Exploring Christian Personalism's Alignment with Leftist Thought with Julian Assele

Embark on an intellectual expedition as we welcome Julian Assele to the podcast, guiding us through the labyrinth of Christian personalism's surprising harmony with leftist ideologies. Transitioning from conservative Catholicism to Marxism, Julian breaks the mold, challenging the conventional political and religious dichotomies. He offers rich anecdotes from his own evolution, broadening our understanding of figures like István Mészáros and Cardinal Ratzinger, while simultaneously drawing connections between Marxist humanism and Eastern Orthodox views on anthropology. Our conversation serves as a beacon for those adrift in the sea of complex ideologies, promising insights that interweave theology, philosophy, and political economy.

In a landscape where organized religion's standing is in flux, we traverse through the dense forests of secularization to shed light on the nuanced interplay between personalism and Christianity. Noting the diversity within the Orthodox and Catholic perspectives on issues such as racism and Christian Zionism, we bridge the gap between contemporary political leanings and ancient philosophical roots. Julian's narrative weaves the past into the present, revealing the overlooked threads of personalism that trace back to Greek cosmos and the early Christian's divine dilemmas, thus framing humanity's intrinsic value and divine potential through the prism of personalism.

Rounding off our journey, we scrutinize the tapestry of societal structures, unearthing the philosophical undercurrents that have shaped our modern identity. Julian's intriguing perspective on the Catholic Church's grappling with modernity and socialism stages a dramatic tableau of contradictions and harmonies within religious and socio-political realms. As the episode draws to a close, we steer you towards Julian's own work where he fuses Marxist political economy with biblical exegesis, offering an invaluable treasure trove for listeners eager to further explore these critical intersections.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:36

Welcome to Varmvog. Today I'm with Julian Assele and we're talking about Christian personalism and the left. The topic was inspired because I've been in a lot of people have asked me a lot of questions about liberation theology, which I how do I say this? If that's your introduction to left-wing thought theologically in any religion, you don't know anything. And this is not to say there isn't a lot of right-wing reactionary thought in religious circles. I would still say that reactionary thought probably predominates on religious circles, but there is a history here and it comes out of places that you don't even always that aren't obvious to the majority of people.

Speaker 1: 2:39

So I wanted to start us off today talking about that we're going to be referring to and I'm going to cite these in the show notes as well. We're going to be referring to being as Communion by Zizoulas, an essay by George MacDonald, cardinal Ratzinger Slash, pope Boniface Slash, as I like to sometimes call him, pope Naziface, the Divine Project, and then Martin Luther King's the Testament of Hope. So if you want to go, search these texts out and so you can follow what we're talking about, it might help you out. But let's just start today. Julian, why are you qualified to speak on this topic?

Speaker 2: 3:31

Well, vaughan, I've had quite a varied religious journey. A lot of my friends tend to be either raising the cradle Catholics or Protestant Southern Baptists or Christians. I was personally raised Buddhist by my mother and I was raised in a foster home run by the Southern Baptist Association of South Carolina and I was a hard agnostic. After those experiences I was not particularly happy during those times. For very obvious reasons, and through a number of interesting events and kind of twists and turns I converted or was confirmed into the Catholic Church senior high school and was kind of in the conservative circles. In college I went to Yale from like South Carolina and was kind of in the conservative part of college at first, mostly because and a lot of it because I thought the way that one should be Catholic was to be conservative. I thought to be a social conservative was to be a good Catholic. Now, due to a number of other events that happen and as I invested, plunge further and further in my faith, I became a Marxist.

Speaker 2: 4:51

Very shortly after college, due to a number of kind of personal events, both intellectual and kind of more on the tragic side of things, I became a Marxist and became heavily enveloped in kind of Marxist political economy, marxist kind of the historical materialist conception of the world. And as I kind of plunged deeper and deeper into my into like the Marxist study of history and Marxism and Marx himself, my Catholic faith kind of was in a kind of stagnant, lethargic kind of stasis. Well, I didn't really know what to do with it because as it became more and more Marxist I obviously had to kind of critically evaluate, you know, the Catholic Church as an institution through the years and kind of the sober understanding that a lot of these beliefs that you know humans have held and continue to hold, you know, are very much molded and mediated through social and religious and political circumstances and are not just free floating ideas caught up in space. Now, earlier this year it was reading Istvam Mazaros and his book Marxist theory of alienation. That kind of got me back into reevaluating my the my Catholic theology at its core.

Speaker 2: 6:15

So I kind of went from Mazaros and his kind of Marxist humanism to James Baldwin, as I was very heavily I was always heavily influenced by the kind of by the black radicals of Du Bois, mlk Baldwin, I read like his whole Library of America collection of his essays and then finally I read Ratzinger's introduction to Christianity, which blew my mind. It was the first book I read that made the Trinity actually sound interesting, like I actually understood why I didn't understand the Trinity. Nobody understands the Trinity, that's just, it's a mystery. But I actually understood. This is why.

Speaker 2: 6:58

This is why the Trinity is such an exciting kind of phenomenon or an exciting cornerstone of reality that I totally missed out on when I was in college, because when you're kind of a college Catholic conservative you just kind of mostly get fed the manualist Thomas Aquinas law, not saying anything bad about Aquinas, but Aquinas has mediated through these kind of conservative American institutions that basically make Catholicism into a phone book of like laws that you have to follow as opposed to a relationship with God.

Speaker 2: 7:31

Now, going through that with, you know, reading Ratzinger and then McCabe, george McDonald, all these kind of theologians. On the more personal side of things, I thought was deeply fascinating because, number one, it made my kind of Christian faith more of a live object and made it more kind of human as opposed to a set of laws and bylaws that were very used to Christianity. And number two, I found quite a few parallels with the Christian anthropology of man as kind of proffered by, say, a lot of the Eastern Orthodox kind of political religious theorists such as John Zizulis and the Marxist humanists like Mazaros and Lukash and those people and it invigorated both my kind of Marxist, my Marxist interests, as well as my Christian interest, my Christian faith.

Speaker 2: 8:33

So that's kind of where I'm coming from and why I'm where my credentials lie. So okay.

Speaker 1: 8:44

So to break this down for my audience. I'm increasingly having to break stuff down for my audience because I realize that people often do not have the the prerequisite knowledge, and so I'm. Mazaros was a anthropologist, sociologist, philosopher, column, any and number of those things who worked under George Gorgie, but say George Gorgie, lukash directly. One of the two philosophers that I've been really interested in who worked under Lukash was Mazaros and Lakatos. Lakatos ends up being kind of an anti-communist, mazaros is not, and what's funny is I'm listening to this and I'm like have you read Raymond Gois' recent, basically autobiography, which is basically about like being raised by Hungarian Catholics and ended up being kind of a Marxist humanist, although he is an atheist? One of the things I find interesting about when we talk about personalism and the reason why I wanted to talk about personalism more than say like just liberation theology I find the term liberation theology overused into. I wanted to talk about the trends that something like liberation theology can come out of that are completely Orthodox. They're parts of liberation theology that are not. I mean, they've never been an Orthodox Catholicist, but they're not totally squareable with like Orthodox Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox Christianity. But there are things in Christianity, if you understand this. That cut in a bunch of different ways and I think it's interesting to talk about Ratzinger, aka Pope Boniface, particularly because he's seen as a conservative force in the church. He's seen as more conservatives in John Paul II and more conservative than Pope Francis, but his teachings on social gospel are identical to Francis's. His emphasis is different than how he presents it to the public, but his teachings on, like preferential treatment of the poor, the stuff on personalism we're going to talk about today, that that's actually in Ratzinger too, which means that, believe it or not, a lot of the more conservative factions in the US Catholic Church, which I find ironically tend to be the intellectual wronghold of Protestantism weirdly I think they're Protestant heretics.

Speaker 1: 11:51

Now, my opinion on this doesn't matter because I'm not a Christian. My journey is almost the well. It's not the opposite of yours. I was. I was raised in a Jewish and Catholic family, ended up being raised partially Buddhist by my father and I stayed Buddhist.

Speaker 1: 12:11

But the I am really familiar with Christian teaching and I've been trying to get people to understand that the secularization of young people does not actually necessarily lead to a left wing result, to that religious people being being axiomatically predictably to the GOP and their morality and almost quasi racialist is actually a sign of their decline in a significant way. And, as I pointed out, at least when it comes to the Eastern Orthodox, oriental Orthodox and Catholic churches, racism is heretical. It's not just it's not just morally bad, it is actually a heresy. So these are things that I think people really need to understand when they're approaching Christian thinking.

Speaker 1: 13:15

And the other thing that I think is a lot of secular people and this is more from my Buddhist perspective, but a lot of secular people actually think like really shitty Protestants and don't realize it. And and when they go to deal with something like personalism, they don't have really a frame of reference to understand what's being spoken about. And leftist, you want to deal with all kinds of things. I mean right now we talk about the Israel Palestine conflict. Yes, material conditions are what's driving that primarily, but you do need to understand religious differences etc. Like it's really helpful to know a little bit about Western right Orthodox and Catholic Christianity when dealing with Palestinians, because they are not a small part of the Palestinian population, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 14:18

One of the one of the great ironies of the event, the evangelical right in America is they. They're kind of constant cornerstone of their kind of thought is Christians are being persecuted globally, all over the world are being persecuted. You know, christianity is a persecuted religion that is on the brink of being made illegal in all countries.

Speaker 2: 14:39

But when it comes to Israel, the, the actual Palestinian Christians who live there are completely erased. They're just a month. They're just Muslims, that's all. They are no Christians there, not even the oldest, some of the oldest sites and Christendom in the history of our religion. That doesn't matter.

Speaker 1: 15:02

I think sometimes too much is made about Christians. I am ism, but I have been looking at the numbers of it recently and one of the things I realized that even if you took the smallest estimate of Christians I am, as, there's still more Christians I'm as in America than there are Jews on the entire planet. It's crazy. Now I say that because people need to understand that like, that's still not a high proportion of the US population is like four or 5%, but all the Jews on the planet would only be 4% of the US population and they're like 2%. Now, so it's, it is. It is something that people need to think about when they think about like why does the US support Israel, like, like that, when even the Jewish community in the US is, you know, it's about 55% Zionist, 45% Zionist, agnostic or anti Zionist. But if you think about the population of the of the country, this Jewish is only like 1% of the population. You can't explain US policy that way. You have to explain it both materially but also the ideological basis does come from religion and it's a really strange form of religion because, like, for example, christian Zionism is not really common. To get into this in, say, orthodox Christian are our Catholic circles at all. Christian Zionism is pretty much uniquely an evangelical thing and looking at the most recent numbers of conservative support for Israel, which is which is dropped dramatically, it seems to be that even that's only tied to a certain generation of people.

Speaker 1: 17:07

Now, what does that have to do with personalism? Not a lot, but it does help to understand a lot of where these debates are coming from, particularly once you get out of Europe and the end North America. If you don't understand religion and you're dealing with stuff and like North Africa are, are even in Eastern Europe, you're kind of at a loss to deal with the way a lot of people thinking and people might go oh what about you in Europe? So one of the interesting things and this is overstated is not like Russia is the most religious country on earth, but one of the interesting things about the far the Soviet Union is. In the Soviet Union itself, actually, more than in places like Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Slovenia, etc. There was a huge revitalization of religion after the fall of the wall and if you don't understand that, you're going to have a hard time understanding certain, certain distinctions, intentions that happen, say, in or Christianity today. So I do think this is important.

Speaker 1: 18:16

Now, that's the broad spectrum, why I think this is important. But let's talk about personalism. What is personalism? Jewels?

Speaker 2: 18:25

I'm glad you asked, barn. So basically, personalism, it cannot be defined as a one philosophical school as like, say, maybe like stochasticism or Epicureanism or like in that kind of vein. It's more a kind of emphasis and a kind of in a kind of intellectual stream within Christianity. It is something that I think got its start in the early, I think either late 18th or early 19th century, and kind of built steam from there. But it really started to coalesce and I think the late 19th and early 20th century with the French personalists, the French personalists, I think, people like Mariach and those folks.

Speaker 2: 19:16

Basically, personalism in this, in this kind of modern conception, is essentially basing the fundamental kind of building block of reality around the human person. Now, what is the human person? Well, if you want a good introductory text to personalism, I would highly recommend reading johns eyes of. This is being in communion. Basically, personalism starts in the premise of every person, every individual human being, not only having value but having an inestimable and uncountable value and a completely unique permutation within the human race and within the universe.

Speaker 2: 20:01

And the kind of history of like, say, zizou is where he's coming from, is essentially beginning with the Greeks. You have this, you know, you have the pagan gods, these kind of rapacious beings who demand loyalty, demand sacrifice for human from humans, and the gods and the humans. None of no one is free from the kind of how do I say this? The order of the cosmos you know the Greek word for order being cosmos and so you have this kind of riot against not riot, but this kind of rebellion against this kind of authority of the cosmos through these Greek plays like escalates and and those folks where you have these people who are fighting against fate with these masks persona the Greek word for you know mask persona. You know the root word of person being persona.

Speaker 1: 21:02

Now, what's a?

Speaker 2: 21:02

persona. Why do we care about a persona? Well, think about your favorite player, think about your favorite movie, say Macbeth. You know citizen Kane. If you take out any single person from citizen Kane or from Macbeth, from the main title character to the lowest, lowest foundation, like an extra, that movie and that play would be fundamentally different play, fundamentally different movie. Because every single persona, every single person in that play or in that production is not something that can exist in and of itself, because every persona, every part in this play, in this production, exists by virtue of its relationship to others. Macbeth exists because Lady Macbeth exists, because King Duncan exists, because all of these different characters exist, because Macbeth is the at once the result and the producer of all these relations that define, say Macbeth, or say in citizen Kane.

Speaker 2: 22:15

Now, personalism within the kind of historiography of the person was like John's I Zulus or in the 20th century with the kind of new va theology folks I pronounce that very poorly like Balthazar or Rattinger or those types Person. The concept of the human person emerges after, like in the second, third centuries of Christianity, where we're trying to make sense of what the Trinity is, because with the Trinity you have God, the Father, god, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and we are given these sort of statements through both, through both the Gospels and using the hermeneutic of the Gospels, through the Hebrew scriptures of each person of the Trinity being at once like, the same in their essence but also completely different. And in making sense of this, we have the Greek fathers, like the Cappadocian fathers, such as Gregory of Nissa, gregory of Nazian Zeus, basil the Great and a number of other great church doctors and great church fathers, basically coming up with this concept of the person where from the Trinity? We're going to start there. God the Father is the Father precisely because he lives like or he is the father of the Son. A father cannot be a father without a son or a child. That's established. God the Son, jesus the Christ, cannot be the Son without the Father. God the Son is defined by His being the Son of the Father, by serving the Father, and the Holy Spirit is defined by His being or processing from the Father and revealing the Son. So we have these three persons who have the same will but are completely different, and they are completely different precisely to the paradoxical effect of being completely relational to one another and the revolution in this kind of thinking of personhood on a cosmic level is that the problem with the Greeks I'm talking about Aristotle and Plato and Socrates in their revolt against the pagan gods and basically putting their stake in the monotheistic Absolute One, the God, the Creator, is that they had this notion of the cosmos as still being an eternal thing.

Speaker 2: 25:07

And God, what they called God, the Logos. He gives form to the formless void of the universe. Why does he give form to the formless void of the universe? Well, how else was he supposed to enact or fulfill His being as divinity? He has to be in relationship with something. Well, if he has to do that, if he has to give form to the universe in order to be pure reason itself, in order to be God, is he really free?

Speaker 2: 25:47

So there's this conundrum within Greek philosophy of the kind of closed system of Greek divinity of God creating, you know, creating, giving being to the universe because he has to. But well, he has to because he's reason itself. Why isn't it reasonable for Him to give being to the universe? Well, because it just is. But with the Trinity and this is the revolution kind of Christian ontology with like or what Ratzinger would call radical monotheism, you know, one in three and three in one, the radicalness of the Trinity is the fact that God did not have to create the universe, because God, the Father, is already realizing His kind of quote unquote essence through His being the Father of the Son and through the spirit proceeding from Him, and the Son being the Son of the Father, etc. Etc. So then, why did God create the universe? Because he wanted to, because he delighted in it, because he wanted to create the universe and he wanted to spread His love and spread His joy and to allow mortal creatures to experience what the Greeks would call theosis or deification, to become like God.

Speaker 1: 27:12

By Greek she meant Greek Orthodox, not Greek philosophy.

Speaker 2: 27:16

Yes, yes, greek Orthodox Become like God, which is why we, which is why personalism is heavily predicated on the human image of God. You know, we have this kind of saying within Christianity, within even secular philosophy liberal philosophy I should say of humans being made in the image of God. But what does that really mean? Well, ratzinger, in one of the readings I sent you, varn in the Divine Project is assortment of essays on the story of Genesis has a great kind of summary of it, which is basically that an image is basically the signifier and the signified. You know, you have a photograph. It signifies, say, the Eiffel Tower. It realizes its essence as being a signifier of the Eiffel Tower, of the thing that's being a picture of.

Speaker 2: 28:19

But the cool thing about the human image and what it means to be the human image of God, is that God has created you in such a way that only you can understand God in the way that you can, because only you are you. You may not necessarily be the smartest or the most attractive or have all these best qualities that you traditionally think of as the best qualities a human can have, but if there's one thing that's certain is that no human being has your life experiences, every second of your life is completely unique to you and you can only understand God in the way that you can. And so, in the kind of in Christianity, you have this relationship between creator and created and you have these very brilliant exe-GCs, or like rolling out of these implications through, like Ratzinger and through Balthazar, and especially for even like Protestant you know the few Protestant kind of universalists like George McDonald who riff off of, for example, there's this great verse, one of my favorite verses in the Bible, I think, revelation 3.17, where Jesus basically tells, I think, the church in Samaria if you win the fight, if you finish the race, I will give you a white stone with your name, with your new name on it, and only you can read it, which is basically God saying you know, in the kind of conception of having that we have in the Eschaton and the end of all things, you will be given a new name that only you will know. God, the infinite of infinities, will tell you a secret that only you can hear and that only you can understand and that only you can tell the rest of creation, because only you can worship God in the way that you can. And so this relational kind of understanding of the human person that differentiates itself from the individual, something that exists for itself and as itself as opposed to completely relationally, has massive implications for how we think about human rights, human community.

Speaker 2: 30:53

Vaughn, I know you've read a lot of Mac and Tire so I'm sure you're kind of making some connections there. But I see a lot of this and I see a lot of practical kind of synergies and overlaps between this kind of conception of the human person and the socialist, specifically Marx's conception of the human person especially You're going to.

Speaker 1: 31:20

you are going to really have to justify that to me, because I don't see any overlaps. You don't see overlaps? Huh, Not at all.

Speaker 2: 31:27

How so.

Speaker 1: 31:30

Can you?

Speaker 2: 31:30

explain myself further. Go ahead, sure. So what I mean by this is, for example, like Marx's conception of the human being. So you read the like his early writings, from his early writings to his late writings, even in capital there's this conception of the human being as at once the product of the certain set of sets of social relations and also the producer of those very same sets of social relations. Marx has this conception of the human person that is completely relational. It's not it's, it is relational in as much as he like.

Speaker 2: 32:12

We cannot understand any individual or any, say, object in space, you know, not just individual person, but any commodity, anything in nature or in kind of reality, without understanding the context in which it takes place, because we live in a fully dynamic environment that both feeds into or produces that object and is being produced by that very same object and affected by that same object. So that's kind of the very general overlap that I see there and I can go. I can go even deeper than that, but I've been talking for a long time here, so I don't want to suck up all the oxygen in the room.

Speaker 1: 32:56

Well, there's a lot to deal with. I mean relationality as a, as a definer of concepts is. How do I say this? With the exception, weirdly, of the ancient Greeks and maybe certain schools of proto-Hindu philosophy, most forms of codified thinking deal with relationality as part of the way things emerge. I mean, in Buddhism you have dependent co-rising. You literally don't have the concepts exist only in relation to both other people and other concepts. They don't have any essence of their own.

Speaker 2: 33:52

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 33:52

Right. Well, I don't know that's true in Christian thought, but it is true for the Christian, for the particularly, this particular form of personalism, and it has to do with the trinity, because the relations there are. Well, when you get into, for example, try to explain this to people, there are no Calvinist personalists. Okay, and people might go why? Well, part of the reasons for personalism is that it is not arguing for. I mean, yes, actually it's Catholic dogma and Orthodox dogma believe in counter-causal free will, but and for those of you who don't know my very technical thing that the soul is the origin of the will, the will is from the soul itself. Therefore, it acts su generous, beyond its context. However, even that in Catholic thought is mitigated, and I guess my pushback on you, on Marx, is yes, the person is defined relationally and we've talked a lot about that. In fact, the whole collective versus individual is to miss the point.

Speaker 1: 35:32

Marx is weirdly I mean, on that he's actually copacetic with Hegel it's just that he thinks that that emerges from the structures of material reality, in this kind of Hegelian reading of Epicurus way, where humans are individuals who only exist in relations to each other because of a biological species being, basically. And this is this is a problem that you and I agree on, against actually some of our close friends who are Althussarians, who start trying to argue about structures and then navigating will, and all this become being like, turned to allot or materialism, and I start going. Well, if that's true and you believe in determination like that, then I don't know why you believe in politics at all. Well, it doesn't make any sense to me, because everything's going to be the way it's going to be unless there's a random swerving of an atom somewhere.

Speaker 2: 36:32

Right, and I think the other big thing that I that I'm taking from Marx here is especially in the economic manuscripts. This is kind of notion about how communism is the like personalization of society or in the socialization of the individual. Well, yeah that's the other thing that I find like very big caught, like a very big parallels with here.

Speaker 1: 36:57

Well, let's talk about that a little bit, Because because that's the part of Marxism I think it's missing. Interestingly, I think it's misunderstood by the new left to used it for in a lot of weird ways and then by autonomous to also use it in a lot of ways. But there's been a tendency and Marxology to double down on the kind of modes of production which I literally pointed out to people. Yes, the most production are important. Yes, they kind of undergird, and I think that's the entirety of late Marxist economic manuscripts, but they're only stated cleanly twice anywhere.

Speaker 2: 37:44

And in the most abstract I mean the first volume of capital, where it's supposed to be the most abstract and most kind of clean cut, so to speak.

Speaker 1: 37:54

And you get what you have is this problem where you have people who have modes of production which control all human interactions and determine social relations, because social relations are somehow epiphenomenal to the mode production, but they can't explain how the mode of production actually emerges from being, which, even in capital, volume one, if you actually read it closely, merz of production, come from relations of production which are just human relations of power and reproduction. That's what they are, and so the mode is just when you talk about that in aggregate, the relations are, when you're talking, like specific types that emerge, and then there are the ways that's reinforced through the fetish, through ideology, etc. Which is why, when everyone wants to throw alienation is unscientific, I'm always like, yeah, but you're literally throwing out a mechanism that that like without alienation. There's a whole lot of stuff in Marx. It just does not make sense. Or are you literally have this idea basically of social sortalities that emerge, either as conspiracies, basically are they just emerge and you can't explain them?

Speaker 2: 39:14

I controlled f. I control f alienation in my PDF copy of volume one and I only got 60 results. That means Marx doesn't care about alienation anymore. Early Marx only.

Speaker 1: 39:28

Well, that that's. That's one of the most fascinating things to me, because I'm always like alienation is one of the terms that doesn't get dropped. Like species being gets dropped, yes, and there's some other stuff, but like alienation is not dropped anywhere. Like you, could you start reading late Marx, and it's implied, it's in letters, and I'm like anyway. So I guess I do see that as as relationship to personalism.

Speaker 1: 39:57

The thing is, though, I want to want to push on you a little bit, is the foundation of personalism is relational, but it doesn't seem to imply any kind of automatic politics. Because when I looked up personalism on my own research and Catholic personalism and then Eastern Orthodox personalism they get to Zula I discovered two things that one personalism in the Eastern Church kind of comes from Nikolai Bordeev and all these Russian and Greek Orthodox Christian existentialists. And then concurrently and I want to point this out and I think this is interesting that it happened concurrently, because we don't have a lot of evidence that, like Dorothy Day was reading, but Dave and Zula, concurrently, you have Dorothy day, john Paul the second I was actually reading up how important this was to John Paul the second like there is a consistency of thinking here and it's interesting to me when we you know I was saying those snarky things about, um oh, liberation theology, but liberation theologians like this is one of the things that you can be a liberation theologist and a member of opus da and actually agree on.

Speaker 2: 41:28

I apologize if I if I apply implied this, but I want to make this explicit now Personalism by no means implies an automatic socialist politics. I want to make that very clear here. I mean, in fact, you see a lot of this in Vatican too, where, or even in like in America, like the American Catholic scene, where you have a lot of very weird political and spiritual alignments that one would not think. For instance, you have very pro-Vatican two bishops, uh, in America, or very pro-Vatican two priests who are very progressive on the church opening up, who also happened to be fairly staunch segregationists in Chicago and in Montgomery and in the South. But then you also had very, very trad Catholics, very trad bishops like I forgot, I forget the name of the bishop from Los Angeles but very trad bishops who also very surprisingly progressive on religious issues. So I want to make that. I want to make that very clear that I agree with you that there is no automatic politics that issues from a explicit personalist leading in one's theology.

Speaker 1: 42:45

Well, let's, let's talk about a key figure here. I know you didn't have me read her, but when I was looking up personalism on my own to talk to you about this, a key figure in America that comes up that even seemed to have influence on the Pope, uh, was Dorothy Day and so. And so why, like? One of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this is because Dorothy Day, in the Catholic worker movement, while it was distributedist, um, and she talked about distributism as a third way between capitalism and socialism, because socialism was associated with God, the communism, etc. Etc. Um, she actually pretty much rejected the, the, the other forms of distributism which, for people who don't know, tend to be integralists or corporatists and kind of smell fasci.

Speaker 2: 43:38

Very pro private property.

Speaker 1: 43:40

Right, um, and very like very pro class collaboration. Um, but one of the things I think is interesting about this today, and the reason why I wanted to talk to you about this, is like, um. So, for example, dorothy Day was a distributist, but she was also an anarchist her entire life. Yes, she basically thought governments were bad, oh and. And yet I would, if I was to to say it, who's going to agree with her? Um, like, politically, today, you might have two very opposed people, such as, so, robb Amari and, say, ron Dreyer, who actually share her assault shots, and that's, that's an interesting thing to think about. So I think that for the, for the Marxist today, that actually, you know, puts them in a weird place. But I think you're right to point out that um, uh, mcintyre was a Marxist humanist, but he felt very betrayed by Lukash's stance and and the Hungarian.

Speaker 2: 44:56

Yeah, hungry, yes, and the.

Speaker 1: 44:58

Hungarian rebel and uh, and then he kind of aligned himself with the British school of Marxist humanism. It's like EP Thompson, um, rodney Hilton, Stuart Hall, uh, um, but slowly, over time he, he seemed to find those guys insufficient. And also I, I actually need, I would love for for McIntyre to actually write out how he became a Catholic. I actually have not found it anywhere Like this is the moment that I went from Marxist to Catholic. Um, even in his book um Marxism and Christianity, which is kind of about that, he doesn't actually say the, the, the turning point, um, although you get the feeling that his frustration is like, if you're going to believe in eschatology, you might as well believe in actual eschatology, which just seemed to be sort of his argument. But there is, uh, there's an interesting, there's an interesting element to him and this is why I mentioned Raymond Goist too uh, that they do derive from this like relational conception of humanity, a rejection of both Christian, secular liberalism, and we need to talk about how personalism and liberal individualism are different. Yes, Um, because I mean, I know it's kind of, I know we've been kind of like we got into the Trinity and that's what justifies it in Catholic thought, it's what justifies an Orthodox thought. Um, people trying to figure out what the Trinity is about is actually like a huge motivator in Christianity, because it is sort of like, as a person who knows Christian thinking and then knows Jewish and Muslim thinking pretty well, amai is like well, the Trinity is where things get weird. Um, but it drives a lot, and it's specifically the Trinity. It is not just man, and gods are humans. I'm going to be non-gender segregationist humans and gods image, because that is true for Greeks and Muslim. I mean for Greeks, it's true, for it's that is true for Jews and Muslims too, as against Neo-Platonists, right? Um, it is specifically the relations of the Trinity which put Jews and um, jews and Muslims. Both are like well, aren't they pagans? And the answer in the Muslim case is no, and the answer in the Jewish case is probably no, but we're not sure, depending on which rabbi you ask. In the ninth century to 12th century, right? Um, by mnemonies, they're sort of like yeah, they're not pagans, probably Um, but that is a key driver and I think it's interesting.

Speaker 1: 48:01

You bring up one of the things that I thought it was interesting when you talk about the church fathers and, uh, as a secular study of the church fathers. Um, I actually find it very interesting that I do not have a kind of post-cosmop uh, what is that create? We always call it a nice entry, but it's not the nice. It's not really a crazy thing. The KIA, the Calcedon nice degree. Thank you, um, that you don't have the Trinity worked out that well, but you do have something like a Trinity Really early on. And you haven't talked about specifically, in what you were talking about, the word used in like or an origin. I've realized origin is not a saying, uh, but in, also in like. Um anesthesiast who is? So we can, we can cite him more, more confidently without having to worry about some, some conservative.

Speaker 2: 49:01

Personally, I'm a big origin fan.

Speaker 1: 49:04

Right, yeah, no, most, most most left-wing Christians live origin. Origin has, has himself never been a mathematician. It's only his doctrine of universal civilization that's been an appetite. Am I correct about that?

Speaker 2: 49:18

It's a very specific what was anathematized at the, I think the fifth council. It was a very specific conception of a pocketastastis, which is the, the term for universal reconciliation. We're basically all the devils and all the demons will also be reconciled with, with, with, with God. But there's a lot of kind of faulty historical things with that council that kind of problematized the notion that, oh, universal reconciliation, you cannot believe that if you wanna be a Catholic in good state Cause I had, I've had friends of mine who pulled that up on me and they say, well, you can't be a reconciled, you can't be a universalist, because this council in the fifth century said so and I said well, if every council, the Catholic, every local synod, the Catholic church has ever pulled since the first century is still valid, I do not want you to start pulling out those synods where we start talking about the Jews as the, the vendors and the bankers of Europe and how they're the.

Speaker 1: 50:32

You know heathens and yada, yada, yada. Well, we won't talk about like that problem in the Eastern Russia church, but there's a I don't know. I mean, if I was a Christian I would only hold the, the councils that everyone was at and there, and universal excretes are as valid, but that that would just be me and that would mean like three councils count. So I'm not a Christian theologian, so you guys are lucky.

Speaker 1: 51:08

But I think this is really interesting to think about, because when we talk about the problems of liberalism, of liberalism even in terms of like wokeness or whatever I'm putting that in quotation marks because I don't like the term. It's not because I think no one knows what it means. I think it's a. I think a lot of people know a lot of different things that it means, and you can use it abusively, even if you believe in it. So it's.

Speaker 1: 51:39

But by that I mean like the idea of like the person as a manifestation of the systemic, but not as, not in relation to the systemic. So what I mean, like, for example, like you are your privilege, but there's nothing discussed about the relations of privilege and what undergoes those privilege other than like this vague system that's spoken about, an abstract To me, the reason why that stuff is still liberal is that it does fundamentally, even though it's talking about the social structures. Its fundamental locus of social structures is not so much the person you even hear this and stuff like talks about bodies, right but the individual as either an agent or a body, a monad, an atom, a contract maker Right, and that is a deviation that really begins in Hobbes.

Speaker 1: 52:43

I mean, hobbes is not probably the only person who came up with it, but it's a Hobbes thing that is taken up by the English founders of liberalism and the French founders of liberalism and they assume it. They assume the rational agent, universal, abstract reason, because Hobbes, weirdly, for all of his bizarre politics, is at base an anti egalitarian, egalitarian. So. But people who wanna follow me on that? Like he believes that humans are fundamentally equal and that's why you have to use force and a stalling. It's not because, like, there's a natural great chain of being. It's actually for Hobbes there isn't a great chain of being, which is why you gotta have a king and everybody's equal, except we gotta suppress Catholics. Cause reasons and stuff. That part of Hobbes never made sense to me, but cause he clearly barely believes in God. But my point in that is that's one of the locuses of the individual.

Speaker 1: 53:52

Then you take in the renaissance, the rediscovery through Arab trading and through trading with the Byzantines, and then when the Byzantines get all bloody by the Selchiks and the Ottomans, and you have all this stuff flooding into Italy.

Speaker 1: 54:10

You get all this Greek stuff about the unmoved mover about forms and types and essences and whatnot, that really do remove relationality from the question. I've always actually talked about this because I'm like it's actually kind of an accident. I know it's annoying when someone like Carlos Guerrero of midwestern Marx like thinks that, like, the difference between good Hegel and bad, all of the west of the Western tradition, is because we're all secretly Platonists and except for Hegel, who's really secretly a Heraclitian. And then I'm like, oh, but what about Nietzsche and all the other Heraclitians? What about people who were inspired by Lucretius? Sorry, dude, that doesn't work, but there is a sense in which both Aristotle and Platonic formalism also is copacetic with this idea of a rational monad, a rational like a rational, alienated automatically, like by existing. Yeah, by existing, basically because of your emanation from the unmoved mover. You wanna get into the theology which, by the way, if you study ancient Greek philosophy and they don't teach you the theology is undergirded, your teacher is failing you, you don't understand it.

Speaker 2: 55:40

I mean this is something that McIntyre talks about in the first chapter of dependent rational animals, where he talks about the default subject of Western philosophy for the first few hundred years, from the 16th century to as late as the 19th century or the 20th century, I should say is an able-bodied male who can do labor and may or may not have the means to be relatively independent.

Speaker 1: 56:09

And able-bodied male can do labor. But if you're really gonna be an Aristotelian, doesn't do labor. That's actually part of what it means to be fully human, oh right exactly.

Speaker 2: 56:18

Oh, and he's also I mean assuming so white, because he's not owned by slave owners or that kind of thing which, as you might imagine, leaves aside not just a whole chunk of the population but the majority of the population children, old people, women, disabled men, men who are not white, et cetera.

Speaker 1: 56:42

Well, I mean, this is interesting to talk about whiteness in this, because what you have in the beginning, and from the 14th to 16th century it's basically between the 9th and 12th centuries there's people trying to do it Roma and Jews in ways that come up with these metaphors that involve color. They don't really, though, take on as ways to classify people, until you get to the transatlantic slave trade and like Portuguese people buying slaves from Arab and Congolese slave traders and then trying to justify when they bought Christians, but what you see there is. Then you have this conception of whiteness, and what happens is people from and I even think modern anti-racist scholars would do this. They'll talk about Roman and Greek notions of waste, and I'm like they have notions of types of people, but they're not our notions of race. What you're actually doing is you're reading the 15th, 16th, 17th misreading of ancient texts into the ancient text. Like Aristotle didn't care what race you are, aristotle cared that you weren't a natural slave, and a natural slave had nothing to do with your skin color. Natural slave had to do with the fact you lost a war, but you give that to people who are, like trying to justify whatever, whatever conquest system, particularly after the end of Christendom.

Speaker 1: 58:07

I do think it's really important to realize that the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire, aka Byzantium, and like everything that we associate with modernity, including the beginnings of capitalism, happening roughly within 200 years of it, that's not historically accidental. I mean, it is contingent, I guess, like no one planned it, but like you don't even have the concept of European, for example, emerges consistently applied to the Europeans the moment a Christendom that is in North Africa and the former Roman Empire is over. What does this have to do with Christianity? Well, my friends, the Enlightenment and I'm gonna actually take the. This is a reactionary argument that I happen to agree with, but the Enlightenment seems to come out of a very particular reading of this, of these Greek texts, analytically applied. And then you get Augustine, you add that in there, and then you have some changes in political economy and sub justifications of wealth assumption.

Speaker 2: 59:27

And the Protestant Reformation.

Speaker 1: 59:28

Yeah, and then you have the Protestant Reformation. But we also like we can't get the Catholics out of this. They like the new Christians. And the new Christian problem is what new Christians in addition to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, is kind of where race comes from, like as a former category, like you start getting ideas of, like blood juice, which is not something you see in the medieval period. You also start getting ideas about like, for example, going after midwives that's an early modern thing. Like the whole burning time stuff. That's not medieval guys, and it also wasn't really burning, it was mostly hanging but and it was actually more Protestant than Catholic.

Speaker 1: 1:00:13

But that comes out of this as well. And you have this idea of the relational whole, for whatever you think of the relational whole as slowly being dropped for the animized individual. Now a lot of people point to, like in literature, people start point like that Christian into reality is where the individual, the person, enters in in Europe. I don't know that. I believe that. I don't know that, like you can actually say that pre-Christians didn't have a notion of person the way Christians do, but I do think that it gets codified in a way, but the idea of the atomized individual as a foundation for all political order, for social order, for religious life et cetera. That's pretty much a 15th century post-war of religions phenomenon, like that is. We're dealing with the Reformation, we're dealing with the wars of religions, we're dealing with the English Civil War. That's where this idea comes from.

Speaker 2: 1:01:23

And specifically like coming from the rising bourgeoisie, who is a class of individuals who are united by their relations to production in as much as they are not anchored or rooted to the land, like the peasantry or the nobility. And so you get this class of like the bourgeoisie, and say, in the cities in Germany and in the Netherlands and in France, who are trying to make sense of the world, this world in which more and more people are unrooted from the land and where, like, how do I put this? Where hierarchy was mystified in the medieval period, where you know, father, son, lord, lordship passed on to lordship, land holding passed on to land holding amongst peasants and noblemen. With the bourgeoisie, this new conception of life emerges, where you really are your own. Well, formally speaking, you really are your own individual.

Speaker 1: 1:02:29

Yeah, you own yourself.

Speaker 2: 1:02:32

You own your labor power and you can dispose of it how you wish. Theoretically, Right.

Speaker 1: 1:02:40

And what's interesting in Marx I mean this is, I guess maybe the push on. Where I was pushing it a little bit is Marx both assumes that's true and false simultaneously and then it's hard to explain. But like he does kind of assume that like, yeah, these bourgeois notions they're actually liberating because, like now we're no longer tied to, like, you know, legal caste as being actually divinely ordained. And when people talk about like the divine right of kings, I'm like well, there really wasn't a divine right of kings, but there was like a divine social order of which the king was on top. But it wasn't because the king was like had the power of God as manifested in the king. It was more just like the spiritual body is divided up in a certain way and it's try to get people to understand medieval European thinking actually does sometimes it's more A lot of complex political theology.

Speaker 1: 1:03:39

Yes, and also, like Marx points out over and over again, force is a economic factor because it's a social relation. But in medieval ways of thinking that's not hidden, the way it is in bourgeois ways of thinking.

Speaker 2: 1:04:02

But it's completely personalized. It's not an abstract force like it is in a completely capitalist society.

Speaker 1: 1:04:10

Right, like yeah, force for us is abstractified. We can talk about the forces of structures, whereas, like no, I'm talking about that, the Lord's over there as a dick, why? Why, I mean it really is that specific. He is not living up to his divinely ordained thing. Hey, king, as arbitrator of God's law, why do you come smack the Lord around? Cause you gotta keep it, you're like, and that's why there was peasant rebels, not because the peasants even necessarily want to power they. It was more like that Lord's an asshole king, do your job, keep these Lords in line. Conversely, in England there is also a counter force where the Lords are like we believe in liberty, cause we don't want the king telling us what to do. Screw you guys.

Speaker 1: 1:04:54

Now, I don't think that's good or bad. I think there's a way we can romanticize personalism, but I do think there is something lost when we talk about humans as atomized individuals who just enter contracts. One, just factually speaking. All the social contract shit is a myth. Like, just like both the both the other social contract. Nor does it make any sense to assume that just because I was born in an area, accidentally, that I can send to that social contract, because I don't necessarily and in most cases, have the right to leave anyway, like so the entire contractarian understanding of liberalism is kind of based on BS.

Speaker 1: 1:05:42

And the other thing that's weird about it, particularly when you look at John Locke, is they try to reconcile this with natural law, which eventually liberals drop. But you know what they replace it with. They either replace it with utilitarianism or deontologicalism, because they're still trying to fill in the gap filled in by natural law. So it's gotta be like oh well, there's gotta be some rational way that we can deduce this. We now have the naturalistic fallacy, so we can't use that anymore. How do we figure that out?

Speaker 1: 1:06:19

Well, kant's got a rule. It's a stupid rule, but he's got one and are we can try to figure out utility or some shit. Do we agree on what utility is? No, but Bentham says you can do math and people like that's unfair. I don't have to be fair to those people. So that's kind of the foundations of liberalism and what happens over liberal. I mean, for example, another reactionary thing, that reactionary. I don't believe this is reactionary. Just take the reactionary's argue. It is when you drop natural law, human rights don't make sense. How do you justify them? Right, you can't justify them utilitarianly or whatever.

Speaker 2: 1:07:03

Right.

Speaker 1: 1:07:06

Because they're supposed to be absolute In an alienable.

Speaker 2: 1:07:10

It's where you get a lot of the dumb reactionaries who really like McIntyre. Where they think like McIntyre is critical of human rights, that means he doesn't want human rights because he wants what we want, which is like power and authority, just pure no.

Speaker 1: 1:07:25

He just thinks that human rights doesn't make sense once you've given up the virtue systems that undergird them, and I think he's right about that.

Speaker 1: 1:07:34

I think like that's why it seems like everybody just asserts random shit as human rights, Like anyone can claim anything as a human right effectively, and also that means that it doesn't really have any purchase in the modern world other than like what we, other than what McIntyre says it is, which is basically emotivism, like okay, so we've gone through all the implications. Let's get back to personalism for a second. Now you really focus on Benedict XVI, aka Rackenser, aka Pope Naziface, and I think it's really interesting because I was reading Caritas in Veritate I think I'm trying to get my church Latin correct which is a charity. In truth, let's just call it that, and this is an encyclical. It was written in 2009.

Speaker 1: 1:08:39

And it's extremely personalist and I think it has actually like the best definition. That kind of corresponds to what you're talking about, and that is as a spiritual being. The human creature is defined through interpersonal relations, or there you go. The more authentically he or she lives these relations, the more his or her own personal identity matures. It is not by isolation that man establishes his worth, but by placing himself in relation with others and with God. And I think it's interesting because I see this as domestic, but it's not domestic analytic, it's domestic phenomenological. And for those of you who are not into Catholic philosophy and whose eyes just glazed over Thomistic analytic leads into Thomism, as like Christian Aristotelianism.

Speaker 1: 1:09:29

Basically, the Thomistic phenomenology leads into Thomism as like an understanding of the basis of being of which you must experience so it's whether or not you're thinking about good old Christian, good old Santa Quino, as being key for your analytic and rational thinking, are key for, like your moral grounding of being Right.

Speaker 2: 1:10:01

I think one thing I'd like to kind of preface when talking about Rattinger, who I would say is probably one of the best theologians of the 20th century, I usually have a pretty low opinion on the popes and bishops and their ability to do theology well, for a number of reasons. They're pastors, they're pastorally focused, like they're not supposed to be theologians.

Speaker 1: 1:10:25

That's why I was wondering to me that Rattinger became the pope. Because I'm like you picked a theologian of the Doctor of Councils and Coffins, AKA the Inquisition, as the Pope. That's weird.

Speaker 2: 1:10:38

But Rattinger happens to be an outstanding theologian and he was a part of the Nouvelle Theologie which basically, to kind of give you a very quick backstory since the French Revolution traumatized the Catholic Church. Thank, you thanks. And in 1848, basically kind of sealed the deal for the next 100 years for like the Curia and like the Church, kind of being the cheerleader of reaction of like the landowning class and in many ways, the capitalist class. And one of the things I mean literally.

Speaker 1: 1:11:17

it leads to Demestra Right.

Speaker 2: 1:11:21

This is where you get like the guild socialism and all these kind of reactionary kind of distributists kind of fantasies, utopian fantasies and who they used to kind of justify a lot of these kind of schemes and fantasies and kind of tracks against socialism. Socialism was Aquinas, but they didn't use Aquinas, they used manuals written on commentaries, based on summaries of Aquinas' works, because, yeah, I know, yeah, they were reading through translations of translations, of translations of Aquinas' works.

Speaker 1: 1:11:59

Where so can I I need to actually explain this, because another thing that, yeah, yes, there's two things that really freaked out the Catholic Church in the 19th century. One is all the French revolutions, all of them. Two is development of socialism and capitalism freaked them out, like Pio Nono, for example, like condemns capitalism outright in an encyclical.

Speaker 2: 1:12:30

Like basically he condemns and forgot the name of the encyclical.

Speaker 1: 1:12:37

but you're right. Yeah, for those of you who don't know, pio Nono is like every reactionary's favorite pope, although there's a limit to his reactionaryism. For example, I do believe he opposed the Confederacy even though they thought he would be on their side, because he didn't actually think slavery was justified.

Speaker 2: 1:12:56

So I guess it was the Confederacy sympathizers like to say that he did vote a favorable letter or a charitable letter to, I think, jefferson Davis.

Speaker 2: 1:13:07

But that was mostly because there are Catholics living in the Confederacy and he didn't want the priests and bishops to be kicked out or have politics essentially, but in any case likely kind of pro-Confederacy if not for the fact that they kind of stood for land ownership and kind of feudalism whatever.

Speaker 2: 1:13:34

Anyways, yes, the Catholic Church was quite afraid of modernity and so they trotted out Aquinas to condemn private, to basically at once condemn the unlimited use of private property, as the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Not Catholic but the factory owners would kind of fire workers at will but also at the same time condemn the abolition of private property, reading it as still nevertheless a sacred thing, so kind of walking a very tricky tightrope and justifying a kind of very Like A stagnant theology of property. That was kind of aiming at a third way. But then you get to the early to mid, early to mid 20th century with the Newville Theolog, theology guys, balthazar, ratzinger, earlier than this Blondel. These are the guys who basically said we should do, we should look into the early church fathers, we should open up the books and we should do what we call resourcement, add fontes, going back to the sources, so you get a lot of the Greek fathers kind of back into Catholicism, like reading the Greek fathers, reading them and studying them.

Speaker 1: 1:15:09

And these are no longer seen as like proto-heretics.

Speaker 2: 1:15:12

No longer seen as proto-heretics, so you no longer had Augustine and Aquinas as the two big dogs of Catholic theology. And so Ratzinger comes in with Balthazar and kind of these sort of quote, unquote, left wing centrist, more like kind of left-er guys of Vatican II and posit this very kind of radical conception of theology and very much more, much more personalist, much more open and relatively more progressive than in its understanding of ecclesiastical relations, than, say, the old guard in the Curia and in the Vatican.

Speaker 1: 1:16:02

I mean from Vatican II. Basically, you get the development of, you know, with these new theology, you get the development of Catholic social teaching, which I mean. One thing I'm going to say, if you want to understand Latin America, like anytime the left has had any success in Latin America, they've had to adopt, even when they didn't want to, language of Catholic social teaching. And what is that language? Human dignity, subsidarity and solidarity. Subsidarity is kind of complicated, it comes from the, but solidarity in the common good, universal charity and preferential option for the poor.

Speaker 1: 1:17:03

There's no like Christian dominionism or Catholic Catholic, catholic Catholicism. That would be a heresy and it would be a gift. Catholic social teaching and also distributism and social justice are actually like the church will condemn you and even conservative Catholic thinkers like Chesterton and Balak will condemn you for coming out against progressive income tax or like not being for antitrust laws. And that's one of the things that I think that's really important to me is the importance of heresy to believe, believe it or not. So, which I do think makes one of the ironies of the American situation, that the conservative Christian movements, key thinkers right now are mostly Catholic, but they are heterodox Catholic thinkers from the standpoint of Catholic social teaching almost all of them and that's also why there's like a like crypto C Davidic in this movement in America even though they won't call it that because that's explicitly erratical when they basically like yeah, well, you know, we don't really want to deal with stuff in this Catholic social teaching way.

Speaker 1: 1:18:27

I mean there's other. There's parts of Catholic social teaching we would consider conservative the sanctity of human life, which is against abortion, also against fornication and contraception, which that one's probably hard for most leftists to build, but also it's against euthanasia and capital punishment and stuff like that. So I think that's something to think about when you're dealing with Catholics.

Speaker 2: 1:19:00

One of the ironies of the right wing Catholics in America is they hate the Vatican so much, not because of the whole pedophilia thing, but by any means, by any stretch of the imagination, the enablement of pedophilia within the highest kind of ranks of the Catholic Church, but because Pope Francis, you know very rightly I would say limits the Latin mass in America because he rightfully proclaims like these are people are using the Latin mass as kind of incubation tubes of reaction and of isolation from normal society and is not good for the soul for like at least the people who are coming to a lot of these Latin masses. And so they condemn Francis for the social justice stuff and they condemn Francis for getting tea with Castro and they condemn him for you know what do you call it like kicking out certain bishops, like Bishop Strickland in Texas a few weeks ago.

Speaker 2: 1:20:13

But they don't kick them out for the one thing they've been chomping at, the bid for, the whole groomer panic. You know, the whole pedophilia thing the Catholic Church has, you know, been struggling with, to put it lightly, yeah, they don't.

Speaker 1: 1:20:31

I don't talk about that. I mean like, honestly, the religious in general don't want to, because everyone comes at Catholics about that, but if you actually look at the stats, it's bad with all religious authority.

Speaker 2: 1:20:44

Yeah, everywhere.

Speaker 1: 1:20:46

Like particularly I mean Protestant, with Protestants has actually gotten really, really bad in the last 20 years because Really, yeah, I think that has to do with the fact they don't have social force anymore, like they are effectively isolated from society, so you have weird enclaves. It's the same reason why you have these problems in marginal political groups, like, because these problems happen two ways You're afraid of power and you're isolated from it, or you have a lot of power and you hide people from it, like those, but they end up doing the same thing. It's a kind of a big problem in general and it's not unique to the Catholic Church. But yes, you will notice they're not attacking the church on that anymore. In fact, you know a lot of them probably like to bonafist the 16th because they ignore his social teaching and because they like the idea of basically an Inquisitor being Pope. But this is a you know, it's an interesting problem and I do think American leftists really need to take this somewhat seriously. One of the things that I've been pointing out to people is like, in general, people under 40 are highly secularized today. That does not mean that they're rational atheists or anything. They are not. And people under 40, about 50% of them are largely unchurched, and for good Anil, and a lot of it comes for good reasons. But it also means that they often can't talk to the people who are a church, and in the United States right now, the only Christian groups that have been kind of growing at all since the mid-oughts have been either Orthodox Christians or Catholics Orthodox Christians through conversion, catholics through conversion and immigration. And so if you're not conversant in Catholic thinking, you're at a disadvantage with dealing with a large part of the population, particularly a large part of the immigrant population, which is not to say that every Latin American person is Catholic. Protestantism is growing down there.

Speaker 1: 1:23:35

Sometimes figuring out reactionaryism in a place like Columbia is actually kind of hard, because you have both evangelical reactionaries fighting, catholic reactionaries fighting and progressives fighting. Yeah, I mean, but you do need to be able to speak that language and I worry that American leftists just don't at all. They don't know how to become conversant in this and they don't know how to pick up on ideas. And I don't mean this cynically, okay. I don't mean like, oh, we should cynically try to trick all the Christians into becoming good socialists. That's not what I'm saying. I know some Jesus was a revolutionary people who actually think that way, and I'm not one of them. I'm not a Christian for one thing, but I do think whenever we hit something like personalism or something where we can share a way of talking about social problems in a way that does not seed that to, reaction is important.

Speaker 1: 1:24:46

Yeah, and because my brothers and sisters knew atheism didn't lead anyone politically to, they weren't already going, and I just want to put that out there Like, yes, the majority of new atheists ended up just boring ass. Progressive Democrats, I get it, but then you have a bunch of other ones who are not and you're like, weirdly, the IDW and a lot of like weird, even quasi, like James Lindsay and Dave Rubin, come out of the new atheist community. Like, do not assume that secularity means that people share your values. And I get that it's hard right now because you're also dealing with stuff like like a burger fell and whatnot, I get it. I get that the law right now and the fact that like, yeah, you have a bunch of like hyper conservative Catholics on the Supreme Court that are but those Catholic theologically, those, those thinkers, are actually out of line with both the majority of American Catholics and with Catholic social teaching.

Speaker 2: 1:26:03

And, importantly, like it is important to understand that the American right they are not the moral majority right. This is no longer the 1980s.

Speaker 2: 1:26:14

No, much smaller group of people for one, the ones who were most vociferously behind Trump 2016, I think in 2020 were the most unchurched pockets of the Republican Party, and I mean, you just look at the Republicans who are, you know, the kind of main subject of the Republican Party. There's this conservative kind of Catholic writer, matthew Walter, who wrote this article. I think that he put a really good name for it. He called them the barstool conservatives, who were conservatives, who had vaguely, very vaguely socially conservative values, but only insofar as they comported to a conception of like oh, I am a all American burger chomping, cigarette smoking guy who has a job on the line and who watches pornography and I like sex, basically, and that's not a very socially liberal, not socially liberal. That's not a very socially conservative conception of a conservative that we would understand it from, like, say, back in the 80s or even the 90s.

Speaker 1: 1:27:35

No, I mean, one of the things I would say is, like the idea that, for example, gen X Antinomianism would end up the image of conservatism is a very weird phenomenon, and at least I've put it this way If you think you didn't like the religious right, wait till you meet the not religious right, because they're going to either be neoconservative, super realist, or they're going to be racialist for the most part, like that's what you got. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:28:16

I saw a video of a woman at the National Prayer Breakfast, the breakfast that the conservatives, the Republicans, like to have in Congress once a year. This lady Congresswoman, she's fairly young and she uses openly talking about oh yeah, I was living with my partner. We're not married. I was living with my partner and he wanted me to give him a hand job before I left. But I was like I'm late for work, honey, and she just said this in front of the National Prayer Breakfast, in front of all these Christian Republicans. That's crazy.

Speaker 1: 1:28:53

I mean, the Laura Berber from Anamanon is actually not unique, and Trump himself is a good example of this but there were groups that were trying to hold out against it, like the. Basically a lot of. They say it's, for example, here in Utah, but they're not. It's a division between the. I mean, one of the funniest things, honestly, were a bunch of people who tried to leave the church because it was too pro-vaccine. Oh, it's so funny.

Speaker 2: 1:29:24

I mean in so far and this is very important to understand in so far as the average Republican is still socially conservative. You have to understand that it is not coming from a thoroughly Christian faith. It is coming from an own the lives conception of morality.

Speaker 1: 1:29:45

Yeah, it's like A to A J to B.

Speaker 2: 1:29:48

If they are homophobic, if they dislike women, if they hate minorities, it's no longer because they're evangelical Christian, it's because oh, this makes the purple-haired Starbucks barista living in my head angry. Therefore, it must be good.

Speaker 1: 1:30:10

Yeah, I think this is something that's hard to get people to understand, because I've actually pointed out, one of the reasons why the GOP right now is so erratic is they don't just not have a consistent ideology. Let's be honest conservatives haven't had a consistent ideology in most of the 20th century.

Speaker 1: 1:30:29

That's not unique. For most of the 20th century the advantage of the right had over leftism is it had community parent institutions that were strong. I don't just mean that because they had money. That wasn't all they had. They had churches, they had the women and family stuff too, and the left really didn't. That's not true anymore. Yes, they have institutions with a lot of money, but you don't have the same kind of cultural reach. And places where that cultural reach is predictable, such as say the black community where there's still a lot more church-ness, it's not predictable. When people talk about reactionary Christians, they have to pretty much talk about it dividing that group up by race and focusing on white Christians, which are one of the fastest declining demographics in the country. So it's an interesting problem.

Speaker 2: 1:31:37

I mean this is where I think, on an individual level, I find personalism to be very helpful. There was actually a post one of my friends posted and I retweeted it where it was like a heartbreaking. The worst person, you know, is love beyond all measure by the creator of the universe. That's a very tough conception of love because it's essentially asking you to hate someone who is, I mean, essentially a monster. It's only possible for God, but that's nevertheless something that we as Christians have to strive for. I mean, very obviously that's not a standard that Republican Christians or even a lot of evangelical Christians who are Republican. They're not holding themselves up to that standard.

Speaker 2: 1:32:25

But I find this kind of ethic to be interesting as something that you know as a socialist who tries to you know, do engage in praxis and something I find a lot in McIntyre of understanding that, no matter what, like I am not trying to liberate society from the bonds of hate and the power of capital, because it'll help the oppressed, but also because I am trying to liberate the oppressor from this role that they occupy which, at the end of the day, dehumanizes them. This is something that MLK hammers in that essay I sent you on agape, where, you know, black Christians who are marching in civil rights were not simply marching to liberate themselves, but to liberate their enemy and to conquer the enemy by making them, you know, their friend, because that's agape.

Speaker 1: 1:33:26

It's interesting to me to think about this. When you talk about like the way you know I have some reactionary friends who complain about you know what they call it like woke leftism is just secular Calvinism, and every now and then I'm like well, I don't know, but some of them think you might have, accidentally, a little bit of a point, because there is no bridging, there's no view of like. The social order that we want to instantiate is not just about resentment and revenge, it is also about like we think it's going to be better for everybody.

Speaker 2: 1:33:58

Right.

Speaker 1: 1:34:00

Like, like no, we can't bring it about. I mean like, unless you're, I guess, an immediate his anarchist, you don't believe you can bring it about all at once. But you do think, like, like Marx, marx and the dictatorship of the proletariat is not to have a permanent dictatorship of the proletariat is so you can abolish class all together. Right, that's the goal. And if you give up on that goal and I think a lot of socialists do from the gate, then what you normally, you know, what you have as social justice, is basically just revenge and that's not really, you know. And to me it's because a whole lot of people have mixed like this On one hand they've taken this atomized individual, even though they'll talk about social structures, and but they still talk about it in terms of individuals. Otherwise you wouldn't say shit like check your privilege, that's an individual focused thing. Then they will combine that with like utterly cynical points of views that assume that everybody always is just in for their best, because they basically think that Nietzsche is right. And I'm like that's a disaster for a leftist project. You've taken liberal atomism in Nietzschean hermeneutics of suspicion that basically what everyone's really about is just power and that's all it's about. I don't even see how that's. I don't see how that's Marxist at all. Like that's not like. Like that's not like we don't like like.

Speaker 1: 1:35:33

If you believe that and you're a socialist, I don't know why you're a socialist. I really don't, and in that sense I do sometimes feel like disagreements around abortion and whatnot aside, which I don't think are small disagreements, I don't want people to think that I think that, but like that, that, not even putting on my, my religious beliefs at all, but also just like talking about this. Even as a materialist, I have more in common with certain types of religious people who believe in community and communitarianism then I do with someone who has a Nietzschean plus a liberal atomist view of the world and, like I don't necessarily agree with everything the religious people want, need or believe in, but I do understand their conception of what a human being is better and I do think it's something that we can both speak to, whereas if you assume that everyone is a cynical actor, no matter what, there is no way to reason with you. Anything can be justified by that.

Speaker 2: 1:36:50

I mean it all comes back to kind of bringing again to the decryption of personalism. It's knowing that we are all one and atom, where we are all connected, and so when we oppress another we actually dehumanize ourselves. I mean this is something that very basic in the black radical tradition that there's a lot of kind of personal elements in Baldwin the decolonialists. I always mispronounce his name, he's French.

Speaker 1: 1:37:30

César E M M M.

Speaker 2: 1:37:32

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:37:32

A-I-M-E for those of you who just want to angle a phone and everything.

Speaker 2: 1:37:37

Yeah, there we go.

Speaker 2: 1:37:40

And you know, I think about that and I apply that to Israel and the Confederacy, especially post-reconstruction, because I see a lot of parallels of Du Bois' black reconstruction in Israel in so far as we're talking about a ruling class who, in their construction of a society that is based totally on oppressing this other and sequestering this other in a dark corner of the society, have basically made themselves into paranoid schizophrenics and no matter how much of an olive branch the oppressed tries to lend towards their oppressor Say, for example, you know, black Republicans during reconstruction to the planter elite, the planter elite cannot but think, cannot help, but think you are trying to kill me, you're trying to kill my family, that is why you want my land, because you want to murder me, because you hate me, even though you know the black Republican says no, I want to build a society together, but that requires some concessions on your part in order for us to live peacefully.

Speaker 2: 1:38:57

And I see that and I compare that to what's going on in Israel and the fruits of oppression have created a ruling class, not just a ruling class, but also the middle class and lower class strata in Israeli society. That is frankly schizophrenic and paranoid and culturally impoverished and completely dehumanized, because they are living in fear 24-7. And those are the fruits of oppression.

Speaker 1: 1:39:31

And that's they're not just living in fear, I mean to me, they also have to export fear. One of the things I will say is like there's a reason why Zionists are usually willing to cozy up with people he would otherwise see as anti-semitic is because, like, the fear is also a justification for their national projects in the first place. Absolutely, whereas like I, as you know, a person of some Hebrew extraction would say, like I have just as much right to live here as anyone else, to live amongst the goi, because I don't see us as different people. Like I don't see, like ironically and I used to say this in college is really pissed my other Jewish friends off, but I would like, ironically, the two groups that seem to think that the Jewish people are secularly special are Zionist and anti-semitic. Right, like, as opposed to someone like me, is like we might be religiously special and I'm not, because I'm not a religious Jew, but like there's nothing special about us as a people of the anybody else other than our history of oppression. And, by the way, I don't buy into this stuff about the show of being historically unique. We're not the only oppressed people from a middle strata of society that's ever existed Like, in fact, I can think of many groups when people like, oh, the anti-semitism is unique, and I'm like, okay, what about parcies? What about Coptic Christians? Like there's plenty of analogous groups and other societies that get attacked in a similar way, and I just bring this up because it is, it is deleterious to the people living in that society and it definitely, over time, it is detourious to.

Speaker 1: 1:41:30

I mean, I do know, I do not think that, like, zionism is the only cause of anti-semitism in the world. I'm not stupid. There's a certain group of number of people who'd hate you no matter what you did. But do I think it helps? Absolutely not, like, and so for me it's like it. I think it is distorted, like.

Speaker 1: 1:41:59

I do think, for example, well, you know, growing up, going up white, passing in southern right, like I am ethnically ambiguous, but I definitely passed for white and I, you know, and because I passed for white, I go ahead and say if I, if you passed for white, you effectively are, yeah, right it. You know the, the, the ability, the relief that I felt when I, when I felt like I could just, like you know, admit the problematic history, admit that, even if I didn't portray this and even fight that I'd benefited from this privilege. But then like be able to integrate in my city, which was a city where, like, it's a mixed-race city but and people live right on top of each other but they don't interact outside of work, right, and the freedom that you got, when you could just like start moving around and not worrying about it because people vouch for you as part of their community, is such a fucking relief, right in both directions. And you know when people ask me, you know when I go abroad, like where would I go if I wanted to? I always say Mexico or Egypt, even though I love South Korea, but there was no way for me to integrate in South Korea, whereas I I could. It helps me Muslim in Egypt, admittedly, but but I could become effectively an Egyptian. I learned the language, I keep the cultural traditions, etc. I can become, I can definitely become effectively a Mexican.

Speaker 1: 1:43:45

Those kinds of, those kinds of of societies are a relief and one of the things I worry about, about like when we think about peoples and ethnic groups. For example, religious ethnicities are a driver of ethnicity, but they're also ethnicities you can join. Right there are there when you think about them in terms of kinship studies. There are kinship that you can become a part of and still be and you're still part of your blood, can, and everything else to, but now you have another family of which you are a part of. I think leftists really do need to take this kind of stuff seriously about our relationships to each other not assume this out of my shit.

Speaker 1: 1:44:27

Talk about you know, understand these religious conceptions, because these religious conceptions are based on kinship, and one of the things I'll give Christian it's imperialistic AF, I'm not gonna lie. But one of the one of the advantages of it is that it is a unit. It does have a view of universal kinship. Eventually, like that's part of the, you know of the claim of capital, of capital city in the first place, like and people go, well, that's not kinship. Yesterday is when you think godparents are. You can't marry your god. It's considered ancestive marry like a child of your godparent, because it's a real form of of relation and in the eyes of the of canon law, so like this stuff matters and not even to mention the.

Speaker 2: 1:45:18

I mean how, how, like Christianity influenced. I mean Marxism through Hegel and the German idealists and that kind of thing. I mean it's not good for good and ill? Yeah, I mean for good and ill. It's not just Christianity is not just useful for understanding and perhaps coming to some common ground with. You know other, you know Christians, you know working class, middle class or otherwise, but it's also very helpful for understanding the intellectual history of the movement of which you are a part absolutely.

Speaker 1: 1:45:52

I don't think you can understand, I don't think you could really understand socialism, our liberalism, without understanding at least why, like what the religious traditions they're breaking from are right, particularly liberalism. Like it really doesn't make sense until you start figuring out what it's coming out of, what its assumptions are, and so, if for no other reason, people should read this for that and also just think about, like, why seed, why seed religious discussions to reactionaries? To me that doesn't make sense. Like like, yeah, you know, I know I don't want to live in a socialist theocracy. Like you know, that's not my goal, you know, and if you were, if you were trying to make the red Soviet of our father the Pope, I would probably not be happy about that. But I do think that, like there's a way in which I need to be able to talk about solidarity and stuff on religious terms and just accept people where they're at and as they are, and not with this over, gonna secretly like flip you over and convert you.

Speaker 1: 1:46:59

I don't think that's gonna work either. We have to. Just it's like these are the values that we share. Can we build off that? Because, a fuck, a lot of workers are religious even now, like we, you know, like, honestly, they are statistically, you know, slightly more likely to be religious than middle class people. So it's and to make it even more so, if you're of color, that's even more likely to be true. Like, so, if you don't speak this language and understand this language, there's a whole part of the world that you can't communicate with.

Speaker 2: 1:47:38

I mean that's the way, I mean that's the mark of someone who has, you know, exceptionally kind of, you know kind of good relations with others, is like an organizer is someone who. There's a great saying by Herbert McCabe, who is a Marxist, dominican friar and one of my favorites. He has this saying about the difference between love and indifference. Where indifference one says I don't care what you do, no love says I don't care what you do, and that difference is a millimeter wide and a million miles deep.

Speaker 2: 1:48:19

And that is the kind of conception, or the that, the kind of disposition I hope to kind of cultivate, that I've I've been cultivating and hope to continue cultivating. You know, with my, with my friends and acquaintances and people I don't know of. They could be conservative or liberal. I could go home to South Carolina, I could be back in New York or DC and I can have conversations and find common ground about, you know, the necessity of building a better future for ourselves and our children and for even even our enemies, who oppress us and who are actively working to make the world the worst place. Because if you, you know, as a kind of someone who sympathizes greatly with personalism, if you are creating a, a society that is for the betterment of all but one person. That is not a society that I want to be a part of that is a powerful statement on that.

Speaker 1: 1:49:21

Now, jules, where can they find your work?

Speaker 2: 1:49:25

right, so you can find me on Twitter at Catholic Claude. I also have a substack that is that should be linked in my Twitter Twitter bio, where I write about both Marxist political economy and biblical exegesis. I hope to be publishing some more essays in the future, once I learn Spanish. I've been learning Spanish recently, been devoting my waking days to it, which is very fun.

Speaker 1: 1:49:54

But yeah, this has been a wonderful conversation alright, people should check you out, even if you're on the blasted X machine, and I don't hate X because of Elon Musk making it a hellhole. I hate X because it was already and always was a hellhole. But anyway, thank you and people should check out your work and it's been a great conversation and we're outie absolutely, and Varn link the readings in the in the YouTube.

Speaker 1: 1:50:31

I will. I'll make sure that you at least that they're listed so people can find what we were talking about today fantastic.

Speaker 2: 1:50:38

Well, it's been wonderful, varn. Thank you for having me thank you for coming up.