Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to political theorist Patrick Deneen. 14/06/2023
Introduction
Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about deep values, the people that hold them, and how those people with those values might be shaping our common life. Every episode, I speak to someone who has some kind of public voice or profile, and I try and get a sense of what drives them. Underneath the hustle and bustle and activity and achievement, what is the vision of the good? What are the values or the ethics that are informing their life? And I want to hear from them what they’ve learned about engaging across our differences, particularly where we might have differences in exactly those deep values. Guests come from all points on the political compass – I think spectrum is an unhelpfully, binary understanding as we’re here with today’s guest – on the political compass; from a wide range of religious and non–religious beliefs, and philosophies and from all kinds of professions. I want in this podcast to be popping the bonnet a bit on how those involved in public conversations, which so shape our common life, which shape our ability to understand each other and to live together well: what’s driving them and how do they think about their role?
In this episode, I spoke to Patrick Dineen, who is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. He’s a political theorist, essentially. And he became very well known in the States because of his book “Why Liberalism Failed”, which was recommended by, among others, Barack Obama. His newest book is called “Regime Change: Towards a Post Liberal Future”. And we spoke about his childhood, his childhood in a small and rooted community, and how that shaped him. We spoke about his Catholicism, and we really tried to get a handle on this slightly difficult or fuzzy concept of ‘Postliberalism’. What is the kind of political vision that he has for how we should be living after, as he thinks, Liberalism has failed us. There are some reflections from me at the end as I chew over, the thoughts that the conversation is brought up for me. Meanwhile, I really hope you enjoy listening.
What is sacred to you? Patrick Deneen’s answer
Elizabeth
Patrick, we are going to go in at the deep end with a question that you don’t normally get asked first thing in the morning for you, which is about what is sacred to you? And guests can really take that and run with it in whatever direction that they want. I try and ask them to bracket out things like family members, which I think are probably sacred to all of us. But I’m trying to get someone’s deep values. What bubbled up for you?
Patrick Deneen
Yeah, I found this to be in some ways both simple and also a difficult question. Because for me, the sacred is probably fairly traditional. It’s God. It’s the Saviour, that Christians believe in, Jesus Christ, who is God. And it’s the divine, the transcendent. But in another level, thinking about what we might talk about, what I really began thinking about was the Trinity as the kind of essence of what’s sacred to me. And I think that opens up a lot of different areas that we can discuss, that touch on things I’ve written, touch on things I think a lot about and teach a lot about. So it’s really God–as–relationship, and as sort of Being, Existence, the Universe, the Created Order – as relationship. So it’s not God apart, it’s not really God as a sort of singular entity apart, it’s God as Himself/Herself/Itself, as relational, and as a kind of ultimate model in some ways, the essence of our own relationality as human beings. So that, for me, would be the way in which I would sort of propose thinking about sacred. And I say that as someone who’s a political philosopher, not a theologian, so anyone who’s listening or watching that wants to start to pick apart my understanding and knowledge of the Trinity. I’ll just fall back on what Sister Carmelita taught me in fourth grade, which is that it’s a Mystery. But never mind what I believe in.
Elizabeth
Yes, I think anyone who thinks that they have a watertight conception of the Trinity needs to take care. Looking back over your life, can you remember forks in the road or moments where that sacred value, that idea of human beings as inherently and deeply relational – because we’re made in the image of a relational God – has shaped your life or your decisions? It’s really hard because these things are so ‘substratum’ under our lives. I want to see if anything surfaces for you as where that value has led you, really, and guided you.
Patrick Deneen
Well, that’s a difficult one to just distil into a moment or a few moments. But I suppose, one area would be when I came to a kind of dawning realisation of what I deeply valued about my upbringing. They say there are two kinds of people in the world: people who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and people who know better. And yet, I’m going to suggest there kind of two kinds of people in the world beyond that, which is people who tend to have really loved, or at least deeply valued and feel deep gratitude to where and with whom they were raised and grew up with, and people who are attempting to escape from that. Obviously, it’s complex, but I think there’s a kind of a little bit of a metre in which one tends a little bit more to one side or another side, or maybe one tends a lot to one side or the other side. And I tend to fall a lot on the side of really deeply valuing my upbringing. I grew up in a pretty small town outside of Hartford, Connecticut, in New England, in a what was actually the oldest town in Connecticut. So it was a colonial town, it was laid out as a town to be walked in. We had the great fortune of living just a few blocks from the downtown, so I didn’t have to have an automobile until I was in graduate school. So I just didn’t grow up driving that much, really walking to school, walking to most places. And I grew up in a neighbourhood with a lot of front porches. The nicer weather in New England, which is not a long part of the year, lengthy part of the year, but a lot of it would be spent sitting on the porch, reading books or hanging out with friends. And it was when I went to college and I read among other things Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America” – who has lovely things and very praiseworthy things to say about New England in particular – that I actually learned that what I had valued about growing up, and all of the friendships and my family and so forth, that there was a kind of philosophy behind this. That there was a philosophy, broadly of relationality, but of seeing ourselves primarily as embedded creatures, creatures who are embedded in contexts and histories and traditions, and kind of deep webs of relationships that expand from the home outward. And I recognise that this philosophy was a kind of competitor to a dominant philosophy that exists in the world that I’ve written obviously a lot about in my previous book, and in the current book about to be released. But especially in the book, “Why Liberalism Failed”. So it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about. And, oddly enough, it was kind of a philosophical realisation that what I valued, actually, could be in some ways conceptualised. And that was kind of an interesting realisation to me.
Elizabeth
Yes, yeah, it’s a beautiful picture of a human–scale community where it was possible to be known, and to know people, to know your neighbours, and to have enough civic scaffolding that people’s lives were brushing up against each other regularly, across classes and across religions. And that, obviously, will come to show up in your political philosophy. I wanted to just say something that connects to Yoram Hazony, who I had on the podcast, I think, last series, in the “two types of people” mode. He talks about loyalists as the people who feel a deep sense of loyalty to their parents, and I am I’m always intrigued by kind of temperaments and personality types. And instinctive tolerance for change, instinctive resistance for change, and how they map so interestingly, on to political tribes. And also, I think on theological tribes, you will find many more extroverts in the Charismatic Evangelical church than you will in the liberal Catholic Church, for example. So it’s helpful for me to hear their kind of loyalism, although you might not call it that, coming through.
Growing up Catholic and patriot: challenging conformism and the intellectual rediscovery of his faith
Elizabeth
Could you say a bit more about your childhood and particularly any big ideas, political ideas, or religious ideas that were in the air?
Patrick Deneen
I guess, a couple of things. So I was raised Catholic. I think it’s interesting to me now how many of my friends in the Catholic world are converts to the faith. And so, there was a big wave, especially in the intellectual world, of Catholic converts that occurred in the papacy of John Paul II, Benedict XVI. I’m one of those rare folks, I think, that was raised Catholic and have remained Catholic, which, especially those were in the more intellectual realm, I think it’s a fairly… I don’t wanna say it’s rare, but I tend to run more into converts in the intellectual world than I do into “cradle Catholics”, and I think that has something to do with the formation of Catholics in the 1970s: problems of catechesis, but also just changes in the broader culture. This has something to do with what I was just saying about escaping from one’s home, in one’s upbringing. It was a period of time, especially in America, in which, especially toward the end of my father and mother’s generation, and my generation in particular, there was a sense of finally being free of the Catholic ghetto, as it’s known in the US. The kind of enclaves that Catholics had created for themselves, in what was a hostile Protestant, dominantly hostile, dominantly Protestant culture and civilization in the US. And so, they had built a kind of parallel culture that sometimes is now called “the Catholic ghetto”. It was the schools, it was all the organisations, the Catholic youth organisations, Knights of Columbus… Kind of a rich field of organisations and relationality, again, but fairly limited in terms of how people experienced the broader country. People sort of kept to their own tribe, I guess, to use the language of Yoram. And that’s not really the Catholic way, I would say. The Catholic way is to want to be more in the world, I think, generally. So when given the opportunity to escape, the form of escape that took place was kind of to abandon the faith, sadly, or to minimise the faith, or to make the faith compatible with the broader world. And so I think of the people I grew up with who were also Catholic; very few of them have remained in the church. And I would attribute my own having remained in the church, really, as a consequence of that intellectual formation. So not unlike converts, I discovered aspects of the faith in an intellectual way that was almost altogether unknown to me as someone growing up in the late 60s and early 70s. That was a major formative aspect. The other one, just very briefly, is that I was 12 years old in 1976. And not to trigger those of you in the UK, but 1976 was the 200th anniversary, the Bicentennial, the 200th anniversary of the US. I don’t know what you would call it, the Rebellion. We call it the US revolution, the Revolutionary War of the Declaration of Independence. And it will surprise some readers who know that I’m critical of aspects of the founding that I was a really ardent Bicentennial celebrator. I actually learned how to sign, to mimic the signatures of all of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, so that still today, I can probably still… I can certainly recreate John Hancock’s, which is very distinctive. But I was very into the Bicentennial. And I think these two points are maybe important because as I matured, and as my thinking about these two aspects of my… the mix of these things, I began thinking that there was in some ways more tension between these two commitments than I had initially realised. And in some ways, the more I entered into this deeper, intellectual form and understanding of my faith, the more a kind of simple, or potentially jingoistic, American patriotism was called into question by aspects of my faith. And in particular, what I was just describing, which is the way in which Catholics broadly learn to conform themselves to the dominant Protestant culture. And I think this is true of both of the kind of dominant tribes of Catholics: the kind of progressive Catholics of the Joe Biden/Nancy Pelosi variety, and the more conservative Catholics, who have also fit themselves into the dominant American, broadly Protestant, belief system, especially by adopting kind of free market orthodoxies and mantras. So in some ways, I had to… One part of my formation as a young person eventually came into some degree of interesting dialogue, and potentially tension, with another part of my upbringing.
Elizabeth
I want to come back to that, because one of the things about your book that really stood out to me is how gently critical you are of nationalism, or a kind of chauvinistic nationalism, that kind of transcendent American identity, in ways that I think might surprise quite a lot of people. But I want to pick up one more thread from your childhood, which is: where your parents political? Did you talk about party politics? Do you know which way they voted?
Patrick Deneen
Not really much at all. I think probably, it’s surprising, as someone who went into political science and study of politics. It seems like most of my colleagues grew up in very, highly political households in which discussion of politics was pretty dominant. And it was sort of seen as unseemly to talk about who you voted for, or to talk much about politics. I did, though, have the strong sense that… I guess, around that time, from ‘76 onward, I hope I don’t embarrass my father at all, but I sensed that he was moving in a more… I guess, you would describe it as a conservative direction, which tracked… Again, his generation – the move that came to be known as Reagan Democrats. So those people that have grown up Irish Catholic, that was our tribe, my father’s tribe, especially, and for whom the Democratic Party was as close to being just a good Catholic as imaginable. And then starting in the late 60s into the 70s, the move of many working class, traditional Irish Catholic or Catholic Democrats increasingly into the Republican fold. So I think that that’s part of what was the backdrop, but it wasn’t strongly articulated. It was just a sense that one of the identifiers, not explicit, but just kind of underlying identifiers of the Irish Catholic tradition was becoming a little bit more muddied. But otherwise, it was really not a terribly political household.
Elizabeth
Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that people struggle to understand about the way religion can intersect with politics. Because we’re very used to now have these sort of hermetically sealed cognate containers of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, and this kind of “ethics bundling” of issues. And what Catholic social thought, this incredible intellectual tradition does is, it really messes with all the categories. And you get pro–Union, pro–worker, pro–immigrant, direct teaching, and pro–family, Social Conservatism… and that is a coherent set of ideas that if you’re not familiar with, it can sound very strange. But we’re going to unpack that a little bit.
From Ayn Rand to McWilliams: an unexpected and transformative journey to academia
Elizabeth
First, I want to hear about what kind of set you on the road to an academic political philosopher? What was the thread that you’re pulling on? Maybe what was that 12 year old, adorable nerd interested in when he was practising those signatures?
Patrick Deneen
I don’t know how adorable it was, but I was certainly a nerd. Well, I had zero plans or even conception that I would have an academic career when I entered college. I was a voracious reader, I always was a voracious reader. I was a bit of a nerd in that sense. And as I moved into my senior year, junior/senior year of high school, I became very interested in sort of philosophical texts. It will shock you to learn this after everything I’ve said, but I became quite interested in the novels of Ayn Rand, the ultimate kind of individualistic Nietzschean… but that’s not an…
Elizabeth
I think that’s a teenage boy thing.
Patrick Deneen
I think it is, yeah. And if you don’t outgrow it, that’s a real sign. But no, I think it is something that young, maybe somewhat ambitious teenage boys, maybe some teenage girls, they’re drawn to. Because it’s about being unique, and great, and distinctive, and appeals to that set of qualities. But it was interesting that Ayn Rand was often critical of Plato and Aristotle, and she would write how she had read them and concluded that they were all wrong. And I thought, “Well, if Ayn Rand thinks they’re important enough to read and think they’re wrong, I better do that, too”. So I started reading Plato and Aristotle as a senior in high school, just to get Rand’s understanding of them, and I became quite intrigued by them and ultimately thought: “I think they’re actually right, or more right, about things than Ayn Rand”. So, I credit Ayn Rand with getting me interested in some of the great classical philosophers. And when I went to college, I was in an introductory class. And in one of my papers, I mentioned some works by Plato, and the professor in the class afterwards announced my name in classes, and said “Could I speak with Patrick Deneen?” It was a big class. I thought I’d done something wrong. And I spoke to him after the class, and it turned out he was a political scientists, political philosopher, and he was the first one that introduced me to the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville, among others, and began a kind of intellectual journey as an academic. I was an English major as an undergraduate, but I took every class that this gentleman taught. His name was Wilson Carey McWilliams, was his name. I think around sophomore year, I said that I was thinking about going to law school. And he looked at me quizzically as like, “You’re not going to law school, you’re going to graduate school”. And I said, “What’s that? What’s graduate school?” I had no idea. I didn’t come from an academic family. I assumed that professors were sort of grown in fields. They just kind of emerged from pods. I had no idea what went into the making of a professor, so I didn’t even know what graduate school was. So he says “A graduate school is what you do when you want to be a college professor.” I was shocked to learn that one could do this. So I began thinking about it, and I thought, “Well, this means I can extend my schooling a few more years.” That seemed like something worth doing. So I do credit that professor, who became a very dear close friend, and someone whose memory I deeply cherish, and I’ve actually edited, co–edited, two books of his writings with his daughter, who’s now also a political theorist, Susan McWilliams. So yeah, I mean, those kinds of encounters are surprising, unexpected, unpredictable, and transformative.
Rethinking the modern university and challenging research productivity in academia
Elizabeth
And again, relational, right? The stories of our lives are as about the people that we meet, that we learn to trust, as about the ideas that we encounter, that we feel are persuasive. Those things are indivisible. Now you are a university professor, you’ve published many books, you sit in a very significant academic institution. How much do you think of that role as a vocation? What are you trying to do with your voice? What do you think an academic can contribute to the common good, to a common life?
Patrick Deneen
Yeah. I guess it’s taken me a number of years to figure out exactly what I think being a professor is. When I first was first told about that this was a possible profession, my main interest was “I can keep reading books, and thinking ideas, and talking about interesting things”. And then, when you start as a professor – and I was very blessed. I had really a series of remarkable positions. My first job was at Princeton University, which kind of plucked me out of complete obscurity into an obviously a prominent institution. But there, the only thing you’re mainly concerned about is doing research and trying to get tenure. And that was kind of the single–minded focus of my first six, seven years of teaching. But as I began to kind of get my head over the parapet – It’s not that I got tenure at Princeton, I didn’t; I was tenured at Georgetown University, my second position – but even when I was at Princeton, and I began thinking about what do I want to do, assuming someday I get tenure somewhere, I did really begin to think about it much more in terms of vocation. And one of the things I noticed was my own unhappiness, or I was able to interpret and understand my own unhappiness with the model of the life of a professor as it’s internalised as someone who especially in a kind of really kind of intense, pressure–filled, highly ranked prestigious institution like Princeton. And the dominant concern becomes research productivity. It becomes production of new knowledge. And by new knowledge, the model is the natural sciences. So the way in which the natural sciences proceed is that small, incremental advances of knowledge which are made always by just kind of slightly examining, or slightly changing the terms of the experiment and coming up with a kind of new way of understanding the phenomenon that you’re studying. So it’s a kind of slow sedimentation of advances of knowledge. And this model, which is dominant – it’s the dominant model of the way in which we understand academia unfolding – seemed to me to be fundamentally at odds with what the purpose of my discipline was, and of the broader disciplines that I was most interested in, which, as I mentioned, was first literary. It was literature in my undergraduate studies. It became more philosophical literature. So, my dissertation was written on Homer’s “Odyssey”, and the way in which it could be read as a kind of text of political philosophy. And the way in which this philosophical and literary tradition intersected with politics. That is to say, the social–political environment, what it is we are as human beings and the kinds of societies that we build. And here, it seemed, to me that the model of progress and the progressive advance of knowledge, was a problem. It was a problematic model, because what it tended to do was to discount that which had preceded us. So that we don’t read old science textbooks, because that understanding has been superseded, right? I mean, if you follow the textbook trades, textbooks are updated every year or every couple of years, right? We don’t read psychology texts from 2010, much less 1960, much less, 1900, or 1800. But I read texts that are ancient. And I learned from texts that are ancient. And I teach texts that are ancient. And so, what increasingly struck me was that the academic model, all of the incentives and the reward system, the system of evaluation by which you receive first a doctorate, and then up as an academic position, and then tenure, and then promotion, and endowed chairs, and so forth – its premise was fundamentally contradictory to what I thought I was doing as an academic, or as a professor. And moreover, this approach makes one as a faculty member much less likely to be interested in teaching undergraduates, because they’re learning your field at the very beginning stages. But as an academic, as an expert, as someone who’s trying to advance the frontiers of knowledge, you’re much more interested, at least in theory, in the much more advanced, much more specialised, much more specific forms of knowledge than someone who’s 18 to 22 years old. And I’ve never forgotten my 18 to 22 year–old self. And I’m deeply grateful for that teacher that I mentioned, who helped me to realise the importance of front porches, and my township of New England in my own formation. I’m sorry, this is a long answer, but if I think my vocation as a professor, in some ways, runs contrary to the entire, more or less, structure of academia today. And so I’ve always felt myself as a bit of a kind of outsider to the ethos of the modern university. But I think that’s also given me a little bit of a critical edge on what the university is, and has allowed me to see it a little bit from the outside, to see it a little bit like a foreigner visiting a new country. And seeing things that aren’t otherwise visible to people who are there all the time. So I think that that has actually helped me in terms of the kinds of work that I’ve undertaken, and the kinds of things that I’ve written, certainly in recent years.
The success of Liberalism: the state of nature, loneliness, and why communitarianism falls short
Elizabeth
And throughout this time when you’re kind of climbing the ladder, from my understanding – please correct me if I’m kind of narrating this wrong – there is this kind of deepening clarification of your own political philosophy from, I think, a short time at least in the orbit of the Democratic Party writing for someone who had been appointed by Clinton, is that right? And then this kind of Catholic reconversion and the increasing sense of relationality, and reading de Tocqueville… And then you come really burst into the public eye outside academia with “Why Liberalism Failed”. And could you just – it’s a horrible thing to ask an author to do – but could you just sum up the argument of that in a couple of lines for us?
Patrick Deneen
Yeah, so that book was published in 2018. But in many ways, it was written slowly then fast, right? I think, as they say, “it happened slowly, and then quickly”. It was the combination of about a decade of work that was more in the world of blogs and lectures – lectures, especially to undergraduates. So, much of the bones of that book was written in about a decade before the publication, roughly around the time that I had started at Georgetown, which would have been 2012, maybe earlier than that, 2009/2008. I was writing for a blog called “Front Porch Republic” that I helped to found, and doing quite a bit of lecturing to undergraduates. So that that was the kind of background. So, in other words, the audience I was thinking about for that work was not an academic audience, or not a narrowly academic audience. That work was really directed at… When I thought about my audience, it was my smartest undergraduates. The kind of undergraduate that would pick up a non–fiction book as something fun to do. Something… the kind of the version of myself, trying to figure out why Ayn Rand didn’t like Plato and Aristotle. That that was my target audience, which is small but, turns out, not insignificant. The book itself was, as I’ve already foreshadowed, was an effort to distil what I thought was wrong with a lot of the modern world that had arisen, or my argument was that it had arisen or resulted from a set of philosophical arguments that became realised in our political–social–economic order. And essentially, that’s a critique. The book is called “Why Liberalism Failed”. And it’s a critique of, not just liberal philosophy, but the way in which liberal philosophy becomes realised. So I’ll just say – again, in the briefest way. In the in the first articulation, the earliest articulation of liberal philosophy, there’s an argument that human beings can understand what true human nature is, if we look at human beings and what comes to be known as the state of nature. So, if we can see it, or if we can distil the essence of human beings, we would imagine them in a world without politics, and a world without even society, a world where, in a sense, relationality doesn’t even exist. We’re kind of autonomous wholes, entire selves that pursue our own ends and our own good. And this condition is described as one in which we are all completely free, and completely equal. This is a condition of freedom, of radical freedom and radical equality. So there’s no real differentiation between us. We’d all just do our own thing. And the great French political theorist, Bertrand de Juvenal, once summarised this way of thinking as “these were all the writings of childless men who had forgotten their own childhood”, which I think is a really perfect summary.
Elizabeth
Oh, the astute feminist critique in there is making me very happy.
Patrick Deneen
Yeah, it is. But here’s the thing. I mean, anyone who reads this recognises it’s a fiction. But what strikes me is that if – again, I’m trained in social sciences, even though I’m a political philosopher. One of the kind of continuous and stunning findings, ongoing findings, of the social sciences is that the world that we have created is more and more like the state of nature than the world that preceded it. That if we look at what are some of the distinctive features of human beings today, we are more and more alone, we are more and more on our own. We are less and less likely to be those relational creatures we began by talking about. We have fewer and fewer relationships. We’re less likely to get married or to have children. We’re less likely to have siblings than previous generations or cousins. We have fewer friends today than people did a generation ago. And we have fewer close friends than people did a generation ago. The Surgeon General the United States, just last week or two weeks ago, issued a report on the crisis of loneliness in America, that it’s now kind of considered to be, according to our government, a kind of national crisis, a disease that needs to be treated. And so, what’s striking about this is that the theory of the state of nature, which anyone who thinks about it for a moment recognises how absurd it is, has actually been realised not because it’s our nature, but by this kind of apparatus, by this massive structure of the modern world. That in the aspiration to make ourselves into that creature, we’ve created these massive structures of politics, and government, and society, and education, and economy and so forth, down into the deepest, most private places that we tend to think of are not political, but which of course, are always shaped by the political order we’re in. And we’re viewing the kind of ongoing accumulation of this kind of data over more than a decade that I wrote this book, essentially saying that Liberalism failed because Liberalism has succeeded.
Elizabeth
Yes. Do you call yourself a communitarian?
Patrick Deneen
I suppose I’ve been sometimes called that by others. I don’t know that I’ve ever called myself that, but it was certainly in the air when I was in both undergraduate and graduate school. It was one of the main debates: communitarianism versus Liberalism. But it struck me that communitarians, at some level, were almost always liberals. They wanted kind of Liberalism to be sprinkled, or just kind of given a little bit of a patina of a kind of community. But that communitarians have, at least of an earlier generation, were really terrified to sort of make a kind of much more comprehensive critique of the liberal order. And I think maybe one difference between, I would say, myself and a growing number of people who are critics of Liberalism, is that “in between places” no longer seen as valuable.
Recovering Aristotle, humans as political animals, and how politics is like table manners
Elizabeth
And your new book is called “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future”, and it’s obviously kind of building on, “Okay, if Liberalism has failed, what needs to come next?” How do you define Postliberalism?
Patrick Deneen
Well, at one level, Postliberalism is pre–Liberalism, in the sense that it takes, especially from the teachings of Aristotle – I’ll get to Aquinas in a second. It takes from a kind of Aristotelian understanding. And maybe at the most basic level, Aristotle writes the statement that’s ultimately overturned, or at least it’s attempted to be overturned by liberal thinkers and liberal political thought. And the sentence is, “man is by nature a political animal”. That’s like one of the core statements, declarative statements, by Aristotle in his book called “The Politics”. And whenever I teach that text, and I teach that sentence, even, it turns out, it’s a really difficult teaching. It’s not as obvious: like a lot of Aristotle, it sounds obvious – Man is by nature, a political animal – but it’s not obvious because Aristotle at the same time recognises that politics at some level is conventional. The way in which we organise our society can take a lot of different forms. In this sense, it’s conventional. It can alter, and it can be altered according to time and place, various particular traditions, various conditions, various kinds of judgments, circumstance, happenstance, coincidence… A lot of factors go into this. Sometimes I compare it to table manners. There are lots of different ways in which we can arrange the manners that accompany dining, from the somewhat familiar when I go to Europe – I see forks and knives; I just noticed Europeans don’t switch hands like Americans do. So, they consider themselves much more civilised. Americans consider themselves maybe… I’m not sure if we consider ourselves more civilised, but Miss Manners said “the more complicated it is, obviously the more civilised it is”. So she said Americans could make a claim to being more civilised. But then you get outside of the US and you have lots of different ways in which… you’re gonna have chopsticks. Or you can have just lots of different kinds of implements used to consume food. And you could take this analogy and say, “For Aristotle, this is like politics.” Politics is, on the one hand, it’s conventional, it can take lots of different forms. You can have democracy, you can have aristocracy and a monarchy. On the other hand, we all have to eat, if we’re going to stay alive. And so politics is natural in the following way. It’s, in some ways, a kind of fundamental aspect of what it is to be a human. Without politics, we’re not fully human. If we could imagine ourselves outside of a political city, it wouldn’t be like Locke and Hobbes, where we’re kind of rational agents that can make this kind of rational decisions about ourselves. We would not be recognisably human. And it’s only through politics that we can become human. But having said that, there are lots of ways in which we can organise our politics that make it also conventional. So it’s natural for us to be conventional creatures. And one of the ways in which Liberalism makes it difficult for us to understand that, is that Liberalism tends to create a division between the natural and the… what we sometimes divide the world between natural nature and nurture. There’s the natural, then there’s that which is nurtured. And Aristotle says, “Look, it’s natural to be nurtured. It’s natural for us to be developed. We’re creatures that achieve the fullness of our being through nurture.” And so the question always becomes, “What’s the form of nurturing, that needs to take place for our nature to be fully realised?” And that’s the Aristotelian argument. So I have gone down a rabbit hole now, but I think that’s the kind of essence or the origin of the alternative way of thinking about politics. And that really is the kind of leaping off point.
Elizabeth
It feels to me just a kind of a critique of this idea that the freedom of the individual is the highest, or indeed only good that a state or a culture should pursue, because we are so inherently relational. And your book really doesn’t fit into the kind of most commonly known tribes or structures. You’re referencing solidarity. You’re talking about integration. You have this sense of the kind of mixed constitution, which is really about people mixing in that same way that you did in your small town, that we should know our neighbours, and we need to rework our institutions to stop this funnelling of two classes, really: a managerial class, and I guess what used to be called the working class. Difference is such a theme in your work, but I think you see what you are already thinking, right? And I am obsessed with difference and divides and how we retain our ability to see each other as fully human across tribes. How we retain a fundamental commitment to the dignity of the other, even when they might be saying things with which we vociferously disagree.
The imperfection of politics and Postliberalism’s vision for a unifying framework
Elizabeth
So I wanted to ask you about how your tone and your positioning – because your post–liberal proposal is so driven, from my reading, by wanting to avert what you call a “cold civil war”, the drifting further and further apart of liberals and conservatives, and to kind of bring people back together, force them into relationship with each other, because that’s how we’re fully human. But as you navigate the public discussion, it’s so interesting reading about you, because your persona in person – and I’ve met you and read about you – is very calm and thoughtful. And yet the way people talk about your ideas elsewhere, is of a “big bad culture war warrior”. Someone’s described you as a “red pill for boomers”, which was quite a phrase. And I can sense these two parts of yourself that we all have, of wanting to listen, and engage, and understand with the liberals that you disagree with, but also sometimes sounding very angry and very urgent about what’s gone wrong with Liberalism and the way you think it’s harmed people. I’m sorry, that’s a very incoherent question. But as you’re trying to work out how your own voice and your own ideas, either help heal or help create divides, where are you on that? Let’s think about that together.
Patrick Deneen
Well, actually, your question reminds me of a conversation I had with a really wonderful student who just graduated, who spent the last few years on campus attempting to create various fora and student groups where people could come together and talk about ways they could overcome division. And I said to her, “This is a wonderful effort, but at the end of the day, there are probably just some things you’re just going to disagree about.” There are just certain things that people… you’re touching on their core beliefs, and you have to recognise that you’re going to be you’re going to be opponents politically. And that’s just the truth. I think sometimes that those who are committed to overcoming difference, or at least continuing to see the humanity of the person who opposes them, that that has to be a recognition. And in some ways, I think maybe it’s coming to that recognition, that maybe still allows us to see the humanity of the other person. It’s not just that that humanity requires us to all agree and get along. The reality of our humanity is that, well, as I said earlier, I’m not sure if it’s that the world is divided between people who liked their upbringing and people who wanted to get away from their upbringing, but for whatever reason, we do have these really fundamentally different ways of seeing the world. And depending on who runs the show, that vision is going to be realised. And this is why politics, it’s hand–to–hand combat, at some level. It’s not just about tribes – I think that’s the way it’s sometimes talked about. That’s too irrational. At some level, it’s about who gets to advance and instantiate a kind of worldview. And that’s going to have repercussions, it’s going to have consequences in the real world. It’s going to shape how people’s lives unfold. And some people are going to be likely to benefit from that. And some people are likely not to benefit from that. And that’s the reality. And sometimes when we speak about politics, people will pose their questions or their views as if they’re coming from a place where I stay away from a position where there’ll be no repercussions, no negative consequences or effects. Politics is always going to be the realm of the imperfect. Certain choices will be advanced, or certain preferences will be advanced and certain others will not be. Can this be done in a way in which you retain, or build on the recognition of other human beings? And this gets back to your earlier question. This is what I hope, but I certainly think Postliberalism is. Which is that it takes that kernel of understanding from the pre–liberal tradition that I mentioned, of Aristotle, or in the writings of Aquinas, who adds that man is by nature a social and political animal. But it’s post–liberal. And it takes in some ways the achievements that I see as having its roots in a Christian understanding of the human person, but has been advanced in the liberal order as the recognition of the dignity of every human being, regardless of one’s gender, one’s sexual orientation, one’s… However, we define ourselves. One’s religion. Without becoming a liberal, can one retain that respect for other human beings, while combining that or realising that through, and in, an Aristotelian idea of relationality. And the way in which this divide is today, or the way in which our politics tends to be posed, is “one can have either/or”. And I think a Postliberalism is in some ways trying to move beyond that divide.
Means and ends: the quest for a blended society and the need for political pushback
Elizabeth
It’s a real tension, isn’t it? You use this phrase, “using Machiavellian means for Aristotelian ends”. And I think your what your book left me with – because I my sacred value is also relationships and relationality, for the same Trinitarian–influenced reasons – much of the proposals that you’re putting forth, and I’m much more comfortable with calling myself communitarian, I feel very convinced by. The bit that I worry about is whether you can ever achieve… I don’t think means an ends are so divisible. And I think that it’s the “Marshall McLuhan” thing. I think the way we go about offering ideas into the world is as important as the ideas that we’re offering. So, my friends on the Left who, for example, around environmentalism, or around trans rights, would say, “Yeah, yeah. Dialogue, very nice, but people are dying. It’s more important that we win”. And my friends on the Right, around pro–life issues in particular, will say the exact same thing. “Very nice, but they’re wrong and we’re right. And the important thing is that we win”. And I am losing faith in that whole theory of change, because if we’re seeking the ‘common good’, which is something that you’re talking about a lot – a common good in which we can all live – then the way we comport ourselves is vital. And it feels like that’s one of the things we’ve lost. And maybe you would say we’ve lost it because of Liberalism, and because of this separation, and because of the primacy of the individual rather than our sense of our deep interconnectedness. I’m sorry, that is not a question. But I would be interested in your thoughts.
Patrick Deneen
Let me take a step back, to address my obviously, intentionally provocative phrase in an intentionally provocatively titled book. And probably the people will be disappointed, since the book is not nearly as provocative.
Elizabeth
It’s really not.
Patrick Deneen
I mean, it’s it is about a regime change. In some ways, it’s more…
Elizabeth
But not a violent one.
Patrick Deneen
No, and it’s not what people thinks. It’s not a sort of violent overthrow of the government, it’s a fundamentally different way of seeing what politics is. And that in that way, it’s got a much more kind of revolutionary appeal than merely overthrowing a government. That would be just replacing one group of bad people with another group of bad people. But the phrase, “Machiavellian means to Aristotelian ends”. What I was really appealing to there, and if you’ve read this, you’re aware of this. So, a step back from the step back. So, the book is really an argument about the nature of, in particular, why we have a kind of particular form of a leadership class in the modern world, this liberal leadership class. And the argument of the book is that this leadership class is shaped by and its purposes are to advance a liberal order, as my last book was describing and laying out. And a consequence of this is that it actually is premised on the rejection of the classical idea of ‘mixed constitution’ or ‘mixed government’ which, in its classical formulation, seeks to achieve a kind of a balance, or even a blending between the ruling class and those who are ruled. A kind of either a balance, or an outright mixing. So there’s two senses of mixing going on: there’s the kind of mixing of the mix salad in which all the elements are still identifiable. And then there’s the mixing of the smoothie in which everything kind of… you can’t really distinguish the particular tastes from one another. Machiavelli argues that the form of mixed constitution that is really only achievable, that creates a kind of working political order, is the “mixed salad” model. And in particular, the ‘power of the many’ is utilised to restrain the ‘power of the few’. The power of the few – we could say the ruling class, the elites, which exist in every society – always tends to be: they have the concentration of resources, they have wealth, they have influence, they control institutions. They don’t have a lot of people, but what they have is a lot of the instruments of power. What the people have is numbers. And so what Machiavelli argues is that Rome in particular was able to achieve a kind of ‘mixed constitution’ by the rabble using their numerical superiority to extract concessions and demand a limitation on the advance and use of power by the elites. And this is the kind of “Machiavellian means” that I mean. But “Aristotelian ends” is more the image of the smoothie. It’s more a kind of mixing of the classes that moves away from the idea that it’s simply a clash. Or it’s simply a kind of almost ongoing continual conflict. And so the argument of the book as a whole, and of that chapter that you’re appealing to and discussing in particular, is that at the moment, in my view, that’s something I think a lot of people would disagree with. But in my view, at the moment, I think that there’s a way in which there’s a kind of domination by elites of the many, of the working class, of the lower classes, of a kind of multiracial, non–liberal, non–successful kind of citizenry, who are largely regarded as having, through their own fault and their own bad choices, not succeeded in this open, inviting, increasingly borderless, boundary–less world. And I think that the only way, in some ways, to force this ruling class to recognise what they are, what their approach and policies are wreaking on everyday people, is through a kind of political pushback. And I think that is kind of what’s happening in our world today. I think that defines the political divide that we’re seeing. And as you said, if we don’t want to see this go the direction of a cold or even a hot civil war, the happy outcome of this, in my view, would be “Aristotelian ends”. But the “Aristotelian ends” are likely only to be achieved through at least first steps of being a kind of Machiavellian means of a kind of assertion of political power. So I don’t know here whether the ends are contrary to the means. But I actually think that there’s a kind of continuity here, that without a kind of forceful political pushback, there’s not likely to be a willingness to achieve the kind of blending that I call for in the last chapter of the book, the chapter on integration.
Elizabeth
Much food for thought there. Patrick Deneen, thank you so much.
Patrick Deneen
You’re very welcome. Thank you for having me.
Reflection and outro
Elizabeth
Well – Patrick Dineen. I really had to engage my “ideas brain” for this one, as we dotted around between Plato, and Aristotle, and Ayn Rand. But we started before we got into any of that with his sacred value of relationships, the sacred value of the Trinity. I may have been projecting because it’s very close to my own sacred value. It might be the first time that a guest has said something so close to my understanding, which is interesting to me. But yes, because of his sense that God as Trinity is so key to how human beings flourish, that we are made for relationships. Relationships is what has driven his work, which, as we’ll come back to, I think, relates in a very interesting way to communitarianism, or community–mindedness, or a kind of hostility to individualism and how that does and doesn’t come through.
He made me laugh by saying, “There’s two kinds of people in the world. Those who think that there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.” And then going on to talk about the two kinds of people, which was very kind of pleasingly self–aware of how much we want to reach for these binaries, and that they’re helpful, but also ridiculous. But I do think there’s something in that sense of the legacy of our childhoods and how much… It’s not that we necessarily want to recreate them, but maybe we want to hold on to the treasures of them. And for those of us whose childhoods didn’t feel like they left a particularly life–giving or liberatory legacy – and I wonder how that plays out across political parties, across temperaments, across different parts of different philosophies and religions. And it made me think about nostalgia, because he talks about… One of his projects was called something like the “Front porch review” or something. This idea of front porches, the idea that you have a community that is walkable, and that is built into the very town planning. There is enough point of repeated accidental overlap in a community that you know your neighbours, that someone will wave at you from their front porch, they will be sitting on the front porch, not out in the garden where you can’t see them, which I think is why it tends to be in the UK. But somehow, designing communities and designing our lives, to force us into repeated, casual overlap with each other. I remember when I was working at the BBC, they’ve redesigned the offices in Media City, and there was all this chat about where they put the toilets, to force people to walk past each other. It feels like, left to ourselves as humans, we might naturally withdraw into our little castles. And one of the ways we can think about the common good and our common life is, how do you create accidental friction? I don’t necessarily mean friction is a bad word, actually, I think in the community in which we live, we talk about friction–full not frictionless. The frictionless world of tech is one of the things that I think is possibly not forming us in particularly helpful ways.
But yeah, it got me think about nostalgia, because in some ways you could hear him talking about his hometown, with the front porches, and it was all walkable… It’s like lovely–lovely, but isn’t that just nostalgic? And I think that nostalgia means homesickness. And it really interests me, this sense… Again, it’s coming up again and again in this series, the hunger in the human brain to find binaries, to find “either/or”: either we hold to the past, and the legacy of our ancestors, and we conserve what we have received, and we’re conservatives. Or we are progressives, and we are focused on the future, and we’re moving forward, basically dumping the past. We’re moving forward. And it surely must be possible to be… It’s an old cliché, but I’m thinking “the roots and the shoots”: to take what nostalgia is telling us, to listen for what is the good that we want to protect and cherish. But also be wanting to grow and move forward. And to do that carefully and with discernment about maybe what we don’t want to carry into the future with us. And wondering what it would be to be someone who could… Backward–facing and forward–facing? That sounds two–faced, literally. What is a posture towards the past in the future? And I’m sure someone’s gonna say “It’s just being in the present. The present is all we have.” But I don’t know, that doesn’t come easily. To me, I think we do need to think about the past. And we do need to imagine the future. And we have a tendency to think one is more important than the other, and to be temperamentally inclined to one more than the other. And then to draw tribal lines around that. Similarly, with new knowledge and old knowledge, right? The academy is all about new knowledge, and he wants to protect the old knowledge. It’s got to be both. Maybe I’m just a woolly fence–sitter.
This conversation clarified for me, at least in his definition, that I think Liberalism just is individualism. That it is the kind of liberating the individual from undue constraints of others – which is obviously a powerfully good thing, if you are living under illegitimate constraints, as many people and groups have. But his definition of Liberalism, which I should have got him to say in this, because lots of these terms are slippery and confusing. But his definition was from the early thinkers. That was basically being able to, he said, dispose of you or your person and your possessions as you see fit – is the definition of that kind of freedom that Liberalism is moving towards. And in its very refusal to take into account or centre at least the fact that, as well as being individuals, we are persons, and persons in relationship and shaped and formed by others, and irreconcilably and unavoidably influential, brushing up friction–full with each other. That it’s somehow doesn’t tell the whole story of what human beings are like and how they flourish? Is what I’m hearing from him.
I’m so interested that he doesn’t want to call himself a communitarian. It feels like that’s the definition of Postliberalism to me. That it is saying: families matter, institutions matter, sites of belonging matter, places that we can grow, communities of moral formation matter. And by putting the full weight of ethics, really, on just the individual, we’ve forgotten that and we have therefore eroded all these places where we become more fully human. I don’t know if communitarianism has got a sort of ‘hippie–dippie baggage’ that he doesn’t like? But I wonder what alternative language is about that. And I have to say, getting hold of what he means by Postliberalism, I found a bit tricky, and I think it’s probably because it’s quite “political theory” language, which is not my mother tongue. But yes, I think it’s the real challenge for someone like Patrick; when you’re trying to offer something that is not an established script, is the ability for those of us slightly outside to get hold of it is really difficult. He did a great interview with Ezra Klein last year. And there was this sense of some level of frustration, of like, “But what does it mean? What do we actually want to do?” And actually, I remember thinking, toward the end of that podcast, Patrick came across as really humbled because he was like, “Policy is not my thing, Ezra. That’s your thing. I’m trying to say these are the values by which we should be orienting our common life.” But yeah, I think I came away thinking I thought I knew what Postliberalism was, and now I’m not as I’m not as sure what it means to set up our society in ways that are not Liberal but neither fall into a kind of authoritarianism, or a just a sort of ‘tyranny of the majority’ that I don’t think Patrick is proposing, either.
And perhaps the most interesting thing for me was this thing at the end, where I tried to really gently challenge him about tone and posture. And I’ve been thinking a lot about that Patrick Dineen, and Jared Sexton, who I had on the previous series, who in some ways is like Patrick’s photo–negative. When I was researching them, quite combative political operators, or at least political commentator… Strong opinions. And both of them actually, in other places, I’d heard them really talking about their opponent with, like, dripping with contempt, and anger. But in person, and in long form, and in my conversations with them, they were just thoughtful, and nuanced, and careful. And so what is it that temptation? Is it just that’s the air of these conversations? Is it that that’s the norm? Is it this sense that you get more listeners, you get more eyeballs the angrier, more withering, and more contemptuous that you are? Or is some of that needed? And Patrick’s thing about politics is basically hand–to–hand combat, and the stakes are high. And so, fluffy people like me who want to listen across the divide are a “nice to have”, but also not really focused on the real job in hand. Maybe we’re a bit naïve. And I really want to hear that challenge. I don’t want to just be creating extra noise in the world. Maybe if there’s battles to fight, I should be in the trenches, fighting them, if I could decide what the right ones were. But actually, I talked about it with my producer afterwards, and I don’t believe that politics has to be hand–to–hand combat. I do believe that it is possible for human beings to collaborate across our differences, to build a common life, but it takes a strong ordinary level of emotional intelligence and a kind of moral courage, and ‘ego loss’, really, to approach contributing to our common life in a way that is not such a binary ‘us–them: we need to win and they need to lose’. But the people who’ve done the most good and made the most difference in the world have those things: they have that moral courage, they have that capacity to hold space for difference. And also, on a more explicitly theological note from my tradition and my language, the clearest command I can find in scripture for how we’re supposed to engage in public is “Love your neighbour and love your enemy”. Like, there’s no explicit command to win a battle, whether it’s to create justice for immigrants, whether it’s to oppose abortion, whether it’s a fight for the environment… I think you can probably read – there’s many ways to read Scripture. There’s ways to get to those things as a command if you’re a Christian, but the plain text off–the–page reading is “Love your enemies”: love them, seek their good, if they smack you in the face, offer them your other cheek. If they take your coat, offered them your other coat. The posture of… It’s a phrase that came up in the Dougald interviews, of “engaged surrender”. Is that relevant here? Anyway, I’m thinking a lot about what’s naivety in politics and public life, and what is possible across our difference. Is it possible to really listen, to really hear, to really see, to really treat each other with dignity, and to be trying to bring about the kind of justice that is informed by our vision of the good and our values, whatever they may be. To be continued.
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