Politics and Virtue: Radical Orthodoxy and Wisdom for the Common Good
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International Journal of Public Theology 12 (2018) 317–331 brill.com/ijpt Politics and Virtue: Radical Orthodoxy and Wisdom for the Common Good Scott Cowdell* Research Professor, Centre for Public and Contextual Theology (PACT), Charles Sturt University, Australia [email protected] Abstract This article reflects on political virtue in conversation with an influential manifesto from English Radical Orthodoxy: The Politics of Virtue, by John Milbank and Adrian Pabst. They see social and economic liberalism as destroying a sustaining metaphysics of communal abiding, with classical and Judaeo-Christian roots. They commend an ‘alternative modern’ version of this past, albeit through British and European politi- cal traditions and arrangements preserving elements of its ‘conservative socialism.’ Yet they undersell the spiritual capacities of secular modernity, also the political virtue of principled, non-ideological pragmatism. And they oversell the actual pacific character of that idealised past, since such closed worlds required the discrete use of violence to maintain order and boundaries. A more mainstream Christian account of political virtue today would see liberal autonomy augmented by a revived communitarianism, along with the civilizing of global capital. Keywords Radical Orthodoxy – liberalism – post-liberalism – civil society – conservative socialism – secularisation * A keynote address on the theme ‘Politics and Virtue’, for a Seminar discussing The Politics of Virtue, by John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, hosted by the Centre for Public and Contextual Theology (PACT), Charles Sturt University, held in Canberra on 21 June 2017. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/15697320-12341545Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:31PM via free access 318 Cowdell We now have a major political manifesto from the Radical Orthodoxy push in English theology. In The Politics of Virtue,1 theologian John Milbank and political philosopher Adrian Pabst pursue no less a goal than the overthrow of liberalism. They believe that half a century of social, political and economic liberalism has undermined our capacity to live coherent, meaningful, content- ed and, in particular, virtuous lives, at least in the Anglosphere. Social liberal- ism of the political left casts off traditional constraints so that free and equal individuals can pursue the lives they desire. Political and economic liberal- ism on the right promises unprecedented opportunities for those who pursue its version of the good life in accord with market forces. Yet for liberalism of both the left and the right, a converging narrative of personal freedom has served to atomize and dis-embed individuals rather than liberate and enlarge them. Hence the widespread disillusionment and disaffection now colouring Anglosphere politics. People know that something is missing. Instead, Milbank and Pabst favour a post-liberal alternative, which has al- ready gained some traction in British third-way politics. They claim that cer- tain older political traditions, if recovered, would restore virtue to public life via an integral vision of the good, reboot civil society, secure decent conditions for a wider range of people, and play better in the electorate. Here the so-called Blue Labour and Red Tory vision is theorised and developed. What they offer is in tune with the overall Radical Orthodoxy project, which seeks to expose secular modernity in the West as a failure of metaphysical and theological imagination, unable to deliver its promised benefits because it has left out the most important thing: a vital sense of at-homeness in God’s world.2 As Stanley Hauerwas summarises this concern, ‘Liberalism goes against the grain of our humanity and the universe itself because it is based on the pre- sumption that life has no telos other than the arbitrary desires we impose on the world to make us feel at home.’3 Radical Orthodoxy traces this loss of bearings to the impact of late-medieval nominalist philosophy. Instead of a pacific neo-Platonic hierarchy of being, we are left with the ontological rivalry of newly atomized equals. Thus, control by 1 John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). 2 See, for example, John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) and Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representa- tion of the People (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013); Adrian Pabst, Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy (Grand Rapids, MI. and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2012). 3 Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Is Democracy Capable of Cultivating a Good Life? What Liberals Should Learn from Shepherds’, ABC Religion and Ethics, 2 November 2016, unpaginated, <http:// www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/11/02/4567512.htm> [accessed 19 June 2017]. International Journal of Public TheologyDownloaded from12 (2018) Brill.com09/30/2021 317–331 02:42:31PM via free access Politics and Virtue 319 naked power supersedes an older social stability based on a mutual exchange of gifts that is ultimately Trinitarian. This philosophical shift yielded far- reaching practical consequences, according to Radical Orthodoxy. It ushered in the Reformation breakdown of Christendom, the rise of warring nation states, and the reduction of inhabited truth to instrumental rationality. Hence an ontology of participation gave way to competitive individualism, to a meta- physically and imaginatively threadbare positivism, and to antagonistic poli- tics, all of which our authors see enshrined in liberalism. ‘The telos [or inbuilt compass] of politics’, they argue, ‘was to re-actualise as far as humanly possible the just and harmonious ordering of God’s original creation within the civic or imperial polity.’4 But no longer. According to Milbank and Pabst, liberalism cannot achieve its ambitions for human flourishing because it is largely cut off from key spiritual resources of the classical and Christian past. In what follows I will highlight philosophical and practical aspects of their proposal and offer some critical reflections. But first, some preliminary defini- tions, observations and questions to set the scene. 1 Politics and Virtue: Strange Bedfellows? Focus group findings, matched by a rise in political populism, suggest that politics and politicians are increasingly held in contempt. The democratic organization of communities, provinces and nation states, with the political class overseeing it, appears morally compromised. If we look to politicians for the classical platonic virtues of temperance, prudence, courage and justice, let alone the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, we court disappointment. Such virtues abide in a comprehensive vision and stable structure for living, as Alasdair MacIntyre has reminded contemporary political thought. And, with- out that framework, they lose meaning and traction. As MacIntyre observes, ‘Moral judgements are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical the- ism which have lost the context provided by these practices’.5 The West’s decline from a more teleological sense of virtue began to be registered in the Enlightenment. For instance, Kant insisted on the objec- tive, decontextualized rationality of moral principles. Bentham influentially linked morality to bare utility. And Benjamin Franklin crafted a personally chosen list of virtues, foreshadowing today’s ubiquitous professional codes of 4 Milbank and Pabst, The Politics of Virtue, p. 322. 5 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edition, (Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). International Journal of Public Theology 12 (2018)Downloaded 317–331 from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:31PM via free access 320 Cowdell good practice. Hence without an encompassing philosophy of the good, and a lived moral and religious habitus of mutual obligation, internalised virtue gives way to externally imposed and increasingly arbitrary-seeming rules. For Milbank and Pabst, this practice ‘tends to encourage the foolish view that any- thing not against the law is acceptable, while endlessly criminalising minor offences and utterances’.6 This trend is increasingly evident in politics, as we see for instance in controversies over politicians’ behaviour, entitlements and receipt of dubious donations. Rowan Williams assesses the increasing shame- lessness of political leaders as reflecting this lost sense of accountability within a wider moral community, including the loss of what he calls the iconic eye— that is, the moral constraint of being under God’s gaze.7 Some despair of this state of affairs, like Simone Weil in her post-war assess- ment of European-style party politics: ‘On the Abolition of All Political Parties.’8 The scope for tyranny to annex democracy was fresh in Weil’s mind, and she remembered France’s Revolutionary terror. A perceived ‘virtue vacuum’ in to- day’s mainstream and populist Western politics supports such concerns. Of course a sense of disconnection between politics and virtue is not new. It surfaces in the perennial political challenge of sustaining conviction when compromise is essential for retaining government and for achieving whatever gains are possible. This disconnect is especially evident as hung parliaments and minority governments become the new norm. Here we see what has been called the problem of dirty hands, where the lesser of two evils is often the best that politicians can deliver. So Simone Weil’s unworldly recourse to withdrawal