Postliberal Order, an online newsletter started in November 2021, is a leading voice for challenging America’s origins as a liberal democracy. It is a collaboration of leading Catholic thinkers Patrick Deneen, a political science professor at Notre Dame and author of Why Liberalism Failed, Gladden Pappin, a professor at the University of Dallas, Chad Pecknold, an associate professor of Theology at the Catholic University of America, and Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard and author of the 2022 book Common Good Constitutionalism.
Most of these thinkers identify as integralists who aspire to a Catholic confessional state that replaces full religious freedom with a deference to church teaching in civil law. Postliberal Order started a podcast called “Postliberals” whose second episode was published on January 18. It focuses on two articles by Deneen as parts of a planned three-part series called “The Crisis of Democracy” based on his study of the 1973 book The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value by Edward A. Purcell Jr.
Described by Deneen as “a history of the social sciences and the rise and formation of the social sciences as a set of distinct disciplines in the landscape of the modern university,” the main theme of his articles is how the social sciences replaced the metaphysical studies of philosophy and theology as the source of authority in the study of humanity and what that has entailed.
Deneen explains how, according to the book, in the mid-to-late nineteenth century what Purcell described as “scientific materialism” became the underlining assumption of the social sciences, which Deneen explains as a kind of relativism “in which human beings are basically no different than the particles and the atoms and the molecules…” This trend of scientific materialism led to an intellectual push in the social sciences away from democracy, or as described by Deneen, “a tendency to prefer and be ultimately orientated towards and be ruled by the…experts.”
This disposition towards an elite-governed society led many social scientists of the day to look towards Europe and specifically the rising ideology of fascism as inspiration for reorganizing society in the United States, including a 1935 speech by Walter J. Shepherd, a past president of the American Political Science Association, which praised the virtues of fascism.
Moving into the argument of his articles, Deneen spoke of how this movement toward fascism by the “relativist” scientific materialists/naturalists was opposed by “Aristotelian-Thomists,” especially Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago. This group of primarily Catholic academics sought to combat the relativistic and materialistic approach to humanity held by social scientists by focusing on “natural law” and focusing on the metaphysical study of the dignity innate to individual humans.
Through efforts such as the “Great Books” program, the Catholic position started to become popular publicly, and due to US intervention in World War II, support for fascism became an untenable position for social scientists. Deneen went on to say that social scientists switched to supporting democracy and rewrote the story: “Social scientists retell and redescribe the situation such that those who are value relativists… become the basis of democracy and the people who believe in metaphysical objectivity and natural law… become defined as authoritarians.”
It is Deneen’s position that conservatives’ acceptance of this switch, especially under the influence of John Dewey’s political writings, has weakened their position and that it is from the seed of this pluralism that the “tyranny of relativism” of the modern “authoritarian left” came. Conservatives, instead of seeking academic diversity, should instead seek what is true, according to Deneen.
Such criticism may seem harsh, but Deneen and these post-liberals do point to an important fact, namely that Americans should keep their mind on objective and metaphysical truths that define the character of human dignity even as they engage with those who hold different ideas.
But the need for different perspectives remains vital for the democratic process, which includes protecting freedom of speech and religion. Christians, Catholic and Protestant, must pursue and advocate for transcendent truth without rejecting a public arena in which all can speak and think without coercion.
The post Relativism, Pluralism, and Democracy appeared first on Juicy Ecumenism.