Against Integralism

If you spend enough time in Catholic circles, especially the terminally online circles frequented by myself and my dear readers, you will eventually encounter proponents of something called “Integralism”. They are usually highly educated adult converts, with a distinct air of affectation about them: today, only the surviving landed gentry in Northern Ireland delight in tweed naturally.

If you engage one in conversation on the subject, you will soon realize your mistake. But do not be afraid! You have simply to ask him* what Integralism is. You may then either make your escape while he is distracted or safely ignore anything he says for at least the ensuing hour, for the whole point of Integralism is to attempt to explain it.

Through long suffering in many such encounters, I have learned that Integralism is a political philosophy seeking to integrate or re-integrate a spiritual dimension into the aims of secular government, especially under the authority of the Catholic Church. As stated, this is neither achievable nor desirable. They believe first that the proposition “government should work for the common good” is controversial, and that the content of the common good is not: the precise opposite of reality.

The fatal flaw of the Integralists is that they seek to intellectualize judgment. Through excessive reading of the Scholastics, they have convinced themselves that the construction of the ideal society is a matter of meticulously designing a correct system. But there is a time for reading the Scholastics and there is a time to act. Leadership is the latter, and it is not reducible to a function of knowledge or even intelligence. The point of reading the Scholastics, as they themselves would tell you, is to train yourself in virtue. If reading them instead makes you merely introspective, too concerned with whether you are choosing the optimal course of action to make a judgment, you would have been better off without them. The Integralists reduce all Catholic theology and ethics to a manual for scrupulosity. They confine themselves to reaction, and especially to sadness, because they can at least be confident that they are not setting any evil in motion through their own volition. They are terrified of their own wills.

Nowhere is the danger of this more apparent than in the total subversion of Catholic Just War Theory over the decades since the end of the Cold War. Since we know that the cause of a defender is always just, we were easily convinced that it is always licit to intervene on the side of a defender. Therefore, to get Catholic intellectuals to support your imperial objectives, all you have to do is wait until your geopolitical opponents do something that can be construed as an injustice providing your pretext to intervene. If you don’t want to wait, you can supply any imaginable provocation short of full-scale mechanized invasion: the oft-cited “kick the dog until it bites, then shoot it” strategy. Since you are not acting as an Aggressor, the Integralists will sleep soundly, knowing that you are acting in accordance with the jewel-encrusted tradition of Catholic thought.

In practice, Catholicism has proven frighteningly adaptable to the aims of empire. The George W. Bush-era justifications for foreign intervention were smoothly replaced by the even more expansive “responsibility to protect” doctrine of the Obama years, carefully crafted by Catholics like Samantha Power, the incubus of the 2010s. Its chief accomplishment has been the virtual extirpation of Christianity from some of its most ancient seats in the Middle East and North Africa: a prospect which might have delighted some of the more violently anti-schismatic Popes of past centuries, but which is hard to regard as a positive result in modern circumstances.

There is, in other words, no positive content to Integralism. It is not about changing the aims of government but deploying the Integralist’s encyclopedic knowledge of papal letters to justify them. The Integralist bureaucrat is welcome to be motivated by his conscience, so long as it motivates him in the direction of the bureaucracy. They are not interested in taking or even exercising power, just in imagining what they would do if someone gave it to them. And what do they imagine? Streetlamp restrictions!

There are important and ancient questions about conscience and how a God-fearing individual is to live in Babylon. Integralism is not a serious effort at addressing them, and Catholics in government, with the possible (questionable) exception of the judiciary, have nothing to gain from it. Integralism is not a program, it is not a vision, it is not even a fantasy. It is a toy, an amusing diversion for overly-educated Catholics to while away their evenings in safely-impossible fantasies of blasphemy laws. It is a form of intellectual masturbation: the sterile expenditure of energies that were meant for a holy purpose. Its proponents will not succeed in integrating a Catholic worldview into the secular government but only themselves into its existing machinery, comfortably encysted. Stay away!

*There are no female Integralists.