Turnabout thoughts in and out of season

Turnabout is:

• Antimodernist, and rejects the stripped-down understanding of knowledge, reason and reality that has led to the current intellectual, social and spiritual dead end,
• Traditionalist, and views particular attachments, the development of social habit, and informal refinement and transmission of past acquisitions as essential to a reliable understanding of almost anything, and
• Catholic, and accepts the authority, sacraments, and teaching of the Church.

Acceptance of Church authority does not mean automatic acceptance of clerical recommendations on specific matters of practical judgment such as "peace and justice" issues. Catholicism accepts reason and experience as well as revelation, and the various aspects of human life have a certain relative autonomy and should mostly be discussed on their own footing. It follows that public affairs are mostly a matter for the laity to deal with on general grounds of reason and public advantage, even though moral issues on which the Church can speak authoritatively do become decisive in a proper setting.

What reason and public advantage tell us depends on circumstances and possibilities as well as general principles. The great enemy today of Catholicism, a tolerable human existence, and even reason itself is a technocratic view of things that ignores its own limits. That view makes human desire, know-how, and purely formal -- and therefore empty -- concepts like equality final standards. All thought of a precendent order of things that is given by God, nature or culture and so must be respected is abandoned. The "dignity of the individual" becomes identified with an equal right to the satisfaction of desire, and everything becomes a means to that end.

The technocratic outlook thus aims at a comprehensive transformation of human life on extremely simple principles. Equality, rationality and efficiency become the highest goals. Traditional distinctions and standards are done away with in favor of universal technically rational organization designed to secure the equal satisfaction of desire. The self-contained perfection to which the outlook aspires demands that all things be subordinated to a universal administrative system that pervades and controls everything. The creation of such a system, and the abolition of all principles of order not based solely on human will and formal rationality (for example, the particularities of religion, historical community and sex), become overriding political goals.

The attempt to establish such a system leads to self-seeking hedonism, politically-correct bureaucratic tyranny, and in the end utter irrationality due to its inability to recognize any principle of order or judgment outside itself. To avoid such an outcome, renewed emphasis is needed on man's transcendent setting, and on the relative mutual autonomy of the various spheres of life. The good life is possible only with the aid of the principles of well-ordered freedom -- limited government, decentralization, tradition, and public recognition of transcendent religious authority. Catholics should therefore promote those principles, and reject whatever fundamentally opposes them: liberalism, the welfare state, "human rights" as now understood, radical secularism, and contemporary ideologies such as feminism and inclusiveness.

By taking such a position. we put ourselves at odds with the functionaries and apologists of the technocratic order: the experts, educators, academics, lawyers, bureaucrats and media people who provide and make authoritative the asserted facts, concepts, and principles that order relies on. The Church as a human institution has been affected by technocratic understandings, as evidenced by the growth of bureaucracy, the decline of traditional understandings and hierarchical order in favor of "expertise," and the abandonment of transcendent in favor of horizontal relationships that can be managed bureaucratically. To that extent, we also put ourselves at odds with many things in the current life of the Church.

Turnabout will develop facts and arguments relating to these issues and propose considerations relevant to their day-to-day understanding within the Church and society generally. Criticism and debate is of course welcome -- there's nothing necessarily correct about what any of us say, and what's worthwhile in it can only become apparent if it's questioned and tested. I hope you join us!