"Are You Feeling Teleological Tonight, Baby?"

Close your eyes and think of St Augustine

I’m intrigued by a group of thinkers called “The Postliberals” (PLs). They hang out here. They are a group of American Catholic academics. They don’t like modernity much and hunger for simpler time in the past where the Church was in charge, people were Virtuous, and nothing bad ever happened. They matter because they play an increasingly important role in the conservative American political project. JD Vance is a big fan of their work and has a 50-50 chance of being Vice President of the most powerful nation on earth in a few weeks.

The figurehead of this movement is Patrick Deneen, a Professor of Political Science at University of Notre Dame and author of the 2018 book “Why Liberalism Failed”. A short and unfair precis of postliberalism is: “Catholic theocracy is the answer, what’s the question again?”

A slighter longer and more even-handed representation might be that the PLs identify that modern liberal societies can be harsh, unforgiving places that overly focus on individual material gain at the expense of community and the spiritual needs of human beings. They are particularly concerned with family formation, sexual mores and the role of public religion with a side order of economic inequality. And I need to state that I don’t disagree with everything that that the postliberals say. I think that we human beings are fundamentally social and interdependent creatures. A view of the human that stays at the individual level and only views well-being through $ is ultimately wrong.

However the proposed solutions put forward by the PLs leave me cold. Firstly, a note on style. Because style is always more important than content. The PLs tend to use a lot of capitalized abstract nouns: Virtue, The Highest Good, Human Flourishing (now who does this remind us of?). On the surface these things sound good (where is the Motherhood and Apple Pie?) but on closer inspection they all seem to synonyms for Catholic dogma. There is a sense of a hostile politics being disguised in a high-flown intellectualism. Or perhaps that’s simply how the PLs express themselves.

As most PLs are academics and journalists they are a bit clueless as how to implement their fine ideas. When Deneen was interviewed by Ezra Klein a couple of years ago, Klein repeatedly asked Deneen what he would actually do to reduce abortion, lower the divorce rate, and so forth. Deneen struggled to answer. He was a philosopher not mere administrator. “The culture” needed to change. But that just begs the question - how are you going to change the culture? The power of prayer maybe? But prayer is notoriously unreliable (“Hi God, where is that Lego set we talked about last week?”). Prayers are second only to Thoughts as useless.

One challenge for the PLs face is that Catholicism is a minority interest in the Anglosphere (US and Australia are about 20% Catholic, UK less than 10%). English-speaking Protestants are not keen submitting to the Dominion of a foreign Pope. And even amongst Catholics, the PLs are a minority. Nevertheless, PL ideas are becoming more influential in the conservative movement. This is not unexpected, what could be more conservative than to privilege ancient institutions over the complexity of modernity?

There’s a fair few PLs on Substack and I encountered an “interesting” argument the other day: Liberal societies don't have children. The argument goes like this:

• Raising children is a pain in the ass and people will only do it if they have an overarching purpose - a telos* if you will.

• Liberal societies lack an overarching purpose.

• Therefore no one in in liberal societies will have children.

I had some… questions about this argument - as well as salty comparison that I imagine the author very much did not like, which we will come to in a moment. But let me just briefly post my rebuttal:

• The proximate cause of people having children is people having sex. And the proximate cause of people having sex is people being horny. The things that break this chain of causation are social mores that reduce people having sex (which is the opposite of what seems to happen in liberal societies) and technologies that prevent that sexual activity turning into children. To talk about fertility without talking about contraception is kinda weird.

• In pre-modern societies, people had lots of children because they needed some free(ish) labour to work on the land and some free(ish) aged care if they were luck enough to make it that far. A diversified economy with a welfare state reduces the need for kids. Not to mention the high rates of child mortality. “Demographic research suggests that through to at least the year 1800 more than one-third of children failed to reach the age of five”. This level of child death is hard for people in the Western world to comprehend.

• There were absolutely ideas about continuing the family name but these weren’t a telos. Or maybe they were.

• The country that has been most vigorous in reducing its fertility has been China. China is in no way a liberal society. “Kurtz” would say that China is modern, non-religious society but I think that’s just dodging the question. BTW the Chinese State currently has a telos around nationalism.

• On the other hand, it is absolutely true that some religious communities encourage their members to procreate like rabbits. But so do certain ethnic and political communities. Who can forget Peter Costello’s suggestion to: "have one for mum, one for dad and one for the country"? Lord knows I’ve tried to.

• Nevertheless, I know lots of lefties, atheists, and agnostics who want and have children. The will pay exorbitant amounts of money for multiple cycles of IVF treatment to get that child. They mostly want to have 1 or 2 kids rather than 10 but 1 is very different proposition to 0. The desire for children is not primarily intellectual, it is primal. It is not syllogistic reasoning that makes you yearn to hold your own baby in your arms. And both conservatives and progressives are subject to their base desires.

What made this conversation poignant is that I had just been to see the Aljube Museum in Lisbon. It is an excoriating presentation of the Salazar regime that ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1974 and the many people they tortured and murdered in Portugal and overseas in Portuguese colonies around the world.

One of the mottos of the Salazar regime was Deus, Pátria e Família** ("God, Fatherland and Family"). The regime promoted the Catholic church as a core element of the social fabric - divorce was illegal. It promoted socially conservative morals and placed women solely in the role of babymaker and homemaker.

All this makes it obvious why many PLs idolize Salazar - to the point that their less illiberal conservative colleagues tell them to STFU. And therefore it should be clear why I am deeply suspicious of the PLs. If Deneen can’t articulate his political project then can we be blamed for assuming that it could well be Salazarist?

*So it’s not just the home planet of the Cybermen.

**Also popular with Jair Bolsonaro.