again someday.
Michael: Thank you, Grant.
Grant: Take care.