Here’s the text of a lecture I presented July 9, 2025, at the Roman Forum conference in Gardone, Italy:

Clear Diagnosis, Unclear Remedies?

James Kalb

Introduction

To understand the world and ourselves we need to take God and nature seriously. But what do we do then? People complain that talking about God and nature tells us a lot about problems and what causes them, but does not provide solutions. Today I will talk about what is behind these complaints, and whether they are justified.

The antiworld

I will start with a discussion of a book by Marcel De Corte, a Belgian neo-Thomist of the last century. He is well-known on the Continent, but until very recently not much of his work had been translated into English. ¹

The book I have in mind is Intelligence in Danger of Death², which was published in French in 1969 and in English translation in 2023. The English translation has an introduction by one of our regular speakers, Miguel Ayuso.

The basic philosophical position presented in the book is that of a common-sense realist, who views the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas as an articulation of that outlook. It tells us that when we see a table it is not a complex of sense impressions or subatomic particles, as some philosophers and physicists want to say, but simply the table we know in everyday life, just as ordinary people think it is.

De Corte does not argue this point, at least not in this book, but takes it as given. Historically, he associates it with the Greeks. Socially, he associates it with peasants and others who deal directly with physical realities on which their livelihoods and sometimes survival depend, and know they are part of a natural order they did not create. He therefore associates it with a mainly agrarian society in which the need to take nature seriously is never lost.

So for him pre-industrial European society, thought, and culture set an enduring standard. This aspect of his outlook will seem strange and even perverse to many people, but it provides the basis for an extremely clear, concise, and penetrating critique of modern life that I will make use of in this talk.

That critique comes out of a critique of the understanding or rather myth of science and knowledge at work in public discussion today. In his view, which many physicists are said to agree with, the table presented in modern physical theory—the complex structure of subatomic particles I mentioned—is simply a mathematical model intended to summarize measurable features of the table, such as the way slices of it transmit or absorb light, in a way that facilitates prediction and control.

For De Corte, the physicist’s table composed of subatomic particles is therefore a human creation, an imaginative construction concerned with usefulness, rather than an attempt to represent what the table really is. The particles of which the physicist speaks are therefore best understood as conceptual devices to organize the numerical results of experiments.

Similarly, to use an old comparison, someone might devise a mathematical model of a watch that predicts the motion of the hands by reference to the vibrations of hypothetical “chronotrons.” The accuracy of the predictions would not show that chronotrons actually exist.

In spite of their limitations, the practical success of physical models, along with our inclination to view habitual ways of thinking as true to reality, mean that they are taken to be accurate and complete representations of the world. Imaginative model building oriented toward prediction and control is thus accepted as the uniquely rational and adequate way to grasp reality. And since science is thought to have debunked ordinary common sense, only specially qualified people are allowed to judge the models and so decide what is real.

These tendencies lead to serious problems when extended to social life, where it is usually impossible to simplify problems to the point that exact measurement and useful numerical models become possible. We see the same imaginative construction of models that are intended to facilitate prediction and control, and are accepted as true representations of the world. However, the models’ predictions cannot be reliably verified, and they do not allow us actually to control events.³

Social models therefore lose connection to reality, and their acceptance becomes a matter of personal opinion or the authority of self-certified experts. Belief thus loses its connection to reality. That means the death of intelligence, by which De Corte means our ability to engage and act in accordance with reality, and its replacement by imagination.

People today thus live intellectually in a world of untethered fantasies that they believe show them how to reconstruct the world, eventually overcoming whatever obstacles to the success of the project actual experience may reveal. So they place all their hopes in a perpetually receding future in which human effort will finally make reality conform to desire.

Thought thus becomes utopian, and the function of the intellectual becomes the production of utopias to replace the realities his theories ignore and the goods they destroy. These utopias can only be based on animality, according to De Corte, since that is what remains when intelligence is eliminated from human life. All problems thus come to be viewed as economic problems to be solved by the comprehensive reorganization of society. In other words, people become socialists.

Thirty years ago, after the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European communism and the economic liberalization of China, people said socialism was dead. But it keeps coming back, if not in the old sense of full state ownership of the means of production then at least in a broader sense of the progressive belief that the state should control social life comprehensively in the interests of equality, prosperity, safety, and so on. People have gotten rid of God, so they demand a this-worldly Providence directed toward this-worldly goals. If you object to the project, for whatever reason, you are simply trying to make people suffer. That is what they believe.

People also believe, although I do not believe De Corte says this, that the alternative to a utopia based on economic desire is a utopia based on an almost equally animal desire, the desire for victory and domination. So the alternative to socialism is believed to be Nazism. If you are not fully on board with the progressive project you must be a Nazi. It appears that many intelligent and informed people actually believe something of the sort.⁴

An especially illuminating feature of De Corte’s book is its emphasis on the role of the mass media. The loss of a common sense of reality based on serious immediate personal engagement with the world means that social coherence is now achieved through images and narratives supplied by the mass media. That is how events and objects become well-defined and meaningful, and it is how we gain the common understandings that make us a society.

“In-formation” (De Corte often hypenates the word) thus becomes literal imposition on experience by the mainstream media of the forms that make man, society, and the world what they are. That reconstructive function, De Corte tells us, is necessary in a democracy, which suppresses, in the name of equality, natural ties of family, region, profession, and homeland, and thus a society based on real human connections, in favor of an imaginary collective that he calls a “dissociety.”

In such a setting, not only consent but social reality must be manufactured. “Democracy” thus turns out to be rule over imaginary unities exercised not by the people, who have no direct experience or usable knowledge of the matters they are ostensibly called to decide, but by those who control information.

The overall result is that those who dominate the regime dominate all of society through a system of made-up stories inculcated by a comprehensive system of propaganda. As we have seen recently, any threat to the regime’s effective monopoly on information is felt as a threat to a tolerable social order. That is why people called Elon Musk a Nazi even before he took on a directly political role. Allowing more freedom of discussion on Twitter was considered an attempt to destroy social order in favor of the reign of violence, greed, and criminality.

To make matters worse, the tendency De Corte describes toward replacement of intelligence by imagination has also gained ground within the Church, which had always stood against it. That development is evidenced by the post-Vatican II tendency toward secular utopianism, along with attempts to create a new Church by obfuscating doctrine and replacing it in practice by what is called “praxis”—in other words, organizational policy.

How to return?

Assuming this diagnosis makes sense, what should we make of it? De Corte presents a deep analysis of the relationship among modern society, scientism, political fantasy, and the contemporary role of the media. But he does so from a traditional agrarian point of view that seems to have no basis in the contemporary world.

Industrial society has been too effective in practical matters like gaining wealth and power for people to abandon it any time soon. The nineteenth century Chinese resisted it in order to maintain their system of rule by the Emperor and Confucian gentry, but that made them ineffective militarily, and they became the prey of foreign powers. Today their government calls that period the Century of Humiliation, and it maintains an intense emphasis on technology, industrialization, and propaganda to prevent anything of the sort from happening again.

It is not just the Chinese who emphasize these things. Technology and so on are considered the answer to everything today. Even denunciations of the consequences of technological society end by proposing more technology as the solution. The encyclical Laudato Si denounced the “technocratic paradigm,” but its response was to call for global technocracy to control everything that might affect climate. And at a more concrete level, the EU is trying to eliminate the environmental effects of current methods of electric power generation by covering the countryside with windmills and solar panels.

Nature

But if industrial society stays with us, scientific and technological ways of thinking will remain dominant, and it is unlikely they will lose their prestige among the people who run things. It does not even seem likely that these people will acquire a better sense of the limits of technology or come to appreciate the value of more traditional forms of thought. Traditions, after all, impose limits on what they can do.

So how do we find our way out of the situation De Corte describes? One answer is to trust nature to take its course: what cannot continue will not continue. So even if the current system seems locked in place, we know it will not last forever. As the poet Horace said, you can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she keeps coming back. And as Joseph de Maistre said, “The counter-revolution will not be a contrary revolution, but the contrary of revolution.” So restoration of good order will not be a matter of overthrowing the current order, and imposing its opposite, but of allowing forms of social life that correspond more to human nature to reassert themselves.

At bottom, the complaint that traditionally-minded people are bad at proposing solutions misconceives the issue. Our problem today, De Corte and others tell us, is an overly technological and ideological view of the world, especially the social world, that ignores God and nature. That problem is not going to be solved by designing and implementing social programs.

When the social order goes wrong in some way and needs correction, any correction has to cooperate with its basic way of functioning. You are not going to fix things by inventing and enforcing a new social order. The solution will have to be a process that happens much more of itself. If over-medication is making you sicker, you stop taking so many pills.

The most important thing, then, is to stop trying to transform society by legal and administrative means and let it do more of what it naturally tends to do. And if something has gone wrong you try to reduce barriers to natural social functioning based on human nature, like the greater part of modern anti-discrimination law.

Its denial

To accept that approach you must believe that there is a genuine nature of things with which everything sooner or later must comply. Today’s public thought rejects that.

Someone said that the problem with the modern world is that stupidity has learned to think. People follow fantasy rather than intelligence, as De Corte points out, and they believe technology has truly conquered nature. As a result, they believe they can make things whatever they want. Men and women have no essential nature, or so it is thought, so a man can decide he is a woman, draw on medical science to obscure obvious physical differences, and become an actual woman with the right to demand recognition as such.

For many people that belief has become a matter of fundamental justice. The idea of nature, especially human nature, is considered a morass of prejudice and stereotypes. To speak of it as authoritative is simply to say that those who have power to define it have the right to tell others what they have to do and be. And that is to deny their victims’ essential humanity as free and equal agents and, in the case of transgenderism, their very existence as the people they are. It is an attempt to wipe out transgender people as a class, so it is even a sort of genocide.

Its reality

But that is nonsense. People either have a nature or they do not. And if they do not, it makes no sense to talk about denying who they really are. Some say that our essential characteristic as human beings is our ability to determine for ourselves what we are. But that is to make our true nature depend on the most unstable thing in the world, the human will.

It is not clear how that is different from having no nature at all. Nor is it clear what it means for a man to define himself as a woman if femininity itself is an open-ended construction entirely subject to the will. What, exactly, is he defining himself as?

Our reliance on it

In fact, concepts like “nature” and “normal” are very hard to do without as a practical matter, because there are limits on our ability to make the world what we want, and they give us a way of talking about things we cannot change.

So these concepts are not simply made up. One reason people want to say that the nature of things is a subjective concept, a matter of social stereotypes, is that technology, which they view as the standard of objectivity and rationality, does not seem to depend on it. So from the technological point of view it can be seen as a personal add-on.

When we deal with something technologically we presume the goal and define the situation numerically, so we do not have to talk about the nature of things. If someone wants to build a highway bridge, he measures the site, looks at engineering manuals and traffic predictions, and then does some calculations based on things like the materials that are available. That tells him everything he needs to know, and he does not have to think about the nature and essential properties of bridges and building materials.

The situation is quite different when it comes to situations that cannot be quantified, especially complex and multileveled situations where we are not already sure what our specific goals should be. An effort to promote the common good is an obvious example. In such a setting we cannot rely on technological methods. We need to ask ourselves how things generally act, and the relation of particular consequences to our ultimate concerns. So we have to think about the nature of things, about human nature, and about God.

What it is

At this point I am discussing nature rather than God, so I should say what I mean by saying something is natural or against nature.

When Christians say something is against nature they often mean it is at odds with God’s design. But there are complications. Some things that are part of God’s design, like the Incarnation, are not part of nature, and some things that are not part of God’s design, like the former Soviet Union, are part of fallen nature. And both the Incarnation and the Soviet Union have or had a specific nature of their own.

So I will say that the nature of something is simply the way it reliably tends to act, at least in its normal state. The definition is a bit circular, because I am defining nature by reference to what is normal and I would have to define what is normal for something by reference to the thing’s nature, but circularity is hard to avoid when you are dealing with something so basic. So it was the nature of the Incarnation to save man, the nature of the Soviet Union to destroy him, and the nature of man himself to aspire to what is good, beautiful, and true, but—in the case of fallen man—constantly to fall short.

How we grasp it

So how do we determine something’s nature?

Pattern recognition

The most basic method is pattern recognition. If you are struggling with a difficult question like reducing crime or improving education, and current methods are not working well, you step back and look for patterns that appear repeatedly and what they indicate. How do things work when they are working well? How do they go wrong? What measures help put things on the right track?

That approach seems obvious, but people often avoid it because it restrains theorizing. Unrestrained theorizing gives people a sense of power, because it lets them invent theories that seem to tell them how to make the world what they want it to be. It is a kind of word magic. Also, if someone claims to have the correct theory, he can demand that other people accept his special authority.

That is why people certified as experts in social matters often deny the obvious. The denial is an assertion of their special status. Resistance to phonics in teaching reading is an example.

The obvious way to teach people to read English is to teach them how to sound out words from letters and combinations of letters. Even so, educators in America (and apparently some other places) resisted that approach for decades, in spite of demands from parents and overwhelming evidence for its effectiveness.

Their resistance was an assertion of superior knowledge. It also had a political aspect: support for phonics, which involved rejection of institutional expertise, was considered populist and right-wing.

There are similar examples in fields ranging from liturgical studies to criminology. The obvious lessons of actual experience are neglected in favor of the theories of the self-certified experts who get put in control of supposedly scientific bureaucracies.

Tradition

But some patterns are less obvious. To stick with education, the most effective ways of teaching skills like reading or basic arithmetic are usually fairly easy to discover. But how about the overall purpose of education? Is it career success? Induction into a tradition? Liberation from a tradition? Love of freedom and equality? Love of the Good, Beautiful, and True? Love of God?

In that kind of situation traditional approaches are usually worth looking at. Something becomes a tradition when people become attached to it. Normally that means it has generally worked out well for those involved. A normally good tradition is in effect a summary of the answers to questions like: what works? What are the pitfalls and how can they be avoided? How does all this relate to other things we care about? And how do circumstances change the answers?

Something that is well-founded usually works, with adjustments, in a variety of situations. For example, someone who is classically educated is likely to do well in a variety of settings. Traditions of practice bring such things out by bringing out all the ramifications of a way of doing things. That is why complex practices that deal with something basic, like education, benefit from a long evolutionary development.

It is also why the classical education movement has made so much progress lately. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the approach to education that became traditional in Europe and remained so for centuries works better on a number of dimensions than anything our professional educators have been able to design.

Orientation is everything

But looking for patterns, seeing what works, and following tested methods is not enough. Without a higher purpose, all these things remain blind. Studying the classics benefited Cicero and Confucius, but something was missing.

What was missing was a proper understanding of the most basic things. To do something complicated what matters most is to be right on the most basic points and to keep them in mind. If we do that, particular actions will work together as they should. So in baseball you keep your eye on the ball. And in Christianity you love God. As the Apostle Paul put it, “To them that love God, all things work together unto good.”⁵

An understanding that what is most basic matters much more than our particular plans and efforts pervades the Gospels. It is behind the parable of the mustard seed, which grows into something huge from something that seems insignificant because it has the principle of life in it. We do not see how that happens, but it happens all the same. That is why “the kingdom of God cometh not with observation.”⁶ And it is why the Church transformed and conquered the Roman Empire. She acted as a leaven, because love of God acted as a leaven within her.

But the same principle applies today. That is the ultimate response to complaints that people who take natural and divine law to heart are not always good at proposing actionable solutions. Any detailed remedy that could be stated in advance would not go deep enough to deal with fundamental issues. We deal with them mostly by keeping the most basic things in mind and then acting as seems best, trusting that the details, which are too numerous to keep track of in any event, will arrange themselves. And that is how the counterrevolution will take place.

What to do specifically?

Having said that, we need to ask what now seems best to do. Even though we cannot invent solutions to all the world’s problems, and it is good to trust in Providence, we also need to use our heads. And to the extent we recognize specific problems there must be something definite we can do that is likely to help.

Problems

First, we need to understand the basic issues: not only the ways in which people have fallen away from the Faith and basic moral principle, but how and why they have done so and why efforts at restoration have been so unsuccessful. We can say it is all original sin, but however important that may be we need to understand the situation in a more particularized way.

Universal problems

Some of the problems are always with us. As we mentioned, the world goes its own way and does not do what we want it to do. So we have to go with its natural tendencies, and try to correct them where they go wrong. But very often they refuse correction.

To add to the difficulties, our attempts at correction can cause further problems. We are limited and fallen creatures, and that affects all our efforts, including our efforts to live better lives, and especially our efforts to reform the world. The Pharisees were trying to make life better when they multiplied commandments beyond reason. And the men of the Enlightenment thought they were promoting a life in accordance with nature when they adopted a secular and technological outlook that set them at odds with nature.

To take another example, the basic idea of tradition as a human thing is that experience allows habits and understandings to accumulate that bring out truths that are not obvious, and allow complex practices to grow up that eventually organize themselves into a better overall way of life.

It does do that, to a large extent—it would be as hard to live without tradition as without habit, and life would instantly come to an end if most human things did not function as they should—but people sometimes decide to ignore truth and live badly. Or sometimes they just make mistakes about what the truth is. We keep doing the same things over and over again, good or bad, and any shared habit can become an accepted way of doing things and thus a tradition. There are bad traditions, just as there are bad habits.

That is why Christ said harsh things about the traditions of men. And in any event, a tradition is a collection of accepted ways of doing things, and any accepted way of doing things is going to fall short in some settings. That is especially true when new situations arise. It really is true that sometimes new ways of doing things are needed.

So tradition, observation, and general good intentions are indispensable, but far from infallible. As noted, what matters most is to keep what is most important in mind so it can guide our other efforts. But that too is easier said than done. As Jeremiah says, “The heart is perverse above all things, and unsearchable.”⁷ So it is often difficult to be sure just what our actual motives are. And trying too hard, even to do what we think is right, can be a problem when it slides into self-assertion. Once again, there are no guaranteed solutions.

Modern problems

In addition to these perennial problems, which we must mitigate as best we can, we have specific problems today. These seem more likely to lend themselves to solution, because their causes are evidently less intrinsic to human life, but sometimes they too are intractable.

Ignoring reality

As De Corte indicates, a basic feature of current society is our ability to ignore reality. Men used to have to struggle directly with the physical world and understand how it worked in a very concrete way. Women had to deal with frequent pregnancy, childbirth, and the physical labor needed to keep the household running. Often they had to work in the fields alongside the men.

Technology has radically mitigated these necessities. In many ways that makes for a better life. But together with prosperity and technical advances like the rise of mass communications and social media, it also makes it possible to live in a world of fantasy. People find that situation addictive, and it seems unlikely they will give it up before it leads to absolute catastrophe. So what do we do? De Corte does not tell us.

Industrial society

I do not blame him. It is a difficult problem. We live in a industrial, bureaucratic, and technological society, and it does not look like that will change anytime soon. In such a society everything becomes an object of manipulation, and the concepts of natural law and God, which tell us that there are things superior to our will that we must respect and give way to, seem to make no sense. After all, a man can now turn himself into a woman, and the truth about God and the moral order are said to change as our aspirations and understanding change. So why recognize any innate limits on what we can do?

Globalization

The situation is made worse by globalization. Economic life is increasingly integrated worldwide. Migrants overwhelm national and even civilizational boundaries. Air transport, containerization, and Internet sales mean anything we buy can be from anywhere at all. And electronic communications make everyone in the world equally present to everyone else. If I try to get in touch with my bank, and finally get to talk with a human being, he is more likely to be in India than where I live in New York.

Under such circumstances, there seems no place for local or even national culture and identity. But a grasp of concrete reality needs to be social and cultural as well as individual. It is through specific culture that our understanding of the world comes to reflect the long experience of many people. But how can that happen today? How can people hooked into the Internet avoid living in a social and mental world composed of electronic images and soundbites arranged for them by whoever hires the most effective salesmen? And how can tradition as a way of ordering thought and action maintain and develop itself?

Globalism

To make matters worse, these practical developments give credence to an ideology that supports them, globalism, the political, social and moral demand for the suppression of borders. And that ideology naturally expands to become the overall progressive ideology of abolishing not only borders, but traditional distinctions in general, so that the world can be brought into compliance with universal abstract rationality.

Progressive ideology expresses the interests of global oligarchs, who would rather do away with all distinctions that are not suited to their way of operating, so that the whole world becomes a level field for their operations, and also of bureaucrats who would much rather answer to their fellow bureaucrats than to a coherent people capable of calling them to account. Even so, it has captured the moral high ground as part of the understanding of justice now dominant.

That understanding is quite recent. Respectable people now believe that “we”—meaning themselves—are categorically superior to people in the past, because “we” reject discrimination based on traditional distinctions like religion, sex, ancestry, and culture. That change in moral understandings is considered so fundamental that our ancestors no longer have anything to teach us. We are thought to live live in a new and categorically superior moral universe.

If that view is pushed as far as people demand, it destroys traditional institutions like family, religion, cultural community, and nation that are intertwined with these distinctions. How can you have family with no distinction between male and female, nation when the statues of your national heroes are destroyed as a matter of government policy, because they were politically incorrect, or cultural community when all distinctions and practical consequences connected to religion, ancestry, lifestyle, and nationality are treated as expressions of hatred that must be eradicated?

Acceptance of that outlook as fundamental to morality has become influential even in the Church, and at the highest levels. In such a setting the only legitimate institutions are those that claim to stand for pure universal abstract rationality: global markets and global expert bureaucracies. That is why major institutions are at peace with DEI and wokeness in spite of their absurdities and inefficiencies: they align with their claim to unique legitimacy, as well as their innate attachment to abstraction and a certain kind of universality.⁸

Failures

So what to do? It is difficult to resist the tendency of events, and attempts to respond to these trends have failed. Illusions spread. Revivals peter out. Populist rebellions lose their way. Even attempts to hold the line fail: conservatism has conserved nothing.

That was to be expected. Decline is very difficult to reverse, especially in a society whose own elites have turned against it. Conservatism as such—the will to maintain continuity—cannot dispute fundamental progressive principles once they become established.

Its leaders want a seat at the table, so that they can do what seems possible under existing circumstances. At bottom, they want to restrain excesses, maintain a few helpful traditions, and bring progressivism down to earth by pointing out real-world patterns that make radicalism destructive. But the resulting concerns about social respectability, and inability to hold on to basic positions, mean their efforts can be at best only a temporary moderating influence.

Progressivism in contrast is principled, and its principles tell it that “traditions” and “real-world patterns,” like the distinction between the sexes, are irrational systems of domination that must be destroyed. As a result, it eventually rejects every aspect of conservatism as evil. Without settled principles to oppose that steady pressure, conservatism slowly gives way until nothing is left.

In the end, progressivism demands a Year Zero, when the old society is swept away and everything starts anew. We saw that in the recent era of wokeness. All history—especially Western and Christian history—was seen as evil, except to the extent it led to the current progressive movement. Even the populations of Western countries had to be radically transformed. There is something of a reaction against all that just now, but how much can that be relied on without a fundamental change in accepted public principle? In the ’90s, after the first wave of absurdity, people thought political correctness was over. Since then we have seen how “over” it was.

Under Pope Francis synodality suggested the presence of a similar outlook within the Church, since it put everything up for grabs, subject only to the will of the pope, and thus tried to establish a sort of perpetual Year Zero. That is one reason Catholic traditionalism, which emphasizes the importance of standing by what has been passed down, increasingly gained traction. It is also a reason for the extreme hostility to traditionalism. In Year Zero all persons, groups, and institutions that provide a connection to the past must be eliminated.

There seems to be somewhat of a reaction against these things under the new pontificate. We will see how that sorts out.

Favorable trends

So we have real problems. But not everything is doom and gloom. There have also been favorable trends recently.

Many people sense a turn toward more natural ways of thought since the 2024 election in America. Transgenderism, for example, seems to have lost momentum. Other developments include the weakening of the power of the mass media. That has largely been due to the rise of dissenting voices on the Internet, in spite of attempts to turn it into another and even more effective channel of propaganda, or what De Corte called in-formation. Without that weakening the Trump phenomenon, among other things, would have been impossible.

But any improvements, if real, are in a very early stage. Trump is a crude and rather self-centered real estate promoter and pop-culture entrepreneur. He is more a disruptor and deal-maker than a leader with a vision. Elon Musk, formerly the other great figure in the movement, is an entrepreneur inspired by post-humanism.

Their great strength is their energy and unconventionality, which includes a grip on reality that is independent of conventional wisdom. They are narcissistic or autistic enough to be indifferent to what respectable people think of them. And they are self-made billionaires who have always run their own show, so constant organizational pressure has not trained them out of normal human reactions to insanities like transgenderism.

But how much can a partial return to what is normal do for us, when “normal” has come to include gay marriage? A loosening of the grip on public discussion by respectable journalists and experts is welcome, but will it bring truth or just warring systems of fantasy? It seems unlikely that the swirl of images, soundbites, and one-liners found on X (formerly called Twitter) is going to bring our public life back in touch with reality no matter who takes part or what expressions of opinion are permitted.

Also, will the current more open-ended freedom of discussion be a temporary phenomenon, like the early freedom of the Internet before corporate interests got involved and governments began manipulating it for their own purposes? And in any case, the quality of discussion in any Internet forum typically declines to the point of uselessness. It is just too easy to churn out bad commentary. Why should that not happen again? In many settings it has already.

A better vision

Without a more definite vision—what the first President Bush called “the vision thing”—people will not be able to deal with these basic problems. The need for a better vision of God, man, and nature is the great issue in America today, and I suppose the West in general.

Failed visions

We have discussed the progressive and globalist vision. “Make America Great Again” is intended to be a counter-vision, but it is extremely rudimentary. I am not sure that anything better exists elsewhere in the West on any large scale. Others can tell me if it does.

MAGA supporters hope their movement brings about a fundamental change in direction. But when things have gone deeply wrong more is needed to put them right than recognizing some obvious realities, disrupting the status quo, making deals, talking about winning, and hoping for a better future.

American conservatives used to appeal to the “Vision of the Founders.” That vision accepted the liberal goals of freedom and equality, but also accepted a generic God, moral tradition, and the personal and social discipline required by limited and devolved government as limitations on what those goals meant. People were expected to be honest, independent, hard-working, patriotic, civic-minded, and so on. But that vision dissipated when the limitations it depended on were no longer accepted.

Something more articulate is evidently needed. Pope Benedict used to promote natural law, which can be defined and defended philosophically, as the proper basis for the legal order of a secular society. But such a view has difficulty making headway in an age in which people believe man has abolished nature. In any event, all significant centers of influence now reject it as regressive and implicitly theocratic. They simply do not understand what “natural law” might be other than a statement of the personal preferences of moral reactionaries.

It is a sign of where we are that many in the Church would agree: a notorious essay, repeatedly praised by the late Pope Francis and published in the semi-official Vatican journal La Civiltà Cattolica, denounced Catholic/Protestant cooperation in opposition to abortion and homosexual marriage as “an ecumenism of conflict that unites them in the nostalgic dream of a theocratic type of state.”⁹¹⁰

That attitude seems to be losing ground under the new pontificate. Time will tell. Even if it does, though, it will take a great deal to get the world to change its outlook.

Signs of something better

But the future is unforeseeable, and there are signs that something more fundamental may be going on. Alternative forms of education continue to grow. Traditionalist Catholics have seen growth within and increasing influence outside their ranks. At least in America, there has been a long-term trend toward greater orthodoxy and openness to tradition among Catholic priests, to the point that almost no young priest identifies as “progressive.” And very recently there has been a reversal of the long decline in religious affiliation, especially among young men. That reversal can be seen, for example, in the very large increase in baptisms in France¹¹ and Britain¹² this past Easter.

There have been false dawns in the past, but not all dawns are false. And as we have mentioned, we have a very basic reason for expecting ultimate victory on at least some basic issues—what cannot keep on will not keep on.

Needed initiatives

So much for problems and vague indications. What can we do specifically that might help improve things?

New ways of thinking

If part of the problem is ways of thinking, for example an overly technological view of the world, it seems the way forward would include finding and promoting better ones. So one thing Catholics should do is look for where past thinkers have gone wrong and ask what would be needed to correct them.

Blaise Pascal and Saint John Henry Newman are examples of those who have made the attempt. Both started with modern thought but believed it left things out. Pascal, an outstanding scientist and mathematician, started intellectually with the quantitative world of modern natural science. That is the source of comments like “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” And Newman began his book on The Grammar of Assent by praising John Locke, a soulless Enlightenment thinker.

Both noted, however, that the clear reasoning from sufficient premises that modern thought aspires to is not enough to deal with real-world questions. It cannot tell us, for example, that Napoleon ever existed. Maybe he was a hologram created by space aliens, or a figure invented by Freemasons and played by multiple actors. So that kind of reasoning needs to be complemented by a more intuitive way of thinking that draws conclusions, often at a glance, from subtle indications and converging probabilities that taken together add up to effective certainty—at bottom, by pattern recognition.

Others have tried as well. We still have Thomists and neo-Thomists. Augusto Del Noce, whom I discussed at this conference a couple of years ago, had his own take on things based on his own interpretation of Descartes. And some of our speakers here are engaged in their own efforts.

These philosophical projects have not had much effect on public discussion. But as with the traditionalist movement, current sociological importance is not what matters, and people fitted for the effort should pursue them. The pursuit is rather specialized, but the rest of us will find it easier to break out of technocratic ways of thinking if we are at least aware that serious alternatives exist and know something of what they have to say.

Infowars

We also need to propagate a more Catholic way of understanding man and the world to the public at large. That mostly means demonstrating the benefits of the Catholic view of things by the way we live. The world will become more Catholic when we become more Catholic. But it also involves specifically contesting scientism and technocratic thinking. This would include apologetics as well as publicizing the sort of philosophical efforts just mentioned.

Debunking

These are specialized callings as well, but contesting wrong ways of thinking would also include more piecemeal efforts that all of us can take part in. Presenting obvious truths and debunking clear falsehoods—combating Black Legends—is part of that. Each of us in whatever setting can do that when an issue comes up. “No,” we can say, “the Church does not hate women, and the Spanish Inquisition was not a leading historical example of cruelty, injustice, and ignorance.” And we can explain why.

A more important part, though, is turning around the background habits and assumptions in which we are all immersed that make Catholicism seem wrong or irrelevant. The social world we live in tells us God has nothing to add to our lives, the concept of human nature is oppressive, and the Catholic view of pretty much everything is false and destructive. So, we are told, the Church needs to change radically if she is going to survive at all.

We are social beings, so these views affect us as well as others. Most of us therefore have sometimes felt a personal need to explain to ourselves why they are not founded in reality. But that personal need to understand more explicitly than people in the past why nature is real and the Catholic Faith is correct puts us in a position to help other people on those same points as opportunity offers.

These effort will sometimes seem unrewarding, but not all soil remains stony forever. Also, we teach ourselves when we try to teach others.

Limitations

We need to remember, though, that social understandings have an institutional setting. De Corte tells us that the information industry creates the social world we live in today. So if we do not like the current social world we need to do battle with that industry. To some extent that involves using the same weapons our opponents do. At the individual level that has involved everything from conversations with family and friends to posting on social media. At a more organized level it has involved various educational and media ventures like the Roman Forum, the newer Catholic colleges, and a variety of media and online ventures.

But there is a more basic problem: as long as information creates the world rather than the reverse, how can thought rather than imagination, truth rather than clever manipulation, be re-established as standards? How can our social world, and our world of thought, become more anchored in reality? It is hard to know how to bring that about, since, as De Corte tells us, the situation seems to spring from the basic nature of the industrial and technological society that we seem stuck with.

A new Christendom

If Catholics cannot change that situation for the world we can at least try to change it for ourselves. Once again, the world will not become more Catholic unless we become more Catholic and provide a persuasive model of how to live. That means doing what we should be doing anyway—trying to transform ourselves in accordance with the Truth—but with a more vivid understanding of our setting.

The Church will find it hard to reach out to the world unless she has a better way of life to offer it. But how can she maintain that way of life? To deal with what he saw as a radically anti-traditional situation shortly after the Second World War, Romano Guardini said that we need “a strengthening of character which we can scarcely conceive.” But I do not see Guardini’s strengthening of character anywhere. Our time is much more a time of dissipation.

So it seems the Church needs a setting in which people—who should include ordinary people with ordinary weaknesses—can grow into a Catholic way of life without constant disruption and struggle. Catholic life and understandings are more likely to maintain themselves in a Catholic social order. It seems then that we need—among other things—to come together and build a more encompassing Catholic world, a sort of proto-Christendom.

Institutions are part of that, and we need new or reformed ones. Catholic institutions should at least be reliably Catholic, and there have been efforts in that direction. But formal institutions are not enough. Their soul is found in the informal connections and understandings that constitute culture.

But how do we build a Catholic culture? Modern conditions leave us awash in images, sound bites, and practical and social interactions that distract us and draw us into the concerns and standards of the secular world. That situation dissolves culture, leaving behind nothing but impulse, fantasy, propaganda, and various diversions. All of us are affected by that situation.

So none of us are natives of Christendom, with the habits and reactions we would have if we were. But we must do our best. We do not know in advance what will work for us, so we can only try things that have helped others, even if they do not at first seem natural, and see if we take to them. Pascal, who was a theoretician of such things, proposed something of the sort as a remedy for unbelief.

But what else? It seems withdrawal from some aspects of the world around us is needed. Saint James wanted to keep us unspotted from this world, and Saint Paul warned that evil communications corrupt good manners. Paul did not need a protected setting himself, but not every Catholic is like him. Also, he did not have a family, or expect converts to live as he did. Instead, he told them to “bear not the yoke with unbelievers”¹³ and “go out from among them, and be ye separate … and touch not the unclean thing.”¹⁴

These are very strong words that undoubtedly need to be applied with discretion. But he did say them, we are no stronger than the people he was addressing, and our circumstances seem less favorable.

So which aspects of present-day life should we withdraw from, and where should we go instead? There are problems with every proposal. Withdrawal could stultify intellectual and cultural life, depending on what it excludes, and make it harder to reach people who could benefit from what we have to say. It could also make it harder to organize an effective defense against aggression. A state that considers it child abuse to refuse to cooperate with pediatric “gender transition” is not likely to leave dissident communities alone to run their lives as they think right.

And then there are questions about larger issues. De Corte liked pre-industrial agrarian society. So should we imitate the Amish? Or if that is going to far, perhaps some of us could try to make their living through something closer to traditional agriculture and artisanry than today’s industrial methods of production.

Avoiding most pop and Internet culture is probably a good idea, along with minimizing subjection to anti-Catholic institutions in general. There can be practical problems. The public schools seem bad, but not everyone can homeschool or find an affordable alternative. Working for mainstream employers can mean constant attempts at re-education and pressure to remain silent when we ought to speak out. But it can be hard to make a living without them. Each of us can only do his best.

The early Christians continued to have social and business dealings with pagans. Saint Paul, in spite of the passages I have mentioned, takes that for granted. And they acted charitably toward non-Christians, for example during epidemics. But they abstained from public festivals dedicated to the pagan gods, and from watching gladiatorial contests and theatrical performances, which were brutal and obscene.

At least some of them read critics of Christianity in order to respond to them. And they continued to read classic Greek and Roman literature, which often shared the problems of pagan culture in general, because of what it had to offer. On the other hand, they did not have much interest in current pagan cultural productions, which were not at the same level as Plato and Aeschylus.

Once separated to that degree from pagan society they found intense reward in the life of the Church and the pursuit of holiness. They developed their own festivals and other customs and ultimately a culture that was better than the one they had largely left.

So perhaps they are the models to follow. But, as suggested, the future cannot be planned in any detail. If we recognize the problems and are rightly oriented we will eventually find a way, by trial and error if nothing else.

It is worth saying that we the laity cannot create a Catholic world by ourselves. That way lies cultishness—self-appointed leaders claiming authority based on their own say-so. And once again, trying too hard easily slides into self-assertion and self-dramatization. So we need pastors who love the Faith, are aware of the problems, and see themselves less as managers or members of the helping professions and more as shepherds responsible for the spiritual well-being of their flocks. And for that we can only pray and support whatever efforts seem to point in the right direction.

Ultimate problems

The ultimate question in all this is how we can get out of the black hole into which we today have collectively fallen.

The eclipse of God

First, we have to identify the hole. At bottom, I think, it is a failure to love God or even acknowledge His existence. That failure is evidently connected to the love of power that is expressed by modern technological society. We are all in this together, so I will be more than ecumenical and appeal to a formulation by a communist-leaning French philosopher, Alain Badiou. He says¹⁵:

The fundamental ontological hypothesis of every oppressive system of any kind … affirms the unlimited supremacy of finitude, which is tantamount to saying that everything that is, all multiplicity, is constructible.

In plain English, he is saying that if you want to claim unlimited power, for example the power to remake the world at will, you will start by denying God in favor of something finite and therefore controllable.

We see that today. As thought has become utopian, God has vanished from consciousness, to a large extent even within the Church. As then-Fr. Joseph Ratzinger commented in a 1958 lecture,¹⁶ the Church

is no longer, as she once was, a Church composed of pagans who have become Christians, but a Church of pagans, who still call themselves Christians, but actually have become pagans.

So far, the Church’s response to that situation has mostly made it worse. In his address closing the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI—now canonized as a saint—set the tone by proposing “a simple, new and solemn teaching to love man in order to love God.”

It seems that the Church wanted to accept modern man exactly as he is so that what is most real in him would lead us all to God. That, at any rate, is my interpretation. The practical result, though, has been to replace love of God by love of human ideals and aspirations. That has led not to God but to progressivism.

Progressive Christianity involves greatly reduced concern for the transcendent aspects of the Faith, and of revelation as specific, substantive, and unchanging. Instead, it is concerned with the things of this world, the changing moral sentiments of mankind, and a vague and open-ended spirituality. A sense of piety remains, but love of God loses its distinctiveness and is reinterpreted as love of neighbor.

But when love of neighbor loses its connection to love of God, and so to any standard higher than human aspirations, it becomes basically a matter of helping people get what they want. The Kingdom becomes indistinguishable from a secular progressive utopia. As De Corte suggests, that utopia is inevitably constructed on the basis of animality and becomes socialism.

There are further problems. We are formed in the image and likeness of God. When we lose sight of Him, and pay attention only to ourselves and each other, we mistake the likeness for the original, and each of us becomes a god.

That, I think, is why there was so much criticism of the recent National Eucharistic Procession in America. It was considered a distraction from social concerns and the need for progressive reform in the Church. Christ in the Eucharist was seen as a distraction from the true divinity of every individual Man, and so as a kind of idol.

But if the Eucharist is a distraction, Catholicism is false. In the end, the vanishing of God from sight means nihilism. The need for an absolute standard survives His disappearance, but nothing this-worldly can be absolute. So the whole system falls apart. That is why totalitarian systems, which Badiou tells us are based on the unlimited supremacy of finitude, never last.

So the ultimate standard in a secularized Kingdom of God must be something with no substantive content and no possibility of actual realization. Otherwise, its inadequacy would soon become obvious. Comprehensive equality is the obvious candidate. But everything that exists violates equality, if only because it suppresses alternatives that must be considered equally good. So comprehensive equality means that everything that exists must be destroyed.

We have seen that in the world around us. Social order involves hierarchy, so it must be destroyed. Hence “Defund the Police.” The Good, Beautiful, and True must be destroyed, because they cast doubt on the goals I happen to choose. Culture must therefore debunk culture, and education destroy—rather than transmit—the heritage of the past.

Such is woke ideology, and that is what the basic logic of progressive Christianity leads us toward. The past is bad, the future is glorious, and its glory consists in the divinization of man and the abolition of boundaries and distinctions, and thus of everything that is particular—which means everything that actually exists.

That tendency seems to have influenced the Francis pontificate, with its downplaying of specific religious and moral claims and its emphasis on inclusiveness and concern for the nonhuman world as signature Catholic issues. How much of that influence will continue into the new pontificate, we shall see.

The one thing necessary

So how do we deal with such a situation?

Recent piety has dreamed of a life in the world for the sake of the world that is nonetheless not of the world. That is impossible without an intense devotion to what is non-worldly. So it seems to me that however important the vision of transforming the world, a focus on God as a self-sufficient end in himself must come before it.

Saint Benedict helped found the Christian civilization of the West by literally heading for the hills to draw closer to God. Today’s official piety seems to have no idea of that.

God is not a means. He is the goal. When we forget that, perhaps because we only half-believe, our faith no longer does anything for us. Without specific emphasis on God—not as symbol, manner of speaking, organizing concept, Omega Point, or unknowable mystery, but as reality and indeed the Most Real Being—Catholicism, along with social life and ultimately thought itself, loses its center and falls apart.

Jesus made the command to love God the first and greatest commandment for a reason. God cannot be subordinated: if He could, He would not be God. To follow Jesus is first of all to follow him on that point. So while there are a great many things to do in the world, and a variety of gifts that are needed, what is now needed most of all is reflection, prayer, and turning toward God.

Without that, I believe, we will never be able to regain a right connection to God and the human and natural world.

Bibliography

1. Arouca Press is now remedying that situation.↩︎

2. Marcel de Corte and Miguel Ayuso, Intelligence in Danger of Death, trans. Brian Welter (Arouca Press, 2023).↩︎

3. For example, policies based on claims about structural racism have not worked at all well. The Black Lives Matter movement in particular led to a large increase in violent deaths among black people. See (Scott Alexander, “What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?” Astral Codex Ten, June 2022)↩︎

4. Post-sixties developments in progressive thought that emphasize equalizing social status can be viewed as an attempt to deal with the presumed Nazi threat by turning social prestige into a sort of economic good that can be redistributed administratively, The struggle for domination thus comes to an end.↩︎

5. Romans 8:28↩︎

6. Luke 17:20.↩︎

7. Jeremiah 17:9.↩︎

8. Such views have deeply affected many people who see the problems with them as well. They often find it hard to shake the feeling there must be something morally dubious about opposing open-ended universality. So instead of opposing current moral understandings forthrightly people grumble under their breath and make jokes.↩︎

9. Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa, “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism in the USA: A Surprising Ecumenism,” La Civiltà Cattolica, July 2017.↩︎

10. Antonio Spadaro, “The Pontiff Meets the Jesuits of Mozambique and Madagascar,” La Civiltà Cattolica, September 2019.↩︎

11. CNA, “Record Number of Adult Baptisms in France Shows Surge Among Youth,” Catholic News Agency (https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/263349/france-sees-record-10384-adult-baptisms-in-2025-45-percent-increase-as-young-catholics-lead-revival, n.d.), accessed April 16, 2025.↩︎

12. Thomas Edwards, “Young Men Lead the Way as Adult Baptisms in UK Surge This Easter – Catholic Herald,” April 2025.↩︎

13. 2 Cor. 14↩︎

14. 2 Cor. 17↩︎

15. Park Youngjin, “A Lacanian Supplementation to Love in L’Immanence Des vérités,” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 8, no. 1 (July 2021): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00864-0.↩︎

16. Joseph Ratzinger, “The New Pagans and the Church,” Homiletic & Pastoral Review (https://www.hprweb.com/2017/01/the-new-pagans-and-the-church/, January 2017).↩︎