The priest began my aunt’s funeral homily thusly. I could not help but smile and picture my aunt and uncle walking through the door carrying a bag or two of gifts for their nieces, nephews, and godchildren. A pashmina from Turkey, an illuminated ornament from the Munich Christkindlmarkt, a penguin hat from Antarctica.

“And she helped others to do the same…. including me.”

Did my aunt help Father book a summer vacation, a trip to see family, or maybe she arranged a pilgrimage? At the post-funeral luncheon I did not ask. Not all curiosity must be satisfied…let this remain a mystery.

One mystery of their three decades of travel had recently been solved.

For years, I wondered how my aunt and uncle were able to keep this pace: flying, sailing, motoring across countries throughout the year. Something that, save teleportation, I imagine to be physically and mentally exhausting. All the more they did this while remaining incredibly active stateside.

The master key to understating their embrace of adventure can be found in Henry Oliver’s 2024 book, Second Act, in which he identifies the attributes of those whose (often hidden) talents fully blossom later in life.

Oliver finds such ‘second acts’ in far-ranging fields. They include executives, innovators, writers, artists, and adventurers. Think: Washington Post owner Katharine Graham, McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, American artist Grandma Moses, essayist, novelist, and lexicographer Samuel Johnson and solo-kayaker Audrey Sutherland.

What makes for second acts? Oliver writes:

For my aunt and uncle that discovery began in the early 1990s and continued two years past the pandemic ending with my uncle’s final illness. These trips, largely to European cities, tilted towards river cruises along the Rhine and Danube as they aged. Occasionally they ventured further: Australia and New Zealand, a safari in Kenya, a voyage to southeast Asia, and their last big adventure: seeing the emperor penguins at the South Pole.

These vistas opened up as they engaged their talents with great energy at a point in their lives when many people start to fret about aging and obsolescence. They did not treat midlife as a crisis, a rut, or an off-ramp, but as a new horizon filled with possibilities.

My uncle launched his second act first. After two decades as an FBI Agent and upon his retirement from the Navy (captain), he started his own company as private investigator and security consultant. By this point he had already accomplished much: serving with distinction in Vietnam, originating the FBI’s aviation program in the 1970s, working notable cases, and taking a field command at the Richmond FBI office.

In the ensuing 35 years as an independent contractor, he continued at a demanding pace: re-certifying as a pilot, learning new things, and refreshing his networks. He kept up old ties, visiting family and friends, attending alumni events and returning to his beloved Brooklyn yearly to walk through the old neighborhood, to see what had changed and what remained.

My aunt loved to travel.

My uncle loved to fly planes, and to fly on them.

When the time was right they combined these interests. At a desk in the guest room my aunt followed suit starting her second act as a travel agent.

Teaching was her first profession. Her true interest was experiencing other countries and cultures. Admittedly, she had “the travel gene,” activated in the 1960s during trans-Atlantic trips to Europe with her family during the first big boom of middle-class Americans vacationing overseas.1

My aunt capitalized on those interests in mid-life, which coincided, in the mid-90s with the steep rise in Americans traveling overseas and the advent of the Internet. A decade before Kayak and Expedia largely replaced the brick-and-mortar travel agency, she built a clientele around referrals from retired federal agents, military, and their spouses. The Internet was not an obstacle to starting a travel agency but an accelerant that lowered the cost of credentialing and communication.

It was a small business for which she gained accolades and a cover story in an industry magazine. And it was tailored to her clientele’s preferences. It allowed her and my uncle to see the world, make new friendships and maintain old ones, and enable others to do the same.

What made this all work is that they each had many of the attributes that Oliver mentions in Second Act: active networks, crystalized knowledge, extroversion, consistency, discipline, and a commitment to learning new things. They took “an active role in their luck”, remaining open to opportunities and to personal growth within a set of interests and skills that they cultivated over a lifetime.

“Think of careers,” writes Oliver, “like fractals,” a developing set of patterns that are “hard to predict or explain” but have an underlying order.

Pulling back the lens as I look at their photos and the heirlooms from their journeys, one thing continues to chase me: how much of the success of their second acts was also influenced by the particulars of their place and time?

Born and raised in Brooklyn, the grandchildren of Irish immigrants, they experienced a vibrant mid-century multiethnic borough. Did their formative years among entrepreneurial strivers in a city that is always assimilating new arrivals make them especially open to experiencing other cultures?

They were part of a generation that does not speak of itself in psychohistorical terms, or even at all. Aptly named, “Silent” it is a generation low on cynicism, irony, and self-pity. Were their successes and perseverance also bound up in the virtues that they and their contemporaries learned as children during the Great Depression and the War? Discipline, honesty, reserve, patriotism, civic-mindedness, and duty: virtues that fuel a high-trust society allowing barriers to be dissolved.

How much of their second acts relied on the “givens” of American prosperity and a culture that encourages initiative and entrepreneurship. As Henry Oliver writes, Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, “had no special privilege, except the massive privilege of being born in America.”

This year we mark two Semiquincentennials: that of the American Founding and the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which helped to root the nascent American economy in free markets rather than in European mercantilism. The ideas contained in The Declaration of Independence, that every person has an unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, combined with Smith’s insights into how nations’ inherent wealth lies in the freedom of individuals to “truck, barter and exchange,” are not fully realized without the oxygen provided by the practice of the virtues, something Jefferson and Smith knew well.

The true meaning of Jefferson’s oft-misunderstood words, are rooted in the classical understanding of happiness as the “exercise of virtue, mainly in private life, which requires little wealth,” as political economist Michael Pakaluk writes:

It is the same conception of happiness as in Aristotle, Cicero, and Boethius. The “right to the pursuit of happiness” becomes then, the right to act virtuously and with a good conscience. Indeed, “without virtue,” Jefferson wrote to Amos Cook, “happiness cannot be.”

My aunt and uncle’s “pursuit of happiness” included entrepreneurial yet economically-modest second acts. The true source of their wealth was bound up in a larger constellation of immeasurable imprints they made in civic, family, and associational life. They were active volunteers, “joiners,” in Robert Putnam’s phrasing, engaged in parish ministries and charitable activities, neighborhood groups, schools, professional, and veterans associations, alma maters and clubs, and most of all as devoted parents, siblings, godparents and friends.

I imagine that among the ingredients that go into many (but not all) second acts include the conditions and cultural attitudes that allow people to embrace a vocation, explore their interests, and engage their talents in new and unexpected ways. Such “pro-entrepreneurial/ high-creativity” conditions are not unique to America, nor our current age, but they also do not obtain in all places, for all people, and in all times. It is the search for such conditions that often leads people to move - to new cities, new states, and new countries.

I locate the discovery and successes of my aunt and uncles’ second acts in the core ideas at the heart of these two Semiquincentennials: the pursuit of happiness and Smithian self-interest aided by the necessary virtues, personal sacrifices, and generosity of spirit which transform individual pursuits into the building up of the common good, “an order founded in truth, built up in justice, and animated by love.”

There were several catalysts: marriage and motherhood, cultural retentions and rejections, aesthetic, and creative draws. I took inspiration from a flurry of blogs and their visually-rich culinary catechisms. I was given the unmerited grace to desire that my children become not just good - but holy. To not only be civilized (“Use the fork.” “Have a napkin.” “Wait until we all sit down.”) but to have gratitude, joy, restraint, and appreciation for the goods of creation, to grow in health and in virtue, to be formed in body and soul.

A few weeks ago the gift was returned to me by my son, home from college for the break.

“Mom, I think you really should read this book.”

I have so many others piled up here. But okay, this sounds urgent. Leon Kass.

“Absolutely, I’ll read it.”

I write this post with gratitude to my son, and to his philosophy professor for assigning The Hungry Soul this fall semester.

It is 30 years since this unique work was published. I cannot think of a more important book to read - to ponder - in the era of instant gratification - amid the tacit awareness that alongside abundance and the ever-increasing wonders and comforts of technology we are at once overfed and malnourished.

Kass brings his knowledge of bioethics, medicine, philosophy, the Torah and the Talmud, literature and history, to the question of what it means for humans to eat. For humans, and humans alone, eating is not only nourishment, it is the basis of civilization, a school of virtue, an expression of our dignity, and our connection to nature and the divine.

The chapters themselves emerge in an order that echoes the Days of Creation: from the first, which describes the human need to eat and the workings of metabolism and biology, to the sixth chapter, a treatment of eating as a means of sanctification bounded by Levitical law and Jewish religious practice that placing man at the pinnacle of Creation, under the care of the Creator.

The Hungry Soul is also an application of Aristotelian philosophy. In particular Kass draws on De Anima to offer an original explication of the relationship between matter and form. He achieves this by demonstrating the primacy of form over matter in the workings of metabolism. In animal metabolism, the organism itself, (form), remains whole, but the materials (matter) consumed do not. In eating, we do not become what we eat.

We consume, transform, and absorb matter and we are not perfectly efficient at it. That is not a defect in our biology. Kass asks us to consider that inanimate crystals grow by incorporation, without waste. Simple bacteria consume glucose nearly waste-free. Such “no-to-low waste” efficiency is not true of higher order (animate) animals. Why hasn’t evolution preferenced organisms that are better at recycling? Is it the Second Law of Thermodynamics at work? Or the fact that animals must expel toxins that would otherwise be poisonous?

Here Kass shows that materialist answers do not suffice nor provide deeper meaning to the “whys” of the natural world and our place in it.

“But a philosopher will wonder whether these necessities are not, paradoxically also good for the organism. For lack, experienced as desire, is the spur to all aspiration, to action and awareness, to having a life at all. Bodies as incorruptible as diamonds, or bodies lacking in nothing beyond themselves, would have no impulse, or orientation toward the world beyond their borders. Waste makes need, and need makes for everything higher than need. Here in the germ of hunger, is the origin of all the appetites of the hungry soul.” p. 27

To see eating through an Aristotelian lens moves us from deconstructing eating into a list of biochemical facts to a considering what it means to be alive. Eating is not, contra the strict materialist, ‘fueling the machine’. We eat for nourishment: to maintain, preserve, and restore living cells, to grow, and to heal the whole body. Metabolism itself illuminates the presence of a soul - a force that animates the body - and points to a telos for all living creatures

“Without any trace of conscious intention, in metabolism all organisms face forward in time and engage in self-directed purposive behavior aiming at a future goal. Even lowly metabolism, mindlessly conducted throughout the animal kingdom, is unintelligible save as a purposive, goal-directed activity.” p. 50

Is this why we immediately recognize as alien science fiction’s many dystopias in which dead-eyed automatons ingest nutritionally-adequate food facsimiles administered through drips, pills, and other technological subterfuges? Creepy. Cold. Sterile. It isn’t…human.

The ensuing chapters examine prohibitions against cannibalism and the practice of vegetarianism as contained in Greek myth (Cyclopses and Lotus Eaters) and the Biblical meaning of hospitality (Abraham and Lot). Kass continues with reflections on the rise of agriculture and the significance of our “discovery” of bread and wine as civilizational markers. What other animal is capable of the transformations and technologies necessary to turn wheat grain into loaves and to select and distill grapes into wine?

Over the centuries, eating was refined and transformed into dining, and gradually perfected into an elevated form capable of transmitting culture, teaching virtues, expressing talents and enriching friendships. Perhaps no better way to draw this out than in Kass’s beautiful interpretation of the 1987 film, Babette’s Feast.

It’s lamentable that we’ve abandoned even more of the habits and customs of civilized eating since 1994 in the name of efficiency and ease. There are base pleasures in grazing on leftovers in front of the TIVO, or slurping ramen at the kitchen island. And yet, I cannot imagine my grandmother ever doing this. Once these concessions to convenience become habits, the memory and even desire for something better is weakened, and eventually lost.

Kass is a scholar and not a scold. He writes with a true love his subject. May his book inspire a new generation of readers who are reaching for the intangible gifts to be found at a dining table set for others.

Hazony writes:

In his admonition, Hazony is partly right. Conservatives may write and talk endlessly about the importance of civic education, family values, and “mediating institutions,” but if habits of virtue aren’t taught within one’s own family, then of what use is Nicomachean Ethics? Hazony concludes with a biographical sketch of his journey from conservative Princeton undergrad in the 1980s where he met his wife, their commitment to orthodox Judaism, and decision to move to Israel to raise their family.

His gratitude for the many blessings of marriage and family are offered as an encouragement to others: to light a path out of the dead ends of the cultural revolution.

Yet ideas still matter. Ideas transformed into political ideologies and movements (and in the hands of the charismatic or megalomaniacal) can turn politics into religion, as the 20th century’s experience with fascism and totalitarianism demonstrates.

Our current political debates mask something much deeper than policy disputes over price controls, tax rates, and tariffs. They are proxy battles in a war over competing visions and metaphysical beliefs: what does it mean to be human? Kitchen table issues have all of the intensity of culture issues because “We no longer know what a human is.” We expect our politics to deliver with creedal certitude the meaning of our lives. Kitchen table needs are now bound up with transcendent ends.

Matthew Burdette writes:

Is it the loss of religious belief or the loss of reason? Have we finally amused ourselves to death?

Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) in his long career as a theologian proposed a third answer: we are in crisis because we no longer understand what reason is. The West has forgotten the origins of its civilization and its greatest contribution: the recognition of human dignity in human rights. This would not have been possible without the gifts of the three cities: Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome, and the mutual enrichment of faith and reason.

A renewed dialogue between faith and reason begins with recovering a definition of nature that includes metaphysical nature which operates according to rational principles discoverable by reason. Without this metaphysical dimension we operate with a limited view of reason, nature, and the human being. This loss ends up expressing itself in other ways.

The hybridization of science and spirituality among some environmentalists and in the field of AI are attempts to find transcendent meaning in the laws of nature absent a true anthropology of the human being as body and mind, and soul. We are reduced to particles and algorithms: compost and substrate-independent intelligences.

With an understanding of nature as possessing inherent rationality it is possible to develop a true ecology of man. As James Cleary writes, we can determine whether certain acts are “inhumane” and develop laws and human rights not as a matter of fleeting majority opinion but because they are rooted in a reason, accessible to all.

In his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Benedict warns about the two extremes that prevent such a dialogue:

Fostering public dialogue between faith and reason takes courage in the face of a radical secularism that cannot tolerate any rational scrutiny of its own doctrinal orthodoxies. Interestingly, Benedict notes that the ecological movement in Germany can be seen as a secular attempt to correct our relationship to reality. We are not self-creating but are part of creation: bound by nature’s laws with a responsibility to care for the earth.

Reclaiming the public square as a place where we “reason together,” will decide if we can keep our rights and freedoms: the hard won fruits of the synthesis of the gifts of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome.

Mayor Kir’s actions were condemned including by groups critical of National Conservatism. (I added my name to one such letter). Belgian prime minister Alexander de Croo blasted the abuse of municipal authority to override the Belgian constitution’s guarantee to freedom of speech and assembly.

Why this conference?

The speakers represent a variety of views on the European and American right including opposition to immigration, a bold defense of Judeo-Christian principles in culture and law, EU-skepticism, anti-globalization, nationalist-centric sovereignty, and a preference for social democratic frameworks for market economies. As with any group of more than two people not all attendees consider themselves NatCons and not all NatCons are mutually aligned.

There is much to unpack about what makes NatCons different from other kinds of American conservatives most notably the “FreeCons” who represent the “Buckley-Reaganite” fusionism that came to define the Republican Party for a few generations.

NatCons sound conservative on some policy issues but their political principles and governing vision are “unmoored from the American tradition.” That drift has lead them to seek inspiration from Continental and reactionary sources, leading to philosophical dissonance and practical contradictions.

Scott Lincicome hones in on a foundational and unbridgeable gap between the NatCons and FreeCon/fusionists.

For the NatCons “the state” acts on behalf of the people within its borders by pursuing the national interest and upholding national traditions. This is, ironically, a major departure from “the American tradition” in which “the people” have rights and “primacy….over their government”

The NatCon Statement of Principles seeks a limited administrative state, but then makes a troubling exception justifying the use of state authority in certain circumstances.

We are left to imagine who gets to define what constitutes a breakdown in order and how it might be restored. On this point alone the NatCons invert the relationship between the government and the people as stated in The Declaration of Independence.

Perhaps confusingly, the NatCons commit to the U.S. Constitution of 1787 and common law legal tradition (Principle 5). They are united in their disdain for Marxist, authoritarian, leftist ideological movements who would extinguish the basis of culture and law in the Divine.

Allegory of Bad Government, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1338-1339

They then proceed to small “d” divinize the nation cutting off the source of human rights in the West: the recognition of authentic human freedom, conscience, and dignity, rooted in the truth and knowable by human reason.

NatCon Founder Yoram Hazony extols the (Biblical) virtues that undergird just and peaceful nations, but he rejects the existence of universal truths and with it the natural law, (both Catholic and Straussian natural rights varieties) and the natural rights tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular John Locke. He looks to Edmund Burke as a philosophical guide, but badly misreads him.

For Hazony, humans are not that reasonable and they need thick cultural or religious traditions to guide them such as the Decalogue.

In this framing, our obligations and duties extend to tribe, family, and nation - full stop. Here Hazony exits the American conservative intellectual tradition and originates his political project in Hebraic scripture and subsequently what he sees as the historical particularism of Anglo-Protestant nations. Akiva Malamet illuminates the troubling implications of “metaphysically imprisoning humans into one group…the nation.” Namely - the lack of limits on imposing one’s will on others, religious discrimination, and ethnic chauvisnism.

Hazony’s anthropology, intellectual history, and his conflation of right ‘reason’ with secular ‘rationalism,’ lead him away from the very Anglo-American tradition he praises as a model. Paradoxically, Hazony doesn’t recognize the residual natural law present in his pantheon of intellectual forbearers: John Fortescue, John Selden, and Edmund Burke.

Reason and rationalism are not one in the same. Contrary to Hazony, it can be said, consistent with the conservative tradition, that reason-aided-by-grace, or the classical virtue of prudence inform the American concept of liberty. A liberty “grounded in (and bounded by) the laws of nature and nature’s God”.

Despite these major errors it is only right that the NatCons be allowed to peaceably assemble and to speak as their consciences guide them. For those who disagree with their views, such as Mayor Kir, all the better to appeal not to force but to reason.

In his 1997 book, The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies, (MVDV) political economist, Vincent Ostrom takes up Tocqueville’s question after an academic career spent partly ‘in the field.’

A respected professor he was not an ivory tower elite. Ostrom studied and participated in finding self-governance solutions to groundwater management in California, and the drafting of the Alaskan Constitution. In his work he took a high view of human creativity, believing people could find ways of cooperating under the right conditions based on ‘shared understandings,’ goals, and values.

He wasn’t optimistic about America’s prospects at the turn of the 21st century, already decades-deep in its transformation from a federalist system to a “Presidential Government run from the Executive Office… exercising tutelage over an innumerable multitude” and a citizenry turning to the government to meet all of its needs and wants.

MVDV isn’t breezy reading but is thick with insights for the patient reader.

He traces the breakdown in American self-governance to the essential building blocks of human societies: religion, ideas, and, importantly: language. Animals may vocalize, but language is unique to humans. It is the basis of all forms of capital: social, human, and physical. It is culture-bound and grounded in our engagement with physical reality and with one another - connecting ideas and deeds.

Problems emerge when there is a gap between ideas and deeds, and the promises of politicians continually prove to be failures or outright lies. Trust is damaged leading to disillusionment and providing an entry point for demagogues who promise “Truth and Salvation.”

Ostrom points to dangers of “The New Newspeak” in media and politics. The use of big abstractions (Justice, Democracy, Truth, Freedom), emotional framings, and slogans serve to project omnipotence and manipulate perceptions that allow power-seekers to rule from above.

And, when language loses its integrity and coherence we no longer have a basis for culture or community, or even decision-making.

Ostrom continually returns to the notion of language as the basis for social orders: reflecting both Michael Polanyi’s “tacit knowledge” and Karl Popper’s “objective knowledge”. Language is interpersonal always involving relationships within a community of persons, in physical reality. Language transmits learning and “institutional facts” across the generations.

At the dawn of the Internet, Ostrom lamented the vapidity of TV and its zombifying and alienating effects. In the 25 years since, hyperconnectivity shapes language and relationships at a dizzying pace. Physical and virtual realities overlap. Communication is instant and disembodied. Social capital and human connection is weak. Intermediary association - churches, clubs, schools, volunteer groups, civic associations, continue to decline.

Amid so much cultural, political and social change what prospects remain for the recovery of civil society, premised on trust, The Golden Rule, and the inculcation of basic virtue, or what Tocqueville called, “the whole moral and intellectual condition of the people.” As we drift further from those cultural-religious moorings and shared meanings and instead isolate in virtual self-defining realities, when is the question of whether we have a government based on reflection and choice, or accident and force, rendered moot?

The rise of alternative and online media at the start of the 21st century diminished the role of gatekeepers and experts - reshaping ideological movements, and super-charging self-expression.

Martin Gurri identified this “crisis in authority” over a decade ago in The Revolt of the Public. Vital new perspectives and minority (or simply neglected) views are shared widely. Corruption and incompetency in governments and institutions are more easily exposed. It also means the fringes are back, bearing conspiracy theories and a whole lot of over-written nonsense. There is a cautionary tale in the emergence of the alt-right and Curtis Yarvin’s authoritarian awakening among the online autodidacts for whom there is no such thing as a discredited idea.

How does one “read well” without giving clicks to dreck and drivel? Or discern between serious scholarship and self-published esoterica?

The truth gives peace. Lies beget dark thoughts, fear, and eventually, violence.

All the more reason to read, “The Mystery of Israel,” in First Things by post liberal Catholic and Iranian-American, Sorhab Ahmari. I disagree with Ahmari on many things economic and political. He has written a “remarkable” piece as a “a son of the Church” and “a son of the Middle East” on the vital connection between Christians and Jews and what it signifies in this age.

Christians and Jews must respect what divides us theologically while recognizing and nurturing the far deeper bond “to Abraham and his children forever.” An important message in particular for “very online” young people to avoid the undertow of this uniquely unholy hatred that is corrosive to the intellect and heart.

Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Anti-Semitic incidents have increased by over 300 percent in the United States alone, including “40 incidents of physical assault, 337 incidents of vandalism, 749 incidents of verbal or written harassment.” Not to mention the hundreds of rallies and public demonstrations, many taking place on college campuses.

Much of this current outburst may be driven by an irreligious generation (or three) ignorant of history, embedded in mimetic ‘protest culture’ and swept up by its attendant peer pressures. Anti-Semitism is not a left or right phenomena. It tracks with belief in conspiracy theories, and speaks the language of scapegoating. This sin has implicated many Christians throughout history and into the present. Mary Eberstadt’s three encounters with anti-Semitism illustrate how the nursing of private hatreds can give rise to evil words and acts. For every Ulma family, there were many who were indifferent or complicit in the genocide of their neighbors.

As recently as December 23, 2023 Bishop Robert Barron wrote, “Catholics cannot be Anti-Semites”, prompted by the blast of unhinged comments he received for posting Hannukah greetings on Word on Fire’s social media platforms. Bishop Barron concludes with a Buckley-inspired ultimatum, “I want the most convicted and intelligent Catholics. Period. But I cannot have Anti-Semites.”

What Buckley banished and Nostra Aetate condemned at the Second Vatican Council, has found new entry points and audiences in the fuzzy world of alternative political movements and publications. Holocaust denial is on the rise - a view held by 20 percent of people under 30, according to a recent YouGov survey.

The return of the fringes, rising Anti-Semitism, and credulity given to conspiracies makes it all the more urgent for publishers, editors, and writers to follow the examples set by Ahmari, Eberstadt, Robert George, and Bishop Barron. Speak the truth. It is simple, clear, and brings peace.

To desire what others desire is the engine at the heart of human conflict. When those desires are unrealized scapegoating and violence results. It is part of a pattern that runs through human culture from the great myths, to Shakespeare’s, ‘theater of envy’, from campus protests, to social-media mobs and pop culture’s fandoms.

This pattern - so clear in Greek mythology - is broken only in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Gospels which reverse the scapegoat and the victim.

Oedipus must die. There is a plague in Thebes. The crowd is innocent. Job stands firm and righteous against his friends’ interrogations – in which Girard finds a fascinating parallel to modern totalitarianism’s mock trials and “forced confessions.” Peter’s denial of Christ before the fire in the courtyard echoes the ritual sacrifices of time immemorial, but unlike myth, as the cock crows, Peter stands convicted. Self-accused, “He wept bitterly.”

Girard’s insights into Biblical Judaism and Christianity are not without critics, in particular his claims about the nature of Christ’s sacrifice. While a devout Catholic, he did not claim to be a theologian. As a literary critic and social theorist, Girard gives us a new window into understanding today’s frenzied obsessions - political, cultural, and societal.

For three different approaches to Girard:

The recently published, All Desire is a Desire for Being, edited by Cynthia Haven includes a selection of his essays on mimesis in myth, literature, and religion.

How does mimetic desire work in our lives and how can we trade our imminent (and insatiable) wants for more worthy goals? Read Luke Burgis’s 2021 book, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.

Or start (where I began, years ago) with the 2009 interview he gave to Peter Robinson on Uncommon Knowledge.

In 2024, get to know Rene Girard.

Happy New Year.

Friar Clodovis Boff, brother of Leonardo Boff, recently concluded that Liberation Theology (which he and his brother developed and promoted in 1970s Latin America) is responsible for the decline of Catholicism in Brazil. Combining Catholic teaching on the duty to care for the poor with Marxism distorted the message of the Gospel. The faith was instrumentalized to advance socialism and revolution.

The Holy See’s 1984 statement on Liberation Theology is clarifying. Pope John Paul II sought to distinguish between authentic Catholic efforts to alleviate poverty and human suffering with the radical and error-riddled ideas that had taken root in Central and South America.

Today’s post liberal Catholics have their own meta-critique of free(er) markets and democratic governments as destructive to peaceful and just orders. The solution: transform them (peacefully and gradually as the liberal order collapses under its own contradictions) so that “the common good” and thus salvation will be more readily obtained for larger numbers of people.

There are many differences between Liberation Theology and the ideologically amorphous post liberals of the New Right. What they have in common is an embrace of a “politics of faith” as defined by Michael Oakeshott. A “politics of faith” does not require religious belief (there are both religious and materialist variants). It describes a faith in government’s ability to order human affairs towards some societal ideal.

Liberation theology held up socialism as a means to advance the Gospel’s message to care for the poor. The post liberal Catholic proposes using the administrative state to harness and nudge the mysterious action of grace in individual souls constructing a great civilization that is aligned with God’s holy will.

Vermeule vision casts a future to be unlocked with a master key that would utilize the Catholic Church to accomplish astonishing ends. He writes:

What is at stake is, indeed, far more elevated than power. What is at stake is no less than authority, the full authority of a reasoned political order, composed of both temporal and spiritual powers in right relation to the natural and divine law, that would put a mere Rome to shame. That limitless ambition is why liberalism finds a genuinely political Catholicism intolerable; why the liberal order will accept only a version of Catholicism that submits to be ruled; and why, whatever their justifications and whatever their self-conceptions, the practitioners and advocates of political quietism unfailingly receive their present rewards.

And yet this is not what Rome imagines, nor is it the Church’s ambition, in its own words.

The canonization of the martyred Salvadoran priest Fr. Oscar Romero (archbishop of San Salvador) is instructive.

Romero was neither a quietist nor a Marxist. Contrary to popular opinion, he did not endorse Liberation Theology even as he rebuked the increasing violence of right-wing militias against the campesinos. He did not seek political solutions. In his vocation as a parish priest he illuminated injustices and awakened individual consciences to the suffering in their midst and to reject violence.

His canonization aggravated some right-leaning Catholics who viewed him through a fog of ideological priors, even as his writings influenced Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger’s (Pope Benedict XVI) critique of Liberation Theology.

Cardinal Gerhard Muller in a 2018 review of Romero’s writings recalls the debates his cause raised with critics trying to fit Romero into an ideological framework - to claim him for Liberation Theology or disown him for not being sufficiently capitalist - when in reality his message pointed to the Gospel.

Cardinal Muller writes:

“The gospel is not a tidy theory that explains the world, a spiritual technique for facing life’s challenges, or a program whereby man can redeem itself - by violence or by peace…..Romero does not offer edifying thoughts that, while they might give our souls a temporary lift, do nothing to confront us with the radical call to discipleship. Nor does he select isolated biblical texts in order to validate a prefabricated ideology. He eschews the kind of propaganda that intoxicates a demagogue.”

Ironically, Christian adherents to “the politics of faith” end up discounting Divine Providence and instead ‘put their trust in princes,’ or in a new bureuacratic elite to direct individuals towards their conception of “the common good.” For those who prefer a “politics of skepticism,” there is still a vital connection to be made between religious belief and government but it is less direct, as John Grove notes. In a “politics of skepticism” government’s role is to maintain and enforce the rules, “that undergird civil peace and basic societal well-being.”

Romero’s own words, addressed to his fellow Salvadorans, in a time of violence, economic and political instability contain many exhortations to authentic solidarity with the poor but none more powerful than the call to each individual to daily conversion. Simply - to love - a love that propelled him to speak the truth plainly no matter the cost.

Q: “Why did God make you?

A: “To know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.”

The answer was settled for Catholics after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, in part due to the work of Fr. John Courtney Murray, S.J. who showed the connection between America’s founding principles and key documents and the natural law. This important distinction between American liberalism and its anti-religious, and often violent, European expressions meant that not only is possible to be a faithful Catholic in America but that its freedoms and elevated view of human dignity integrated core Catholic beliefs about the person into America’s governing fabric.

Courtney Murray’s view prevailed in the Church just as the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s transformed America and the Catholic Church made stunning changes to the liturgy, music, architecture, and curriculum in parochial schools and seminaries. We have woken up 70 years later to find empty pews and a society reeling from interlocking breakdowns in families, communities, schools, and neighborhoods. America has become sad and mean as David Brooks writes. What happened? Who or what is to blame?

There is no shortage of diagnoses. American political conservatives have for decades lamented the loss of virtue education and the breakdown of the family as foundational disasters wrought by the sexual revolution. Many Catholics place blame on a Church hierarchy that failed to teach the faith or who have given tremendous scandal in their handling of clerical sexual abuses cases. Progressives lament a consumerist culture and profit-seeking corporations as the source of economic injustice and hollowed out cities.

A new ideological movement has woven these criticisms into a damning indictment of America’s sins. These voices come not to praise America and its inbuilt ability to repair itself but to bury its founders in the hopes the country can be resurrected into a confessional republic held together with a ‘we-know-what’s-best-for-you’ administrative state.

The post liberal integralists are unknown to the vast majority of American Catholics. Their primary idea that we should “secure the common good” by subordinating the political authority to the Catholic Church’s spiritual authority is not part of a groundswell movement among the laity. It has no endorsements from the world’s bishops. Pope Francis disapproves.

What began as a discussion confined to online salons is now gaining an audience in some colleges and lay apostolates. It tracks with the decade-long crack-up in the conservative-libertarian consensus: a foil to fusionism’s blind spots. In a short time the notion travelled from a few philosophers such as Thomas Pink to the blogs and Twitter feeds of New Right journalists.

Attractive to young Catholics who see a world in moral freefall the Integralist critique of American society is alienating and despairing. American integralists define their vision of government as “post liberal,” because they reject conservatism, liberalism, and libertarianism as ideologies that all flow from a flawed American founding based on Protestant/Scottish Enlightenment falsities which denied Catholic truths about the ‘telos’ of man and the ordering of the Supernatural over the Natural order.

Their cri de coeur: “When will we realize that we are the victims of the moral chaos guaranteed by our philosophical patrimony?“ falls into immediate trouble with its blunt rejection of religious liberty.

“Do you really think 330 million Americans will peacefully assent to rule by the nation’s Catholic minority, who, according to recent Pew statistics, aren’t quite filling up the pews?“

The “sheer implausibility‘ or “Hey, that’s obnoxious!” argument is easy to make but it is also inadequate.

We should not be complacent in understanding integralism’s re-emergence in America and its roots in Internet-stoked disenchantment with both American elites and the scandals, omissions, and commissions of the post-Conciliar Catholic Church.

It is also important to reckon with what is actually being said. Even integralism’s advocates acknowledge their full vision is unlikely to happen. The real danger of the movement is in its power to create myths that feed ‘restorationist fantasies,’ and lead to the emergence of new kinds of “monstrous moral hybrids” in American discourse and institutions that conflate State and Church in ways that undermine both.

American integralism begins with a small set of professors with bespoke political ideas based on a particular reading of Catholic theology and tradition, Enlightenment, Marxist, and post liberal philosophy, Ancient and Medieval history, communitarianism, legal theory, and Catholic Social Thought. This fuels a fire-branded ‘retconning’ of American political history and the post WWII free-market movement that crested with Reagan’s presidency. In general they seek a “post-liberal” constitutional order to undergird a New Deal-esque Christendom. Eject John Locke and Adam Smith. Install Aquinas and Michael Sandal.

Sympathizers and critics of the integralists defy easy categorization. Ross Douthat helpfully breaks down a taxonomy of today’s political Catholics: populists, fusionists, integralists, benedictines, and tradinistas.

What’s the allure? It’s erudite. With an underbelly of contradictions. Idealistic. And darn sure of its chances. Angry. But they come in peace.

The most insightful responses come from within the traditions they claim to represent. They are:

• It’s not post-liberal philosophy.

• It is a solvent on Catholic Social Thought.

• It ‘paganizes’ Christianity and seeks God’s kingdom in the fallen world.

I. That’s not post-liberal philosophy. It’s theo-technocracy for the soul.

American integralism operates on two levels. It is philosophically consequentialist and breezily pragmatic offering a short list of virtue-supporting regulations for the good of the American people. Integralism’s most notable advocate, Harvard law professor, Adrian Vermeule, makes a case for promoting the common good through the administrative state, infused by the natural law, and led by a super-charged executive branch. A semi-structural change that empowers the Executive over the other branches. His policy prescriptions include banning pornography, instituting Sabbath laws, strong protections for the environment, and bolstering welfare programs.

There are two problems here. First, it is at odds with the natural law tradition. Secondly, it is not post liberal philosophy, properly understood.

As Sam Gregg writes, the natural law tradition on which Vermeuele seeks to ground the U.S. Constitution (which some argue is already infused into it) can be “known by human reason without the aid of revelation.” It holds that the political authorities should seek the political common good by ensuring justice and peace. The state is not ordained to legislate over matters of private virtue. We have traffic laws to protect human life. We do not fine people for gossiping or gluttony, even if those acts may harm others. Those are matters proper to moral formation and not the domain of the state. This was recognized by Aquinas.

Post liberal philosopher Jason Blakely identifies another of Vermeule’s devastating inconsistencies. Vermeule rejects, on theological grounds, the liberal order and then suggests deploying its social science toolkit (rational choice theory and behavioral economics) to enable an elite class of administrators to enact regulations in the service of a benevolent theo-technocracy.

It is neither Catholic nor post-liberal.

It’s also not “Legal History nor Academic Jurisprudence but Dworkian Fit and Justification”.

Call it simply, “Vermeulism.”

Tocqueville in Hungary

Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, in his most recent book, Regime Change, calls for ‘a revolution’ in American government. He seeks to peacefully encourage the emergence of an “aristopopulist” movement to serve a new national consensus which combines elements of Tocquevillian localism, cultural conservatism, and social democratic economic policies. Build a new elite class drawing from “the people” who will preference anti-big business, and pro-union policies to benefit the middle class and encourage family formation, civic virtues, and localism.

Starry-eyed and also ordinary. Deneen adopts a “Vermeulian contradiction”. Build the common good “top-down and from-within”, turning the concept upside down. CST holds that “the common good” flows from the principle of subsidiary and is a ground-up phenomenon. The state’s role is to provide the conditions (justice, order, and peace) to allow lower levels (family, churches, neighborhoods, charities and associations) to do what is in their domain. That is because these foundational institutions have their existence, “prior to the State,” as John Paul II writes in Centesimus Annus.

Baptism in the Potomac

Who gets to decide what is just in a post-liberal constitutional order? That depends. To be fair, Deneen is religiously ecumenical in vision for a new “expert class.” At least some of the regulations they seek are not. CUA theologian Chad Pecknold wants to ban blasphemy and Sorhab Ahmari is partial to blue laws. As Dominican friar James Dominic Rooney observes this is nothing more than an abuse of power with new kinds of ideological purity tests.

But is it “post-liberal“ properly understood, or merely over-intellectualized power politics?

Post-liberal philosopher Michael Hanby notes in several recent essays that today’s integralists by virtue of even offering technocratic solutions fail to grasp the nature of the problem they claim to have discovered: the more than half millennium-deep desacralization of the world. American integralists not only seek the impossible. They seek to achieve it through incoherent methods.

This intellectual project cum pragmatic policy agenda conflates, “theory and praxis, knowledge and power, truth and unity, philosophy with intellectual archeology.” They mistake metaphysics and medieval scholasticism for a 21st century manual on how to operate a virtuous American bureaucracy. There is also the McLuhanesque irony of conducting a conversation about the nature of the cosmos and man’s relation to God on Twitter.

A perspective from Plato’s Cave

If once accepts Peguy’s “Mystical Disaster,” that we have lost touch with the most elemental understanding of reality, human nature, and the meaning of life, then the problem that the American integralists claim to solve is intractable. “The metaphysical disaster” of liberalism far exceeds the domain and power of politics to fix.

Hanby recognizes this. The role of the integralist (properly understood) is not as political strategist but philosopher-king - one who is able (as saint, mystic, or artist) to reveal man to himself “not by imposing its truth forcibly upon the world, but by suffering even unto death its apparent absence.”

II. A Solvent on Catholic Social Thought

The challenge in applying Catholic Social Thought (CST) developed over the last 150 years of papal, conciliar and episcopal writings is threefold.

1. CST is a set of principles not positions. These are: Respect for human life and the dignity of the person, solidarity, and subsidiarity which are the basis of just and flourishing societies. These principles are rooted in binding moral teachings on the sanctity of life and our duty to care for the poor.

2. CST is also contextual, contingent, and limited.

   Much of CST is non-binding, constituting papal reflections on everything from corporatism to climate change. Popes are entitled to their views. There is ample room for disagreement on whether the best way to help the poor is by removing occupational licensing laws, welfare policies, or raising the minimum wage. In fact, CST is clear, these debates are best left to experts, not theologians.

3. CST is not a game of proof-texting or pitting “Pope against Pope.” Catholics of all political persuasions are apt to cherry-pick encyclicals to bless their preferences (“proof texting”). Or they stress the writings of some popes and discount others. For Integralists this manifests as emphasizing the encyclicals of pre-Conciliar popes. They cite Leo XIII to make a case for the Social Kingship of Christ. Or find a blessing for specific economic and environmental policies in Laudato Si where Francis calls for the circumscription the market to protect the poor and the environment. (See number 2).

   An ongoing and serious challenge of CST writes Sam Gregg is that the Church itself does not always make these nuances and distinctions clear. Social encyclicals at times suffer from ambiguous scope and the conflation of positive and negative norms

The integralist’s appeal to reorient society around a confessionally-defined common good via a civil bureaucratic rule that preferences Catholicism disintegrates on contact with both the U.S. Constitution and one of CST’s binding teachings: the dignity of the person.

Catholicism teaches that we are each made in the image and likeness of God (Imago Dei), as such we have reason and free will. God is Love (agape). Love cannot be not forced. It is a response to God’s call.

Pope Benedict’s reflections In Deus Caritas Est begin with how we are to understand a God who is love, and then how we are to practice what we have received in faith and the sacraments as a “community of Love.”

“the entire activity of the Church is an expression of a Love that seeks the integral good of man: it seeks his evangelization through Word and Sacrament, an understanding that is often heroic in the way it is acted out in history; and it seeks to promote man in the various arenas of life and human activity.”

How are we to do this?

Benedict defines the separate yet interrelated spheres of Church and State, as rooted in Christ’s admonition to “render unto Ceasar”. (Matthew 22: 15-21)

The State’s role is not to impose religion, but to “guarantee religious freedom and harmony between the followers of different religions.” Catholic Social Thought “… has no intention of giving the Church power over the State. Even less is it an attempt to impose on those who do not share the faith ways of thinking and modes of conduct proper to faith. Its aim is simply to help purify reason and to contribute, here and now, to the acknowledgment and attainment of what is just.”

Then how do we square Leo XIII’s Social Kingship of Christ with Paul VI’s encyclical Dignitatis Humanae and the subsequent writings of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis in favor of religious freedom while avoiding the game of “proof-texting”? We distinguish between the principle of “how to live the Gospel” and its prudential application in different historical contexts.

In an interview, Francis addresses the paradox of a missionary Church operating in settings where religion is to be a solely a private matter. He distinguishes between a healthy secularism and an oppressive laicism as legacies of the Enlightenment.

“…. In general, a lay state is a good thing; it’s better than a confessional state because confessional states always finish badly. But secularism is one thing, and laicism is another. Laicism closes the doors to transcendence, to the dual transcendence: both transcendence towards others and, above all, transcendence towards God; or towards what is beyond us. And openness to transcendence is part of the human essence. It is part of man…”

We could even say that the liberal order is itself an imperfect refraction of Christianity’s elevated view of human dignity and freedom even as we struggle to articulate and acknowledge it in a post-Christian age.

III. My Kingdom is not of this World

Benedict’s “Separate yet interrelated” points to the necessary and inescapable connection between religious belief and the formal structures of society.

A recent lecture by Prof. Russell Hittinger at CUA identifies a problem with the concept of integralism as a “first principle.” The problem is “Christological.” What Christ accomplished was “separation” of the temporal and spiritual. In the pagan world the deities and the state were intertwined.

As Benedict writes in Deus Caritas Est (2005)

The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not replace the State. Yet at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice. She has to play her part through rational argument and she has to reawaken the spiritual energy without which justice, which always demands sacrifice, cannot prevail and prosper. A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church. Yet the promotion of justice through efforts to bring about openness of mind and will to the demands of the common good is something which concerns the Church deeply.

The Catholic faith is to be lived. It is not a call to quietism or passivity in the face of injustice. It is the task of individual believers to witness the Gospel and to live its teachings in all settings. It is not to take the reins of power to compel religious practice. Our prayers and fasting, speaking truth in love (agape) - even at personal cost - and love of neighbor and acts of charity will infuse its institutions and transform the world. And we may not live to see the results.

For Sorhab Ahmari that’s quitter talk wrapped up in Benedict Option fantasies. Enough with the catacombs and mustard seed stuff. It’s time to ‘do something.’

Post-liberal Catholics Michael Warren Davis and Marc Barnes offer him a fraternal correction, here and here.

By lightly casting aside, the one thing necessary for believers, political Catholicism runs into trouble quickly, and it is not hard to see why.

“My grace is sufficient for you.”

I am not a trained theologian or philosopher. America has become sad and mean.

What do we do about it? Who is to blame?

He is heard in the silence and speaks to the heart.

When does a totalitarian regime become an ideocracy?

How do assumptions about human nature shape the tactics used to maintain doctrinal allegiance in ideological systems? Do such societies ever truly live up to their vision or must they compromise to survive?

In their recent book, Institutionalizing Indoctrination, Paul Dragos Aligica and Simona Preda offer new analytical framing for answering these questions using a case study of the Romanian experience with Communist rule from 1947-1989.

The book’s aim is not so much to explain the past as it is to alert us to the present.

For the past decade liberal democratic societies have seen a rise in illiberal ideologies from within established political parties promising to deliver social justice, promote national greatness, or deliver cultural and economic stability, by silencing, disenfranchising, or marginalizing ‘unbelievers’ who stand in the way of a better world. Is this a passing thing? Or are the new authoritarians inching closer to gaining traction and power. What are the tipping points?

The Romanian experience provides a window on how illiberal ideologies can quickly go from being fringe or external threats to fully operationalized realities.

In the case of Romania, communist ideology was seeded throughout a sophisticated managerial hierarchy complete with executive leaders (nomenklatura or Party elites), senior to middle managers, (political commissars, or ‘ideological workers’) and their cadres who were enlisted to propagandize or agitate citizens through the written or spoken word, respectively. The authors sketch out an eerily familiar Taylorist system of scientific management with feedback loops, reporting structures, and documentation protocols that monitored adherence to Party doctrine - a doctrine that was more shifting than certain and one that could only be discerned and interpreted by certain members of the elite.

We know it ultimately failed. As early as the 1960s the regime’s promises grew ever more divergent with reality. Another Achilles Heel was anthropological. The New Man needed to make the system work did not materialize. Instead people found ways to evade or protest the imposition of ideological straight jackets on human expression.

The things that allowed communism to spread in Eastern Europe and globally are worth noting for our present crisis: higher education, mass media, and technology.

Catechizing Converts: Gatekeeping for the elite

Schools and universities provided a structure conducive for institutionalizing ideology in the Romanian case. Communism was the curricula. Its beliefs, “wooden language” and “science” touched almost all subjects. Education was aimed at catechizing and credentialing a class of ideological workers for advancement to greater levels of power and influence in society.

Creating Facts and Narratives

Part of the success of today’s post-liberal political movements is their use of social media to gain converts by offering conspiratorial and Manichean views of the world which serve to both agitate and reassure “true believers.” To what extent do they operate parasitically - drawing on the legitimacy of established religions or political parties only to discredit them in the process?

Conjuring the New Man and Woman

One weakness of totalitarian systems is that they can only realize utopia if inhabited by supermen, angels, or robots, and not fallible human beings. How might reality-distorting technologies weaken or cloud human reasoning and diminish an authentic free will response against assimilation into new prisons of the heart and mind?

Lessons for Today

Cancel culture is a symptom. It points to the loss of analytical thinking that accompanies a tsunami of digital information. Mass media and messaging manipulates perceptions and emotions. Good propaganda doesn’t just stir up feelings it presents itself as fact-based and reasonable.

As Aligica and Preda write - the one antidote to stopping the tyranny of ideology - is to allow for a pluralism of views and protects and encourages the open exchange of ideas - without fear of censure. The Romanian experience shows there was no need for the communists to build new structures to inculcate propaganda. They simply inhabited existing ones: schools, universities, libraries, offices, and even hospitals.

How close are we to crossing the line in which people voluntarily trade their right to speak, to assemble, to defend and/or practice the free exercise of religion, for a fleeting feeling of ideological righteousness?

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