Timid, Theoretical Radicals
October 18, 2005
I hurried up to Columbia University to inform my friends on the campus that I had located the Communist Party, had made contact with it, and was, in fact, a registered member. By chance, the first man I met as I crossed the campus was one of my literary friends. I told him the news. As usual, he squinted one eye and lifted the eyebrow of the other, so that he looked as if he were peering through a monocle. “Do you drill in a cellar with machine guns?” he asked airily. It was he who, when I was first seeking enlightenment about Communism, had given me The Communist Manifesto to read. Now I saw that Communism as an idea was disverting. Communism as an idea to do something about was amusing. I turned away. I looked up another friend who was later with the Theatre Guild. More than any other individual, he had been directly responsible for swinging me toward Marxism. Now that I was a Communist, I explained, I would be able to bring him into the party at once. There were some moments of painful embarrassment. He was delighted at my political enterprise, but he had no intention of joining the Communist Party. Nevertheless, his position was awkward and he felt obliged to put me off without actually saying no. The same pattern was repeated with others. For the first time, I understood the contempt with which Communists pronounced the word ‘Intellectuals.’ I thought: “That miscellaneaous mob in the English speaking branch may not know the English language, but they know a good deal about history. They are not as intelligent as my college friends, but they do not think that ideas are ping-pong balls. They believe that ideas are important as a guide to coherent action. They have purpose and they have courage. They are grown men and women, and these are children.” I felt a sudden warmth for my shabby, quarrelsome comrades and a readiness to overlook their failings in the name of their faith and purpose. I began to see less and less of my college friends. –from Witness, by Whittaker Chambers
From time to time someone asks me what I think of “radical orthodoxy” or if I have read these people, and when I answer, they tell me I should. My answer is no, I haven’t read them, except for an interview with John Milbank, and I don’t really want to read them due to their now unfashionable poor post-structuralist English and its chronic cause: life in a corporeally irrelevant academic bubble. I have read responses, summaries, and critiques of RO, such as Eugene McCarraher’s (note the firestorm of responses) and R. R. Reno’s (see here and here), which can now be taken as a similar, thoroughly Catholic dismissal of RO as another compromised, clay-footed Protestant attempt at a “full-orbed” (as seom neocalvinists like to say) and to my mind a really Catholic critique of modernity that falls short of recognizing the need to be Catholic (and not just in some warmed-over ‘Anglican’ way) to follow through on the implications of that critique and to put some flesh on it. So in efect I suppose I see RO as a kind of personal waste of my time–ground already trodden, in essense–and possibly an evangelistic vehicle for others, though possibly also a kind of late modern neo-tractarianism not necessarily wedded to “high church” types, which is to say another attempt at denial–shoring up the ruins of churches that have already been overrun.
If I were to offer a more direct critique of the RO folks on their own terms, however, this is where I’d start. There are real radicals, and there are people who like to talk. Who in the RO camp is really willing to put their lives and livelihood on the line? The John Milbank interview I mentioned suggests his answers to such practical questions are, as McCarraher describes his modus operandi, relentlessly abstract and theoretical–as well as naive, in my view. (Support labor unions? I’m with Richard Weaver and the radical commies on this one–unions are an example of co-optation where the workers accept the basic premises, ethos, and habitus of the machine and the mechanized worker-unit. This is at best a pragmatic compromise. It is not “radical,” except to academic types whose radical theorizations bely conflict-averse passive aggressive folks who feel “radicalism” is telling the dean or chair what you really think.)
Others associated with RO or the general ethos of anti-Constantinian political theology woul be better respondents than Milbank, I suspect. The Other Journal’s interview with Stanley Hauerwas shows him slicing the Milbank cheese quite ably. So what would Hauerwas have a good anti-Constantinian do, on the ground, as it were? Michael Budde advocates a radical political withdrawal which can indeed “work” if it is accompanied by a strictly disciplined life of separation like monastics, the Amish and similar Anabaptists–and if it reaches sufficient numbers to constitute a real political revolt which the rest of the country must reckon with. Is that the desired effect?
Whatever their real-world goal is, for those that have such a munda, concrete vision, I have the distinct impression that Radical Orthodoxists, like most radicals, don’t see that their real value is in pulling things a certain way (i.e., acting as a reactionary force–call it “progressive” if it makes you feel better) as long as it doesn’t go too far to upset the apple cart of general societal order. These things work in cycles: a thoroughly unconstantinian church would need to get more constantian (as it has in the past), and vice versa. If one believes a stasis can and should be reached by right thinking and acting, I say that is naive, dangerous, and wrong.
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