Over my brief tenure contributing to Vox Nova, I have written myself into a rather harsh polemic between Liberalism on the one hand and something else on the other. What this “something else” is exactly, of course, is the question. Facing this question, I want to continue to defend the dialectic I have presented several times now, but I also think that I should spend less time defending myself and more time explaining what my intuitions and intentions are in the first place. I am confident that none of this will be sufficient, but it might be a start.
One of the most frequent commenters here, Ronald King, raised a critique of my earlier post, Don’t Forget, Liberalism is Bad, that I found surprising. He rejected the notion that as Catholics we should desire the Reign of God. I empathize with the sentiment of his comment but, upon further contemplation, I think that this desire for the Reign of God begins to clarify what it is that we ought to desire other than Liberalism—the elusive “something else.”
Before I get to that, allow me to clarify something that is fundamental to this ongoing theme: There is a difference between what is desired and what there actually is. To desire true love is one thing, to receive it is another thing entirely. While different, our desires frame our sense of what is possible. Without the desire for employment, for example, the possibility of getting a job is nonexistent.
This is crucial to understanding why it is that I believe that we ought to broaden our political appetite and imagination. Far too many people desire te status quo (e.g. liberalism, secular nation-states, and alike) thereby making the possibility of something else nonexistent—even the possibility of the existence of God.
It is my view that we need to develop an appetite for something that is both present in our desires and not yet the case in actuality. We cannot let Liberalism, or whatever else we take as the horizon of political possibility, stake a claim to autarky and monopolize our sense of what is good, beautiful, and true—and possible.
This brings me back to Ronald King’s objection. He is on to something. Presenting the Reign of God as an alternative to the politics of the day has a ring to it that is off-putting and smells like an opening to religious oppression. If that is what I mean, then, I most certainly am a dangerous lunatic. But this is not what I intend to convey.
What if this theocracy—this Reign of God—was the reign the mysterious God who is love? In other words, informed by the theological challenges to knowing God and the political need for a good and just social order, we may find that seeking the Reign of God is the only alternative to all other problematic political ideologies; especially Liberalism. Maybe Aristole “best of the worst” way of speaking hides the fact of the “best of the best” from us.
What would this politics be like? Well, it would seem to be a monarchy where the Sovereign is a lover. It would be a kingdom where the reign of the Sovereign would be best described as a reign of love. Consequently, the social order would be held accountable to the ordo amoris, the order of love.
This is a rather opaque sketch of the meal that I think that we need to learn to crave, but it is my belief that if we truly craved the Reign of God in this particular way, we might begin to imagine and expect anew what politics should and can be like. This, of course, is not only a matter of politics. It raises eschatological questions of the now-and-not-yet, the here-and-to-come, of the Kingdom of God.
Isn’t this the water we should be swimming in politically?
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