The following is the text of a lecture I presented at the Roman Forum conference in Gardone, Italy, on July 6, 2026:

Introduction

Today I am going to talk about technocracy, that is, about the attempt to make a governing principle out of increasing power through modern scientific reasoning without reference to its intended use. As such, it is a way of organizing society that is intertwined with a particular outlook on the world, so my discussion will be clearer if I start with the ways of thought to which it is connected.

Public thought

Every coherent society has a way in which influential people think about things that facilitates discussion and cooperation among them. You cannot make sense to the people who run things unless you present your thoughts in terms that fit the way they understand things, so the nature of the system of public thought matters a great deal.

In America and the West generally this system is deeply at odds with the Faith, natural law, and loyalty to particular traditions. It also rejects principles that until recently all reasonable people agreed upon, like the objectivity and significance of the distinction between the sexes.

In particular, today’s public thought tells us that human nature does not exist, the human good is a matter of personal preference, religion is a purely private and individual affair, and tradition exists to be questioned. So none of these things can tell us what is good and true. To the extent such questions are not a matter of personal opinion, it tells us that they are the province of human rights theory and of science, including social sciences like economics.

It also claims to be the only rational and disinterested system of thought. If you reject it, if you say for example that Catholic teaching ought to define publicly what is good and true, you are crazy and tyrannical. You are imposing arbitrary personal opinions upon a system based on rational premises that all reasonable people should accept.

Serious Catholics thus find themselves in fundamental opposition to the outlook of the people who run a secular world that now, through electronics and rationalized methods of social organization, invades everything, including family life, leisure time, and the Church herself. To make matters worse, the Church has institutionally absorbed a great deal of that outlook.

Even so, we are not without resource. Most basically, we have the assurance that God prevails in the end, and he helps those who ask for his help. But even from a natural point of view, the social world would not last a minute if there were not a great deal of good sustaining it. So we can draw some comfort from the real and enduring—if sometimes weak and conflicted—human search for what is good, beautiful, and true, from our own real if limited ability to choose how we will live, and from the innate weaknesses and inconsistencies of the system itself.

But more on that toward the end.

Popular thought

Public thought as I am describing it is not the same as how people in general understand things. The editorial page of the New York Times does not speak even for New Yorkers, let alone the rest of the country. But there is normally a connection between the two. If the differences are too great, the rulers will have to govern against the grain and need overwhelming advantages that are hard to maintain. The European colonial empires provide an example.¹

Both rulers and ruled affect each other.Italian government is not the same as Swedish government because the habits and outlook of the people differ. But the government also affects the people: after the fall of Rome the conversion of peoples usually followed from the conversion of their rulers to Christianity.

So there has always been a balance of influences. In modern times, though, the balance has shifted. When most people were farmers, tradesmen, artisans, housewives, servants, and laborers each class had a distinctive outlook and way of life that was quite difficult to change. As Confucius put it, “you may rob the Three Armies of their commander-in-chief, but you cannot deprive the humblest peasant of his opinion.”² That is why it took centuries for the people in the European countryside—the pagani—to convert to Christianity.

But things have changed now that people are mostly clients of the state, employees of large organizations, and consumers of mass-produced pop culture. Modern politics bring all aspects of human life and human relations into their purview. Governments want to remake the social world—that is part of the technological project of remaking the world in general—and they are enormously powerful. As a result, the nature and specific policies of the government, and the tendencies of the governing arrangements of which it is part, increasingly affect popular thought and habits.

Today, if the peasants have the wrong opinions, the authorities make unremitting efforts to change them. And it has become difficult for ordinary people to resist pressures from above. Their connections to each other have been radically weakened by the weakening of particular traditions and inherited ways of life. At the same time, dominant institutions are becoming larger, more formal, and better coordinated. They are also more involved in organizing daily life—work, amusements, raising children. And through mass schooling and the mass media, they are directly involved in shaping how ordinary people think about the world.

In the long run the propaganda and other efforts have a great deal of effect. When respectable public thought turned against public religion, traditional sexual standards, and even the belief that there are significant differences between the sexes, people eventually accepted the new views as proper even though their original views were strongly to the contrary.

So public thought and policy and the everyday life and thought of ordinary people are now being pushed into a single integrated system. The official explanation for the convergence is democracy: the government takes its orders from the people, so naturally it aligns with them. In Tocqueville’s time that could seem somewhat plausible, but it is hard to see how it could be the explanation today, when circumstances increasingly turn “the people” into an abstraction rather than a connected body capable of common deliberation and action independently of their rulers. We live in a globalizing world of ever more mixed populations that is more and more run by transnational and even global institutions. How could a people capable of taking charge of such a world possibly exist?

A Marxist explanation?

So what explains the system of public thought now being propagated?

One way of explaining it is to note that it radically downgrades traditional authorities, such as family, religion, and tradition, in favor of expert bureaucracies and global markets. That means it promotes the interests and outlook of the billionaires and bureaucrats who run our world. Also, it is defined by people in fields like academia and the media with close ties to the seats of power. So it is easy to view it as an ideology in the Marxist sense, as a set of views accepted and promoted mostly because they explain why the people in power—those who dominate markets and bureaucracies—should run everything, and why anyone who says otherwise is crazy, evil, or both.

That view makes sense in this setting. If people are wholly secular, and do not recognize goods that transcend desire, there is not much to keep their individual and collective interests from determining their entire political and moral outlook. So the Marxist explanation of why they think about things as they do seems to work. As Augusto Del Noce put it, “Historical materialism is valid, but precisely only as an expression of the secular forms of thought, and of their sequence.”³ So if you want to understand what has been going on in the world of thought recently, you look at the interests of our rulers.

To expand on the point, technology has given rise to an extensive and ever more closely coordinated society that emphasizes formal expertise and rational bureaucratic procedures. Such a society requires, in order to function, a dominant scheme that determines what lines of thought are treated as legitimate and rational. That scheme must lend itself to the way the system works, so that it enables it to run smoothly, and make its organizational principles seem identical with rationality itself, so that any alternative seems crazy. It is not necessary for it to be clearly stated, intellectually defensible, adequate to reality, or even altogether coherent. But it does need to be easily transmissible, usable by properly trained people from almost any background, and generally coherent with regard to the questions it treats as legitimate.

And that is a good description of present-day public thought, which provides decision procedures based on a technological understanding of reason and views alternatives as crazy and oppressive, so that it is justified in silencing them. Also, it requires no particular cultural background to accept and live by due to the abstract and quantitative nature of its goals and methods.

So on this view it turns out that secularism, the outlook that puts human autonomy first, ends up forcing on us all an inhuman way of thinking and therefore living. That should come as no surprise: put freedom and equality first, without regard to the Good, Beautiful, and True, and there is no way to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate uses of freedom other than mutual non-interference. But man is social, so enforcing mutual non-interference means a comprehensive system of control to prevent him from acting in accordance with his nature. You cannot let family members, friends and neighbors care very much about what the others do, for example, because that will lead to attempts to exert control or at least unwanted influence. And a serious attempt to prevent such a result leads quickly to an extreme and degrading, if not necessarily bloody, tyranny.

But it is important to remember that Marx does not explain all thought and social life. It seems to me, for example, that the transformation of the social order by the influence of the Gospel during the Christian era provides an example of the effect of transcendent commitments that has no good Marxist explanation.⁴ So in this talk I will treat thought itself, and the basic principles that order it, as a true cause of people’s actions and a contributing factor in social organization.

Principles

Scientism and physicalism

The most basic principle of today’s public thought is human autonomy: that is, rejection of God, nature, and tradition as authoritative in favor of human will. People want to make their will supreme and create their own world. In other words, they want to be gods.

But that is easier said than done. People may believe they can make a girl a boy and a man a woman, but they know they cannot flap their arms and fly to the moon. Somewhere there has to be a reality principle that sets limits. But what are the realities that will be accepted as limits on the will? The aspiration today is to reduce them to a minimum, and make them manageable, by including only those that are clearly and publicly demonstrable, and formulating them in a way that tells us as much as possible how to control them.

Modern natural science seems to satisfy that aspiration, so scientism has become a basic element of today’s public thought. Scientism is the view that modern natural science gives us the only knowledge worthy of the name. Everything else is personal opinion with no public validity. Science is based on measurement and prediction, so the knowledge it gives is knowledge of objects of the kind modern physics deals with—those defined by their measurable properties and the mathematical laws governing their interactions. So scientism gives us physicalism, which tells us that these objects are the sole constituents of the world. If anything else did exist—God, the soul, the Good, Beautiful, and True—it would not really be knowable, because it would not be numerically measurable and predictable, so why bring it into the discussion?

Current public thought therefore treats the world as a big machine in which everything that happens is determined by mathematical laws. Knowledge of these laws, which increasingly gives us control over the world, is a specialized matter. The result is that experts, or at least people who can put on a sufficient show of scientific expertise, are expected to run everything. Anything else would impose unnecessary limits on human autonomy by reducing the control scientific expertise makes possible, so it would be oppressive. Obeying our expert rulers is therefore perfect freedom. Their consensus is the truth that sets us free.

Subjectivism

But there is a non-quantitative ghost in the machine. People have subjective experiences—like sensations, feelings, and intentions—that are not measurable numerically. But these are things that are immediately present to us. Thought and judgment are not numerically measurable either, so they too are excluded from a physicalistic universe. But if thoughts and judgments do not exist, how can science exist? So scientism and physicalism deny both the reality of our immediate experience and the basis of their own validity.

Accepted ways of thinking provide no way to account for this situation. One response to such an obvious deficiency in the accepted picture of the world is refusal to discuss the issue. If the experts refuse to talk about an issue, nothing worth taking seriously can be said about it, so it vanishes from respectable public discussion.

Another response is to get rid of subjectivity by appealing to substitutes. An example is the practice of identifying desires and the like with observable preferences—that is, with the choices people tend to make. This is what economists and political scientists do, at least in America.

A third response is treating the problem of the status of subjective experience as irrelevant to any issue that need be decided publicly because it is a matter of personal opinion rather than observable fact. But that begs the question: the very point at issue is whether the current distinction between fact and opinion makes sense when scientific conclusions, which are treated as factual, depend on judgments, which are treated as opinion.

Hedonism

However doubtful its status, the world of subjective experience is nonetheless put to use in defining the ethical system that is to guide the experts in how they run things.

That system is based first of all on hedonism. Desires impel us to do things, and since they can be identified with observable preferences they can be viewed as scientifically knowable. Everybody feels their compelling force—we all want to get what we want—and can observe their effects on himself and others.

So the rational goal of action—that is to say, the good—can most simply and directly be understood as what is desired. The point of life, then, is to get what we want. Any other standard—conformity to human nature, the Good, the will of God, the mos maiorum—is considered an arbitrary demand based on personal opinion. It is assumed to reflect a desire to assert the speaker’s superiority, since he evidently believes that his own desires should outrank other people’s, and to induce or force them to do what he wants in the name of supposed higher considerations.

Egalitarianism

The accepted ethical system is also egalitarian, at least in theory. Since desire simply as such determines what is good, and all desires of all persons are equally desires, all preferences of all persons, at least in the first instance, have equal status as goals, and deserve equal treatment as such.

Utilitarianism

Naturally, there is more to it than that. Desires conflict, so you cannot satisfy them all. You have to pick and choose. People reliably prefer some preferences to others, so they can be put first: immediate survival outranks movie tickets. But where preferences seem more-or-less equally preferred, and so have equal claim to satisfaction, it seems right to satisfy as many as possible. So there is a systemic preference for desires that a technological society can readily satisfy and are held by a lot of people—e.g., desires for consumer goods.

There is also a systemic preference for tolerant desires—those that give free rein to the desires of other people. So we should favor people who support Drag Queen Story Hour over people who support traditional understandings of the sexes and the proper relations between them. The latter impose a variety of restrictions on everybody that sometimes seem burdensome and must be enforced by a complex system of sanctions that are difficult to administer bureaucratically. In contrast, Drag Queen Story Hour lets everyone do what he wants. If you want to take part, go for it. If not, do something else. The only restrictions and sanctions needed are those that protect the ability of institutions like schools and libraries to carry on their activities in accordance with internal and public policy.

And then there is a systemic preference for desires that promote the smooth functioning of the system. These include productive desires—those that promote the satisfaction of desire in general, like a desire for a successful career in an economy oriented toward consumer satisfaction. They also include a desire to follow and enforce the system’s version of morality, meaning principles that help it function without conflict among the citizens, and especially without opposition to the system itself. These include rejection of transcendent claims and particularistic loyalties.

The result is that the politically-correct employee with few strong personal ties who is motivated by career, consumer goods, and lifestyle pursuits, and has weak religious and cultural attachments, becomes the ideal human type. The success of the system is that we see them all around us, and they are treated in popular culture as the norm.

How they play out

Technocracy

All this is to be put into effect in a rational and effective way—that is to say, technologically—by applying science to all available resources, human, natural, and organizational, to bring about a society in which everyone gets what he wants, as much and as equally as possible. Such, at least, is the ideal.

Resources are finite, so it must be determined how many should be devoted to each purpose. That is done primarily by markets—that is, by the concurrence of individual goals. That facilitates the satisfaction of consumer preferences, and it is the theoretical justification for allowing people to be billionaires. Socialist economies do not work very well, and you cannot have a successful market economy unless some people succeed much more than others.

But the market does not take into account all social concerns, so government steps in to provide income redistribution and promote goals like safety, sustainability, and correct public beliefs and attitudes. These interventions grow until they become altogether comprehensive due to the abstract and therefore unlimited nature of the goals—the world can always be made more safe and equal, and the popular mind can always be corrected yet further—and to the confidence experts have in their own expertise. After all, expertise determines what can be recognized as true, so it cannot ever be seen as a false guide.

Ultimately, experts would like to prescribe all human life and interactions apart from choice among career, consumer, and lifestyle options from a menu that seems limitless in some respects but is quite limited in others. You can choose to be a lawyer, Rastafarian, rock climber, or furry, but you cannot choose to live in a cohesive culture oriented toward transcendent goods. In other words, you cannot choose the sort of life for which human beings seem designed. If you call for a state of affairs in which such a life is possible, like a traditional Catholic society, you are a bigoted crank who should be silenced to keep you from hurting people.

This society is to be global. National borders are considered arbitrary lines on a map, since there is nothing technological about them, so they are organizationally irrational and morally unjust. To permit anything to remain outside the universal homogenous global order would be to maintain a structure of exclusion and injustice. So markets must be global, business and regulatory bureaucracies transnational, and labor internationally mobile.

There are, of course, tensions. An obvious one is the tension between bureaucrats and billionaires. They see each other as necessary, and try to work together, but there is always a conflict between the bureaucrat’s desire for control and the billionaire’s desire for money and his own kind of control. Others include the tension between the desire for cultural uniformity and recognition that the culture that is to be made uniform is residually Western, which reopens the door to non-Western cultural particularisms as a counterweight. This tension contributes to the paradoxes of multiculturalism that seem to be causing so much trouble in Britain just now. Equality, it turns out, only goes one way.

It seems unlikely though that these tensions will seriously weaken a system based on such strong common interests.

Effects of particular technology

The nature of technocracy and its effects on people depends not only on basic principles but on the particular state of technology. Today’s technology has led to a vast increase in economic production, and the multiplication and diffusion of labor-saving devices that range from running hot water to “artificial intelligence.” The results have included a remarkable increase in wealth and comfort, but also disruption of the connection between producer and consumer, and of concrete engagement with the world around us. That disruption has led to a decline in taste and everyday competence, and to a populace less able to resist manipulation, or indeed do anything at all.

A particularly striking development has been the abolition of space by cheap and fast transportation—jet aircraft and containerized shipping—and above all by instantaneous broadband electronic communications. The effect is to make everybody in the world equally present to everybody else. Human connections have thus become more transient and shallow at all levels, from everyday friendship, to family life and the relation between the sexes, to how people understand nationhood. That tendency has aggravated the effects of technocracy in general.

Electronics have also abolished time, or at least the reality and distinctiveness of the past, by making sounds and images from the recent past omnipresent. That is why the pop culture of sixty years ago is still with us in most ways, but no-one knows anything about the pre-60s world except that it was bad because there was discrimination. In the face of the vivid electronic imagery representing more recent times, the written records and physical remnants on which the history of previous times depends have lost their interest.⁵

Cultural policy

In support of a technocratic social order, human beings must be made as uniform and easily manageable as possible. Modern methods require interchangeable components, so people must be made interchangeable. Specific natural and cultural relationships like family and local, cultural, and religious community, along with the distinctions and particularities that support them—man and woman, fellow-countryman and foreigner—are an obstacle to that. They cannot be managed from outside, and are intertwined with non-technological goals, so they are at odds with the efficient functioning of a technologically rational system and must be suppressed so they do not affect how people live.

But they are also central to all cultures: the natural family supported by distinct sex roles is universal, and boundaries must be there for culture to exist at all. Constant mass immigration from everywhere, combined with legally enforced inclusiveness and equality, make coherent culture impossible. Inclusiveness and equality tell us that any expectation that behavior will conform to particular cultural standards is racist. If you call the police about a loud party that goes on to 3 a.m. that is racist, because there are peoples who like such things.

So the solution to cultural clashes in modern technological society turns out to be abolishing culture, or rather changing it into something radically different from what it has been. It cannot be a shared way of living and of understanding the world that evolved over generations and legitimately orders the communities people live in because it encodes a huge amount of experience. Such an understanding accepts the existence of distinct communities based largely on ancestral heritage as the normal state of affairs, and that is out of bounds. Culture becomes instead a matter of self-assertion, often by those with claims to have been unjustly subordinated, like “queer culture,” or else a voluntary consumer and lifestyle choice: “pop culture,” “bro culture,” hipsterism, and so on.

The resulting campaign of cultural disruption and suppression is integral to current public life. It proceeds under the banners of inclusiveness, tolerance, and fundamental rationality, and is treated as the quintessence of morality. Traditional connections are assumed to have no legitimate function, since they are not suited to be part of an overall technological system, so they are presented as a matter of irrational hatred. If you say that marriage is something specific, an enduring union of man and woman oriented toward new life and mutual support, you are a Nazi, because you are saying that a relationship between two men cannot constitute a marriage. As such, you are attacking gay families simply because they are gay.

All official ideals and policies further the campaign. Every method of propaganda is applied to drive the official outlook home: advertising, pop culture, and “education” that is designed to mold people’s outlook and goals in favor of those the system prefers.

Education

State-run education is intrinsically propagandistic. That has always been true. It transfers children during their most impressionable years to the custody of the state, so it is the state and not the family, Church, traditional community, or independent educational association that is in charge of their intellectual and cultural development. The point of the transfer is always to produce the citizens the government wants. So it teaches vocational skills, and it used to teach some prestige subjects like classical languages that were thought a good preparation for social leadership, but these are less critical than the habits and beliefs the government wants to see in its citizens.

Naturally, it denies being propagandistic, just as our public thought denies being an ideology. It claims to teach critical thinking, for example, but “critical thinking” turns out to be rejection of customary and traditional understandings in favor of institutional expert consensus. Believing your grandmother or even your own experience is uncritical. That is personal anecdote and antiquated prejudice. You should believe the New York Times instead.

Advertising

With few exceptions, advertising and marketing also promote official cultural policy. Businesses are willing to forgo profits and even risk major losses to support it. Recent examples include the Cracker Barrel and Bud Light fiascoes, in which managers who found their core customers culturally deplorable redesigned commercial brands in ways that reflected their own outlook and resulted in financial disaster.

Such things happen again and again. That is partly because the educated and culturally-attuned people responsible for design and decision-making find non-progressive viewpoints unthinkable. But it is probably a good business decision in any event to stick with official cultural policy. You do not want to annoy government regulators, Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores affect credit ratings, and good press is good for business in all sorts of ways, from marketing to recruitment to dealings with other institutions.

Pop culture

What is true of advertising is also true of other aspects of pop culture—music, TV, movies, and so on—since these are products of large companies, and like advertising part of a media complex that is largely integrated with government. Hollywood movies are an obvious example. The immense profitability of The Passion of the Christ did not induce Hollywood studios to produce Mel Gibson’s next film, which was also quite profitable. It had the wrong cultural implications. And where elements of pop culture like video games, superhero stories, or the Lord of the Rings universe reflect non-progressive values, they are soon subjected to compulsory reform even at the cost of alienating their core audience.

Pop culture, like good propaganda generally, works on a variety of levels. It appeals to crude sensation, which enables it to appeal to the most people possible, and makes them less thoughtful, less perceptive, and easier to manipulate. It relaxes standards, so it promotes the one-sided dominance of ideals like tolerance, inclusiveness, and individual fulfillment. When made comprehensive and compulsory, these weaken social ties and so facilitate both marketing of consumer products and untroubled ruling class dominance. And it promotes approved perspectives through choice of themes, storylines, and interpretations, along with casting choices—a religious fundamentalist as the villain, an African woman as a Viking ruler—that disrupt normal expectations and confirm progressive stereotypes.

Intellectual life

It is not surprising that the tendency toward technocratic organization is also found in the public thought that supports it, even at what is considered its highest and most serious levels. That is a basic problem with the system. No matter what proponents of “artificial intelligence” tell us, thought cannot be mechanized, so the system becomes increasingly thoughtless.

The arts and sciences

Intellectual life has mostly moved into academic institutions. There are a variety of reasons for that. One is specialization. The technocratic conception of expertise is specialized, since it emphasizes exactness rather than wisdom, and that requires concentration on specifics. The resulting specialization requires overall organization, so that the particulars can be brought together in an orderly way. The result is that knowledge becomes bureaucratically organized.

Their industrialization

So the academic organization of knowledge into faculties, departments, specialties, and subspecialties seems the obvious and natural one, apart from which actual knowledge is impossible. If you want to know how to be happy, you ask the psychologists, since theirs is the science dealing with states of mind. And given specialization, certification is necessary, because outsiders cannot judge competence within a specialty.

That approach carries over into the humanities, since everything that does not follow the lead of quantitative science is considered personal opinion with no place in public life. A hundred years ago there was strong resistance to the demand that university professors in the humanities hold a doctorate. Broad learning, good judgment, and experience were considered better qualifications than intensive study of a very narrow topic. Today the PhD is basic to an academic career.

To a considerable extent the tendency toward institutional organization applies to the creative and performing arts as well. To the extent these pursuits are not carried on within academic institutions they have become heavily reliant on government, corporate, and foundation support.

A personal anecdote: the daughter of someone I know attained some recognition as a performance artist, and then decided to write a memoir based on her oddly assorted family background. I went to the book party and the younger people there—her peers—thought it was worth serious discussion that she had succeeded as a memoirist even though her master of fine arts degree was in performance art rather than memoir writing.

Another reason for the move to formal institutions is the decline of general public interest in intellectual topics. In the nineteenth century major writers and composers were popular celebrities. A publication like The Century Magazine, with 250,000 subscribers in a nation of 80,000,000, published serious articles by leading figures on a huge variety of intellectual topics, from theology to Chinese music. The article on Chinese music, by the leading American music critic of the day, included scores so that readers could play them on their pianos.⁶

That tradition took a long time to disappear completely. Well into the 1950’s scientists like Albert Einstein, artists like Picasso, architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, and conductors like Toscanini, were still celebrities. American radio networks maintained their own symphony orchestras, and popular culture in general presumed at least a nodding acquaintance with such things. The 1957 Bugs Bunny parody of Wagner provides an example.

Today all that is gone. Since popular support has dissipated, and knowledgeable patronage is hard to find, intellectual and cultural life has come to depend on institutional support and funding. That means it has relocated to large institutions, and come to rely for support on government, large corporations, and foundations, all run by professional managers. In the case of the visual arts, it has come to be dominated by a fashion-driven international art market.

Results

All this leads to problems. The institutions that support our intellectual life have interests but not much judgment. Those interests cannot help but affect the work that is produced. Beyond that, academia loses its ideal character when it is technocratically conceived. It becomes pragmatist on the one hand, more concerned with its contribution to GDP than the things of the mind as such, and careerist, credentialist, and conformist on the other.

It has also become subject to affirmative action and other political requirements that distort recruitment, evaluation, and programs, and create factions without much interest in teaching or scholarship, but mainly concerned with political and career objectives. That situation promotes ideological capture. Personnel are policy, so once progressive dominance of academic departments reaches a certain point they simply hire and promote each other.

Ideally, intellectual life would correct and refine social trends. Today it is more likely to exacerbate them. The more is spent on it—on research and higher education—the stupider people become.

Journalism

Journalism has also become uniform, institutional, and careerist. The growth of chain ownership and news wire services has been one aspect of this. In technocratic society everything becomes organized industrially, journalism like everything else. Another is the rapid decline of local news reporting, and print media generally, due to competition from the Internet. Everybody reads the same few national or international publications that have successfully made the transition to the Internet age.

Still another is the changing character of journalists. Their status as professionals was late to develop: the traditional way of becoming one was a sort of informal apprenticeship to a trade. That is why journalists in old movies were hard-boiled characters who had somehow fallen into the business and knew their way around shady places. A long-deceased relative of mine,⁷ for example, who owned a newspaper in New Orleans around 1900, was involved in several impromptu street duels and very nearly lynched by an angry mob. He was quite different from Woodward and Bernstein in the movie All the President’s Men, and indeed from the journalists actually at work today.

It was only after the Second World War that a university degree was expected of those entering the business, and after the 1950s that most new hires had degrees in journalism or related fields like mass communications. The result has been uniformity of perspective, with a few very modest deviations like the tabloid New York Post and the business conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. As late as the 1960s a few major newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times were right wing. Today, in a professionalized and careerist journalistic world, that would be unthinkable. The New York Times sets the standard to which everyone conforms because the Times is at the top of the hierarchy and—in addition to the professional compulsion to conform to standards—the goal of those in the profession is to climb the hierarchy.

The Internet

The Internet was expected to decentralize and open up intellectual, artistic, and cultural life in general, but its effect has been limited, at least with regard to what is considered serious. It has allowed many of us to find each other and create our own communities of discussion. It has also created citizen journalists and commentators who are sometimes interesting, sometimes have large followings, and on occasion have forced mainstream journalists to confront issues they wanted to avoid.⁸ And above all, it created the Trump phenomenon.

It is not clear, though, how much any of that will end up mattering, because it is hard to know how enduringly influential the people involved will be. They have established channels of discussion and information that are so separate from those defining mainstream journalism that they lead to a very different understanding of reality. The result is that each side considers the other delusional. But the people who run things still rely mainly on mainstream journalism, so the non-progressive opposition may mostly be engaged in what amounts to a multitude of private discussions among people with no stable connection to the exercise of power. The Trump presidency seems to refute that, but he is personally essential to his otherwise rather ill-defined movement, so politics seem likely to revert to business as usual when he leaves office in 2-1/2 years, or even after the midterm elections this November.

One reason people who run things rely mostly on mainstream journalism is the extreme freedom of publication on the internet, and the ease of jumping from place to place. These make it possible for unconventional perspectives to express and propagate themselves, but also make discussions fleeting and superficial. People glance at things, usually just reading the headline, and respond to buzz words. At the same time the myriad images and sound bites, all without context, makes it possible to make any claim seem plausible. The result is that internet discussion becomes chaotic, a sort of white noise, and points nowhere.

That gives an advantage to the established, credentialed, well-funded, and well-connected, who can present themselves as serious and reliable people in an age of charlatans. Jake Tapper may be neither serious or reliable, but he looks that way compared to Alex Jones. At the same time the need to compete in an age of instant communication, and the necessity of explaining an endless variety of events all over the world immediately to people with short memories and attention spans, means journalists rely on pre-set story lines that usually have little to do with reality but are needed to carry out what their jobs have become. These are often extremely durable, even coming back after being thoroughly debunked. People remember the story, which aligns with their general outlook, better than the debunking, which can always somehow be put in doubt.

Thought control

They can maintain the dominance of their story line without much danger of effective correction because the plasticity of apparent reality enables them to create consensus reality through informally coordinated narratives and talking points that all respectable publications support. They can then use their position as “serious people” to press for the suppression of other perspectives as “misinformation.” That effort has recently met substantial opposition, but we can expect it to continue, because the institutional interests behind it are so strong, and because the Internet really does produce a lot of distorted perspectives and false information.

So in some basic ways the current situation facilitates control of what is discussed and how it is discussed. To some extent that is even done by methods rather like traditional censorship, under the banner of preventing harassment, hate speech, and the like.

So in the UK you can get arrested, charged, and convicted criminally for silent prayer within 150 meters of an abortion facility⁹—women going in for an abortion are considered vulnerable people trying to exercise a fundamental human right, and any suggestion, however slight and indirect, that there is something wrong with what they are doing is considered harassment.^{10 11} And in Canada a school board member who publicly rejects gender ideology can be ordered to pay $750,000 in damages to local teachers for the injury to their feelings and dignity.^{12 13}

In spite of such spectacular cases, the most widespread methods of control are framing and choice of the topics treated as important and worthy of discussion by those who qualify as serious, respectable, and responsible people. If someone is raped or murdered, is it a local event without larger significance or a national crisis? And if the latter, what lessons should be drawn from it?

Framing includes setting the scene. In a story about a deranged street person in San Francisco beating up a random Asian woman, is it important to mention that several months previously Trump had referred to COVID as “the China virus”? It also includes which details to emphasize. If someone who is in the United States illegally, and who at some point fathered three children, commits serious crimes and gets deported, is it a story about “a local father of three” getting deported? And framing also includes tendentious language, like the expression “gender-affirming care for transgender youth.”

Sometimes thought control involves simple falsehood, easy to correct but never effectually corrected, and believed by those who perpetuate it because it agrees so well with their preconceptions. An example is the Black Lives Matter movement, in which demonstrably false claims about widespread institutional racism, prominently including systemic police abuse of black people,¹⁴ led, among other things, to a breakdown of law enforcement and a jump in lawlessness that led in turn to the deaths of thousands, most of them black.¹⁵ People who questioned the falsehoods were subjected to public abuse and loss of social position and livelihood.

The consistency of the progressive outlook and its domination of our public thought means such things can be coordinated informally and often unconsciously. In polite society there are always things people do not say and topics they do not talk about. Everybody knows what they are without having to be told. If someone makes an error he is soon made to feel it, and if he persists in the error he is excluded from society. It appears from a distance that journalistic coverage of the “grooming gangs” scandal in England followed this pattern.

Religion

Current tendencies apply to religion as well. How could it be otherwise, when the fundamental problem is a religious one? So church governance has become bureaucratic and professionalized, religious education and liturgy this-worldly and utilitarian. Under such conditions the sacred can be hard to find. That, of course, is in line with the turn away from God and toward human purposes that is at the heart of modern thought.

Even so, there remains a need for the sacred—for a highest principle of authority and explanation that is understood as a worthy object of devotion. So the sacred persists, but it becomes a branch of the secular. Instead of God creating the world out of nothing and redeeming it, “society” constructs itself and then reconstructs itself through politics. In other words, religion becomes politics, divine providence becomes secular progress, the Holy Spirit becomes the evolution of progressive doctrine, and the Christ in whom we hope becomes the coming secular utopia.

Many people in the Church, some very highly placed, have been deeply affected by this tendency. So for them religion has become largely interchangeable with secular progressive politics. Thus, the discussion of the principle that “time is greater than space” in Evangelii Gaudium speaks of “the greater, brighter horizon of the utopian future as the final cause which draws us to itself.” And the problems the Synod on Synodality addressed—war, violence, poverty, migration, marginalization, climate injustice, and internal Church structures considered antiquated and repressive—were basically social, secular, and organizational, and were viewed from a secular progressive point of view. Leo seems affected by this tendency as well—consider his comment on the relative importance of sexual morality, which he says is not worth dividing the Church over, and grand social concerns like equality, which he says are much more important.

Embrace of secular progressivism as self-evidently correct has led people to think that opposition to such tendencies can only stem from secular anti-progressivism, from “fundamentalism,” an expression intended to refer to the weird religious obsessiveness Vatican II is thought to have abolished, or from a mixture of the two as described in the notorious La Civiltà Cattolica article by Fr. Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa entitled “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism in the USA: A surprising ecumenism.”¹⁶ That situation facilitates exclusion of opposing persepctives. If someone is not a secular progressive, there is no point discussing anything with him.

Is my description one-sided?

I have been describing our current situation in a way that makes it sound like we are falling into a black hole from which escape is impossible. Is that too extreme?

I certainly hope so. Our theories about the world are always incomplete and our predictions unreliable. But the conditions and tendencies I have described are real, long-lasting, and deeply rooted, so the dangers need to be faced, especially when the official tendency within the Church in recent decades has been to deny them as part of an effort to reconcile the Faith with modern secular society.

We always like to think that life goes on and disaster never quite strikes. It is hard to live otherwise, and usually we do avoid the worst. And some considerations suggest less gloom and doom than my comments have indicated. People point, for example, to the apparent recession of wokeness, at least in the United States, since its peak at the beginning of the present decade. But the same thing happened with political correctness in the 1990s. People said it was over, and then it came back 100-fold.

They also point to the tolerance extended to religious communities like the Amish and Hassidim, who are able even today to maintain distinct traditional ways of life unmolested. At least in America you can still step out of the global technocratic project by cutting yourself off from the outside world and basing your way of life wholly on religion.

But does that way of life suit Catholicism, which does not prescribe all of life and has generally rejected separatism? And in any event it is doubtful how long that degree of toleration will last, given the declining prestige of religion and the ever-growing demands of individual autonomy, including the autonomy of the women, children, and sexual minorities who must, it is thought, be protected from the tyranny of particular tradition.

What to do?

But who knows? The future is unpredictable, and in any event whatever cannot go on will not go on. I have suggested that the current system attempts to put man in the place of God. That leads it to ignore basic realities, and we can expect that situation eventually to lead to crisis followed by radical transformation. The precise direction of that transformation is unforeseeable, and we will have to deal with it when it arrives. In the meantime, however, what should we do to minimize the damage and encourage the return of sanity?

Such a struggle would necessarily involve support for a political and social order that is less anti-Catholic. That would include dealing with “culture war” issues as well as structural tendencies like globalization. Just what to do about these things is a complicated discussion that I will not go into. But ultimately the problem is spiritual, and the battle must be fought at that level.

Enemies

The topic of this symposium is “Who are our friends? And who are our enemies?”

I have mostly been talking about the forces that oppose us, with just a few references to those that help us, so I have been talking almost exclusively about our enemies. And I have presented the problems as the result of trends in public thought connected to the overall organization of social life. But that makes it hard to find particular people who bear special responsibility.

Do we complain about John Locke? Bill Gates? The Deep State? The media-academic complex? We should be aware of such people and institutional arrangements, understand what they contribute to our current situation, and do what we can to counteract them.

It seems, though, at least from my perspective, that they are all part of a self-regenerating web of causation. If one disappeared someone or something else would take its place. So how do we fight something so pervasive? We have very little power, of course, but we should use what we have. We can run our own lives, for example. In a consumer society that matters somewhat, and it matters a great deal to ourselves. So if we do not like the passtimes and politicians on offer, we should choose or produce others.

And we do have voices, so it is particularly important that we challenge consensus views. That is easy from one perspective, since the accepted view of the world is so obviously defective. But it is very difficult from another, since that view goes so deep that contesting it makes you sound like you are speaking Sumerian, and to the extent people understand something of what you say they think you are proposing a restoration of Sumerian theocracy.

But you cannot judge by immediate results. If you spoon water into a bucket of sand it looks for a long time like nothing is happening, and then suddenly it overflows. And in the present world we must keep articulating our view, at least to ourselves, so we will remember what it is in the face of the contrary influences constantly bombarding us. So we must keep on trying.

Friends

And we need the help of our friends. They are more numerous than you might think, but in disarray.

Anonymous friends

I said early on that people have more and more been brought in line with official thought and policy. That has been the goal of our entire governing class, and they have been somewhat successful. But there are limits on how successful they can be. People notice it when what they see around them does not line up with what they are told. And they retain some aspiration to what is good, beautiful, and true. Those things matter, and they can sometimes be decisive.

Our rulers are not all-powerful evil geniuses. They tend to be intelligent and capable, although they are becoming less so, but it is a big world and no one can really run it, especially against its innate tendencies. And they have their weaknesses. In particular, the defects of their way of understanding the world make it increasingly inadequate to reality. As a result, they are fundamentally incapable of understanding what is going on. For example, they are collectively incapable of understanding the concerns of their opponents.¹⁷ That is why they so often get hysterical. When something happens they do not like and did not expect they find it incomprehensible and even demonic. If Donald Trump gets elected it means some combination of Hitler and the Spanish Inquisition is upon us.

That makes it increasingly difficult for them to govern effectively, let alone carry on so delicate a matter as managing public beliefs and attitudes. As it is, more and more people sense that their rulers do not know what they are doing and are not really on their side. Something else is evidently needed, but the progressive domination of education, pop culture, serious public discussion, and career paths for talented and ambitious people makes it hard for them to articulate just what the problems are and what to do about them. Even so, these people are at bottom our friends.

Dissidents have talk radio and podcasts, and the internet with its memes and film clips. These are important, but have deficiencies that we have discussed. There are also books, essays, and lectures like the ones presented at this conference, but they lack popular appeal and institutional authority, so few pay attention to them. And recommendations differ, with no authority to choose among them.

The result is that people object and resist, but usually in crude and ultimately ineffective ways. They are usually right in general tendency but wrong in many particulars. The Trump movement provides an example. The man has many flaws and limitations, but he does have a sense of at least some realities, and given the state of our public life it is hard to imagine anyone more housebroken doing nearly so much to bring popular discontent and a sense of realities that have been denied into public discussion.

But populist rebellions are rarely successful. Elites and serious thought are needed for the success of almost any political movement. Once again, Trump seems to be providing an example. He has had some successes, but his lack of an overall grasp of the problems of modern society is a serious problem. In addition, universal application to all situations of New York real estate negotiating tactics that aim at immediate victory seems unlikely to build anything permanent or coherent. Since current problems spring from a governing philosophy that is deeply based in the modern secular, utilitarian, and libertarian understanding of the world, any movement that hopes to deal with them effectively needs to go much deeper.

Winning them over

We need not just different policies, but a different understanding of the world and human life. I do not see any alternative to Catholic thought in that regard. So we need to develop it to deal with current challenges. I take it that is part of what we are trying to do here at Gardone. But then it needs to be propagated. How do we do that?

Part of the answer is to show people what the problems are to which it is the answer. To us it may seem obvious what is bad about the current situation. To others it is not. If you have been raised in the view that everyone has his own values, and we should respect each other and each other’s choices, then a system that at least officially tries as much as possible to help everyone realize his own goals will seem incontestably a good thing. How can anyone possibly be against it?

If it turns that the system limits what goals can effectively be pursued, and finds itself obliged to control what thoughts and attitudes are allowed expression, that is true of every system. In a traditional Catholic society there would be repercussions if you put on Drag Queen Story Hour at the local primary school rather than an hour devoted to stories of the saints. So why is it tyrannical for our current society to do the reverse?

This, of course, is a conflict over the nature of man and the human good. Can something substantive be known about these things, so that the great social sin is to do something that damages the common good that advances them? Or are they just matters of opinion that each should be allowed as much as possible to decide for himself, so that the great social sin is to burden the choices of others more than necessary? In other words, can some choices be known to be better than others because they line up with human goods that are greater than preference satisfaction? And if so, what are those goods and choices?

To me it seems that the best way to discuss that issue with people who assume the subjectivist position, because that is what they have been brought up in, but have the feeling that something somewhere is wrong with it, is to discuss systemic consequences. For example: what have been the consequences of sexual liberation? Has it made people—men, women, and children—happier? Do people who lack specific inherited culture live better lives than those who have it? Are children happier and do they end up having better lives if they are told that different people like different things so it is up to them to decide for themselves what sort of life to pursue? And has transgenderism solved the problems of people who are uncomfortable about being men and women?

It can be hard to get people to discuss such issues. They think they have all been settled, and want them to stay that way. That makes life simpler. Even if someone is dissatisfied with how things are going he is likely to resist bringing in new categories like natural law that evidently have huge consequences and are radically at odds with everything he has been told all his life. That is why even people who should be somewhat sympathetic keep reverting to subjectivist dogma, to Black Legends about the hidden misery under which people suffered before present-day “liberation,” and to the need to prioritize the supposed interests of minorities, including sexual nonconformists. The current conception of “rights” turns this last concern into an absolute moral imperative.

These responses can all be debunked, if anyone is willing to listen. Most will not—certainly not seriously—but some dissatisfied people will. As always, we need to keep trying.

But even if people do listen, there is a serious issue lurking in what I have said so far: assuming things really do go better if traditional assumptions are accepted, are we simply proposing a noble lie? Is there really such a thing as the Good, or the Divine Law, or the nature of man and woman, that calls for respect and cooperation, or are such things simply constructions put forward to organize people’s lives and relieve them of the burden of freedom? If so, why these particular noble lies? Why would others not work as well? Who decides and how? And can any noble lie that is not already generally accepted work without comprehensive thought control? That is the basic objection to traditionalist thought that leads many people to see it as fascist—it leads, they believe, to an extreme tyranny that attempts to enforce an invented orthodoxy that does not end up working anyway.

But if these are not noble lies, because “the Good” and so on are real rather than social constructions, what is real about them? How and where do they exist? How do we find out about them and what they demand?

So we find that today every social question soon leads to the deepest possible questions. Pascal, who had as good a grasp of the modern world as anyone, thought that once again the road to persuasion was to consider how one answer or another works out overall. Point out that someone who rejects the traditional and orthodox positions, because he believes they cannot be proven, ought to believe the same about all other positions. But he has to live by some position or other, because he has to make decisions, and not to decide is also to decide. So the question is how to choose, and “what works best” seems a better basis than most. So on this view “what works best” goes all the way down in human life and thought.

It seems, though, that such an approach will ultimately need to be backed by a more directly rational approach involving things like proofs of the existence of God. People today are not rationalists regarding ultimate questions, which they view as a matter of personal feeling and opinion, so it is likely be helpful to start by showing them why, even starting from conventionally modern assumptions, these issues matter and someone might well favor orthodox and traditional answers. As the novelist Walker Percy put it, when asked about his Catholicism, “what else is there,” meaning what other view can possibly stand up to life as we find it. But it seems that a directly rational approach should then be added to the overall constellation of considerations that lead people toward faith and support them in it.

These are not considerations suited to Twitter exchanges, but at some point on some level they matter to a great many people, especially those suited to be leaders of thought, and we need to be ready to present our answers. It may be very slow going, but if that is where we are there is no point complaining. There are signs of a return to the Faith, especially among the young, including young men. And that is important, because people view questions regarding fundamental realities as men’s responsibility.¹⁸ But once again, who knows? It may be yet another false dawn among many false dawns, or it may not: as always, we cannot predict the future and must simply do what we can.

The one necessary thing

But I have left out the most important thing. As Ambrose said, it is not by argument that God chose to save his people.¹⁹ Arguments can clear away obstacles to faith, and that is important, but they cannot give faith, and without that none of this goes anywhere.

So what helps people to faith? God gives it, but it is supported by visible examples of Catholic life and thought that embody what is true, beautiful, and good. We have talked about truth and how to persuade people of it. Beauty can help orient people and make them receptive—that is an argument for traditional Catholic worship, among other things. But most of all, people are attracted and motivated by what is good—for example, by examples of lives well-lived.

We can offer the dissatisfied something better only when we have something better to offer. That is a tautology, but it has a point. In principle Catholics can always offer something better, but we will not get far unless principle becomes concrete reality. So our faith must order and inspire how we live. We cannot do that by our own power, and we cannot do it as a means to something else—Faith, Hope, and Charity are not techniques. So all we can do is try to order ourselves toward God, and trust Him to do the rest.

God is the Friend we must ultimately rely on. If we are with Him, we ultimately win. If we are not, we will not and should not win. And we cannot be with Him if winning and not God Himself—loving Him with our heart, soul, and mind—is our ultimate concern. If we want to save the world through Christianity, there is no substitute for being Christian.

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

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Footnotes