Christendom, Take Two

Commentary on Beyond Secular Order

by Eugene McCarraher on January 1, 2016

 

John Milbank invokes Edmund Burke at key points in his brief on behalf of the restoration of Christendom. The epigram—from Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)—sets an ominous and accusatory tone:

In the groves of their academy, at the end of every visto, you see nothing but the gallows.

The “academy” to which Burke refers is a school of instruction in a “barbarous” philosophy: the appalling and disruptive idea that political institutions are human contrivances, not the edicts of an omnipotent divinity, and that underneath all pomp and rectitude lies the vulnerable flesh of human beings:

A king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order . . . Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity.

This iconoclastic rationalism is “the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings” and is “as void of solid wisdom, as it is destitute of all taste and elegance.”1 Once reason reduces monarchy, family, and religion to fables of power, then society will degenerate into an orchestrated anarchy, as individuals vying for self-interest will respect only the terrors of legalized violence. Hence, Milbank contends throughout the volume, the pandemonium of liberal modernity, inaugurated with the French Revolution and continuing for the next two centuries and counting.

Later, Milbank calls again on the Burke of the Reflections, arguing that the only alternative to a further descent into chaos is Burke’s Christian teleological politics—presumably free of coercion and carnage, with no gallows in the groves of its academy—that fuses “the animal, the artificial-historical and the human orientation to their final end in God” (BSO, 182). Milbank rehearses “the most famous of all the passages in [Burke’s] writings” (BSO, 182):

Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible worlds, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and moral natures each in their appointed place.

This “great primeval contract” attests, Burke argues, to “a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection.” It’s a Great Chain of History, this partnership—continuous, Burke implies, with the Great Chain of Being that unites the “visible and invisible worlds”—for it is contracted “not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” G. K. Chesterton, that most charming of reactionaries, would later dub this lineage “tradition,” a “democracy of the dead” to counterbalance the weight of “that small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”2

Of course, this means that the present is forever outvoted—and by an accretion of the small and arrogant who themselves once merely happened to be walking about—and Burke’s “partnership” similarly weights the scales against both the living and the unborn. It’s because of this charming mendacity that critics of Burke from Thomas Paine onward have rejected his Reflections as ideological camouflage, servitude to power masquerading as sagacity, propaganda for a decadent ancien regime dressed up in “the equivocal idiom of politeness,” as Mary Wollstonecraft characterized the orotund prose. Whether tagged as a “conservative” or a “patriot” Whig (as Milbank prefers to think of him), Burke cared more for the maintenance of extant hierarchy than for any “tradition.” Perhaps no one knew this better than Burke himself. For all the grandiloquence he lavishes on behalf of the feckless and beleaguered Bourbons, Burke is no dewy-eyed fabulist. Even Paine missed the joke when Burke described Marie Antoinette as “glittering like the morning star,” for he was not paying her a compliment; her dazzle exemplified the decadence of a dynasty too soft to bludgeon its opponents. Later, in one of his Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795), Burke expressed a grudging admiration for the radicals whose “barbarous” philosophy he despised. “In ability, in dexterity, in the distinctness of their views, the Jacobins are our superiors,” he conceded; seeing through the Bourbons’ glamour, they knew a decrepit order when they saw one.3 With a ruling class so indefensible, Burke had nothing but the frippery of eloquence to prettify its injustice and dissipation.

Yet Burke thought the “distinctness” of Jacobinism an iniquity as well as an advantage, and his reasons for preferring obfuscation to transparency shed light, not only on the counter-revolutionary mind, but on the shortcomings of Milbank’s political thought. Burke’s Reflections should not be read apart from his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), where he argues, in effect, for the virtue of ignorance. “It is our ignorance of things,” he writes, “that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions.” A “great clearness” about anything or anyone “is in some sort an enemy to all enthusiasms whatsoever.” Get too close or become too curious about a beloved object, idea, or person, and the inexorably depressing result is a thoroughgoing “loathing and weariness.” (The end of “simplicity” would appear to have a similar effect, as the complications produced by knowledge erode the incredulity necessary for obedience to a law whose origins we dare not question.) This unlovely thought reveals much about the depressive psychopathology of conservatism, which seems to consist of a simmering stew of disinheritance, disappointment, and grievance; but what I want to underline is Burke’s political linkage of ignorance and “admiration” in the Reflections. Recall this, the truly most famous passage of all his writings, in which he rhapsodizes “ancient chivalry”:

All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal . . . All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature . . . are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.4

Many readers find the sentimentality of those lines unbearable, but we should give the devil his due—Burke tells us quite clearly that the wardrobe of chivalry is comprised of an ensemble of “illusions.” Covering our “naked and shivering nature”—the nature shared by Bourbons and peasants—the costumes of illusion ensure ignorance, obscuring the knowledge that, yes, the king is but a man, and the queen is but a woman, both of whom require a “pleasing” embellishment of lies to guarantee their station. Burke’s keenest fear is that the emperor’s body will be seen through the beguiling but threadbare raiment of political and religious illusion, and that the fabric of the “great primeval contract”—the fraudulent “partnership” of monarchs, nobles, clergy and commoners through the ages—will be unraveled to reveal the naked truth of men and women without rank, status, or title. To “explode” these phantoms with criticism (a jarring but effective change of metaphor) is to peruse and abrogate that contract, discovering in its clauses the illegitimate pretentions of bodies like ourselves.

Like ruling classes and their lackeys everywhere, Burke insists that most of his fellow human animals—“the swinish multitude,” as he hisses in the Reflections—are unfit to manage their collective affairs. When the multitude goes without the “habitual social discipline” of “the wiser, the more expert, and the more opulent,” Burke mused in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791)—a subordination intended, of course, to “enlighten and protect the weaker, the less knowing, and the less provided with the goods of fortune”—then “they can scarcely be said to be in civil society.” Their daily labors incapacitate the swine for the exalted deliberations of political life. “The occupation of a hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person,” Burke harrumphs in the Reflections, “to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments.” While graciously averring that such rabble “ought not to suffer oppression from the state,” Burke insists that “the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule.” “Such as they,” or slaves in the American South, whose masters Burke breezily compared to the citizens of “ancient commonwealths” and “our Gothic ancestors.” An ocean away from the inferno of slavery, Burke could write with the callous insouciance of the clueless that the grandees of mint-julep tyranny tempered their “haughtiness of domination” with a “spirit of freedom” that was invincibly “noble and liberal.” It’s not hard to see why Burke was beloved by John C. Calhoun, John Randolph, George Fitzhugh, and other ideologues of plantation paternalism.5

I’ve dwelled at some length on Burke because Milbank upholds him as a paragon of Christendom—and he is, which says a lot about Christendom—and affirms his “great primeval contract” as an exemplary expression of Christian political ontology. It’s a perfectly apt choice, in its way, for it suggests that Milbank’s version of “Christian socialism” is precisely what Marx derided as “the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heartburn of the aristocrat,” and that the “democratization of exaltation” he envisions (BSO, 269) means the evacuation of democracy. Indeed, the present volume confirms what many have long feared since the publication of Theology and Social Theory (1990), Milbank’s sprawling, provocative, and pugnacious treatise on the ills of and cure for modernity: that what began as an effort to revitalize theology as a form of social and political imagination would evolve into a bizarre and fantastical enterprise in Christian imperialism. Beyond Secular Order is (so far) the most daring and grandiose argument for Christian imperium made in our time outside of fundamentalist circles—the “Christian Reconstructionism” or “dominion theology” that has percolated into American Protestantism is eerily similar but not as highbrow and humane.6 (I say “so far” because Milbank warns us that this book is the prolegomena to a tome entitled—God help us—On Divine Government.) “Radical orthodoxy” has finally culminated in a genteel dominion theology, shorn of the punitive moralism and capitalist economics advocated by Reconstructionists. (If Milbank wouldn’t let gays and lesbians marry, he certainly doesn’t want them stoned to death.)

It’s not as if there weren’t any warning signs of Milbank’s retreat into political chimera. Always combative, Milbank has grown steadily more strident, quixotic, and offensive over the last fifteen years. It’s loopy enough when a theologian of politics turns to J. R. R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings as a model for political life in the twenty-first century. (“Monarchic anarchy,” Milbank calls it elsewhere; “no law in the Shire, but the orderly echo of remote kingship”—remote, of course, as long as the hobbits remember their place.) But things get no better when he turns from medievalist fantasia to the realm of history. Christianity, he informs us, is “the sustained source of feminism”—which would be news to the countless suffragettes who encountered little but opposition and vilification from the churches. Unable to restrain his ill-tempered brio, Milbank winds up adopting some truly unedifying and even downright sinister positions. He once referred to liberal Protestantism as “nihilism lite”—a flippant dismissal of a theological lineage whose most courageous political archangel was Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Then there’s his hysterical opposition to gay marriage, or his equally delirious pronouncement that “the separation of sex and procreation” is a “state capitalist programme of bioethical tyranny.” And consider Milbank’s melancholic twaddle about “the lamentable premature collapse of the Western colonial empires.”7 The white man laid down his Burden too soon, in Milbank’s infallible judgment; the swinish multitudes needed more Euro-Christian tutelage in the disciplines of divine government.

That’s the inexorable terminus of every longing for “Christendom,” and it’s sad to see so learned a theologian waste his mind on so discredited and futile a project, especially as our politics desperately needs a strong and engaging theological presence. Alas, Milbank’s is not that presence. It is strong, to be sure, replete with his ostentatiously encyclopedic erudition and laced with polemical braggadocio. The prose alternates between turgid disputation and romantic evocations of the power of divine love. Calling on Christians to nurture “the steady fire of a confident and yet absurdly hopeful charity” (BSO, 221), Milbank reminds us that

genuine interpersonal love—both erotic and generous—begins as the supernatural love of God for us, which we share in by loving him in return and by echoing this bond in terms of our mutual relations with other human beings and other creatures. (BSO, 222)

Amen; yet it doesn’t warrant the political ontology that Milbank outlines in this book. Milbank’s voice is certainly vigorous (I would say “robust” but that’s one of the most overused words in our theological vernacular these days). But it is also less than engaging, and its unpleasantness stems from the imperious benevolence it so gorgeously and sophistically defends. Committed, like Burke, to a Great Chain of History sanctioned by a Great Chain of Being, Milbank derives an elitist theory of democracy from an “ontology of participation” in a similarly hierarchic and unalterable cosmic order.8 Profoundly suspicious, like Burke, of “the many” yet resigned to their historical achievements, and determined to reinstate some ascendency of the virtuous that he imagines to have characterized “Christendom,” Milbank argues for a democracy of the few: an enfranchised but circumscribed populace, overseen by an aristocracy of righteousness and united in thrall to some principle of monarchy.

It’s a vision without political purchase anywhere save in the groves of the theological academy, where resentful savants of divinity disinherited from cultural preeminence can imagine their restoration. Like other mandarins divested by modernity, Milbank rightly identifies the dynamic hierarchies of money and technology as the culprits of their dispossession. Yet the irony of Milbank’s “Christendom”—embodied ideologically in the “Red Toryism” associated with his former student, Philip Blond—is that far from promoting a new medievalism or a “Christian socialism” (itself of dubious provenance), it assists in furthering the neoliberal project that Milbank claims to abhor. As desperately as we need alternatives to the insidious ascendency of neoliberalism, another round of Christendom is not one of them.

Milbank has never made a secret of his desire to resurrect the broken body of Christendom. He dedicated Theology and Social Theory to “the remnant of Christendom,” at once a reference to the Christendom Trust (now renamed the M. B. Reckitt Trust in honor of its founder)—an Anglican research foundation devoted to “Christian social thought and action”—and also a nod to those longing for the restoration of Christianity to cultural and political supremacy in Europe and in the rest of the world as well. In that first book, Milbank was more concerned to deconstruct “the secular” than to reconstruct a vision of Christendom, so his gestures in that direction were relatively reticent. Over the 2000s, Milbank gradually dropped any pretenses. In a representative 2010 essay, he brashly defended Constantinianism against critics such as John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas, characterizing their opposition as “politically disingenuous and theologically dangerous.” (He even threw in a charge of Marcionism for good measure.)9 With “Radical Orthodoxy” as his Fellowship of the Ring, Milbank became the Gandalf of Christian theology, calling for an Army of the West to do battle with the Sauron of liberal modernity.

In Beyond Secular Order, Milbank is straightforward and dismissive in calling for a postmodern renaissance of Christendom. “The idea of Christianity without Christendom is a self-deluding and superficial illusion” (BSO, 233). He writes scornfully of “‘anti-Constantinian’ Christians” who “would have preferred that the Church remain a quasi-Montanist nomadic puritanical sect, whether in the deserts of North Africa or those of New Mexico.” Such fools and cowards display “a somewhat deficient sense of both mission and common humanity” (BSO, 248). As he has in his previous work, Milbank enlists Augustine, citing approvingly the bishop of Hippo’s dictum that Christian emperors should exercise their power “towards the promotion of the ecclesia” (BSO, 228). He even quotes—again, with apparent approval—Augustine’s observation that “stern necessity” will often force “the good” (or to be more specific, the Christian emperor) to “make war and extend the realm by crushing other peoples.” Milbank sees here, not a tragic perversion of the Gospel, but rather “the incarnation of cosmopolis in ecclesia,” a conception of an “international commonwealth” (BSO, 230–31). What Milbank envisions, in fact, is an ultramontane Christian imperium—“peaceful” and “ecumenical” he assures us, superintended by “a symbolic and representative centre of world government” (which replicates “the lapsed imperial role”) that would ideally recognize “the spiritual primacy of the Pope.” This new world order would champion “the collective pursuit of innately desirable human goals”; only in this imperium can humanity be oriented to enter “the eternal kingdom of love” (BSO, 257–61 passim).

To be sure, Milbank suggests an illustrious and seductive prospect, so beautiful that many readers might experience a rapture of theo-political ecstasy. But that’s why we developed that hermeneutic of suspicion that Milbank and his ilk find so nettlesome; it compels us to examine the picture and ask if its loveliness conceals something flawed, even hideous. And when one recalls Milbank’s more outrageous statements about liberal Protestantism as “nihilism lite” or the “lamentably premature collapse” of Western colonialism, a broader and much less enchanting ensemble of possibilities comes into view. Let’s start with Milbank’s invocation of Augustine’s “Christian emperor” who acts with “stern necessity” to promote the church and “extend the realm.” If God acted through Rome in antiquity to spread the gospel and promote the ecclesia, then surely the Western colonial powers who brought Christianity to the indigenous peoples—and whose “premature” departure from their conquests Milbank professes to find so lamentable—surely they were the agents of divine providence? The stern necessities of genocide, slavery, and colonial brutality, atrocious and regrettable as they were, were surely unpleasant but small prices to pay for the global promotion of the ecclesia. Were the slaughtered and commodified natives the unavoidable collateral damage of providence?

And what of those today who oppose the promulgation of the gospel by a Christian state? The dominion theology of Christian Reconstructionists is clear on this point: death. As the theorist of what purports to be a kinder and gentler Christendom, Milbank is elusive on this point. He tells us that the advance of Christendom will provoke “enemies,” but he argues for downgrading their status from “terrorists” to “criminals, who still have souls worthy of saving” (BSO, 260). I feel less than reassured by this. Who are these criminalized enemies? It would appear to include those who do not participate in “the collective pursuit of innately desirable human goals.” But who will identify these goals? And what if—as I sense Milbank is really saying here—it will be Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox who determine them? Will “enemies” then include atheists? Muslims? Liberal Protestant “nihilists lite”? Mennonites, Quakers, and other pacifists who would not defend Christendom with violence? Theologians and philosophers who purvey “univocity,” the ontological position that Milbank and his cohorts consider the modern road to perdition? Surely all of them will be enemies of Christendom, for in one way or another they would deny or inhibit the purpose of the Christian imperium. Will they be jailed? Executed? Sent to camps for re-education in orthodoxy? It would seem that in practice, Christendom would have to be much less “peaceful” and “ecumenical” than Milbank claims.

All of this should end speculation about Milbank’s thinly veiled leaning toward theocracy, an inclination he has long denied but which he might as well stop repressing after this volume. In Being Reconciled (2003) he contended that “theocracy” rests on the very dualism of secular and sacred produced by modernity. “A theory which limits rule only to a sacral class,” he explained, “requires there to be a distinct secular sphere over which to exercise this authority.” On the other hand, he reasoned, “where access to the divine is mediated throughout by an elusive participation [the ‘ontology of participation’ that serves as the substratum of Milbank’s political thinking], the secular is less distinct, and theocracy finds no scope for its peculiar logic” (BR, 175; see also TST, 225, for a brief precursor to this argument). This is pure sophistry: however lissome the elision of the secular, the dualism is still abolished by absorbing the secular into the sacred—the realm where ecclesial hierophants reign.

In Beyond Secular Order, Milbank tries to continue prevaricating, but the pleasing illusion is wearing pretty thin. The slippery move that allows Milbank to avoid an open avowal of theocracy is his insistence that “secular office” must be both inside and outside the church. While “secular office” should remain outside the church in some conveniently hazy fashion, it should also, Milbank maintains, be “also partially located within the Church” (BSO, 229). It belongs inside the church because “political rule, and especially monarchic rule” (for which Milbank demonstrates an unmistakable and extravagant affinity) should “reflect the general order of the cosmos”—a cosmic order apprehended, of course, by ecclesiastical officials and their theological preceptors (BSO, 241). But political office must also sit outside the church because, as the community of divine charity, the ecclesia cannot use coercion or violence to extend its boundaries. “A certain externality of the political to the ecclesial helps to ensure that the latter will remain true to its vocation to be a society of charity without exception” (BSO, 245). Again, this is sophistry, this time a way of keeping two sets of ledgers. If the rulers of the Christian state must employ “stern necessity” to promote the church and “reflect the general order of the cosmos,” the church can claim innocence, for to the extent that “stern necessity” remains external, the ecclesia can dote on its beautiful soul, safe in the knowledge that—as with the Inquisition—no ecclesial fingerprints will be found on the implements of violence and coercion.

If the peaceful ecumenism of Milbank’s Christendom is dubious, so too is the “democracy” that he claims will come into its own in the Christian imperium. Here, the “participatory” ontology and “analogy of being” (analogia entis) that underwrite Milbank’s political imagination are crucial, and they come together in this passage (BSO, 56):

Finite being as such is hierarchical, because it “participates” in various analogical degrees (and in different spheres in different degrees) in that infinite actuality which, for Dionysius the Areopagite, was “thearchy” beyond hierarchy.

Here is Burke’s Great Chain of History (“finite being”) that partakes of a Great Chain of Being (“infinite actuality”); and since “infinite actuality” is itself hierarchical (Pseudo-Dionysius’ and Aquinas’ “celestial hierarchy” of seraphim, cherubim, etc.), then so, by analogy, is “finite being.” The political import is unmistakable: someone has to be in charge, for as Milbank contends, “while the differences of being may often be egalitarian, they can only strike us at all within certain complex hierarchical patterns of overarching and overarched, predominantly influencing and subtly inflecting” (BSO, 56). Equality must always exist within a larger framework of inequality. That’s just the way the world is.

I’m not going to even attempt to adjudicate the controversy over the analogia entis. Thomist scholars such as Ralph McInerny and Fr. Herbert McCabe have argued that analogy in Aquinas concerns the language we use to apprehend the divine, not what the visible world tells us about God. Even if we must use analogies from the world to understand God, they insist that it is dangerously misleading to rely on them too heavily. “We always do have to speak of our God in borrowed words,” McCabe once mused. “He is always dressed verbally in second-hand clothes that don’t fit him very well. We always have to be on our guard against taking these clothes as revealing who and what he is.” I’ve long found this more “apophatic” mode of theology congenial, just as I find attractive the agnosticism of Mary Jane Rubenstein about the ontological order that Milbank seems to know so well. “I do not know whether there is a great chain of being or not,” Rubenstein has written, “but I do know what happens when Christians act like there is”: slavery, genocide, and misogyny, for starters, all of which conservatives routinely slough off as the tiresome resentments of liberals.10

For Milbank, the hierarchical nature of finite being is distilled politically in the classical ideal of “mixed government,” a constitution that combines monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—the “the one, the few, and the many” in Aristotle’s formulation that Milbank appropriates. Even though he devotes quite a few pages to a paean to the monarchical principal of “the one” (lamenting the atrophy of “the old dynastic mechanisms,” he remarks that “we need either to preserve or restore them in a new way or find equivalents for them”—“in the interests of democracy,” he adds hastily), he is most concerned about the role of “the few” and what he sees as their plight in liberal democracy. Modern political theory—“which is always liberal political theory,” Milbank emphasizes (even when it’s Marxist or anarchist?)—represents “an attempt to excoriate and remove the role of the few, regarded as the seat of privilege, of non-consensual power, of debatable claims to ethical value and as a threat alike to overall unity and individual liberty” (BSO, 159). It’s the perennial mandarin (first enunciated by Plato in the Republic, and resounding from Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville to Leo Strauss, Russell Kirk and Michael Oakeshott) about the fate of the talented and virtuous in a world where democracy levels everyone to rubble. Democracy empowers the illiterate, the workaday, and the boorish, in this view, the masses too busy to enter the shrine of philosophy, the hairdresser who believes herself the equal of a professor of religion and ethics at Nottingham. The resentment is as old as Plato, who expressed his disdain for the Athenian demos in this memorable ejaculation of bile:

For as compared with other occupations, philosophy . . . enjoys a higher prestige, and attracts a multitude of stunted natures, whose souls a life of drudgery has warped and maimed no less surely than their sedentary crafts have disfigured their bodies. For all the world they are like some bald-headed little tinker, who, having come into some money, has just got out of prison, had a good wash at the baths, and dressed himself up as a bridegroom, ready to marry his master’s daughter, who has been left poor and friendless. Could the issue of such a match ever be anything but contemptible bastards? And, by the same token, what sort of ideas and opinions will be begotten of the misalliance of Philosophy with men incapable of culture? Not any true-born child of wisdom.

What was begotten, of course, was democracy, a “contemptible bastard” that landowning families (like the one that begot Plato) were always itching to drown in the Aegean.11

Milbank can protest all he wants that Christianity represents a “democratization of virtue as charity” (BSO, 10) but—as his sourpuss hero Burke demonstrates—nearly two millennia of Christendom did little to mitigate this outraged sense of entitlement, this effrontery at the idea that ordinary people are quite capable of participating in intellectual and political life—given the time and power to do so without interference from the few. Platonism is inexorably an ideology of authoritarian rule, and it’s for that reason, I suspect, that Milbank is artfully ambiguous about “the few” and their role in his renovated Christendom. The few will perform “necessary functions of guidance” and preserve “an objective sense of the human good and its promotion” (BSO, 215, 263). He is not always clear about who “the few” are, writing at one point that he means both “the expanded Christian sense of mediating free associations”—trade unions, professional organizations, hospitals, universities, etc.—and “the antique Greek and Roman sense of the guidance of the wise” (BSO, 263).

Milbank clearly favors this latter “sense,” as becomes clear when he discusses the relationship of the few to “the many” in Christendom. Eager to swipe democracy away from liberals and socialists, Milbank maintains that the hierarchy of Christian imperium, far from smothering democracy, is rather the precondition of its full development. “The viability of democracy,” he insists, “depends upon a continued constitutional commitment to ‘mixed government.’” Since, in a new Christendom, mixed government would be “transfigured” by “the Christian democratization of virtue as charity” (BSO, 10), then all levels of hierarchical human being will be harmoniously leavened by divine love. “The few or the one are ‘identical’ with the many,” he explains, “since they are all involved in a common participation—for the Middle Ages in the body of Christ under the governance of an invisible head” (BSO, 145).

This nimble ontological move enables Milbank to completely redefine democracy. Rooted in his “participatory” ontology, “true” democracy, for Milbank, is not characterized so much by popular agency as it is by popular acquiescence, more or less avid, to the wisdom and will of the few. Because the one and the few are “identical” with the many through analogical participation, they “also ‘represent’ by consent or acclamation the needs and even the will of the many” (BSO, 145, my italics). Milbank equivocates on this score so as to preserve his democratic bona fides. He remarks that direct democracy is possible within “small-scale bodies”: monasteries, workshops, streets and neighborhoods. Indeed, he writes, “at every level, people should be able to shape their own collective lives as much as possible.” So far, so democratic, even anarchist; “but,” Milbank then adds, “the question remains of what options are put to them in the first place.” Put to them, not generated by them. It is not “true to reality,” he argues, that these options should “come from the people themselves”; “it tends to be the dynamic few, from whatever social stratum, who shape and present new options” (BSO, 215–16). (That “from whatever social stratum” is a really adroit move, enlisting the spirit of egalitarianism in its own demise.)

If Milbank were trying to argue that major historical transformations have often been triggered by the thought and action of creative minorities, I would have no objection; history if full of “dynamic few” who shaped and presented “new options”—even anarchists, who possess the most extravagant faith in popular agency without elites, are in present circumstances “the few.” But he wants to say something more: that the creative dynamism of “the few” will always be the sole catalyst of political life. In his idealized Christendom, Milbank wants to institutionalize the spirit of the vanguard—a group that by definition tries to bring others with them, and aiming to no longer be a creative few—and make it an elite, a “few” in stasis. Genuinely popular politics is inconceivable to him—mainly, as he suggests himself, because despite his profession that Christianity “democratizes” virtue, he cannot conceive that virtue and truth are truly open to popular access. Even though Milbank insists at one point that “genuinely educative processes . . . must keep pace with the extension of direct democracy,” he writes later that “the ‘educative’ dimension cannot be itself democratized without an impossible infinite regression” (BSO, 216, 264). I’m at a loss as to what “infinite regression” means; but the crux of the matter appears when Milbank continues that democracy must be complemented by “a non-democratic ‘Socratic’ sense of the importance of the role of the few as pursuing truth and virtue for their own sake” (BSO, 264). The “Socratic sense,” that is, that bald-headed little tinkers are incapable of “philosophy,” that the many cannot possibly pursue truth and virtue for their own sake, mired as they are in everyday labor.

In this way Milbank is able to redefine democracy as popular consent to the wisdom of the few. The few, he assures us, will “respect democracy as the importance of free consent” and as a “majority testing” of elite proposals, but they will “resist any idea that what people want en masse defines the nature of the good itself” (BSO, 263). Milbank never explains why something desired “en masse” is ipso facto not good; like the antique triad of his political ontology, it is asserted or assumed rather than argued. Since all “participate” in the transcendent reality that exceeds their differences, their interests are by definition harmonious, if not identical; and since the one and the few are wise enough to discern the terrestrial import of this participation, they can speak and act on behalf of their many, less sagacious brethren in transcendence. Thus the role of the many in a renewed Christendom will be to accede to policies already formulated for them, not to govern themselves through popular forms of deliberation. The next Christendom will be a democracy of the few, an aristocracy of wisdom and virtue.

What will happen if the many reject or dispute the rule of the one and the few? What if the demos refuses consent, or if, after “testing,” the majority flunks rather than acclaims the proposals of the few? Milbank never really answers these questions—perhaps he will in On Divine Government—but he clearly hints that such misbehavior will be countered with some elite interdiction of popular will. “Sometimes the advice of the few or the will of the one must override the popular will in the interests of equity” (BSO, 263). Just as we never learn how domestic “enemies” of Christendom will be handled, we never learn how this annulment of democracy will be enacted—perhaps through some (educative) exercise of “stern necessity” among the populace.

This transfiguration of democracy into the rule of the few is paralleled by the metamorphosis of “socialism” into a benevolent capitalism. As in his previous work, Milbank advances “Christian socialism” as both a critique and an alternative to the secular socialism of the left. Drawing on Marxist, Romantic, and distributist writers—Marx, John Ruskin, Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Eric Gill—he rejects the view of capitalism as an arduous but necessary phase of history, chastising the modern “left” for embracing its antagonist’s mythology of “progress” and for sanctioning the industrial centralization that pulverizes skill, perverts poesis into productivity, and eviscerates political community.12 I’ve long thought that this form of anti-capitalist critique is both more historically defensible and politically fertile than Marxist “dialectical materialism.” But that’s why his account of “Christian socialism” here is such a huge disappointment, for we need a vibrant and credible alternative to revolutionary socialism and social democracy. In this volume “Christian socialism” amounts to “the extension of chivalry and noble aims to all through the formation of ‘knightly’ guilds of work and trade,” “high standards,” and “virtuous practice” (BSO, 268). All of this is unobjectionable, but it is moral exhortation, not political economy, and it is not “socialism”—unless, as Milbank puts it lamely and abstrusely, socialism means simply “the primacy of ‘the social’ as against the economic or the political” (BSO, 168). Elsewhere, he calls for “the greatest possible equal distribution of private property and a justification of larger private property always in terms of both the specific needs and capacities of different individuals . . . and the fulfillment of functions which genuinely serve the common good” (BSO, 175). Milbank leaves “private property” undefined, even though it must be distinguished from capitalist property if its existence is even to be considered, let alone accepted, as compatible with “socialism.” And there is nothing here about workers’ control of technology, or the abolition of wage labor, or the eradication of class society—all classic demands of socialists (as well as communists and anarchists).

What Milbank seems to be advocating is not socialism but rather a more localized and parochial capitalism. Although he states that “Christian socialism” represents “a ‘left’ reading of Catholic social teaching” (BSO, 268), the scare quotes around “left” are telling: they signal that his reading isn’t really left (since a repudiation of the left-right binary is part of the upshot of “Christian socialism”) but that it’s sort of left in that it contains a critique of capitalism. Yet in both papal-encyclical and lay forms, Catholic social teaching has never been fundamentally antagonistic to capitalism; it has never envisioned anything like a rearrangement of property and class relations, and its ahistorical and flexible account of “private property” has enabled it to embrace capitalist enterprise (with a number of qualifications). Emerging from a sickly Christendom confronted by a burgeoning industrial society, mass democratic politics, a powerful socialist movement, and an emancipatory cultural modernity, Catholic social teaching is best understood as an attempt to graft a medieval moral economy onto a capitalist political economy, an effort that ends either in “Christian democratic” politics (Adenauer in West Germany and De Gasperi in Italy after World War II, who advocated moderate business regulation, a modicum of welfare provision, and moral traditionalism) or in some “corporatist” brand of reaction (Austria under Dollfuss, Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar). Milbank’s references to guilds, chivalry, and the “common good” reflect this medievalist moral imagination, as does his ideological filiation with the “Chesterbelloc,” idealists of all things organic and patriarchal, champions of the yeoman farmer and village artisan.

But when one inspects closely the “Red Toryism” of Milbank’s former student Philip Blond—founder of the think-tank ResPublica and erstwhile guru to Prime Minister David Cameron—the medieval veneer drops to reveal a paradise of the petty bourgeoisie, an arcadia of local accumulators suffused by a magnanimous paternalism. As the political distillation of “Christian socialism,” Red Toryism attempts to separate conservative moralism from neoliberal capitalism, a bond forged in Britain under Margaret Thatcher and in the United States under Ronald Reagan. The antipathy toward corporate globalization, cosmopolitan sensibility, and moral libertarianism is palpable, but it winds up suborning a homespun capitalism, not a distributist retro-medievalism. (Unless, of course, a homespun capitalism was really what distributism was always about.) In the Red Tory republic, public policy would enable small towns and villages to predominate over metropolitan areas; markets would sell products made locally; small farmers and artisans would supplant agribusiness and mechanized production; families (with heterosexual monogamous couples at the head) and voluntary associations would both revive civic life and assume many of the duties now performed by the alienating welfare state.13

Yet although the “big society,” as Blond calls it, would reinstate a hierarchy based on virtue rather than money or technical expertise—the goal, Blond and Milbank have stated, is to “link social and economic prestige with virtue”—the “justifiable inequality” that would result would not, by definition, be onerous or oppressive. As in the larger political hierarchy of Christendom, the virtuous few of the locality—rewarded with “prestige” and superior material wealth—and the not-so-virtuous many would be united in ontological harmony, so the small-town notables (which would include, one imagines, the local clergy) would oversee the common good, mostly free of the intrusive regulations of the distant social-democratic welfare state.14

None of this has a chance of ever happening. (Blond was soon kicked to the curb once Cameron no longer found his guru useful.) Blond and Milbank seem to expect the overlords and institutions of the neoliberal political economy—ensconced in both the Conservative and Labour parties—to simply disassemble and disempower themselves. The idea that Cameron and the Conservative Party would foster or tolerate anything that contravenes the interests of their wealthy donors is preposterous, as is the idea that a “Blue” insurgency could reverse the neoliberal drift of the Labour Party. Ironically, the primary historical significance of Red Toryism will be, I suspect, to have placed an unwitting imprimatur on the advance of neoliberalism by providing a “populist” language with which British social democracy could be further undermined. Its uncritical celebration of “localism” will not in fact empower localities, or even the small-time plutocrats who would rule if they were empowered; it does undermine the state’s welfare and regulatory functions, the last bastions of defense against the neoliberal transmutation of all things and people into commodities.

The fanciful quality of both “Christendom” and “Red Toryism” stems, I think, from the vagaries of a theological intelligentsia displaced from cultural hegemony, a dispossessed clerisy still searching for some kind of relevance to a world in which theology is no longer a lingua franca of intellectual life. It emanates especially from theologians who, conditioned in the mental reflexes of “establishment,” cannot imagine a world without Christians in charge. Especially when experienced at a time when Christians as a whole are in a state of drift and confusion, this fraught sense of displacement and perplexity can lead to compensatory delusions of grandeur. In what has to be one of the most laughably self-important sentences he has ever written, Milbank himself once complained about the burden of the contemporary theologian. “Uncertain as to where today to locate true Christian practice . . . the theologian feels almost that the entire ecclesial task falls on his own head.” Uneasy lies the head that wears a church. But it voices an anxiety that Christians are incapable of bearing the ecclesial task themselves, and that a new church must somehow arise from the febrile intellect of its theologians. It’s the same charge Edmund Burke leveled at the French revolutionaries he condemned as “barbarous,” except that in this case, it’s legitimate: a cadre of intellectuals attempting to create a new order out of their own grandiose lucubrations.

The attraction of Milbank’s reverie is, of course, undeniable, especially in the face of a neoliberal ascendency that reduces everything to pecuniary values. But we should always recall that the first Christendom collapsed, not because of nominalist or univocal theologians, but because of the confusion of faith with credulity, hope with hubris, and love with compassionate domination. Milbank would have us undertake a second venture in dominion in a haze of theo-political incense, assuring us that, the second time around, we will avoid the grotesque mistakes of our forebears. We should resist the siren songs of Constantinian imperium that Milbank and his cohorts compose, and decline their invitation to a vain and self-deluding reenactment of Christian hegemony.

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Eugene McCarraher is Associate Professor of Humanities and History at Villanova University. He has published in numerous publications including Books and Culture, Commonweal, The Other Journal, Modern Theology, and The Nation. He is the author of Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought and the forthcoming Enchantments of Mammon: Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination. 

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Response to Eugene McCarraher

by John Milbank on January 1, 2016

I come finally to the outright opposition and indeed hostility of McCarraher. A reviewer once remarked that my writings were a strange combination of forceful belligerence and subtly-argued nuance. Were they all nuance, then one might lose any sense of strong claim or shape. But McCarraher, for reasons best known to himself, wilfully elects to focus only on the belligerence (and even that very selectively). But without the nuances I do indeed sound completely fatuous and intolerable. Thus reading McCarraher’s piece I found myself largely agreeing with him: “Yes, the prematurely ageing Milbank is an intolerable twerp, lost in the bizarre twilight fantasies to be expected of one of the last representatives of a disappointed Brit mandarin class. I agree—I loathe him; he is as infuriating as he is despicable and irrelevant.” But then I had to pinch myself, remind myself of my relatively humble origins and history of tussles with an older British establishment, never mind a newer—and to check McCarraher’s references with my own statements in the text of BSO and elsewhere. There was hardly ever any alignment that I could see.

This seems sad, because I suspect that if I met Eugene McCarraher face to face we would probably have a civilised discussion and agree about much, besides nuancing our disagreements. Exaggeration of the latter is one of the “standardising” perils (as alluded to by Stiegler) of that technology called “writing,” and is a reason why the Phaedrus’s exaltation of orality is partially right, even if not entirely, as Plato may well have known.

But in lieu of such a perhaps more fruitful engagement, here is my rebuttal of McCarraher’s apparent points against me:

1. The “democracy of the ages” does not reduce to a defence of the given and an assault on the present. This is primarily because we never live in the present, but always in the continuous passage from the past to the future. Thus any revolutionary claim, like that of Paine, to represent only the present, must dogmatically and undemocratically freeze an imaginary synchronisation of time. The only antidote to this would be permanent and terroristic “Maoist” revolution as every present had to overthrow the previous moment, with ever-mounting delirium and hysteria. Presentism will tend both to foreclose the future, that always emerges from continuing past tradition, and to deny the authenticity of un-voted-for traditions that persist into the present. These may both enjoy tacit, popular assent and also represent the wisdom of cumulated experience, which may not be fully conveyable by abstract formulation. To denounce all that as obvious obfuscation is crudely to side with rationalism against the most deeply valid aspect of an empirical and positive attitude. And the enemies of past legacies are always as much the destroyers of folk habits and the loves of the people as they are (sometimes rightly) of entrenched privilege.
2. Burke, as any Burke scholar will tell you, remained an enemy of every ancien regime. His thoroughly unexpected assault on the French revolution rather entailed a belated grasp of how currents in that progressive whiggery which he had hitherto espoused could themselves engender a novel kind of oppression: manipulation of the national debt, the primacy of commerce before cultural mores, the cult of individual right.
3. One cannot just ride roughshod over the sheer complexity of the relationship between Burke’s aesthetic and political stances. There is, for one thing, no simple correlation to be made between Burke’s earlier sublime and his later defence in the Reflections of “pleasing illusion.” Indeed, Mary Wollstonecraft complained that he had abandoned the aesthetic sublime which he might (and as McCarraher indicates, fleetingly does) have recognised in the Jacobins. This interestingly aligns Wollstonecraft’s feminism with what, in The Sublime and Beautiful, is clearly a male gendered category. And Wollstonecraft is here perceptive: there is a notable aesthetic shift in the more Romantic Reflections towards the primacy of beauty and of “grace” as a kind of “picturesque” mediation of the beautiful with the sublime (this being the technical meaning of “picturesque” at this period). Thus Burke’s thoroughly picturesque account of Marie Antoinette, etc., with which he illustrates the need for cultural fictions is gender-coded “female.” It is not complete nonsense to suggest here that it is then by no means clear who is the feminist, Wollstonecraft or Burke? The issue is problematic and difficult—something evidently not much to McCarraher’s taste. For by both authors the sublime is regarded as the natural, the raw and the unencumbered. The later Burke’s point is that this will likely mean the rule of violence and of mainly male violence—a sheer imposition of bodily force and mental will. And his point has a correlate in what we know of the history of this period. The revolution saw a notable decline in the influence of women (as still explicitly celebrated by a current French conservative defender of the revolutionary legacy, Eric Zemmour!) especially in the aristocratically sponsored salons. Conversely, the counter-revolution in the Vendée and Britanny was sometimes led by women, including fighting women, modern Joans of Arc—as some feminists in France are now studying. It was also women who were newly to the fore in the sustaining of Catholicism though a time of persecution. One can reflect here that traditional female power is often linked to family, kinship, economic productivity and the sacrality of domestic and peaceful norms rather than to the public, male sphere of market exchange and political legality. When these are challenged in the supposedly “progressive” name of citizenship removed from family, religion and locality, then it is inevitably male power and freedom that are celebrated. If, nevertheless, women are subsequently and gradually “emancipated” (and the revolution quite soon generated its own liberal feminism in France) this necessarily requires that they adopt male, “sublime” roles, albeit often in a conveniently (for men) more amenable, docile and disciplined form. The alternative, non-liberal feminist course would be to exalt the public and political impact of the more traditional female functions and attitudes through a further merging of polis with oikos that Christianity has always implied and has partially achieved. The visionary here is Ivan Illich, in his great work Gender—surely the most cogent and apposite ever written on the subject. Equivalently, for Burke, women are associated with the “birthing” of culture, rather than with brute, natural force. Hence his linking of “femaleness” to all artifice and charm, and all “superadded ideas.” For McCarraher to protest here that Burke is simply defending the empty shams of ritual, fashion and parade that occlude unjust power is almost laughably simplistic: because clearly Burke is rather saying (in a somewhat proto-anthropological and postmodern way) that if one laughs too quickly at things like monarchs, court rituals, religious ceremonies, etc., then one may be failing to see that “decent drapery” is the whole of human existence, the symbolic technology peculiar to the human animal as such. Of course McCarraher can then validly point out that Burke is also being more specific than this—indeed offering a defence of monarchy and ritual hierarchy. But even this specific defence is not so easily dismissed: Burke is suggesting that, of course all human rule over other humans tends to the “sublimely” rude and violent. But the mere “tempering” of such power, even by somewhat dubious claims to legitimacy, style and social beauty may, therefore, be something not to be too readily derided. Above all, the channeling of male energy through something like “chivalry,” through a feminine coding of what is to be sacrificially defended, including women themselves, may be all that can ever possibly stand between women and male sexual violence in every sense. Would an honest reflection on our contemporary predicaments suggest that Burke is manifestly wrong here?
4. As to that “vague” aspect of the picturesque which is the relatively sublime, this is nothing to do with blind and ignorant obedience to laws. It is rather, as in Coleridge’s Burkean stress on the importance of the “tacit,” a defence of all those traditional forces, more often than not popular, which are not able completely and fully to articulate their character, for all their undeniable reality. It is a plea that substantial personal bonds and local attachments, that cannot be put into words, not be overridden by the instrumental and conveniently classifying instincts of the metropolis. It is also a plea that we not wilfully destroy some inherited cultural inherited features whose true potential and virtue may not have, as yet, fully emerged. This thematic relates closely both to the “democracy of the ages” and to the non-alienation of obscure, not fully expressed will by representing powers which try to make things more explicit. (See further, point 10 below.)
5. As we have already seen, Burke is wary of “the naked truth” about people, in a way that McCarraher is not. He fears that this would be first a purely animal nakedness and second that it might not after all be the truth, the specifically human truth. There are two points to be made here: first, that for all his understanding of culture as fiction, Burke still thinks that fiction and even fiction exclusively may mediate transcendent truth. One could even say that for him religion makes the necessary difference between culture as purely arbitrary and culture as somehow also “trans-organically” natural. Second, that Burke is not necessarily oblivious to something like “ideology critique” in Marx and Marxism. Instead, he points to a critical dimension that Marx fails ever to reach, even if Burke (very limited and blinkered in some ways indeed—as with his entirely condemnable failure to allow that there can be “working poverty”) by no means sees its full implication. Marx quite rightly sees capitalism as still a kind of religion—a religion of fetishes. But this gives rise to the pervasive notion that, in order to criticise capitalism, one must complete the critique of religion—one must strip away its more subtle idols, ruses and symbolic subterfuges. But just for this reason the usual secular left possesses no really adequate account of capitalism and this is surely one major reason why the left is declining and perhaps vanishing in our own time. For even though capitalism is itself a kind of anti-religious religion, it is more fundamentally a denial of any symbolic sacrality whatsoever—this is the precondition for it being able to melt all that is solid into the abstract air of finance or equally to conglomerate and enclose all solid particulars into one compoundable and redivisible mass. Of course there can then be a vestigial cult of the abstract and a vestigial cult of sheer extension and these cults are just as arbitrary or else more so than any other. Marx is not wrong. But to go along with his inadequate project of first dismantling every pre-capitalist sacrality is inevitably to side with the drift of capitalism itself. Just for this reason, all radical “critique” and especially the “hermeneutics of suspicion”—of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche—has always ultimately proved to be the advance-guard of liberal capitalism, just as ’60s new leftism so carefully, if inadvertently, prepared the ground for the rise of ’80s neoliberalism on the so-called “political right” of today. Beyond Marx, the later Burke saw more clearly that what “capitalism” does is convert the sacred—in the French case the ecclesiastical patrimony—into abstract speculation—in the French case the paper assignats securitised on seized monastic domains. Burke notes that the revolution abolished everything bequeathed by the ancien regime save the national debt, which it greatly exacerbated. And as J. G. A. Pocock suggests (roughly): if Marx had been able to say to Burke “but you have ignored the fact that the French revolution is the political eruption of the capitalist system of production,” Burke might well have replied, “No, it is you who have ignored the fact that capitalism is a system of financial speculation before it is a system of manufacture—and so a system of destruction before it is a system of production, which the revolution much extended.” It is a thesis that we might well ponder today—did Marx regard capitalism as a more rational project than it really is? But Burke in effect did not. For him, rather, the purely rational never gets a look-in because the human-constituting fictional “addition” is always in excess of reason. So the choice is between “conservation” on the one hand and an iconoclastic nihilism on the other. McCarraher ignores the sheer weight of evidence that those ready to overthrow idols—from the Puritans, through the Jacobins, to the Bolsheviks to ISIL—are often happy to deface many human faces and to topple many human bodies also.
6. I am happy to admit that Burke failed, unlike Ruskin later, to see the virtue and preparation for citizenship inherent in every human occupation. But William Cobbett already started to democratise and radicalise Burke’s positions. Where Burke rightly argued that political power and franchise exercised without responsible and propertied influence was dangerous and therefore desired to restrict the qualification to vote, Cobbett instead—in anticipation of distributism—argued for the extension of property and so of responsibility in every sense as naturally going along with an extended franchise. The later “chartists” thought something similar, and in lieu of available rural property in Britain often emigrated to North America and Australasia in order to find it.
7. Burke’s relation to the abolition of slavery is complex and disputed, but it would seem that, in the end, he was one of the first people to propose a partial scheme to realise it. One can also note here his notable protests against British economic and political exploitation of India and failure to respect India’s cultural and legal norms. He is not answerable for the Confederacy.
8. Hobbits of the Shire will note that McCarrer has little sense of fun, allusion, play or paradox. He might at least respect their anarchic dimension, according to his own lights. I know this being one myself and certainly no Gandalf—whom perhaps the West awaits.
9. Apart from opposition to the redefining of marriage (shared by many gay people, even now) which is partially based on a respect for homosexual difference, my positions on homosexuality are wildly liberal and accommodating by any historical or past ecclesial standards. As to my fears of a total separation of sex from procreativity and its consequences, that is exactly the main topic of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a book not usually regarded as obviously wild or contemptible.
10. As to the role of the few I am not an advocate of aristocratic domination. Rather, like many other political theorists at present, I am suggesting that the phrase “representative democracy” is a misnomer, and that advocates of “representative government” from the eighteenth century onwards rather, and logically, understood it as a mode of “mixed government.” Democracy means mainly direct, participatory democracy, and I am so far from being haughtily opposed to it that I even regard it as paradigmatic and wish to extend it as far as possible. But in any reasonably extended and complex polity, the interplay of the one, the few and the many is less a Classical recommendation than always a description of actual reality. In some sense, there must be the consent (voluntary or forced) of the many for the working of a viable polity. In addition there will be the role of (an often highly fluid and recomposable) few, whether as prior “proposers” or as subsequent “representatives.” Then there will be the executive One (monarch, president, first minister, symbolic ultimate power, etc.) where the buck always stops and without which there does not seem to be, so far, any possibility of drawing a political circumference. McCarraher says why cannot proposals just emerge spontaneously from the people themselves en masse? Fine and wonderful if they do, but this is rare, while the notion that it should be normative is first a fantasy and second not always desirable. We need the influence of the more inspired, creative, gifted, generous, detached and virtuous wherever they are found throughout society. But the few should not, for me, in any straightforward way constitute a circumscribed political class. Rather the point is that some such class, however arranged is always constituted (the United States, Cuba, France, Venezuela, etc.) and always plays its part. But for me, as already indicated, the crucial paradox is that, where such a variegated class is seen as entirely subordinate to democratic opinion, whatever it may be, or as “representative” is regarded as being in some way mandated, then first one gets the substitution of monetary influence, bad corporatist lobbying, spin, second-guessing populism and manipulation of opinion for wise guidance, and second one gets the substitution of the representing class for the supposedly exhaustively and adequately represented. Thus in either case less democracy and above all less latitude for regions of informal, spontaneous and participatory democracy. Inversely, where the “aristocratic” function is directly acknowledged as irreducible, and no spurious claims to pure democracy or even the ultimacy of democracy as a value (this must always tend to the licencing of sophistry and the downgrading of objective truth, justice and beauty as the only final legitimate standard) are made, then in reality more democracy will be exercised. For one thing, more space will be left to informal self-management and to “latent” forces and potentials. For a second, people will be offered more educated, nuanced and responsible options. For a third, representatives reflecting and acting according to their own views will be all the more also inclined to consider and not take for granted the symbolic resonance of their own positions with those of the many whom they represent and will tend to search for substantive horizons of agreement as to the nature of true human flourishing. So in absolutely no sense whatsoever am I advocating a supreme role for the few or the triumph of their perspective, much less their material interests. If I stress their role it is because liberalism tends definitionally to remove its operation between that of the one and the many, as paradigmatically instanced by Hobbes, the most crucial liberal theorist, as Leo Strauss rightly asserted. But this role is a mediating and therefore in a sense a modest one—sometimes to be trumped by personal executive decision from above and always to be tested by the many whose acceptance should finally prevail and must of actual necessity do so. Nor do my interlocutors seem to grasp the way I link the hierarchical role of the few to education as a temporal process which means a ceaseless—and temporally democratic—process of initiation, induction, education and eventual reversal. Finally, my linkage of the few as an “aristocracy” or “clerisy” to “the few” in the sense of intermediary associations was by no means arbitrary, as I should have made clearer. For, as Burke for one stresses, the traditional role of the aristocratic few is inherently linked to their representation of specific localities and corporate bodies, rather than to an aggregated franchise of individuals taken one by one. Today we need to rethink and reconstitute “aristocracy”—for example by reconstituting second ruling chambers as chambers representing various vocational groups, trades, religions and regions. Otherwise one is left with the ever-extending grip of spectacle, funded propaganda, faction and secretive cabal—which is most assuredly not democracy at all.
11. As to the usual and unreflectively naïve crochet about “who decides” as to the nature of the good and just, etc., the first answer is of course, no one, else these values would not be such. The second is that naturally only good people can recognise the good, as Aristotle taught—whereas if it is rather a matter of majority acclaim, then we are denying the goodness of the first lone protestors against slavery, etc. Should they have attended to the mass opinion of the non-enslaved, rather than to their own novel reconsideration of the deep implications of the gospel? If one finds this circularity frightening and precarious then it is—but this is one aspect of the terror of our existential condition. Worse horror can only follow from the suppression of its terms. This is not to say that we do not need democratic checks on rulers and calls to public accountability. But if it would be naïve to deny this need—which amounts to a balancing of the desired and required more intense virtue of the few by the more dispersed but sometimes securer virtue of the many—then it is more subtly and yet more profoundly naïve to fail to see the inevitable limits of checks and accounts. Without the inner check of conscience and its cultivation they will always be evaded. We need therefore both to be always suspicious of our governors, and yet somewhat to trust the process of their education into trustworthiness—a process which is today considerably lacking.
12. As a “postliberal” I advocate a politics concerned with the production of human flourishing (as opposed to the mere promotion of negative liberty or utilitarian comfort) which I see as entailing a civil economy (as articulated in outline, after the Italian economists Bruni and Zamagni, in Pope Benedict’s great and yet far-too-ignored social encyclical Caritas in Veritate), a mixed constitution, an aesthetically educative culture and a culturally-based foreign policy, again after Edmund Burke and later “the English School” (which included the theologian Donald Mackinnon) not bound to the ultimacy of the nation state, nor driven by either Niebuhrian “realism” nor Kantian “IR utopianism.” These positions have roughly in the UK come to define “postliberalism” as represented both by “Red Toryism” and by “Blue Labourism.” I have always stood in the latter camp, not the former, and well before the arrival of Blue Labour had already spoken of a “blue socialism.” There is, of course, as the teasingly swapped colours indicate (it is of course doubly confusing that in the US the right is normally red and the left blue!), much shared ground, but I am considerably more anti-capitalist, pro-egalitarian and ecologically romantic than is Phillip Blond. Just as crucially it would be a total mistake (and an altogether false boast) to imagine that postliberalism is the eccentric, maverick child of RO. To the contrary, many other forces have been pressing in this direction, in the UK and elsewhere. A certain shared “communitarian” or perhaps better “associationist” front has appeared between a Labour MP like Jon Cruddas and a Tory one like Jesse Norman. And although “the big society” has supposedly now taken a back seat, the new Tory government (arguably more left wing without the Liberal Democrats . . .) has taken over (albeit in diluted form) several “Blue Labourish” Labour policies that Ed Miliband foolishly and bizarrely kept hidden during his disastrously vacuous general election campaign: the living wage (greeted with horror by some pure Thatcherites), vocational training, machinery for national infrastructural development, some new tax restrictions on banks, humanitarian prison reform (to which even US Republicans are now starting to convert) regionalisation of government and the economy. Meanwhile, to everyone’s surprise as much, no doubt, to that of McCarraher, the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn has gone in a “Syriza/Polemos/Bernie Saunders anti-austerity direction. But so far, in each of these cases, this just looks like a more dogmatic mode of social democracy and Keynesianism, somewhat mired in statist nostalgia and only acquiring a big popular following in countries who remember fascism too well to be tempted by a rightwing populism that prevails elsewhere. Any examination of, say, Cruddas’s proposals would suggest that he wishes truly to encourage just economic structures, rather than merely and forlornly to “corret” market excesses, which remains Corbyn’s horizon. To my mind Cruddas, a Catholic, is the real socialist and the real radical.
13. In this respect I do not advocate a merely reformed capitalism—even if my socialism is not fully laid out in BSO. Capitalism is hard to define but I prefer to think of it simply as a distorted market economy where the interests of capital, of shareholders and profit are always paramount and the welfare of workers, the needs of consumers and the excellence of products are only ever of incidental and indirect concern. This definition makes it apparent that there are degrees of capitalism and that today it gets ever perversely “purer.” I want instead a truly fair market, a genuine “social market,” which means that I reject the extraction of surplus labour (with Marx) and of surplus desire for profit; that I believe that it is possible for social justice to enter into contract (with the civil economists of Italy from Genovesi in the eighteenth century to Bruni and Zamagni today) and for social purpose to be demanded as a precondition of the establishment of a business corporation (with Will Hutton); that there can be a just distribution of profits amongst workers, managers, shareholders and consumers; that there be “just pricing” after Aristotle and Aquinas; that extraction of profit from monetary loans is in general wrong and usurious. Many socialists have ruled out also share ownership; but Aquinas did not do so and yet he can scarcely to be considered, with anachronism, as an advocate of capitalism. I would follow Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox social teaching at this point—but where, anywhere, are the socialists today realistically pointing in any other direction? I believe in cooperative ownership wherever possible and sensible—otherwise in worker stakeholding, workers on management boards, etc. It all sounds socialist enough to me . . . As to “class,” if that follows from unjust economic extraction then it is wrong; if from a sense of vocational and cultural solidarity and organic belonging then not necessarily so. It may be either harmless or positively useful. Today’s increasing encouragement of the declassé and the non-deferential (towards the plumber, as much as towards the doctor) is manifestly but another ruse of capitalism, and goes along with the ever greater extension of economic equality. To imagine that it is in apposition to it—as if a cultural gain, as with some illusory “advances” of women, were balancing out economic regression—is not to have begun to think seriously at all about our contemporary predicament.
14. To think of my return to the thematic of a “new Christendom” as hopelessly out of touch is itself to be stuck in the past—namely the second half of the twentieth century. For today Europe languishes with a low birthrate, an inadequate army, and a shared commitment only to inegalitarian wealth that is perhaps becoming still worse than in the United States. Having forgotten what it is—the outcome of Athens, Jerusalem and Rome—it is a double prey to both nihilism and to a politicised and debased mode of Sunni Islam that offers (as Michel Houillebecq so well delineates in his novel Submission) a much more simplistic, intolerant, misogynistic and totalitarian version of the combination of economic equity, social traditionalism and gender-reciprocity which neoliberalism and a renewed Christendom would seek to promote. Unless Europe is able to repeat its authentic past differently into the future, it could conceivably crumble.
15. Ah Bisto! Ah empire! There is too much that could be said here. The nation state is not more innocent than empire—just as much based on founding coercion and often more prone both to racism and to cultural intolerance. My statement somewhere about the regrettably premature collapse of modern empire has to be balanced by my citation of Lionel Curtis in BSO and his pre-war desire that the British empire mutate into a real collaborative and shared “commonwealth.” What I am talking about is the failure—both racist and admittedly to a degree culturally realist—of the British (despite considerable advocacy of this by some within the UK) much earlier to inaugurate the development of the “non-white” colonies towards the independent dominion status of the “white” nations (all eventually and manifestly much more successful democracies than the US, though equally or more multiracial and multicultural—as Obama comes ever closer to pointing out.) That would have involved cultivating the habit of representative government, as desired by the Indian National Congress itself from the late nineteenth century onwards and by other indigenous groups elsewhere. Failure to do this proved to mean the forced handing over, by war-exhausted powers of colonies based to a large degree on economic extraction and exploitation to new, indigenous rulers who could then prove still more tyrannous and capitalistic than the colonial powers they replaced—in part because the restraining hand of London or Paris, etc., in defence of beleaguered minorities was now absent and London’s equal need sometimes to qualify purely capitalist considerations with political ones and so to somewhat rein back (for all the more fundamental and undeniable fact of British, etc., encouragement, promotion and collusion) the most naked economic predation. Unlike many post-colonialist accounts I reject the reading of the two world wars as the desperate last act of already threatened European colonial powers and rather consider that the huge losses entailed in global mass warfare scuppered any chances for an evolution of European empires into substantive collaborative maritime commonwealths—even though this dream must still today haunt us and may have, of necessity to be returned to. Europe (and America) may eventually, in the face of ever-increasing mass migration have to ensure, through their assistance in the setting up of new trans-border frameworks of political and economic regulation and guarantee, that Africa, the Near East and parts of Asia—threatened by political corruption, capitalist exploitation, ecological degradation, climate change and religious extremism—become once again habitable.
16. Everything positive that has ever happened, in any degree, and every redeemed thing is an act of divine providence, within the operation of divine government. Everything else that has occurred is a degree of privation of this—a lack of providential rule. This consideration has to govern our assessment of empire, ancient and modern, as of everything else within history.
17. Missionaries were often opponents of military, economic and settler empire as has now been abundantly shown by historians. In a parallel fashion, traders (like the British East India Company) were often annoyed by attempts at religious conversion; free-traders were often opposed to political and settler empire, while wanting a more effective economic one; and frequently the (initially at least) usually reluctant makers of political empire were anxious to protect native populations against settler predation—partly in the interests of trade, but also in response to public humanitarian cries of outrage which date right back to the 1830s—for example in Britain concerning the fate of the Australian aborigines, as woefully and disastrously impotent as this was later to prove. There was no single “white, Christian, racist, capitalist” imperial project in the way often spoken of within religious studies departments, with insufficient attention to the work of real historians. Instead, there were often entirely contradictory aims and sometimes clashing exigencies—that could not have been avoided unless one fantastically imagines that all “encounter” between Europeans and other peoples should have been avoided. In what ensued there was much wickedness and more collectively culpable blindness, but also perhaps just as much sheer tragedy. I recommend the remarkable balance of John Darwin’s book Unfinished Empire—which scarcely skimps on the iniquities of Albion abroad and their possibly worst instance in the final endgame of the 1950s.
18. I am not technically a theocrat because, to repeat, I do not believe in political rule by a sacerdotal class, or directly on the basis of revelation. But on McCarraher’s apparent definition of theocracy, all mainline Christian thought has always been so tainted. But this charge is surely inaccurate and obscures the importance of the Christian desacralisation of political rule. That this was but partial was nonetheless good—for otherwise politics would have been rent away from all ethical considerations of the good life and of our final transcendent end. Boundaries are here blurry—but that is good and both ethical and realistic, not something to be triumphantly pounced upon, as though the very dangerous, middle-brow and deliberately anti-Catholic crudities of the divisions imposed by the American founding fathers could be passed off as evident revelatory truths. But this is rather the wrong kind of boldness—overriding that subtlety that is benign league with the determining beyond.
19. No one seriously now supposes that Aquinas’s account of analogy is “only semantic.” As scholars like Alain de Libera have shown, it is at once semantic, logical and ontological. Thomas directly speaks of univocal, equivocal and analogical modes of being and reality.
20. There can be few better examples of utterly ridiculous prim academic smugness than the claim “not to know” whether there is a chain of being—not to know, then, the manifest difference and yet link between dust, grass, alder, squirrel, dove, ape and human—but to know for certain that belief in the great chain of being brought about slavery, genocide and misogyny. It almost certainly didn’t, whereas for absolute exegetical certainty it did help to generate, for example, John Locke’s doctrine of human equality: we are, for him, all on the same level in the ontological hierarchy and so therefore . . . Mary-Jane Rubenstein has usually done a great deal better than this, but the pressures of the American (and increasingly the British) liberal academy to conform are terrible.
21. Ellen Meiksins Wood, a highly sophisticated Marxist writer whom I much admire, even where I dissent, does not treat Plato with the disdain that McCarraher claims. The demand that politicians come from occupations accustomed to taking a broad synthesising and achitectonic view is not obviously reprehensible and in Plato it is in any case balanced by an acknowledgement that artisans also consult the Forms and in The Laws by a mode of ritual and oral government that is in one respect suffused throughout the populace.
22. Catholic social teaching has mainly been explicitly anti-capitalist (and it is politically important not reversely to confirm the wildly incorrect readings of American Catholic neoliberals here)—recently not quite with John Paul II, but certainly with popes Benedict and Francis—between whom there is far greater continuity than the press allows. Neither the abolition of property nor of class in every sense is requisite for anti-capitalism, but most certainly ST has regularly condemned that exploitation of labour which is partially constitutive of capitalism as such. On McCarraher’s account of CTS as a disingenuous moral and organic overlay upon essentially capitalist relations, what it really advocates would be fascism. Yet just this hatefully kitsch characteristic of fascism was condemned by Jaques Maritain and others. Corporatism, on the other hand, is certainly implied (and still implied, if one reads carefully) by CTS and is the radical doctrine, also shared by the early British Labour Party, that economic groupings should enjoy a degree of political power in exchange for the exercise of economic justice responsibility. Any serious critique of capitalism should embrace corporatism (as opposed to the Marxist fantasy of the withering away of the political) because it opposes that artificial separation of an economic from a political class and so of professional businessmen from professional politicians which was the precondition for the emergence of an anti-republican (in the technical sense of the participation in government of significant economic actors) and capitalist mode of political economy in the British eighteenth century—as continuously critiqued by the “country party” and belatedly by Burke. Corporatism of a less distorted kind than with the Nazis played a considerable role in German and Austrian recovery after WW II alongside some survival of guild regulation. These things are then just as much medieval fantasies as the fine engineering of a BMW automobile . . . One can effect to scorn relatively small differences of justice with respect to a utopian ideal, but the fact remains that German worker participation and stakeholding has helped to engender a relatively more just and economically stable manufacturing base than with the UK, for example. (In fact even the United States is more benignly and rightly corporatist—and so more “medieval” and “feudal”—in a positive sense of the term than is the UK!) If it is now eroding then this is the result of a neoliberal drift becoming considerably more severe in Europe than in the United States under the somewhat Keynesian Barrack Obama. The main point here is that features of a “medieval moral economy” have only continued to make some impact on the European continent (also in Italy) just because they have truly modified a capitalist economy. A little may not be enough, but anything that makes a crucial difference to many peoples’ lives is not to be despised, especially by secure academics. A political left hopelessly on the economic retreat for some time (and so confined to a cultural liberalism that covertly advances economic liberalism also) cannot afford to ignore these slightly alternative evidences —that encourage us to rethink, without compromise, just what “socialism” is and whether any real anti-capitalism has to recover a more conservative dimension that would be truer to the character of pre-1900 socialism, prior to its blending with the revolutionary and Jacobin tradition which only commenced in France in the twentieth century, as Michéa has now shown. I submit that I am a far less complacent radical than McCarraher, taking seriously the secular collapse of “the left” as defined in the previous century. And far more interested in real possibilities and making a real difference. The relatively more successful left in Latin America may well be just in a time warp, while newly modish anarchism remains but half the truth, if an important half—the half that rightly values spontaneous participation, which the internet can encourage, even if its more usual effect is disguisedly to suppress it. The half it ignores is that, today, the main problem is not law as such, but the displacement of law by contract and criminal coercion. Here again, a general, undifferentiated attack upon law is likely to work in capitalism’s favour, as the British Hegelian Gillian Rose rightly discerned, from the 1970s onwards. It will always prove more effectively anarchic than any left anarchist can imagine in her wildest dreams turned nightmares . . .
23. It would be news to the Liverpudlian Phillip Blond that he is a ruralist . . . More true of me, I admit, but then the Catholic teaching of the primacy of the countryside over the city now looks like sound ecology. It needs rethinking for our time.
24. Constantinianism was likely in continuity with Christian aspirations from the outset (see St. Paul) and the church seems to have contained wealthy and influential members from this outset also. The idea that Christendom collapsed because of credulity, hubris and domination is moralistic tosh, lacking a shred of evidence; but my view that it collapsed because of a loss of symbolic enchantment, of synthesis with certain pagan elements both in practice and in theory, combined with an anti-festive and excessive focus on ethical discipline is not implausible—since thereby it started to engender and construct an autonomous, secular space, often in the name of piety itself.
25. My view remains that none of this was ever inevitable but was contingently occasioned. Therefore all remains possible in the future—even a new and extremely different repetition of Christendom. If we believe that the incarnation was the final revelation, what other recourse in the face of nihilism, other religions and other civilisations, would we imagine that there could be? I am only asking that we return to being serious before it is too late within foreseeable time.

But many thanks, once again, to all five contributors for taking the time to ponder my case.

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John Milbank is Research Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics and Director of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of several books, of which Beyond Secular Order  is the most recent. He will shortly publish, with Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue: Postliberalism and the Human Future.

 

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