A Catholic Boost for Democracy: Politicizing Performed Solidarities

The Lack of Solidarity in Liberal Constitutional Democracies

While the constitutional state has long been appreciated as an adequate political framework for liberal democracies, the limits of constitutional democracies have become more apparent in recent years. The idea of a constitution was originally closely linked to the aim of an egalitarian rule of justice and the common good among all people, in contrast to monarchic or aristocratic governments. Constitutionalism is meant to accommodate a people’s self-government, by granting each citizen individual liberty and equal participation in political affairs. Yet, it has become questionable whether constitutional democracies are still sufficiently being supported by the people, or whether instead the constitution is increasingly seen to function as an alien force. The constitutional state is now in the difficult situation of not being able to enforce its liberal democratic principles, as this would be self-contradictory; in order to be legitimate, a constitution requires that people appreciate the rights and freedoms it provides and accept the responsibilities these confer. According to some, this can be assured only at the pre-political level. Here, religions are called upon to educate the people in such a way that they not only embrace and support the benefits granted by the liberal constitutional state but also cherish the solidarity needed for any political engagement beyond sheer matters of self-interest. ² In short, religions are entrusted with the task to form a culture suited for constitutional democracies.

This argument is compatible with Catholic theologies that assume a fundamental split between democratic processes, and constitutional principles, such that the latter guards essential humanitarian values and principles that should never become the topic of democratic debate. As metaphysical realities, constitutional values and principles are believed to abide beyond positive law. ³ This reasoning easily turns into a self-promotion of Christianity, and perhaps of other Abrahamic traditions, as resting at the heart of constitutional democracies, especially if it is postulated that such a faith in the eternal validity of constitutional rights can be best upheld if humans understand themselves as gifts of a Creator rather than as self-constructed beings. ⁴

The exemption of constitutional principles from the democratic rule of the people has not only invited critique from certain liberal theorists of democracy, such as Habermas, but also from some Catholic thinkers. Instead of following Joseph Ratzinger’s suggestion to uphold some metaphysical (and therefore presumably undebatable) set of values in order to to prevent democratic processes from becoming unjust and exploitative, Milbank and Adrian Pabst criticize the German Rechtstaat for fundamentally eroding democratic expression, even if its legal rigorism is meant to avoid democratic anarchy and oligarchic oppression. ⁵ They put the critical question thus: “If sovereignty lies originally with the people, then how can it be so alienated that they only express this through an unquestioned sovereign centre and an unquestioned legal formalism that is self-sustaining and totally outside popular control?” ⁶

Similarly, Habermas criticizes conceptualizations of the liberal constitutional state as a positive entity whose foundational validity would have to be cognitively secured through religion or any other consolidating narrative. ⁷ Habermas argues that democratic citizens should not subject themselves to laws merely because they fear its sanctions (by the community or by God), but rather because they can accept the law as fundamentally just because it has been democratically instituted. ⁸ Constitutional rights should not be upheld as an essential feature of the human species, independent of communicative processes, to be fideistically held for there to be solidarity and justice. ⁹ Instead, the particular interwovenness of democracy and constitutional rights should be admitted to the point that the latter exist only to the extent that people accord these rights to each other as citizens in a shared democracy. ¹⁰ It seems that both Habermas and Milbank conceive of an intrinsic link between an essentialist understanding of the constitution and the current erosion of democratic solidarity. The very essentialization of the constitution by some thinkers might contribute to the growing disinterest in democratic processes, as it attributes higher value to metaphysical claims lying beyond human deliberation than to democratically instituted laws.

Yet, their shared rejection of an essentialist conception of the constitution leads Habermas and Milbank to propose very different visions of democracy for the contemporary context. In short, Habermas reinforces the split between religion and politics, and positions the democratic procedure that legitimizes constitutional principles in the realm of politics, not of religion. Milbank, to the contrary, sees the split between politics and religion as a residue of the Reformation, responsible for the “continued discrete hegemony of the Christian outlook,” ¹¹ by which he means a “Protestant” outlook. Looking beyond the politics-religion split, religion for Milbank is always the more encompassing realm, orienting the entire democracy, including the constitution, toward a common telos. Instead of concealing this fact, as in secular conceptions of politics, one should openly admit it.

Creating Solidarity through Liberal Democratic Deliberation

If many Western constitutional democracies currently witness a cultural lack of solidarity, Habermas does not view this as symptomatic of liberal constitutionalism as such, somehow to be cured by religion as secular liberalism’s pre-political complementary other. ¹² Against such proposals to religiously revivify democratic cultures, he upholds that people in pluralist democracies should not be unified by anything other than their common desire to live under a democratic rule. ¹³ While the secular constitutional state is meant to accommodate religious diversity by systemically granting religious communities the right of self-determination, the state, not religious communities, must unify the people. ¹⁴ The constitution is thus not seen as an extrinsic safeguard of certain religiously held essential values and principles, but as a safeguard of political essentials for the continuous functioning of democracy. ¹⁵ The constitution provides citizens with liberties that are intrinsically communal, thus stimulating their active democratic participation. ¹⁶ By means of the constitution people grant each other communicative liberties and political rights, such as the freedom of opinion, with the right of education as its necessary correlate, and the right of political participation, thus actively mobilizing all to participate in public debates about topics that concern all. ¹⁷ Simply by using their communicative and participatory rights in deliberative democratic processes, citizens are no longer oriented only toward narrow egoistic self-interest, but also toward the common good, inasmuch as they participate in the maintenance and the shaping of the constitutional state. ¹⁸ Thus the “problem” of Europe’s growing multiculturalism and a certain hesitancy to appreciate liberal values and the separation of church and state on the part of some religious or populist groups might be solved, according to Habermas, not through an education of these people in supposedly European values, but through integrating them in the deliberative democratic process. ¹⁹

Milbank lauds Habermas’s intellectual integrity when the latter admits that religious resources might be important for the formation of democratic solidarity, ²⁰ but disagrees with Habermas’s contention that such resources need to be translated into secular language when entering the realm of public democratic deliberation. ²¹ At this point, Milbank sides with Ratzinger in the debate concerning the relation between faith and reason, opposing Habermas’s respect for metaphysical truths as legitimately abiding outside the realm of reason. ²² A formal problem with this supposed Kantian epistemic humility is that it claims for itself an all-encompassing, superior knowledge, to be accepted by all others. ²³ The egalitarian relativization of all religious convictions as belonging to the same undecidable realm of the sublime can only be uttered from a position which somehow oversees the content of all metaphysical claims. ²⁴ Milbank here joins those who question the liberal assumption that the split between politics and religion was eternally in support of peace in pluralist settings. ²⁵ Those in favor of a strictly secular political realm fear that a religious majority’s metaphysical convictions could decide a whole society’s future—a systemic injustice in a multicultural setting, and therefore deemed to be generally unacceptable. ²⁶ Yet, the strict split between politics and religion can also be evaluated more critically as promoting itself as a specific religious telos for politics, disguisedly consolidating the secular constitutional state as eternally the best political order because the metaphysical convictions and principles upon which it relies are naturalized and thereby so tacitly presumed that they can no longer be debated. ²⁷

While Milbank at times tends to present Habermas’s separation of public discourse from metaphysical convictions as something like an a priori split, Habermas is keen to emphasize that what abides outside the realm of discursive rationality is never known in advance but is determined in the very process of democratic deliberation, and thus always affirmed anew by the people. ²⁸ Habermas indeed clearly differentiates between particular metaphysical outlooks, which differ from one religious community to another, and universal reason, governing the political sphere. ²⁹ On the political level, everyone is equally expected to embrace the value of impartiality, which denotes the readiness to validate those political decisions that are deemed intersubjectively acceptable. ³⁰ People are allowed to cherish their particular religious values on a cultural level, but are obliged to accept the standards set by religiously neutral practical reason in the field of politics. ³¹ Importantly, this obligation is not extrinsically imposed, but is systemically required: egalitarian universalism at the political level is meant to protect individual and cultural autonomy at the cultural level. ³² If liberal constitutional democracy currently meets certain impasses, Habermas blames capitalist economics for the present erosion of politics. ³³ Many areas of life that had previously been coordinated by democratic forms of communication are now being administered by liberal market mechanisms. ³⁴ In line with his argument, Habermas’s solution to the present lack of democratic solidarity counts on the strength of good arguments. ³⁵ Politicians should inform citizens about immediate costs and long-term benefits so that everyone can form a rational opinion about national or European matters. ³⁶ In sum, in order for people to be reoriented toward justice and the common good, Habermas aims at a recovery of the liberal democratic process that underlie the current economic rule.

Creating Solidarity through a Catholic Telos

At this point, Milbank conceives of an intrinsic link between an emphasis on individual and cultural autonomy, on the one hand, and the current rule of capitalist economy, including its relation to right-wing populism, on the other. In contrast to those political theorists who seek to revive constitutionalism in multiple ways, Milbank regards the failure of the secular constitutional state to sustain a democratically engaged culture as not accidental. He associates the current lack of political solidarity with the orientation of Western constitutions toward individual, self-interested liberty. A constitution can but protect the sheer coexistence of free individuals without any common purpose other than respecting each other’s freedom, protecting each citizen’s life, and maximizing life before death. ³⁷ In this way, the constitutional state actively promotes a culture of narcissistic self-interest, perfectly combinable with capitalism. ³⁸ By favoring the isolated individual as the only politically relevant subject, the liberal secular state erodes democracy from the start, as such an individual fearfully accepts the state’s absolute power to protect life. ³⁹ If a constitution is meant to safeguard peace in a pluralist society, as well as to allow everyone equally to participate in democratic processes, irrespective of their religious backgrounds, Milbank denounces this as a reductionist vision of peace, and a hindrance to those political activities that are oriented toward communal purposes. ⁴⁰ Centering politics around the value of individual autonomy discourages people from becoming politically active with regard to issues that surpass egoistic self-interest.

This criticism tends to overlook the fact that Habermas’s argument is particularly geared to pair individual autonomy at the religious and cultural level with solidarity at the political level. Habermas coherently argues that each citizen is expected to vote in everyone’s interest not for any religious reasons, but for the political reason that emancipated individuals can all rationally agree that living in a democracy is best suited for their emancipatory purposes. ⁴¹ In political matters, everyone should aim at reaching a consensus among the whole of society that is generalizable in the sense of being acceptable by all. ⁴² If one sought to govern others in favor of one’s narrow self-interest, regardless of whether this is good and just, one would legitimate the arbitrary rule of the most powerful, an irrational position from the perspective of aiming at individual self-determination.

Nonetheless, Milbank’s argument reveals a certain blind-spot in Habermas’s proposal, namely its conceptualization of solidarity exclusively at the abstract level of the state, always aimed at all citizens. This reduces the political significance of all kinds of solidarity, occurring in intermediate associations, to the right of autonomous self-determination; in effect, people can legitimately satisfy their “fundamentally human need for loyalty and collective belonging” in any shape they want. “Unrelated to the good, to transcendence or to the universal, these have often taken, and continue to take, unpleasant, atavistic forms.” ⁴³ The current sway of right-wing populism could be interpreted as the outcome of such unfortunate pairing of the principles of autonomous self-determination, on the one hand, and abstract generalizability, on the other.

Furthermore, as noted earlier, Milbank unmasks the supposedly universal aim of autonomous self-determination promoted by Habermas as a specifically Protestant understanding of the telos of individual and communal life, ⁴⁴ and therefore as competing with a Catholic understanding of the telos of life. ⁴⁵ Milbank regards the positioning of Catholicism within a secularist political realm as allowing for but “a thinned-out version of the Catholic faith.” ⁴⁶ According to Milbank, Catholicism cannot abandon its claims to be an all-encompassing worldview, embracing therefore also the realm of politics. ⁴⁷ Consequently, Milbank argues that Catholicism competes with secular liberalism over true universality. ⁴⁸ He conceives of Catholic Christianity in terms of an alternative society, “an international society, independent of political regimes and legal codes.” ⁴⁹ Catholic Christianity is not just one religion among others, all aiming to coexist within a post-secular society, striving for autonomous self-determination, but universally includes every human being, in some way. ⁵⁰ Presenting Catholicism and secular liberalism as competitors about true universality, and about the legitimacy to determine the telos of a pluralist society, Milbank speaks at times of “modern, liberal tyranny” and a “totally non-Christian reality of contemporary economic, bureaucratic, spectacular and military power,” ⁵¹ a “new democratic tyranny” that undermines key traditions, institutions, and embedded practices. ⁵² According to Milbank, Catholicism offers precisely the unifying telos that would promote solidarity in a highly diverse democracy. ⁵³

A Christocentric Catholic Political Theology in Search for Solidarity

According to Milbank, the key distinctiveness of the Catholic telos is its orientation toward metaphysical truths, whereas its Protestant counterpart is oriented toward autonomous self-determination. ⁵⁴ Milbank writes, “Authentic Christianity requires a re-enchantment of the cosmos and a recovery of the way in which it mediates to us the divine pattern of goodness.” ⁵⁵ This divine pattern of goodness is christologically dispersed in the world, to be recognized and appropriated as metaphysical truths in order to ascend from immanent depths to transcendent heights. ⁵⁶ Those Catholic thinkers who are in support of Milbank’s argument offer substantial arguments regarding how such a metaphysical telos would guarantee a society’s orientation toward justice and the common good. The inclusion of metaphysical discernment in the political realm prevents the political community from turning “immanence into a project of our power to make itself absolute, as absolute as possible, and more than anything else absolved from transcendence as other.” ⁵⁷ The aim is to detect the rich ambiguities within immanence that reveal that the immanent is always already more than itself. ⁵⁸ Charles Taylor argues that instead of asking everyone to subject their metaphysical claims to the secular procedure of discourse when entering the public spheres, people should learn to articulate their metaphysical claims in such a way that it becomes apparent that they are talking about a reality independent from themselves. ⁵⁹ A society that opens its politics up to include metaphysical discussions is meant to prevent people from bending “the ‘to be’ in the direction of [their] own ‘to be’ as the only good, in an absolute sense.” ⁶⁰ People would learn to see how the immanent realities they discuss always already contain a truth greater than themselves and thus point toward a transcendent ideal. ⁶¹ All would be encouraged to detect traces of transcendence in reality that show the human community how to transform the world into a non-utopian yet more ideal version of itself. ⁶² Instead of thinking of people as endowed with the empty liberty to choose for themselves what is true, everyone should be continuously encouraged to search for that which is intrinsically desirable for themselves and for society. ⁶³

The orientation toward truth acts here as a guarantee for the realization of justice and the common good in a pluralist society. This is similar to the way generalizable, commonly accepted ideas and principles guarantee a society’s orientation toward the common good and justice in Habermas’s model of deliberative democracy. A key difference concerns the most basic agreement in these two scenarios: Catholic thinkers ask for a fundamental agreement in society that there is a truth about the world, as a regulative yardstick for all policies, whereas Habermas asks for the basic agreement that no one enjoys a rational access to the truth about the world, which is why the truth cannot act as a yardstick for political deliberations. A resulting difference is that a common orientation toward the truth in Christ, understood as analogically dispersed in the world, would allow a society to appreciate unique particularities, whereas the negation of truth’s mediation and accessibility seeks to reach a societal agreement upon one unique particular, to be used as the common yardstick against which all other unique particulars are univocally measured. ⁶⁴

However, instead of following Milbank and other Catholic thinkers when they seek to involve the whole society in a quest for metaphysical truths, I think Catholic political theology should rather discern the ways a society is always already participating in Christ, and therefore already oriented toward the true telos, even if not everyone might express it in such terms. The truth, as revealed in Christ, might not lend itself to basic agreements, and a Catholic political theology might be most distinct through its admission that a society’s orientation toward the common good can never be guaranteed, but should be thankfully welcomed and received whenever it occurs. ⁶⁵

Milbank himself offers precious insights into how this can be conceived when advocating for the acknowledgment of “corporations” such as guilds, religious associations, or universities as the loci where solidarity and an orientation toward the common good are always already performed. ⁶⁶ Neither individual citizens nor the state, but rather these corporations should be acknowledged as primary political agents in a democracy. Significantly for this discussion, such corporations are not unified by generally accepted abstract ideas or principles, but by common habits, practices, and traditions. Analogous to living organisms, corporations develop dynamically, in unpredictable accordance with the incessant interactions between individual members and the tradition in which they participate. To find agreements on abstract ideas or principles among the members of a corporation would involve a ceaseless task of distilling commonalities out of such irreducible diversity, and finding a measure between individuals who are inherently incommensurable. ⁶⁷

If we think of the truth as something primarily performed, precisely in the corporations to whose political significance Milbank suggestively points, and only secondarily as something known and expressed in more abstract terms, a Catholic political theology would not have to aim for any propositional consensus with regard to the political telos of a society. A Catholic theologian might rather want to discern the society’s common telos by gathering the different interactions among all corporations into one harmonious picture, which could then be offered for political deliberation. Others, however, could not be expected to do the same, for although a Catholic theologian would want to affirm that everyone participates in Christ, not everyone could be expected to confess this. More concretely, this would mean that the narrow self-interested telos of right-wing populist parties would neither have to be corrected through an integration of such parties in deliberative democratic procedures nor through reorienting them toward metaphysical truths. Instead, a Catholic political theologian might look for moments in which right-wing populists performatively contradict their self-interested political propositions, when they act for the common good in surprising ways, in solidarity with those whom they abstractly despise, thus performing the truth despite their shortsighted political views.

Conclusion

I have argued that both Habermas and Milbank disagree with a religious essentialization of constitutional values and principles, and the concomitant endowment of religions with the task to save liberal constitutional democracy from the current erosion of political solidarity. Such externalization of the constitution from democratic negotiations might exacerbate the current erosion of democratic solidarity. Habermas’s deliberative model of democracy shows how the emancipatory interest in autonomous self-determination rationally coincides with an interest to be actively engaged in democratic debates concerning the common good, thus to maintain and shape the liberal constitutional state in the process. Exposing the Protestant roots of the Habermasian telos of autonomous self-determination, Milbank calls into question the justice of such a social order in a pluralist setting. Milbank’s solution to the present lack of solidarity in liberal democracies is to replace the current implicitly Protestant sociopolitical order with a Catholic alternative. Here, a society’s orientation toward the common good and justice would be guaranteed through a common search for metaphysical truths in political debates, and corporations would be acknowledged as political agents at an intermediate level between the state and individual citizens.

Nevertheless, I have argued that a Catholic political theology, precisely because it should follow Milbank’s suggestions, cannot seek to replace the present sociopolitical order. Instead, Catholic political theologians should discern where the truth breaks through in this order; where people form corporations, they can act in surprising solidarity with each other even if this conflicts with their abstract political views. The order that emerges would be one that does not presuppose any basic agreement, but corresponds always to the shifting relations and exchanges occurring in pluralist societies. The discernment of commonalities and agreements would always be a retrospective task. While the secular liberal followers of Habermas would enjoy a legitimate place in such a political order, they could not expect everyone to agree that the telos of autonomous self-determination is the highest political telos of the whole society. Perhaps, Catholic thinkers regularly discard too quickly the liberal quest for autonomous self-determination as something in conflict with a metaphysical discernment of the truth. Yet, it might not suffice to explain this quest in reference to its historical and religious roots, and to denigrate it as a deviation from the path toward the truly good. ⁶⁸ For, if the truly good is primordial and superabundant, such that all our deviations still paradoxically participate in it, the question remains: What does it say about the nature of the truly good that some humans treasure autonomous self-determination as the most precious good?