Politics - Opus Publicum

March 17, 2015 Politics, World

Mark Lilla’s Tragic Trilogy on Islam and France

Mark Lilla has done little to endear himself to Christians, specifically Catholics, over the past decade, but that doesn’t mean he should be ignored. The Stillborn God, Lilla’s less-than-complete account of the role of religion and politics in modernity which largely failed to include Catholic thinkers, earned him some chastising words from George Weigel: “[W]riting any part of the history of the Western debate over religion and politics without a serious wrestling with Catholic sources is a bit like writing the history of baseball without mentioning the National League.” More recently, Lilla’s polemical review of Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation was unsurprisingly ill-received despite having a few insightful words to offer on meta-narratives of spiritual-intellectual decline. Lilla, for reasons which remain foggy, hasn’t done much in the academic sphere since transferring from Chicago to Columbia. Happily, however, that has left him with sufficient time to keep running reviews and commentaries in various publications, including The New York Review of Books which just published Lilla’s three-part series covering, inter alia, France, Islam, and the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Comprised of two book reviews and an independent reflection, Lilla’s “trilogy” deserves to be read in full, not because everything he says is spot-on, but because unlike most commentators on “things political and religious,” Lilla has a surprising, even enchanting, way of detaching himself from secular-liberal commitments even if, at the end of the day, he appears dedicated to holding on to them.

March 5, 2015 Church, Politics, Theology

A Jot on Playing the Fear Card

At some point along the way in America’s culture wars the fear card became commonplace. Perhaps no other camp has used it to such astounding advantage as the so-called “gay rights movement.” By dominating the nature of the discussion and the acceptable (or unacceptable) terms on which it would be carried out, homosexualists eliminated all principled opposition with one word: homophobia. A man can no longer say with a straight face that homosexual acts are immoral; he must rather confess that is afraid of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders, etc.

February 20, 2015 Meta, Politics, Reading

Comments on Left/Right Blogs, or What’s Fun to Read?

A friend queried me the other day as to why Left-leaning blogs are, on average, more fun to read than Right-leaning ones. Because I am quite aware of his politics, I am confident he meant something else other than, “Why are Democratic blogs more fun to read than Republican ones?” Still, the categories “Left” and “Right” are often difficult to define, especially when applied to bloggers who write about more than just politics. I’ll start here. Is Opus Publicum a Right-leaning blog? Regardless of whether or not my posts are fun to read, the views they express are integrally bound up with the Catholic Faith. If I read an academic article and comment on it, I do so as a Catholic. If I read a book and review it, I do so as a Catholic. And when I discuss socio-economic matters, whether in the form of critiquing liberalism or championing alternative avenues, I do so as a Catholic. Given all of that, it seems that Opus Publicum can be safely categorized as Right-leaning, which maybe also means that it’s foolhardy for me to advertise its contents as “fun” to a single, well-adjusted human being.

February 19, 2015 Catholic Social Thought, Integralism, Philosophy, Politics

Anti-Liberalism, German Nihilism, and Integralism

One point often raised against what I will broadly refer to as the “anti-liberal tradition” is that it lacks intellectual, if not moral, seriousness. There is a whiff of truth in that claim, just as there is an element of truth embedded in observations that liberalism—and those who champion that ideology—are intellectually timid, complacent, and devoid of any horizon which stretches beyond their individualistic self-satisfaction. Anti-liberalism, which comes in many different forms and encompasses persons and movements with greater-or-lesser degrees of antipathy toward liberalism, has shifted courses many times over the past three centuries. With the last vestiges of the old regime now swept away, anti-liberal movements are compelled to either start anew, looking to the past while fixing their sights on the future, or—as is too often the case—desirous of taking up the mantle of socio-political movements which were not so much lacking in seriousness as they were overflowing with evil. Some today, understandably disillusioned with contemporary political realities, flee to whatever they can find. If they happen to be Christian—Catholic or Orthodox—they might seek refuge in an integralist position that is either principled or escapist. If they happen to harbor a distrust of religion, specifically the Christian religion, then there is always the so-called “New Right,” along with any number of unsavory racialist and nationalist organizations. Why people make the choices that they do cannot, in my estimation, be reduced to a handful of causal factors, though certainly these types of orientations, which are “fringe” by their very nature, have a tendency to draw in socially marginalized individuals. At the same time, these movements can also attract bright, well-educated young people who, out of boredom more than principle, find the anti-liberal posture congenial even if their daily lives reflect very little of the sacrifice which such a posture should entail if it were serious.

February 18, 2015 Economics, Politics

Some Remarks on Frohnen and Libertarian Socialism

Professor Bruce Frohnen, writing over at Nomocracy in Politics, asks, “Is Libertarian Socialism Our Future?” I confess I am not a fan of catchy, chimerical labels like “libertarian socialism,” especially since there are plenty of iterations of run-of-the-mill socialism which embrace heavy-handed government intervention in the market (including sizable redistribution and entitlement programs) while upholding social and moral libertinism. Perhaps Frohnen should have just gone with the expression “libertine socialism.” For as difficult as it is to reconcile the basic economic tenets of libertarianism with those of socialism, “libertarian socialism” would seem to imply a bottom-up or grassroots approach to economic organization, such as guild socialism or even more radical movements like mutualism and anarcho-syndicalism. Those movements have a long intellectual pedigree and have already been grouped together under the macro-heading “libertarian socialism.” If Frohnen is discussing a new phenomenon (and I don’t think he is), a fresh term is in order.