Politics and Virtue: Radical Orthodoxy and Wisdom for the Common Good

International Journal of Public Theology 12 (2018) 317–331 brill.com/ijpt

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 political 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.

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 liberalism of the political left casts off traditional constraints so that free and equal individuals can pursue the lives they desire. Political and economic liberalism 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 already gained some traction in British third-way politics. They claim that certain 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, [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 metaphysically and imaginatively threadbare positivism, and to antagonistic politics, 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, without 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 assessment 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 today’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 and the cultivation of private sanctity cannot represent a mainstream Christian option. Mistakes happen, and competing virtues must be weighed, such that imperfect and ill- judged outcomes with potentially harmful consequences are the unavoidable bane of even a good and morally serious government. Apart from which, it remains widely held that virtuous people are a force for good in politics. John Macquarie suggests that wielding such positive influence should be seen in terms of Christian lay ministry. ‘Where the principles of the Christian gospel are clearly taught and understood’, he writes, ‘this is bound to point us towards the humanization and even the Christianisation of vast areas of society in which the law of the jungle still holds.’9

6 Milbank and Pabst, The Politics of Virtue, p. 276. 7 Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000). 8 Simone Weil, On the Abolition of All Political Parties (1957) (Melbourne: Black Ink, 2013). 9 John Macquarie, ‘Politics as Lay Ministry’, in Theology, Church and Ministry (London: SCM, 1986), pp. 197–202, 211, at p. 202.

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An alternative approach is to give up idealism and reconceive political virtue as the principled embrace of realpolitik. Erasmus had insisted on en- tirely virtuous leadership in The Education of a Christian Prince. Yet his contemporary Machiavelli, in The Prince, provided a classic manifesto for crafty manoeuvring in pursuit of desired political ends—supposedly the best virtue that can be attained in an atmosphere of vice. And, indeed, Western political thought has a tradition of settling for compromise solutions. Augustine’s ‘city of Man’ supports ‘the city of God’ on its emergent trajectory in history, in turn receiving moral guidance and limited legitimation from the city of God. Augustine’s God sustains the fallen world providentially, harking back to St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2, verses 6 and 7, whose Katéchon preserves a world that is not yet fully conformed to Christ. This approach points forward to Hobbes at the dawn of modernity, whose God helps secure a stable political order through the disciplinary oversight of a socially-contracted Leviathan. Subsequent iterations include the twentieth century’s so-called German Hobbes, the Nazi-era political thinker Carl Schmitt. He saw true political virtue in terms of securing national identity and unity through maintaining abiding enmity with another nation.10 Indeed, it is suggested that widespread political disaffection in the West is due to politicians no longer reliably delivering these necessary enemies.11 Though, as Hauerwas points out, Donald Trump appears to be trying.12 This recognition of reality tempering virtue in politics recalls Luther’s notion of God’s strange work, and sits alongside an important current in modern economic thought. Public virtues are seen to emerge from private vices thanks to an ‘invisible hand’ of divine providence—a tradition extending from Bernard Mandeville to Adam Smith in the Enlightenment on to Fried- rich Hayek and neo-liberalism’s near-half century of trickle-down economics. Right-wing politics indebted to this tradition is wary of high-minded political intervention of whatever sort, for instance in the well-intentioned relief of economic hardship, lest the system’s workings are upset. Better to leave it to the markets, and keep politics out of it, as we hear for instance in political de- bates over industry protection, climate change and renewable energy. If this alternative political tradition can be deemed virtuous, it is based on the premise that you have to be cruel to be kind. It stands in contrast to

10 See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (expanded edition) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 11 Jean-Michel Oughourlian, Psychopolitics: Conversations with Trevor Cribben Merrill (East Lansing, MI.: Michigan State University Press, 2012), p. 39. 12 Hauerwas, ‘Is Democracy Capable of Cultivating a Good Life?’.

International Journal of Public Theology 12 (2018)Downloaded 317–331 from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:31PM via free access 322 Cowdell socialist politics, which credits a major role for government in securing worth- while social and economic outcomes. They will not come otherwise, according to socialism, because the free play of private vices cannot yield public virtues. This socialist rejoinder is in tune with what Milbank and Pabst are propos- ing, though they regard socialism and conservatism in actual practice as equally deformed and deflected by liberalism’s self-regulating individualism. A more integral socialism, grounded in a hierarchical (and frankly paternalistic) conservatism, is their alternative prescription. Rather than seeking to reintroduce virtue into liberal political culture, then, Milbank and Pabst set out to reinstate a more naturally virtuous politics—a ‘politics of virtue’.

2 On Politics, Democracy, Culture and Virtue

Milbank and Pabst proceed via historical and philosophical discussions of various meta-crises that they attribute to liberalism—meta-crises of politics, economy, democracy, culture and international affairs. Each analysis is accom- panied by concrete post-liberal proposals rooted in the lost traditions and sur- viving remnants of a more integrally virtuous politics. Key to the book is its opening discussion of politics according to liberalism. There is no obvious place for virtue when our being is divorced from community, locality, duty, tradition and religion—when the ‘negative liberty’ of autonomy and unfettered choice replaces what they call the ‘positive liberty’ that responsibly and strenuously pursues human flourishing.13 Liberalism’s com- mitment to equality is not new, of course, though what is new is its inevitable conjoining of formal equality and actual social inequality.14 ‘By celebrating individual choice and dismissing reciprocal responsibility,’ our authors argue, ‘the liberal ‘market state’ disembeds the economy from society and at the same time re-embeds social relations in a transactional, economistic and utilitarian culture that only state-power can coordinate’.15 Hence Milbank and Pabst can endorse Michel Foucault’s critical account of biopolitics, according to which increasingly centralised power overlays and colonises personal freedom.16 Such liberalism embodies an ontologically pessimistic narrative of human motivation, ascribed to a gnostically perverse view of reality.17 It is indebted

13 Milbank and Pabst, The Politics of Virtue, p. 15. 14 Ibid., p. 29. 15 Ibid., p. 14. 16 Ibid., pp. 46–48. 17 Ibid., p. 58.

International Journal of Public TheologyDownloaded from12 (2018) Brill.com09/30/2021 317–331 02:42:31PM via free access Politics and Virtue 323 more recently to what Milbank and Pabst call the bastard Augustinianism of Calvin and the French Catholic Jansenists, with their extreme view of original sin.18 Enter the invisible hand—a deus ex machina ensuring the social stability that sinful humans cannot achieve, while crafting simulacra of charity out of a normative selfishness.19 Hence ironically, for our authors, ‘liberalism has been doubly promoted from the outset by both secularising hedonists and Christian puritans—both those unashamed of egoism as the basis of economic order and those who think the latter is a providential diversion and tempering of our shameful nature’.20 For liberalism of the right, this turn of events spells legal enforcement by contract and property rights. For liberalism of the left, deregulated desire un- derpinned by violent ontology accompanies the displacement of guiding virtue by external power. ‘Hence,’ for Milbank and Pabst, ‘the convergence of the two liberalisms is reflected in the more apparent than real oscillation between the liberal right as the party of greed and the liberal left as the party of lust’.21 Virtue thus denied is compensated for by the advent of Hobbes’ Leviathan, which our authors regard as ‘a blasphemous substitution for the community as the body of Christ’.22 Or virtue, as reimagined by Machiavelli, becomes mili- tary and political excellence in sustaining personal independence, reflecting a fundamentally antagonistic and alienating assessment of political reality.23 At best we are left with the quasi-peace of a nihilistic world.24 Hence liberalism tends to undermine its own social contract.25 Our authors want ‘Europe to overcome liberalism by being otherwise modern in a manner that will repeat, differently, its authentic antiquity’.26 Their clear- est definition of the tradition they seek to reinvent is set out in these terms.

It was the Christian fusion of ancient with biblical virtues and of the prin- ciple of free association in Germanic law with the Latin sense of equity and participation in the shared civitas that created the conditions for an ethics and politics of the common good.

18 Ibid., p. 23. 19 Ibid., p. 24. 20 Ibid., p. 25. 21 Ibid., p. 27. 22 Ibid., p. 35. 23 Ibid., p. 37. 24 Ibid., p. 58. 25 Ibid., p. 56. 26 Ibid., p. 277.

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Equally, Christological and sacramental notions of representation of a whole by a part, sign or person first encouraged—through canonical monastic and mendicant influence—the growth of constitutional government in the West, initially within the Church and later within the secular order.27

Radical Orthodoxy is regularly criticized for being nostalgic—although our authors distance themselves from both the reactionary right and the utopian left, regarding both as fatalistic and wrongheaded.28 Instead their concrete proposals reference a range of contemporary options, chiefly European, that share a Catholic personalist and communitarian heritage. For Milbank and Pabst, ‘the alternative to atomistic liberalism is something at once social and political, which embeds state and market in a social polity (‘civil society’) more loosely yet substantively and humanly constructed’.29 Regarding economy, the authors contrast a Scottish Protestant tradition centred on Adam Smith with civil economic survivals in Italy and Germany, along with so-called economies of communion in Portugal, Brazil and elsewhere. All these find their roots in the renaissance rather than the rationalist Enlightenment—so too, we are advised, does the British Labour Party.30 For our authors, such traditions support human flourishing but, crucially, they also help to ensure good business. They prove ‘more practically effective than an apparently pragmatic amoralism and misplaced cynicism as to people’s most consistent motives’.31 The economic success achieved through socially-inte- grated industrial practices in Germany and Italy reveal that evidence-based as well as ideological conclusions are at work for Milbank and Pabst. These concrete examples constitute authentic survivals of integral political virtue playing out in actual communal and economic well-being. Regarding democracy, our authors blame liberalism for failing to prevent democratic tyranny, war, economic exploitation and the decline of both high and popular culture.32 They see democracy yielding to oligarchy, dema- goguery, and anarchy—as offering little more than a formalistic mask for the wielding of power.33 Against all this debased popular will, entrenched influence and executive power, they favour a mixed constitution approach to

27 Ibid., pp. 34–35. 28 Ibid., p. 80. 29 Ibid., p. 84. 30 Ibid., pp. 115–146. 31 Ibid., p. 171. 32 Ibid., pp. 186–187. 33 Ibid., p. 194.

International Journal of Public TheologyDownloaded from12 (2018) Brill.com09/30/2021 317–331 02:42:31PM via free access Politics and Virtue 325 government that relies on virtuous cultural leadership.34 Radical Orthodoxy’s metaphysically-grounded social hierarchicalism favours constitutional monarchy, as an umpire for the body politic.35 Here there is an established Church, too, helping the Crown to maintain a divinely ordered imperium against un- restrained nation-statism,36 while also countering both radical secularism and religious fundamentalism.37 Rather than nostalgia, however, the stated ap- peal is to practical considerations. Our authors point out that seven of the top ten and 16 of the top 20 countries in quality-of-life surveys are constitutional monarchies. Regarding culture, Milbank and Pabst once again confront the spirit of liberalism, which they see as having become hegemonic in England since the 1960s. They regard it as a fount of despair—as rendering culture purely arbitrary, turning education functional and entertainment prurient, and as making long-term marriage and a dignified old age increasingly inconceivable. All this leads them to conclude that ‘liberalism is on a path that will either undo itself or finally undo humanity’.38 Again, its pseudo-Augustinian Calvinist and Jan- senist roots are declared, as politics reveals an abyssal contamination caused by the Fall.39 Our authors’ uncompromising remedy for the decline of embedded virtue under liberal cultural influence involves a restored cultural hierarchy.

We construe our modern politics as high versus low, right versus left. But suppose, instead, the real political crux concerns the triumph of the mediocre middle […] and the possibility that only the natural organic alliance of high and low can question this triumph? After all, an aristocratic right without a popular left has engaged in either nostalgia or a kitsch gloss upon the mediocre middle. Meanwhile a popular left without an aristocratic right has usually, and in whatever complex disguise (including most Marxisms), merely removed symbolic barriers to the ever- greater victory of capitalism and bureaucracy; promot[ing] a resentful aspiration of the masses towards the middling mode of economy and culture. […] Is it not by now obvious that, as John Ruskin suggested, any viable resistance to the capitalist-bureaucratic centre would have to

34 Ibid., p. 205. 35 Ibid., p. 217. 36 Ibid., p. 219. 37 Ibid., p. 233. 38 Ibid., p. 254. 39 Ibid., p. 255.

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come from a continuously dynamic and paradoxical blue/red fusion of guiding excellence with populist spontaneity?40

Such political sensibilities find their natural home for Milbank and Pabst not only in England’s constitutional monarchy, but more broadly in what they term an axial vocation for Europe.41 Their discussion of international relations struck Rowan Williams in a review as the book’s weakest point.42 It is certainly strange for a non-English and non-European reader to encounter their case for peaceful commonwealths and benign Empires,43 which require the support of religious or at least ‘metaphysically sensitive’ individuals.44 Particularly intriguing is the lost opportunity for what Milbank and Pabst term a global Anglican project. This original promise of the British Empire would have provided a grand template for the renewed politics that our authors seek. Appar- ently, it was derailed by the French and American revolutions, and it degener- ated during the colonial era thanks to Whiggish capitalist excess.45

3 Interlude

In summarising their case, Milbank and Pabst explain that ‘the post-liberalism we advocate seeks to renew long-standing and variously embodied traditions of ‘conservative socialism’ that have been sidelined and eroded and yet have never completely disappeared’.46 For anyone having difficulty grasping what they offer, an illustration might help. I suggest that their project resembles that of former Tory Cabinet minister Michael Portillo, who now roams Britain, Europe, America and India by train as presenter of BBCTV’s Great Railway Journeys. Along the way Portillo revels in both high and low culture, for instance visiting Glyndebourne for the opera while also joining-in the singing of sea shanties at a wharf-side Bristol pub. He seeks out many sites of local production, from innovative hi-tech indus- tries to traditional cottage enterprises long associated with particular towns and regions. Colourful personalities, local histories and regional cuisines are

40 Ibid., p. 268. 41 Ibid., Virtue, p. 353. 42 Rowan Williams, ‘The Post-Liberal Moment: Liberalism and Capitalism Have Been Hol- lowed Out. So Where Do We Turn Now?’ New Statesman, 14–20 October 2016, 42–44 at 44. 43 Milbank and Pabst, The Politics of Virtue, pp. 358, 362, 367. 44 Ibid., p. 384. 45 Ibid., p. 354. 46 Ibid., p. 381.

International Journal of Public TheologyDownloaded from12 (2018) Brill.com09/30/2021 317–331 02:42:31PM via free access Politics and Virtue 327 all celebrated, while the focus on railways ties together tradition, modernity and economic progress. If you want to see the vision of Milbank and Pabst at work, observe Portillo, the avuncular ex-Tory politician, with his beautiful manners and his practised ease at negotiating the British class system. He travels England and Europe venerating the time-honoured, the communal, the home-grown, the creative and the vocational, while also reminding America that it once cherished these same cultural markers. Every bit the proud Englishman, Portillo also reveals a wider European heritage. He is unmistakably though unostentatiously Chris- tian, too, suggesting that Catholic belonging might constitute a necessary supplement to his project. Portillo at large does something that is recognizably Milbankian.

4 Assessments

In evaluating the book, one might of course take issue with this or that feature: a strong whiff of nostalgia despite disclaimers; a respect for folk culture and working-class habits combined with a marked sniffiness about actual popular pastimes; and the near fruitiness of certain suggestions (like the value of teach- ing children to knit). There is also the unlikelihood that many of their sub- stantive goals could ever gain real-world traction. Here the shade of Edmund Burke reminds us that politics runs better on principled pragmatism than on ideology. One might raise concerns about theoretical blind spots, too. For instance, Rowan Williams finds more promising political resources in the Calvin- ist tradition47 than Milbank’s version of Anglo-Catholicism would allow. Here one thinks of so-called covenanting, or Federal theology,48 in which political covenants echo the divine-human covenant—a theologically-motivated political philosophy that has played out in the United States. But I am concerned with more basic preoccupations of Radical Orthodoxy, especially its account of secular modernity as parlous and godless. It must surely be admitted that political and economic liberalism improves many lives. There is at least some truth in the economic adage that a rising tide floats all boats. Likewise, socially mobile Westerners can be thankful for deliverance from yesterday’s stifling gender inequality and much oppressive cultural conformism. Charles Taylor acknowledges widespread contentment

47 Williams, ‘The Post-Liberal Moment’, p. 44, mentioning also the political theology of Oliver O’Donovan. 48 From the Latin foedus, for treaty or covenant.

International Journal of Public Theology 12 (2018)Downloaded 317–331 from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:31PM via free access 328 Cowdell with a shift from what he calls the porous self to today’s ‘buffered’ selves, at ease in their expressive individualism, and content to abide somewhere between loneliness and communality.49 As for spiritual and metaphysical resources sufficient to undergird virtue under liberalism, both secular and theological alternatives are on offer. The twentieth-century British political theorist Michael Oakeshott dis- dained what he called telocratic approaches to political theory, of which we find an example in Milbank and Pabst. Oakeshott argues that a nomocratic approach suffices. That is to say, rather than seeking any guiding purpose behind politics, any telos, it is sufficient to base politics on the rule of law, or nomos— specifically, the bare structural necessities for maintaining a workable ‘civil association.’ Political virtue, on this view, would consist in securing those basic operating conditions. Oakeshott demonstrates the conservative’s characteris- tic suspicion of politicians’ high-minded aspirations.50 These are not thought to be necessarily helpful even if achievable, as former Australian Prime Minis- ter Kevin Rudd discovered having declared climate change to be the greatest moral challenge of our time, then proving unable to follow through politically. Minus such high appeals to political virtue, and without insisting on the re- covery of a lost cultural telos, conservative incrementalism concentrates on maintaining the basic political conditions for ensuring personal liberty and market freedom. A more theological reading of secular modern conditions is offered by Charles Taylor. Like Oakeshott, he makes a virtue out of lost foundationalism. Instead of God underpinning a metaphysics of participation, as in pre-modern theology, or post-Enlightenment attempts to restore this foundationalism through theological anthropology, here is a self-consciously post-modern alternative that Taylor calls epiphanic. God enters the human story as an epiphany,51 rather than through any inbuilt teleology. It is only by such epiphanies that a meaningful, inner-directed narrative of human life can be crafted in postmodern conditions. But, as Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us, ‘Stories are lived before they are told—except in the case of fiction.’52 Hence the need for exemplary narratives of virtue that are lived out in the real world. Here Hauerwas insists on embodied narratives from the Church. These are

49 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA.: The Belknapp Press., 2007), p. 482. 50 See, for example, Michael Oakeshott, ‘On Being Conservative’ (1956), in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 168–96. 51 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 495. 52 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 212.

International Journal of Public TheologyDownloaded from12 (2018) Brill.com09/30/2021 317–331 02:42:31PM via free access Politics and Virtue 329 conceived as liturgical and ethical challenges to excessive liberal autonomy and agonistics.53 This is a point made elsewhere in Radical Orthodoxy, most nota- bly by Catherine Pickstock,54 but not here by Milbank and Pabst.55 In both these approaches, one secular and the other more theological (albeit non-foundationally so), sufficient virtue remains available within the practice of political liberalism to ameliorate some of its excesses. A related concern is Radical Orthodoxy’s reading of secular modernity as a capitulation to ontological violence, and hence as a betrayal of humanity’s inner-directedness towards peaceful co-existence. For Neil G. Robertson, in his root-and-branch critique of Radical Orthodoxy’s grand narrative of theological decline, God is not absent from modernity’s independent saeculum. Nor do self-love and agonistics exhaust the reality that secular moderns inhabit. For Robertson, an embedded, systemic virtue survives in secular modernity, though I think it is closer to Oakeshott’s version than to Milbank’s. As Robertson explains,

Modernity, on the one side, disciplines us in the face of an objectivity, whether of nature or the larger movement of society and the market and the law. Equally, on the other side, it releases us to the […] fulfilment of private satisfactions and enjoyments and gives space for the free devel- opment of practices and civil society more generally. Further, moderns know the inner connection of these two sides. It is crucial that, because of the inward freedom of the modern […], the greed, competition and pursuit of self-interest which are released in modern social and political life both have already been inwardly negated, and are effectually sus- tained in that negation through the presence of the absolute state and the general movement of society and economy. This means that […] modern life, rather than evading evil, inwardly dissolves its power […]. Competition and desire are known not as private sins, but as the whole movement of society and the state within us and as such already overcome and contained […].56

53 Hauerwas, ‘Is Democracy Capable of Cultivating a Good Life?’. 54 See Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). 55 A criticism made by Hauerwas, in ‘Is Democracy Capable of Cultivating a Good Life?’. 56 Neil G. Robertson, ‘Milbank and Modern Secularity’, in Wayne J. Hankey and Douglas Hedley, eds, Deconstructing Radical Orthodoxy: Postmodern Theology, Rhetoric and Truth (Farnham, UK.: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 81–97, at p. 95.

International Journal of Public Theology 12 (2018)Downloaded 317–331 from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:31PM via free access 330 Cowdell

Such refusal to follow Radical Orthodoxy in setting poisonous agonistics at the heart of secular modernity, while admitting a constructive role for competition and rivalry, represents an advance on the political theory of Carl Schmitt. For example, French political theorist Chantal Mouffe develops Schmitt’s ac- knowledgement of necessary political rivalries in a more positive direction. She argues that, properly managed, such rivalry represents an indispensable force for good.57 After all, healthy competition is crucial in sport, for propel- ling technological innovation, and alike in the realm of business. Politics, too, if it unavoidably retains the aspect of agon, need not necessarily descend into agonistics. Mouffe reminds us that a flight from healthy political contestation to some post-political ideal is to over-react—that a world of lively political op- positions is not that bad. Yet neither is an altogether peaceful world necessarily all that good. We are reminded of this by the French-American cultural theorist René Girard, with whom John Milbank has taken serious issue.58 Girard argues that secular modernity is an improvement on the closed worlds of pre-modern culture. Such worlds are typically stable at the expense of an unacknowledged supplement, which is the discharge of accumulating internal violence onto victims.59 Girard points to Jacques Derrida’s major essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ as a key text, referring to the slaves called pharmakoi who were kept by the Athenians for sacrifice.60 This practice reveals a connection between the metaphysical un- dergirding of stable political arrangements and a violent supplement, which in Derrida’s terms is both essential and unacknowledged. These violent roots of pre-modern social orders cast in doubt our authors’ claim to offer something inherently less agonistic than secular modern liberalism. For Girard, the secular modern entails a more open society in which scapegoating is acknowl- edged and lamented, thanks to Western cultural dissemination of the Chris- tian gospel. He suggests that Milbank would do better to look at the Gospels and their influence than to seek idealistic solutions in Catholic philosophy.61

57 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 14–16, 116–17. 58 See Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, pp. 392–98; ‘Stories of Sacrifice’, Modern Theol- ogy 12:1 (1996), 27–56. 59 See Scott Cowdell, René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis, (Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). 60 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 296–97. 61 René Girard (with Rebecca Adams), ‘Violence, Difference, Sacrifice: A Conversation with René Girard’, Religion and Literature 25:2 (1993), 11–33 at 20–21.

International Journal of Public TheologyDownloaded from12 (2018) Brill.com09/30/2021 317–331 02:42:31PM via free access Politics and Virtue 331

My conclusion, then, considering such examples of virtue that can still be found clinging stubbornly to political and economic liberalism, is that Milbank and Pabst undersell the innate if paradoxical virtue to be found in secular modernity, while overselling the virtue and probity of their favoured pre-modern heritage. They seek an ‘alternative modern’ version of this past, albeit through British and European political traditions and arrangements that retain echoes of that past. Yet, in so doing, they not only overlook the decency and virtue re- maining under conditions of liberalism, but risk doing a violence of their own to a version of life under liberalism that most people in the Anglosphere really do seem to prefer. 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. One example is provided by libera- tion theology, and in Anglo-Catholic circles by the legacy of Christian socialism. In short, Milbank and Pabst do not give us the only way to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.

International Journal of Public Theology 12 (2018)Downloaded 317–331 from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:31PM via free access